Inna, Say Hello To Chukcha

on, you've persuaded me that you have it all figured out, but also that you have never taken the time to examine how you "know what you know"...... If you have, you wouldn't be wasting your time on this....

I quote Jamws Carroll, and he referred to Upton Sinclair and to Sinclair Lewis. James Carroll is a former Catholic priest, a Boston Globe columnist, and the son of the first director of DIA, the US Department of Defense Intelligence agency which dwarfs the CIA and it's annual budget. Read Carroll's words, are they any less accurate of compelling than yours are?

The peril of valuing celebrity over history - The Boston Globe

"The shallowness of contemporary public discourse, devoid of history, is everywhere visible -- from the "eternal now" of celebrity journalism to the absurdity of an "antiwar" rhetoric that assumes, in fact, a permanent US war machine in Iraq. In the emerging Democratic consensus, forged by Congressional leaders and presidential front-runners, supposedly in opposition to Bush's war, "out now" is becoming "out when conditions permit" -- which is, of course, Bush's exact position. Such conditions will never come; therefore -- Garrison Forever.

Yet, speaking of history, this conjuring of the appearance of opposition where none actually exists has been mandated by the American political system since the onset of the Cold War. The quadrennial political puppet show, highlighting not opposition but its appearance, is essential to keeping the captive-taking war machine running and to inoculating the American people from the viral knowledge that they themselves were first to be captured.

A minimal acquaintance with history, including dissections of American culture already performed by both Sinclairs, would undermine our national complacency. Upton Sinclair, for example, showed the rapaciousness of capitalism, the vampire-like appetite with which it feeds on the blood of human beings. Even with "reforms" ("The Jungle" led to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration), the profit-worshipping economy to this day eludes controls that would protect majorities of citizens in this country and across the world. Sinclair Lewis, for his part, showed how the simultaneously banalizing methods of capitalist enterprise (false advertising, consumerism, pieties of affluence, amoral bureaucracy) are exactly what that enterprise created to keep from being criticized."

His reference to "rapaciosness" has to do with Upton Sinclairs' seminal work, the book "Jungle", which was the expose of the Chicago meatpacking industry which resulted in the creation of the FDA....Sinclair won the Nobel prize for his work. In California in 1934, Upton Sinclair won the democratic primary in the governor's race. This is waht happened next:

(THINK!!!, Jon....the following is a description of what "KICKED IN", in reaction to an actual campaign for REAL change that was gaining ground with voters. It is ludicrous to expect change to come from the Election of either tht McCain or Obama tucket....look at the difference in the reaction, in 1934, to Upton Sinclair's candidacy, to today....there is no reaction to McCain or Obama....because they are both irrelevant empty sutis, placed in tghe limelight to substtute for any potential for "change".....Do you really beliece the folks who have the most power and wealth now, are for "change"? Consider what they did in reaction to Upton Sinclair......)

Are you part of the "camp" who believe the news media is "liberal"? Think about it...who owns the corporate media? Do you think GE's NBC and Sumner Redstone's CBS, or any of the US newspapers would truly tolerate a "liberal" bias? Is it possible that they control what is reported, more by omission, than by a particular slant? Have you ever read the details of this 1934 campaign? Read them, an eyeopener:

When 'Mad Men' In Media Took Control of Political Campaigns
Upton Sinclair is back, thanks to 'There Will Be Blood' movie ties. But in 1934 his race for governor gave birth to the modern media-based political campaign.

By Greg Mitchell

January 11, 2008) -- It's good to see Upton Sinclair back in the news again amid the raves (which I don't quite share) for the new film "There Will Be Blood," very loosely based on his 1927 novel "Oil!" Even though Sinclair earned a nod in many of the articles and reviews of the film, which stars Daniel Day-Lewis, few have commented on the original source material..

..On Aug. 28, 1934, Sinclair swept the Democratic primary for governor and all hell broke loose across the state, then across the continent. On the day after, the Los Angeles Times, under Harry Chandler, denounced Sinclair's "maggot-like horde" of supporters, and the Hearst press was no kinder. The movie studios threatened to move back east if Sinclair took office.

Sinclair, author of "The Jungle" and dozens of other muckraking books, led a grassroots movement called EPIC (End Poverty in California). His friend H.L. Mencken explained in a column, "Upton Sinclair has been swallowing quack cures for all the sorrows of mankind since the turn of the century, is at it again in California, and on such a scale that the whole country is attracted by the spectacle."..

The prospect of a socialist governing the nation's most volatile state sparked nothing less than a revolution in American politics. With an assist from Hollywood -- and leading newspapers -- Sinclair's opponents virtually invented the modern media campaign. It marked a stunning advance in the art of public relations, "in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor," Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. later observed.

The 1934 governor's race, in short, showed the candidates the way from the smoke-filled room to Madison Avenue, from the party boss to the "spin doctor." Media experts, making unprecedented use of film, radio, newspapers, direct mail, opinion polls, and national fundraising, devised the most astonishing smear campaign ever. "Many American campaigns have been distinguished by dirty tactics," columnist Heywood Broun commented, "but I can think of none in which willful fraud has been so brazenly practiced." (See
link at bottom for video on the campaign.)

The political innovation that produced the strongest impact was the manipulation of moving pictures. MGM's Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg produced fake newsreels, using Hollywood actors. W.R. Hearst helped distribute them. For the first time, the screen was used to demolish a candidate, a precursor of political attack ads on television.

No institution dishonored itself quite like the California press. One anecdote that illustrates this: In October that year, The

New York Times' star reporter Turner Catledge (later top editor of the paper) came to California. Naturally, he hooked up with the Los Angeles Times' political editor Kyle Palmer, who pretty much selected the state's chief executive every four years -- hence his nickname, "The Little Governor."Decades before the press combed through Barack Obama's books and Mike Huckabee's old sermons, the L.A. Times printed out-of-
context excerpts from Sinclair's many books on its front page every single day. Palmer was also advising and even writing speeches for Sinclair's opponent. Over dinner, Catledge asked Palmer why the paper refused to be fair and balanced. "Turner, forget it,"

Palmer replied. "We don't go in for that kind of crap that you have back in New York, of being obliged to print both sides. We're going to beat this son of a bitch Sinclair any way we can. We're going to kill him."

.Sinclair's huge lead evaporated -- especially after those fake newsreels hit the screen -- and Gov. Frank Merriam won re-election. Kyle Palmer continued to rule California politics for decades. And today, "media politics" still dominates most elections."

Jon, above is an account of the reaction to the last time an election portened the possibility of actual change, and nothing like that is unleashed in reaction to Obama or McCain. I am showiing you, if you'll open up to consider it, that it makes no difference if the winner is Obama or McCain....none to get worked up about to the levcl you seem to.....

Consider the following, it is referred to as "the Mighty Wurlitzer, and Operation Mockingbird....

The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America - Hugh Wilford ...

Operation Mockingbird - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 ....to make certain that no real change emerges from a major American political campaing, again!