Introduction
Greetings loyal readers! Recently my good friend Lalit Jain told me about an annual contest called The Great American Think-Off (www.think-off.org). As you can see from their website, this is an interesting organization with an interesting contest. Each year the group proposes a yes/no question. People pick a pro or con position and submit a 750-word essay. The group selects four (4) finalists, two from each position, and flies them out to New York Mills, Minnesota for a debate. The debate is televised on C-Span. (Last year one of the finalists was a 15-year old girl!)
This year’s Think-Off question: Is Democracy Fair? Of course, there’s the question of what the organizers think the word “democracy” means. However, assuming that by “democracy” they mean our current system of government (which is in fact oligarchic, not democratic), regular readers of this column will know that my position is clearly in the negative. The contest rules specify using examples from personal experience. Here for your reading pleasure is my Great American Think-Off contest entry for the year 2000.
Is Democracy Fair?
Marcy J. Gordon
Age 44
Occupation(s): Attorney, Songwriter/Musician, Psychic, Alternative Healer, Internet Columnist, Public Advocate, Guerrilla Anthropologist and Self-Styled Social CriticIs democracy fair? No. Representative government in the year 2000 is a system of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. This truth was forcefully illustrated by a piece of graffiti art I saw on a wall in New York City’s Lower East Side in1992. It was a painting of then presidential candidates Bob Dole, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot wearing devil costumes. A huge legend appeared below that read: “IF DEMOCRACY IS ABOUT CHOICES, THEN WHY DON’T WE HAVE ANY?” The only people who can become presidential candidates in our supposedly great nation are folks who are bought and paid for by society’s corrupt special interests.
Consider the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996. This atrocious piece of legislation was forced down our throats with abject lies about how removing barriers to ownership of multiple media outlets would be in the public interest. The result has been the exact opposite - as of this writing, more and more television stations, radio stations and newspapers have been consolidated into fewer and fewer hands. Journalists are fired from major news outlets around the country for practicing journalism. (This happened to a friend of mine!) Familiar hallmarks of journalistic integrity, such as separating news reporting from advertising, have disappeared completely.
Benjamin Franklin wisely observed that “[W]hat is in the public interest is not necessarily what interests the public.” Where mainstream journalists once labored to inform the public interest, news departments are now required by their multi-national corporate masters to function as profit centers, resulting in a cross between news and entertainment. Roughly half of mainstream media news consists of celebrity promotion. Upcoming movies, concert tours and celebrity marriages and divorces are routinely touted, but we hear nothing of women organizing strikes against their slavemasters in the maquistadoras of Latin America. A 1990 mass media study conducted by Laura Flanders of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) revealed that 89% of the guests invited to interpret world news on television and radio were male and 92% were white - neither democratic nor fair.
Journalists now publicly embrace and flout their close friendships with politicians, cabinet members and heads of federal agencies. How can such people be expected to report objectively on public figures that are their close friends? ITN World News received a Pulitzer Prize for a fraudulent story on a “concentration camp” in the Prijedor region of northern Bosnia. The world was treated to images of emaciated men and commentary describing Hitlerian-style atrocities. When Thomas Deichmann, freelance journalist and co-editor of the bi-monthly German news magazine Novo, visited the same Trnopolje location he found a refugee camp where ITN had filmed voluntary refugees from behind a nearby barbed wire fence. The fact that this outrageous lie won a Pulitzer is not only a stain on the entire journalistic profession, but a testament to the travesty of democracy in the so-called free world.
Society is completely dominated and controlled by a coalition of government, global corporations and organized crime interests. Our so-called “free” press is free for those who control the presses - along with radio, television and increasingly large swaths of the Internet. The tiny country of Serbia has more independent newspapers and independently-owned media outlets than the United States. Our so-called “peace-loving” nation produces and exports 60% of the world’s arms, along with movies and television shows glorifying guns and violence. Our media conglomerates try to destroy other nations’ cultures with American media garbage and stifle their cooperative economies with the exploitation of so-called free market economic policies and worker exploitation.
Our alleged democratic free market principles have produced a society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Increasingly more of the world’s wealth is in fewer and fewer hands. Currently half - HALF! - of the world’s wealth is in the hands of 500 billionaires. Our special interest-controlled legislators continue to pass laws that favor the rich and exploit labor and the environment. If our economy is doing so well (as the news reports tell us every night) then why is poverty greater now than at any time in our nation’s history? Poverty exists because it is caused by wealth - specifically, by the exploitation and abuse the rich continue to inflict upon the poor. We call this democracy, and it is by no means fair.
Super Tuesday
Did you notice how “Super Tuesday” coincided with the New Moon in Pisces? Pisces is ruled by Neptune, the planet of illusion, dreaminess and false realities -- in short, delusion. And speaking of delusion, did you notice my totally wishful thinking in predicting Bradley and McCain for candidates? Here’s more wishful thinking: that all those Bradley and McCain supporters will vote for Ralph Nader just to express their disgust over those matched New World Order Bookends Bush and Gore. (The NewsHawk listserve calls them “Gush and Bore” -- a far more accurate description.)
The media manipulation we are now subjected to makes our media virtually identical to the media being purveyed behind the Iron Curtain throughout its existence. Just consider the absurd news stories we’re asked to believe - never mind the ones we aren’t told about at all. We’re supposed to believe that JonBenet Ramsey was killed by an intruder when there was new-fallen snow showing no footprints around the house and signs of forced entry on any doors or windows. We’re supposed to believe that an Air Alaska flight started climbing and diving as if it were engaged in military evasive maneuvers while on its way back to San Francisco - when the plane was near to a military base that it could have landed at. (Clearly the military base was shooting at it. Makes you wonder who was on that plane, doesn’t it?) And this is just one example of the many suspicious air crashes we’re supposed to believe are due to mechanical malfunctions and weird atmospheric events.
And what about Columbine? Does anybody really believe two teenage kids without formal military training could pull all that carnage off by themselves without help? Why was a NATO officer on the scene before the media arrived? Why were some people allowed to stay in the school for over an hour and bleed to death when they could have been evacuated in time to receive meaningful medical attention? Could it be that the authorities waited until these people died so there would be no witnesses to the other people shooting and setting off explosives while the two boys were shooting and after they were dead? If it were so true, why would we need a report spread all over the media saying conclusively that two teenagers did it? It’s the Kennedy assassination all over again.
A Positive Note
For those of you who are getting hopelessly depressed by all this, here’s a positive note. The old adage that it is always darkest before the dawn is an old adage precisely because it is true. Back in the 50s and 60s the media was less corrupt so the background corruption of world power was less evident. But now that the mind-controlled puppets of the Service-to-Self aliens (otherwise known as the New World Order) have become so drunk with their power they have lost the need for pretense. It was widely reported in the European press (although totally ignored U.S. media outlets) that a few months ago when George W. Bush was asked by reporters why he hadn’t set foot in California when he had already lost New Hampshire, he replied that he didn’t need to because “[w]e’ve already bought all the delegates.”
Anyone who still believes there are democratic elections anywhere on this planet is living in a pipe dream. But I said there was light coming, didn’t I? That’s right. Because if George W. Bush gets elected to the Presidency (the sure winner as the New World Order’s first choice) the evil darkness of his mind, heart, and soul will so blacken the face of the nation that the hoards of foolish people who had been deceived into voting for him (and his father before him, and Ronald Reagan) will suddenly see the light and finally realize how they continue to be duped. Only then will it stop. Only then will people realize that true compassion and caring for every little thing is the only life path that has any merit. And then, my friends, we can begin the journey down the road to the thousand years of peace. Blessed be.
Copyright 2000 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com.
Psychicbabble is a service mark of Marcy J. Gordon Webmaster - John G. Derrickson
Psychicbabble Archives