In 1970, 18-year old soldiers returned to their homes in America and were told that the government they had been fighting for in Asia was not willing to allow them to vote. Outrage was palpable and because of that, a constitutional amendment sailed past all of the hurdles necessary to cure that defect in the law. But it was outrage that was necessary to our population to make that adjustment - the same kind of outrage that drove the Women's Suffrage Movement.
Establishment typically becomes wildly uneasy when they sense outrage in our population. The establishment media ignores outrage -- it scares them - in hopes that if they ignore it, it will simply go away. The Occupy Movement is the best example of that old guard establishment from both parties' politicians that are always working desperately to have us focus our attention away from issues that, by all rights, should blow the top off of our outrage meters. So they master the art of distraction by leading us to believe that maybe steroid use in the national baseball league is far more important than catastrophic climate change. They tell us that what occurred in Benghazi is a far more serious threat to democracy than thieves on Wall Street hustling trillions of dollars away from the American economy without any prison sentences being handed out for their crimes.
Give the American public enough of those shiny things to focus on and those distractions will typically keep them from ever focusing enough on issues that should generate pure sustainable outrage.
But it is only sustainable outrage that has historically moved the American population to put down their People Magazines and jump into a fight.
It has to be a sustainable, almost physical sense of outrage, that has the capacity to push a majority of Americans to spend more time surfing the net to figure out truths rather than surfing their TV channels to figure out who will be America's next bachelorette -- (or) what insanity the Kardashian or
Duck family have lined up this week. Right now, we have both America's corporate media establishment and old guard political establishments on both sides of the isle desperately hoping that we spend our time watching and listening to the shiny things.
And God forbid that the American public should ever really recognize that our democracy has already been auctioned off to a corporate controlled gaggle of billionaires.
Fifteen years ago some of Americas most talented
Progressive intellectuals were screaming at the top of their lungs that this was happening.
Over the years, Ring of Fire has had the opportunity to interview Howard Zinn, Chalmers Johnson, Christopher Hitchens, and Gore Vidal before their deaths years ago. In every one of those interviews, there was a common theme that surfaced long before we ever heard about Citizens United or McCutcheon.
They collectively and constantly delivered a
message that right here in America, we were becoming one of those colonial nations where imperial power gobbles up the best of us -- where global corporate multi-national corporations extract the very best of what we have created in this democracy and leave a lifeless carcass...the same way we read about in all the history books...about other nations. Just like what we like to call third world nations -- places like South American Banana Republics, places like South Africa, Eastern Asia.