The people of the United States of America voted for the Presidency on Nov. 8th, 2016. The people voted for Hillary Clinton. Due to a dated system of election calculation, invented to prevent corrupt plantation owners from buying the office, a reality television star name Donald Trump (DT – I do not like mentioning or typing its name) was appointed as the new President Elect. This unbelievable result could very well end the reign of the proud and strong union of independent states, known as The United States of America, and its adaption and support of democratic government, is coming to an end. The democracy and the republic are in jeopardy; The Great Experiment is over.
What is
The Great Experiment and why is this in jeopardy? George Washington called the American political ideal "
The Great Experiment." Contemporary English historian Paul Johnson writes, "The creation of the United States is the greatest of all human adventure” (
Johnson 6). The great American republican experiment is "a human achievement without parallel."(
Johnson 8). The early days of the Great Experiment bristled with questions. Can human beings establish good government simply through reflection and choice? Can a free people govern itself? Can a self-governing people sustain its freedom? What form of government best suits those who are neither angels nor animals, but imperfect human beings? Can a nation rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them?
The history of the United States and its people is one of conflicts, conquests and crimes. Yet in the darkest of times, the foresight and wisdom of our founders, the authors of our own Constitution, has shown the way to conflict resolution and leadership by example on the world stage. This country bred generations of great men and women, a history of excellence, grace and leadership. One of my favorite heroes, R.R. Wilson (
see here), represents the best in us as a people and as a citizen of the world. Those time are over, where have these men gone to, where are they when we need them?
The election of DT has divided our nation, destroyed 240 years of leadership and good will. How did this reality TV star get elected and what does it mean in the future? Who is responsible for this insult? Can anything be done to prevent such perversions in the future?
In modern America, another
element of influence in which the Founding Fathers did not address is the advent of modern media. 90% of all media outlets in the United States are owned by six companies:
General Electric (GE),
News-Corp,
Disney,
Viacom,
Time-Warner and
CBS. In 1983, this 90% was owned by a diverse array of 50 companies, today, it is six.
According to the publication
Business Insider, as of 2012,
“232 Media Executives control the information diet of 277 Million Americans.” (Lutz 1). These conglomerates are in the business of entertainment. In 2012, they controlled over 70% of your cable companies and generated income in excess of 275.9 BILLION dollars. News outlets as a division of these companies are a small but important wing of this
Retail Infotainment [1] business
. Over the last decade, how well a newly released movie performed financially on the opening day has been deemed News. Prior to these mergers, this information was internal information relevant to movie studios and their executives. What modern media executives have found is; If we make our business the consumers business, the consumer can be guided to consume the media properties they direct. How well a motion picture does financially on its opening weekend is not News, it’s an advertising campaign (not a press release), targeted to the consumer for greater media property consumption.
What this means is there is no news, there are however Retail Infotainment events and personalities to maximize their income. Period. There is no Independent Objective Journalism anymore. If it’s not on TV, the internet or your screen, it does not exist. The 6 companies control that, what is and what is not news. If its profitable, its news. If its unprofitable, its rumor and innuendo. Walter Cronkite is dead and no one is or will replace him.
DT, with his 14 years of Reality Television success for his master General Electric, has learned how to feed and manipulate these media giants at will. Numerous times during the 2016 presidential campaign, DT would make inflammatory statements, that were purposely structured to be plausibly denied (or taken out of context), which would then focus the Media spotlight on DT and his campaign. Soft news and controversy took the spotlight away from hard (boring and unprofitable) news. Media broadcast time DT did not have to pay for.
A typical DT story of free advertising goes as follows:
Everyone in television news production knows that sound bites have been getting shorter as time goes by. So it was curious to see the reverse of this trend on Megyn Kelly’s show The Kelly File on Fox at 9 p.m. Thursday night.
She introduced a segment on Clinton’s email “scandal” by playing a clip from a Trump speech early in the day. The clip began with “Hillary Clinton’s staff deleted and digitally bleached, which is acid cleaning her emails after receiving a Congressional subpoena.”
The clip ended with “ . . . the world was falling apart.” The clip lasted 90 seconds, uninterrupted. That’s the length of three commercials. In the 24th minute, Kelly introduced another clip of Trump speaking. This time, it was many short quotes from the same speech presented back-to-back.
It, too, lasted 90 seconds—the length of three commercials. And at 9:32 p.m., introducing a segment about moderator Matt Lauer, Kelly showed a string of clips of Lauer firing hostile questions at Clinton. Clinton’s responses were eliminated from the clips except for a couple stray words.
This lasted 50 seconds—almost the length of two more commercials. That give us, what, almost four minutes of free air time that backed attacks against Clinton, who—surprise! —appeared only in brief still and moving images and never was heard speaking on The Kelly File on the “Fair and Balanced” network.
What does it cost to buy four minutes of commercial time on the hottest prime-time show on the most-watched cable news outlet? Doesn’t matter DT did not pay for it. When you are a Favorite Son of the media giants, you get perks.
So who did the Media manipulate to award their favorite earner into the White House? The uneducated, unemployed middle to lower class, white alienated population. DT reached out the poor, the disenfranchised, the beaten, and he fed them exactly what they wanted to hear.
What’s the first rule of control, management and domination? The application of Fear. Fear of losing your job, fear of losing your home, your children. What’s the best way for media companies to focus their campaign of Fear, to reach the most people and causes of Fear? Blame the Immigrants!
This time tested, age old campaign against immigrants goes back further than the founding of America, in Europe, goes back to the beginning of recorded time. Blame the Negroes, blame the Mexicans, blame the Irish, the Italians, the German, the Vietnamese, blame whatever the last wave of immigrants are or whatever race, color or creed that fits your agenda. Muslim, Islam, Persian or Arab, it’s all the same, a religion, a belief, a people, all fair game when it comes to blame.
The Arizona Senator and Naval Hero
[2] John McCain, took some heat over his blaming wildfires on Mexican immigrants. According to an article in Mother Jones, you can blame immigrants for anything:
Car Accidents: Thank Arizona's senior senator for this one, too. McCain told Bill O'Reilly (who else?) that Arizona's highways were plagued by illegal immigrants who intentionally crash into other drivers. No word on how doing so could possibly be to their benefit.
Swine Flu: Remember this? While everyone was running around buying face masks and speculating on Swine Flu's origin, CNN's Jack Cafferty suggested that illegal immigrants—not just anyone traveling from Mexico—might be at fault.
The Mortgage Crisis: Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin argued that banks specifically targeted illegal immigrants for shady home loans, and when they couldn't pay up... well, you know what happened.
America's Drug Problem: The majority of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico are "drug mules," according to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.
Litter: Some officials think border crossers need to brush up on their "Leave No Trace" etiquette.
California's Budget Deficit: Forget about mismanagement and overspending: some argue that California ran out of money because of illegal immigrants, who used services like hospitals and schools without paying for them. (Actually, many undocumented immigrants pay taxes.) Immigrants had a friend in the Governator, though, who said they were an "easy scapegoat" and not the real source of the problem.
Bad Traffic: The American Immigration Control Foundation ran ads accusing immigrants (illegal and otherwise) of worsening gridlock and pushing urban sprawl.
Various Episodes of Violence: Something scary happened in your neighborhood and you can't find the criminal? No problem! It was probably illegal immigrants (this rule applies internationally, too!). (
McDonnell 1)
Yes, Mexican Immigrants were DT’s scapegoats. Thief’s, Liars, Rapists and uneducated, according to DT. The solution? Build a wall to keep them out, and even better, make their corrupt, crooked Government pay for it! Propaganda guaranteed to make the masses scream ‘Merica! …. And that’s what happened, DT riled up the uneducated, the unemployed middle to lower class, white alienated population that’s scared.
Here’s what we know now. DT was being a favorite Retail Infotainment Personality that has the proven track record to cost-effectively generate maximum profits of Advertising income for their Media outlets.
The media outlets followed in lock step, showering the DT campaign with endless free advertising and screen time every day of the campaign. He would get airtime if he did nothing that day. When it comes to DT, doing nothing, is news.
So now we understand the HOW of DT being elected, the final question we have to answer is the WHY?
In any problem, question or dilemma, it is best to work a backwards to find your answer. Now, assuming a given end result (the Presidency of DT), who or what stands to gain the most? Or in matters financial: follow the money. The winners in this race are the 6 companies that control the media and the companies the 6 companies control. See listing 1 (attached for all the 6 company’s holdings). Basically, the 6 companies that control 90% of all media outlets, control in total 1376 companies in all including 490 of the top 500 consumer brands worldwide.
In his 1961 farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower warned: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” We as a country failed to heed this lesson and began 50 years of the Cold War, where outspend your opponent on weapon would guarantee your survival. It was, in the end, a hoax, a means of using Fear as a weapon, so these corporation (a majority of them on the enclosed list) could profit from this fear.
Retail Infotainment is the new Military Industrial Complex, except its more powerful, more profitable across all business ventures not just weapons manufacturers. Its cleaner, more fun, more distractions, but clearly very much more profitable. GE itself diversified its weapons assets in order to seek greater profits in the Retail Infotainment sector. DT represents the interests of all of these companies as they have been his masters literally his whole business career. DT as a business friendly President? Very profitable.
Letting Bernie Sander of Hillary Clinton get elected? Smart, honest and driven people who have served their fellow man in some form or fashion for over 100 years combined, where is the profit in that.
Maybe the last questions to ask are how did these companies get so powerful and what can we do to prevent this from happening again? I have no answer. We allowed this to happen to us, we stare at screens, being distracted, intentionally from things that really matter, our youngest generations have never known it to be different.
A curious observation in conclusion is that during and after the election, no one, no entity, no group or organization, has done a single thing to hold DT accountable for the myriads and hundreds of lies he has spouted. No government agency has commissioned an inquiry into this and other allegations of election hacking, Russian intervention, even reviewing the influence of the FBI in the election.
Literally, you can control the national dialog, the conversations we have at the dinner table, if you control the media. And that’s exactly what has happened to us.
We don’t sit at the family dinner table and talk anymore. We are all working too many jobs or school to schedule family time. We tweet each other, or message on Facebook. There is no modern dialog other than Facebook memes (which are more false that true) and scores or intentional false news sites. 27% of Americans did not read a book last year, its less this year as well. 17% of Americans read actual newspapers (if there is one printed in your community). The dearth of hard news, real information you can trust, is getting harder and harder to find. We are being manipulated, distracted, we are being played for others profit, and we let it happen to ourselves.
The Great Democratic Experiment is over. Democracy lost.
It’s as if we are walking off the cliff, willingly, staring at our little screens.
God Help Us.
[1] "Retail Infotainment" ®™© Copyright 2004-2018 John Steven Calder
This phrase is my invention, its media, advertising, fake news, eye-candy, click-bait, all rolled into one.
[2] My addition, I'm a vet. Regardless of his politics I still respect the man (even though he WAS captured).
Works Cited:
Lutz, Ashley. Business Insider – June 14th, 2012. "These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media in America".
McDonnell, Tim. Mother Jones –22nd June 2011 "Got A Problem? "Blame It On Illegal Immigrants"
Listing 1: 6 Companies Holdings
General Electric ||
News-Corp ||
Disney ||
Viacom ||
Time Warner ||
CBS