Raking Muck

Turn off the television news, the radio news. Stop believing half the top stories on the favored websites. Most of it is propaganda. Material from both left and right and in between; written to manipulate and direct the thinking in one direction or the other. Most of it is nothing more than links to mainstream media anyway, the latest spiel from leftwing or rightwing shill. Pro-Bush, anti-bush, or in the middle. Left, right, in between – it's manufactured containment, controlled opinion; behind every headline is a corporate hand. Uruknet and the Guardian are not bringing any more "truth" than MSNBC or Fox News.

I watched the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man on CSPAN. John Perkins is an excellent speaker and I agreed with most of what he said. His book tells of US dark machinations around the globe in third world countries; an economic "hit man" for U.S. corporatocracy (coalition of government, banks, and corporations).

Reviewers call the book a shocking tell-all from an insider. But Perkins basically gives us the same information that Major General Smedley Butler gave in the 1930s; which is governments and war is a corporate racket. Every generation has their "shocking tell-all" insiders. Yet the country continues on the path set by the founding fathers : Expansion, conquest, empire. There has not been one decade in American history without war, whether big, small, overt, covert, fought for corporate interests. Stop the pretense that America was ever a peace-loving nation. This country was founded and built on corporatocracy. Corruption and lawlessness is the American spirit. Face it, we're a nation of grafters and grifters, willing to kill for indoor plumbing while the rest of the world sits in our sewer. It's our way of life.

"Muckrakers" is a term from the turn of the last century which Theodore Roosevelt nicknamed authors who wrote investigative exposés on child labor, prisons, religion, corporations, and insurance companies. The term comes from Pilgrim's Progress which spoke of a man with a "Muck-rake in his hand" who raked filth rather than look up to nobler things. Roosevelt is credited with noting the muckrakers publicized the need for progressive reform, but only as long as they knew when to "stop raking the muck" and avoid stirring up "radical unrest."

Successes you say? At what cost to the world and ourselves? We're better off? Why, because we moved our child and slave labor overseas or into US prisons? Our food is healthier, or creating epidemic diabetes? Work environment better? Where, Wal-Mart and McDonald's, or mining? More humane prisons, where? in Florida youth boot camps? Better education? to do what, handcuff 5-year-old girls who throw tantrums in school? Insurance corporations more honest? Longer lifespans? My great grandparents lived to be 81, 90, 95, and 102. Living in luxury because we have Ipods and Blackberries?

The tell-all insiders were published a century ago as they are today – yet nothing has changed in regard to corruption and corporatocracy. Why? Commercialism. Muckrakers, either for or against an issue, whether exposing truth or parceling out excuses, bring big bucks.

Commercialism is profit, not patriotism; recognition, not honor; elite gain, not national prosperity; it's dealing and selling, not principle. Every generation has tell-all insiders telling it all to the truthseekers among us. Nearly all readers of the tell-all believe the latest article, book, exposé may be the one that "changes things." Tell-alls pacify a segment of America, content with reading and hoping change will come from the next NYT bestseller tell-all, a journalistic exposé, or the next whistleblower. Yet here we are in the same handbasket, decade after decade.

Did Gandhi's India, American Blacks, Nicaragua's Sandinistas, Bolivia, Venezuela, change their landscape without violence? Did they shed corporatocracy? No, and not likely to without Joe America joining in. Even Perkins admits that in order to change America, some will die. He didn't mean death by bookworms and bloggers. We can vote in an entirely new administration, we can bring the troops home now, we can win a few privacy protections on paper, but not much will change and the cycle will repeat.

Truth is - corporatocracy is not going anywhere without an ugly bloody fight. And Americans know that corporatocracy has always won in the end; just look around the world. When enough muck is raked commercialism will have us look at nobler things. The majority of Americans, in their corporate devised comfort zones, ever fearful of change, will continue to permit their government to stage, finance, and commit wars abroad, lest the war comes home as "radical unrest." We've always had the truth (even more so today) – we just keep mucking around with it.