Last night I went to a dentist appointment and they had the ubiquitous big flat screen tv which was tuned to CNN. If I had just entered a restaurant I probably would have walked out; if obliged to sit in a waiting room more often than not I ask if anyone is watching it, and either ask to switch it off or to change the channel. There was even a flat screen tv in the patient's room where I had my teeth cleaned. It's always a reminder to me of how frighteningly tethered American culture is to the pacifying and destructive influence of media propaganda.

It was all too predictable and pathetic. Non-stop Drumpf, with a heaping of ISIS far-mongering, delivered by fresh-faced, self-important pundits bloviating for a spot at the next cocktail party. All sandwiched between the all-important procession of mind-numbing predatory ads, which come to us with a deceptive veneer of gentility, abundance and people having a really swell time.

To have concertedly moved myself away from MSM makes it that much more jarring when it's in my face (although of course you can avert your eyes, stuff headphones in your ear and read a book, which I'm always prepared with). We got rid of the toxic influence of cable tv years ago and it's been one of the best decisions we've made (I also finally decided last year after many tries that Farcebook was the Great Missed Opportunity, a jr high school cafeteria klatch of cringe-inducing self-aggrandizement, mindless banter, and petty quarrels and misunderstandings).

The overselling of each and every story as if we might be experiencing the end of the world, complete with reinforcing images on a loop, colorful graphics and bold headlines running across the bottom, is just a predatory psychological minefield of propaganda, fear-mongering and mind-conditioning.

I'm glad to have seen this mentioned in a couple of threads lately because there's no more important conversation right now, especially with this blinding red herring of "fake news," which is ironically dominating the fake news purveyors' coverage these past couple of weeks. We need to prioritize convincing our friends and family of how poisonous the corporate media is.

As with the corporate processed food system in this country, we've also been fire-hosed by monopoly ownership of the media with its attendant relentless advertising and its dominant placement in all walks of our everyday lives. It's so powerful that we don't even realize how submissively we accept it as a reality of having always been this way and that there are no other choices. Fact is, we have choices. No kid comes into this world with a predisposition to wanting to eat at McDonald's, or thinking America is the greatest country in the world, or that CNN is the most trusted news station. We're subliminally told repeatedly that our happiness is to be mortgaged to a future when you have x amount of consumer goods, are taking all the right prescribed drugs and are eating regularly at the various franchise food places that dominate your neighborhoods.

It's all conditioning, through relentless advertising and propaganda appearing in all of our institutions, which begins barraging you from the cradle and follows you to the grave. Our education system's conditioning of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream is another important cog in this, but I don't have the time to flesh it all out now in a manner that it deserves.

It takes a concerted effort, yes; but it is the difference between slogging through life as a slothful self-centered person mumbling "it is what it is" and thinking one's highest civic duty is voting every 4 years, and a civically responsible person who is intuitively connected to his progeny and his fellow human beings occupying a diminished planet together stifled by a treacherous social system based on predatory crony capitalism, understanding that we all sink or swim together, and a great part of the reason we don't find ourselves concluding such a salient truth is the media purposefully distracts us with consumerism and fear. An appeal to reason to our friends and family might be a tough conversation but it needs to happen.

As Bernie Sanders was reminding people on a CSPAN Q&A recently by stating the all-too-overlooked obvious, "the media is in business to make money." That can not be overstated, and should be repeated to everyone still watching mainstream corporate media. How do they make money? Advertisements. Advertisements from whom? Predatory Banks, who for the past 8 years have been running massive saturation campaigns to give a facelift to their tarnished reputations as frauds and criminal cheats and Economic Terrorists; Big Pharma, who pay Big Money from their Big Profits to create ads preying on your deepest fears by promising quick fixes; the Corporate Food Monopoly, who pump out images of cheap fast food deceptively marketed as healthy choices without mentioning the over-salting/sugaring and ago-farming produced/GMO derived that goes into this perfectly displayed Franken-food unrecognizable in nature.

By the end of watching even 10 minutes of corporate news media you've had the parameters of your worldview shrunk down to a selective highly corporatized, Disneyfied unreal world which has alternately riled up repressed and sometime irrational fears and installed a depressing feeling of malaise, leading ultimately to a helplessness that finds expression in consumerism and a blind fealty to government to protect you from the big bad scary world out there, brought to you by CNN.

Anyway, wasn't expecting to fire up a rant today. Really just wanted to bring this article to our attention here and write a short preamble with what was on my mind. Can't help myself I guess.

From the Baffler article is this caption beneath the photo, "If only Hillary had chosen another slogan." Pretty good job of explaining why many on the Left feel so strongly about the demise of Hillary Clinton and Neoliberalism. It's worth mentioning also that Thomas Frank is one of its founders.

Second, neoliberalism. It took over the Democratic Party on Bill Clinton’s coattails, shaped all its policy thinking and ushered in our era of free trade, union-busting, deregulation, middle-class decline, mass incarceration, and massive inequality. It was fitting that this era left its leader’s spouse with a campaign so lacking in positive message—a thin gruel of identity politics, credential-brandishing, and anti-Trump harping. Yes, the Hillary campaign did offer a plethora of progressive policy nuggets discoverable by the Internet-savvy, but she could not credibly push them to a Rust Belt so demoralized by decades of neoliberal devastation. RIP, neoliberalism.

Third, the Shillaries. The host of journalists, commentators, pundits, and celebrities who took it upon themselves day in and day out to explain, scrub, polish, promote, praise, defend, and sell Hillary as the best thing that could ever happen to our blessed country, because she had an endemic inability to do what politicians are supposed to do: sell themselves to the public. Presidential candidates, especially those with Clinton’s record-breaking funding base, can pay consultants to promote their ideas and promise. We don’t need journalists to volunteer to do it for them, and we sure as hell don’t need journalists who are taking on double-duty as PR flacks to further their own careers in the liberal punditocracy’s cursus honorum from lowly scribe to editor-writer at a highbrow magazine or earnest millennial channel to White House press secretary—or the C-suite at a Silicon Valley unicorn. RIP, my Shillaries.