Corporate Media Drains You of the Energy to Consume Anything but Corporate Media

Fellow American citizens, you are surrounded by clear-headed individuals who are using plain language to report on the world exactly as it is, but you'll never even notice these folks as long as you keep staring into the black hole of corporate news.

You know full well that the job of CNN is to distract you from troublesome facts and inconvenient information by ignoring some stories and coating others in a veneer of impotent moral outrage. You don't (and can't) expect Wolf Blitzer to diagnose the 2016 election with anything approaching lucidity. But since it's no trouble to turn on the tube and passively soak up lies and distortions, you let access-based reporters tell you how the world isn't instead of letting research-based journalists such as Chris Hedges tell you how it is, as in this excerpt from a recent article for TruthDig:

The liberal class refuses to fight for the values it purports to care about. It is paralyzed and trapped by the induced panic manufactured by the systems of corporate propaganda. The only pressure within the political system comes from corporate power. With no counterweight, with no will on the part of the liberal class to defy the status quo, we slide deeper and deeper into corporate despotism. The repeated argument of the necessity of supporting the “least worse” makes things worse.

People ignore such points out of convenience, not stupidity. It's easy to follow Hedges' logic, but even easier to have a newscast playing in the background while doing household chores. Why should you spend time reading thoughtful political commentary when the only result of doing so is the sense that you're now duty-bound to demand accountability in government?

Your job is hard. Your family is demanding. You're tired and you need a little downtime, so you drown out your own memories of how terrible the Clintons have been with fanciful narratives from MSNBC about how terrible Trump might be. You let Rachel Maddow spew nonsense into your ear instead of heeding Michael Howard when he writes:

[T]he notion that voting third party is a reckless and ultimately dangerous decision is losing its cogency, if it ever had any to begin with. Third-party voters—and hopefully there are many more of them this time around—understand that meaningful change in this country presupposes a subversion of our inveterate two-party (or two-factions-of-the-same-party) political system. By “holding your nose” and voting for Wall Street’s vetted candidate, you are casting a vote for the system itself, and you’re hindering real progress. And all for the sake of… what, exactly? Expediency? It’s always rich to hear establishment pundits charge the #NeverHillary crowd with myopia. Nothing could be further from the truth. In trying to establish a viable third party, one not subservient to the economic elite, these voters have an eye to the distant future, one in which the U.S. actually functions as a democracy. How short-sighted of them!

Do Hedges and Howard sound like petulant brats--or like adult human beings who have seen firsthand what we accomplish by electing the less obnoxious servant of plutocracy every four years?

The main lesson we should all have learned about Hillary Clinton by now is that she wouldn't be inevitable if we weren't already convinced of her inevitability. The important corollary of this lesson, however, is that we wouldn't be convinced of her inevitability if not for a few dozen highly paid, well-placed Clintonite mouthpieces assuring us of her inevitability 24/7.

Let's say that you're a person with a sweet tooth who is trying to lose weight. You take pains to eliminate all forms of candy and dessert from your house, but your paper boy starts including a complimentary chocolate doughnut with your daily paper. Is the paper boy helping you out--or tempting you to backslide into self-destructive behavior?

Now let's say that you're a person with limited free time trying to help build a better future. You take pains to educate yourself about political realities, but the New York Times and Washington Post and every other major news publication in the country keep inserting themselves into your Facebook feed with stories about how you had better settle for Clinton to avoid Trump. Are those news sources helping you out--or tempting you to backslide into self-destructive behavior?

We're killing each other. We're killing the world. We're killing ourselves. And the only reason we accept this reality is because the articles we read from the Wall Street Journal, the stories we hear from NPR, and the reports we soak up from cable news all tell us this is the way things have to be and that any attempt to bring change will only make things worse.

Please dig deep enough within yourself to find the energy required to tune that garbage out. Please don't allow the corporate shills to manufacture your consent for the destruction of your political voice.

How to Spot a Hillbot: Entitled Shill Is Entitled

It's always slightly saddening to see one online poster respond to another by typing nothing more than "Troll."

It's not sad because trolling is sad. Sometimes trolling is funny.

It's not sad because the epithet is meant to shut down online arguments. Many online arguments need to be shut down.

It's not even sad because it's name-calling. I'm pretty sure the internet was invented for name-calling.

It's sad to see that one-word response because it's a lazy and witless way of asserting what we used to assert with a gloriously lulzy four-word formulation: "Obvious troll is obvious."

So part of me wishes that instead of reflexively labeling Hillbots trolls with a single word, we would all just go the extra mile and type out "Obvious troll is obvious" in our responses.

But that doesn't really go far enough. We should actually type "Entitled shill is entitled" because entitlement is what their primary argument ("Opposition to Clinton is support for Trump!") boils down to.

Seriously. The Hillaryans genuinely feel entitled to our votes.

It's not Clinton's job to earn our votes. It's our job to justify voting for anyone else. But of course, if we try to justify voting for any other candidate, we can't even finish our first sentence before the Hillbots interrupt with indignation, "But don't you see that if you vote for [insert candidate here], you're just throwing your vote away and helping to elect Donald Trump?"

No, I don't see that at all. The way I see it, the Democratic Party is electing Donald Trump by presenting us with an alternative who is a warmongering advocate of the carceral state with a track record of lying and a deeply unprofessional aversion to press conferences. Although she has a slight edge over Trump in the polls at the moment, history demonstrates that the longer Clinton remains in the public eye, the less people can stomach her. She's going to lose not because I refuse to give her my particular vote, but because she is unelectable. And when the Democratic party's unelectable candidate goes down to Donald Trump, the real finger of blame should point at the superdelegates who insisted on nominating an unelectable candidate--not the voters who failed to achieve the impossible by electing the most unelectable candidate in history.

That response only makes Hillaryans laugh because they are convinced that my vote started out belonging to Clinton and that any attempt to cast it for someone else is a deep perversion of immutable justice.

But the thing is my vote NEVER belonged to Clinton. I'm one of those pesky independent voters--you know, the folks who outnumber both Democrats and Republicans and wait for some candidate to step forward and win our support.

Of course I won't give that support to Trump. He's terrifying because, as Clinton says, his ideas are "dangerously incoherent." But neither will I support Clinton. Her ideas are terrifying because they are "dangerously coherent." I know exactly what her agenda is and that she has the political chops to accomplish it. I just happen not to be in favor of more police brutality, more displaced populations throughout the world, more poisoned water, more poverty, and more consolidation of power in the hands of those who are already abusing it. 

To say so, however, is to invite the scorn of countless Correct-the-Record minions who will gleefully point out that whatever atrocities Trump permits will be on my hands.

To which the first response is obviously that at least the atrocities Clinton would have perpetrated won't be on my hands.

But the second (more important) response is that if I can't vote for Bernie Sanders, then I'm going to vote for the candidate whose values correspond most precisely to my own. That candidate is neither trump nor Clinton. It's Jill Stein.

If we reach November and Clinton and Trump really are still the major party nominees (a matter I hardly take as settled), then I'll vote for Stein not as an act of petulance, but in the hope that enough other people will be disgusted enough by the Trump-Clinton binary to do the same.

I know that Hillaryans can't take that claim seriously. They understand that Trump is utterly loathsome and repugnant, but they can't grasp that their candidate is equally loathsome and repugnant. They know that the prospect of a Trump presidency is terrifying, but they can't grasp that the prospect of a Clinton presidency is even more terrifying to a lot of us.

Any attempt to express these sentiments to them prompts a sarcastic, "Thanks for electing President Trump"--to which the suitably sarcastic reply is, of course, "You're welcome."

Followed by: "Entitled shill is entitled to Trump."

Clinton Vs. Trump: Voters Choose between America Destroying the World and the World Destroying America

In 2016, American voters are being told to make a very difficult choice that turns out to be no choice at all--because we're going to destroy our species and our planet either way.

If we elect Clinton, we'll get to watch America destroy the world. Hillary Clinton will talk sweetly and incessantly about the importance of protecting women, children, and other vulnerable people around the globe as she forges diplomatic, economic, and military alliances with their oppressors.

She will say that she has kindness in her heart for all Muslims and that America has always stood for freedom of religion. Her rhetoric sounds positively mellifluous compared to anything coming out of Trump's mouth, but what she really means is that she will provide the Saudi royal family the weapons and credibility necessary for them to quash dissent among their subjects. 

She and her husband have always been sneaky that way. And they're very good at what they do. The honeyed words of the Clintons are toxic--but so sweet that the people they poison often die with smiles on their faces.

As the atmosphere chokes on its carbon content, Clinton will say just the right things to make distracted folks believe that important work is being done behind the scenes to improve matters.

As populations are displaced throughout the world by the various military campaigns that Clinton will doubtless sponsor in the name of "humanitarian relief," Americans will take solace in the fact that they are "winning" because widespread human misery will be confined (at first at least) to other people in other regions.

Under Clinton, America will be #1 again . . . by virtue of seeing to it that the rest of a blighted world has to fight over scraps for several decades--perhaps even the better part of a century--before we have to do the same here.

If we elect Trump, we'll get to watch the world destroy America. Donald Trump will talk angrily and provocatively about how everything that's going wrong is the fault of people outside our borders. When it becomes plain that no one really believes climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, Trump will acknowledge that it's a real phenomenon--but nevertheless the fault of the Chinese . . . and the Russians . . . and every Muslim nation on the planet . . . and any other perceived threat that he can get a vocal segment of the American population excited about bombing out of existence.

He has already alienated Muslims everywhere, and for his success with his base in America to continue, he will have to keep antagonizing disaffected Muslim-Americans. If only we could predict what kind of fallout there might be from ratcheting up antagonisms within the American population . . .

Unlike Clinton, however, Trump lacks the political skill, the patience, and the connections to start wars all over the globe and destroy/displace populations before they have a chance to strike back.

Unlike Clinton, Trump will make his enemies scared (instead of persuading them that they are dying because of humanitarianism gone horribly wrong). He will unite his enemies in opposition to the U.S.A. Even Canada will realize that unless we are stopped, we'll simply end up killing everyone. Our loyal Israeli allies will begin to wonder whether it's more important to accept our financial aid or to prevent us from deploying tactical nuclear strikes just outside their borders--because radiation has this pesky habit of not staying where one puts it.

Donald Trump will make America look like the Death Star that it has become, and all the orphans that the Clintons, the Bushes, and Obama have worked so hard to create will aspire to become Luke Skywalkers. Sooner or later, one of them will identify and destroy the exact right vulnerable target in our system to cause the whole shebang to collapse under its own weight.

The worldwide resistance to the Trump agenda will be strong enough to stop us and destroy us--but not before we do enough damage to the planet and other civilizations to ensure that those who defeat us end up as smoking ruins a few decades thereafter.

The strange thing is that refusing to choose between these two equally genocidal alternatives prompts scorn and derision. If I would rather support Jill Stein than the idea of America destroying the world or the world destroying America, then I'm apparently just a chump guilty of throwing my vote away.

But it's hard for me to believe that as Trump and Clinton compete over who will get to throw away the future, the only chumps in this picture are the ones willing to take a gamble with their votes.

I present these thoughts on Juneteenth to support YahNe Ndgo and the Revolt Against Plutocracy as outlined in the #GoGreen619 video. I recommend that everyone hear Ms. Ndgo out.