Tuesday, January 11, 2011

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 128, ISSUE 163
RELEASE THE KRACKEN!
by Malik Isasis




"Release the Kracken!" is the line Liam Neeson's Zeus, orders at the behest of his duplicitous brother Hades in the film, Clash of the Titans. The people of Argos have begun to question Zeus as a god, and as a punishment Zeus has allowed his brother Hades free from the underworld to wreck havoc on mankind, so that they return to believing in gods. This is not a review of the film Clash of the Titans but an observation of Fox News' fight to push back on any responsibility in the violent, raging political atmosphere it has created since the election of a black man as president to keep the Southern Strategy alive.

While Fox News' has released the Kracken, mainstream media are running like the citizens of Argos, slipping in a dysfunctional, exploitive and lazy narrative of false equivalency between the right and left, and the American public suffers from the consequences of being under informed.

And this is the dysfunction of the corporate media, pretending to be above the fray by being milquetoast, afraid of the ire from the right. The corporate media would rather say both sides (left and right) are equally responsible for violent rhetoric to avoid the criticism of being unfair to the right, being actual journalists and discerning what is truth and what is spin. The right doesn't have that problem.





It seems when the corporate media has a choice, it always choose the path of least resistance. The corporate media’s main goal is to penetrate our consciousness and sub consciousness every second of every day with its news, images, and products, but not with anything of value, just useless exploitation of tragedies.

Past Behavior is a Predictor of Future Behavior

Back in April of 1994 there was a genocide in Rwanda, Africa. The genocide was the result of a number complex issues such as civil war and strife and neocolonialism by the Europeans. Tutsis and Hutus, genetically the same were divided politically by Europeans (German and Belgian specifically), with the Tutsi the minority tribe being appointed a more superior racial type than Hutus, a numerical majority, thus began the seeds that would blossom into a full blown genocide once the European colonists Germany, and Belgian uprooted

For 100 days, a million people were murdered, shot, raped and hacked to death with machetes. It was called the most efficient and coordinated genocide in human history, but in America there was a perverse obsession with the O.J. Simpson Murder case (for which thousands of hours were dedicated), and during the genocide, the corporate media garnered more sympathy for the silver back gorillas who were being slaughtered in the cross-fire than their human brethren. 10,000 black, African bodies floated down the Nyabarongo River hundreds miles to neighboring countries, and America watched O.J. Simpson.

The reasons the genocide was so efficient was because of the media: world media turning a blind-eye, and the local radio disc jockeys telling the murders where to find people hiding, broadcasting their whereabouts. The radio stations stirred the hatred and fueled the holocaust that was Rwanda, which brings me to Fox News. It is a genocide of intelligence.

Fox News, is not really news, but an arm of a neoconservative cabal designed specifically to destroy the Democratic Party and to project a parallel universe that is filled with American exceptionalism, nationalism, fascism, war and most of all a perversity of jingoism that seems no different than if you were watching a State controlled news program in North Korea. With a network of echo chambers, Fox News and their political operatives in the corporate media have convinced poor white people to rise and rage against their own interests. The absurdity of this would be like slaves rising up against legislation to free them from human bondage.

Universal health care, unions for better pay and job security, privacy, the choice to have an abortion or not to, etc.--all these things to a person who doesn't suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, is just common sense.

We are a nation of idiots because our media teaches us so, but evolution will take care of the United States just as it had other superpowers before it.

Go ahead, release the Kracken!

Monday, January 10, 2011

THE CULTURAL ISSUE: VOLUME 127, ISSUE 162
COMING HOME TO ROOST
by Malik Isasis




For some two years, Fox News’ 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year of propaganda fueled the anti-government, anti-people of color, and anti-immigrant zeitgeist of the Tea Party. It was bound to happen that someone would be killed due to the incessant, and vile hate that is being produced by the political and corporate right. And now that Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford fights for her life after a assassination attempt, Fox News has been running away from the last two years of their brand of hate. They may receive a reprieve from the corporate media, but they won’t receive one from the truth.

Fox News Pretending

Fox News has a habit of causing bad things to happen and then pretending it had nothing to do with the mess. Arizona has been a tinderbox for anti-immigrant fervor, and Fox News has for two years stoked the flames of bigotry, and since the tragedy of congresswoman Gifford, Fox has been pretending to be a real news outfit, but the obfuscation was short lived, it didn’t take long for its pundits to be hypersensitive and project, and rightly so, they and their radio compatriots bear some blame for the bubbling political violence in American politics, but they can’t run from their broadcasts.



Here is Brave New Films, which has exposed Fox News for what it is:






President Obama should cancel his upcoming interview with Fox News. The corporate media should also call out Fox News for not being a news organization, rather a political machine.
One can only dream, right?