Amerika - Force of Occupation

I don't consume a whole lot of commercial media, i.e., television, commercial radio, or any pop-culture literature. So, it's easy for me to forget what most of the other people in the U.S. are subjected to on a constant basis. That said, it does not mean that I do not think of these things in terms of the current oligarchical structure of the U.S. government. The United States has a very efficient propaganda machine in the form of its ever-consolidating media corporations.

For example, the Republican plutocrats in the U.S. and their supporters like to refer to the holders of high concentrations of wealth as, "job creators." This is in spite of every honest economist who accurately states that the true job creators are those that actually spend money and create demand. This is only a single example, and I do not wish to carry at length illustrating the matter. Any one interested in more examples of this twisting ideas and language need only perform a web search on the name Frank Luntz

Maria Gilardin has produced a radio show called TUC Radio since at least 1993. TUC stands for Time of Useful Consciousness. I'd only discovered it shortly after moving to Olympia, roughly in 2003. To digress momentarily, as much as I really like the Internet radio stations I listen to -- I'm listening to Suburbs of Goa on Soma FM as I write this -- I've become increasingly aware of how much they are isolating me from my local community. One of the consequences of that isolation is that I rarely listen to the local low power FM stations that introduced me to TUC Radio. So with that in mind, I recently downloaded a bunch of recent episodes of TUC and two other radio shows that I haven't heard in a while.

On November 11, 2010 TUC recorded a show entitled Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy. I was snooping around radio4all.net when I found this show. It's nauseating listening. (Slackwrdave gets stress headaches. I get nauseated.) If you choose to download and listen to this show, note that there is part one and part two. This is what motivated me to purchase the book pictured at the beginning of this post. It arrived in the mail today. I suspect that it will push me ever further off the cliff of distrust in all things U.S. There is also a five part video collection of this topic on youtube, but I haven't watched it so I don't know what its contents are.

I need chocolate. Peace.