I have lived in the US, the heartland of it, my whole life. My parents are farmers, retiring this year, registered Republicans. My sister is a fundamentalist Christian who lives in Iowa. My other sister is a middle-democrat small-business owner in Minnesota. The rest of my family are farmers, and I teach at a fairly conservative, liberal arts college with a Christian affiliation.
This country, led by the media has, in the 30+ years I've been on this planet, become increasingly conservative. We're not quite at THE HANDMAID'S TALE yet, but we're moving that direction, via BRAVE NEW WORLD, in my opinion.
The media is corporate controlled. There are 5 corporations--Viacom, Time/Warner, Fox, MSNBC, and a German-based corporation--that control something like 90% of all television, movies, print-media, books, music in the US. Those 5 corporations produce and edit and profit from virtually everthing your average US citizen sees. Yes, they will show lots of sex; sex sells. But the way they show sex is essentially conservative: women are passive (regularly raped, in fact, during prime time) and they are more likely to disrobe; men are aggressive and their bodies less visible. Condom commercials are non-existent in mainstream media, still. So to call the existence of "sex" on TV as liberal is simplistic.
And more and more time is given over, in all forms of media, including the Internet, to commercials. Using commercials to support media production means that the media inherently tilts "right": commercial support means corporate support. Anything not likely to be profitable or to complicate the minds of the demographic those corporations seek to reach--e.g., educational television, for instance--will not get support. It's easier to sell to people who don't challenge what they see, or who challenge it only in ways you can predict. That's why there's only something like 1 investigative journalist for every 10 public relations workers in the U.S. Lots of spin, lots of heat, a little shouting in the name of "a variety of perspectives," very little light.
When I was in England during an election in the late 1980s, I was stunned to see two Marxists arguing about Leninism versus classical Marxism. I have never seen anything like that on TV in the U.S. yet. I have never seen anything like that in a major U.S. newspaper.
Corporations in the U.S. are "conservative" in their views of the role of government and markets. However, I think one must define "conservative" in this sense: conservative corporations do not actually like free markets. What they like are "sure things," e.g., government giveaways that benefit only a tiny, economic elite (Halliburton, and Bechtel, most recently; Enron, before that). Taking advantage of those giveaways, however, is not seen as being dependent on "big government" or as the government interfering with the free enterprise system; it's just being "smart." So throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a few massive congolomerates paid a great deal of money to ensure that they would have an easier and easier time taking over formerly publicly owned space--and with the variety of telecommunications acts, this particularly targeted the airwaves and rules about monopolistic practices in the media. Seeking fewer restrictions on what they do there, in the name of "increasing competition," which is supposed to be wonderful for the consumer by promoting low prices.
But they didn't "increase competition." The corporations immediately began merging with one another (now in the name of "efficiency") so that now very few corporations monopoloze huge sectors of the economy, particularly the media, and continue to press for control--at firesale prices--of what little is still in the public sector. Even our military is increasingly dependent on "privatized" sectors.
There's a fallacy out there that markets are "natural forces." But they are not: they are a human production. Therefore, they are much more like games, the product of human choices made within systems in which there are rules, enforced by governments. The rules in the US are so strongly tilted in favor of massive corporations, in all sectors of the economy, that we can't even see how "conservative" our country has become, in the sense that we are moving more and more towards being an oligarchy, where a small group of high-level capitalists are increasingly controlling the wealth of the world, and writing our laws in order to ensure that their control is indisputable, a "sure thing." True markets--with negotiations between costumers and persons who have any real power to determine the prices--are becoming a thing of the past. Wealth is being massively transferred up the scale (now there are 225 people in the world who control more wealth than 1/2 of the rest of the human population).
Welfare in the US is almost non-existent. 1/2 of the tax-giveaway that the SENATE is currently proposing would pay for health-care for all children under 18 in this country. But no one's even talking about that.
It DOES matter that our culture has been brainwashed by a corporate press into not seeing what is happening in our culture. Nixon would be unelectable as too liberal today, with his support for universal health coverage, opening of relations with communist China. We are not simply more conservative by European standards; we are more "conservative"--if that's the correct term--by our own standards, and it is hurting us deeply.
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power." - Franklin Roosevelt
Sarandon and Robbins don't live in Hollywood, by the way; they live in New York City. And their power and wealth is miniscule by comparison to the corporations that are controlling our current government, and, increasingly (alas!) the world. |
