The Middle East

What most people don’t understand is: even though the media doesn’t cover Libya or any of the revolution still taking place in the Middle East, people are still dying.

There are still plenty of people fighting for their lives and losing them every day. It is not enough to simply watch the evening news every night and read the paper in the morning.

Editorial biases affect what is published and when it is published.

I would venture to say there are many more innocent civilians who have been killed during the United States’ time in Iraq than the amount of U.S. soldiers.

The media just doesn’t report on it. The reason? That is beside the point.

The point is: in order to be well informed citizens in the world, we must actively seek out news and information, not simply rely on what American news media tells us.

The Revolution must start in America

Tyler Hicks / Redux / The New York Times

The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.

The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the one imploding in our faces – is ignored.

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