Radical Ideas to Improve the World

Maybe the right wing had it right all along. Maybe the problem is television.

Of course, not for the reasons the right wing likes: degradation of morals, licentiousness, and a bizarre conviction that the billionaire corporations and their stockholders are funding a liberal agenda. But maybe they are right. The problem is television.

Television, and the movies, made the media into big business. Television, and the movies, need large capital investments, which makes them dependent on capital. Now, a scant four corporations control television, movies, books, magazines, radio, and even most "local" daily newspapers across the country. One of these four is famous for an extreme right-wing ideology, and was indeed the architect of Bush's usurpation of the White House in 2000: Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corporation, which also owns Clear Channel (home of Rush Limbaugh) and Gannet New Service (provider of most daily newspapers in America).

With four corporations owning all the mass media, one a right-wing extremist and all beholden to corporate interests, what hope is there for democracy? How can the people run the government, if the people must depend on four corporations to know what the government is doing? Rather than court people's votes, candidates court corporations for funds to buy publicity from other corporations. The system has been breaking down since before 2000, but 2000 and, perhaps even moreso 2004, when a criminal and inept president with 60% disapproval ratings won over 50% of the vote, show that our electoral system does not reflect the interests of the people.

I am thinking the only way to restore democracy is radical surgery to excise the influence of corporate billionaires on our country. The only challenge is how to do this. How to do this, when the only culture common to Americans, from Harlem to Maine Backwoods to the Spanish Southwest to Georgia to Silicon Valley, is consumerism: Walmart and Nike and Tommy Hilfinger.

Could it be possible to reject all corporate influence? As a vegetarian who does not eat meat, nor anything made with anything derived from meat, can one refuse all things derived from corporations? I'm thinking about this, and what it would mean.