Sunday, May 31, 2009

America's Political/Media Kabuki

By Robert Parry
June 1, 2009

Kabuki is defined as a highly stylized form of classical Japanese dance-drama in which actors often wear elaborate makeup and engage in precisely dictated movements, a useful metaphor for the current American political process which can’t seem to break out of old patterns even as the nation hurtles from crisis to crisis.

Read on.

22 comments:

William Shanley said...

Excellent essay, Bob.

If we move more deeply down into the system, we see that the Kabuki Dance is but a political side show orchestrated by powerful financial interests to keep the public distracted while the grand theft goes on.

Both partys' governments are staffed at key positions with members of councils organized, funded and approved by the elites and money trusts. The CFR mapped out global domination through economic imperialism in the early 1940's in what it called "the Grand Area," and one can see that since then US foreign policy has matched it flawlessly and with astonishing success in most cases. As such, our military and CIA have decapitated virtually every nationalist or democratic movement since WWII. We have propped up every reactionary dictator, staged phony elections, trained secret police and supported terrorism against, and proliferated nuclear weapons and precursor bio-weapons to dictators.

The US citizenry has been so propagandized, it's unaware of this reach for global empire and the 20-30 million deaths it's caused.

These same elite interests own and control the mass media and keep important issues facing the people sidelined throughout the campaign, forcing Democratic winners to break campaign promises, as we are now witnessing Obama's "change you can believe in."

While US military seeks to keep the US on a permanent war footing with total spectrum dominance==now in cyberspace==and a presence in 150 nations, military funding now swallows 54% of the federal budget, ensuring that policies of social repression and political reaction continue.

In my view, the US is being strip-mined to underwrite authoritarian, anti-democratic multinational corporations and the financier class. For example, while the $15 billion bailout for the auto industry was being hotly debated in the media, the Fed gave out $7.5 trillion to the private banks without a whimper. Tallies for underwriting the banking bailout are now in the $15 trillion range. To put this in perspective, $1 trillion dollars equals 20 million jobs at $50,000.

Travel anywhere in the world, and Europeans are taking long vacations, have substantial pensions and life-long health care and education. For the US citizen, vacations average about ten days, healthcare at their once public non-profit hospitals looks more like life for sale, the cost of education is through the roof, and wages have been stagnant since the 1970's.

Employers today pay a US wager earner so little, that at the 25% percentile, he or she must work more than 12 years to equal the cost of a slave in Mississippi in 1850==before pay for food, housing, energy, clothing, transportation, taxes, medical insurance, etc. That's why it's called wage slavery. At the same time, a tiny 1% receives 40% of national income.

The Bill of Rights, the very principles on which this nation was founded, are under attack at many levels. Bill Maher stated this week that the US imprisons people at a rate five times that of China. Could this be true?

These are the issues of today that must be addressed, or the US will collapse from the weight of debt, the evisceration of its population and the extension of its empire.

In the end, if this country is to survive, we must expose and confront the oligarchical psychology and the institutions that sustains policies that are destroying America. We need to reclaim our money system from private ownership, nationalize healthcare, break up the media trusts, enforce anti-trust, downsize the military to a defensive posture, eliminate covert activities except in self-defense, and un-privatize the commons.

We might look to civil disobedience and general strikes as means to restore republican democracy, for a close examination reveals that is not what we have today.

Florence Chan said...

I agree with the essay. Just want to add a few things:

- Pseudo objectivity is a big problem in today's press. That's what Bob meant by "bending over backwards," I guess. Editors feel the urge to provide "balanced" coverage to shake off the "liberal bias" label, with disastrous results.

- There's a formula to the right-wingers' strategy and it's so predictable that Kabuki is a perfect term to describe it. They spit out "arguments" that are not arguments at all, with the purpose to confuse, not convince. They know very well that confusion will cause people to be (1) unable to tell the right from wrong, (2) distracted from the real issue, and (3)tired of the discussion completely, declaring they don't care anymore ("Whatever! Let's move on!").

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家出 said...

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素人 said...

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友達募集中 said...

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