The Media Veto and the Partition of America by arendt
....
The liberum veto was a parliamentary device in the Polish-Lithuanian
....Commonwealth that allowed any deputy to a Sejm to force an immediate
....end to the current session and nullify all legislation already passed at it...
....In the first half of the 18th century, it became increasingly common for Sejm
....sessions to be broken up by liberum veto, as the Commonwealth's neighbors
.... — chiefly Russia and Prussia — found this a useful tool to frustrate attempts
....at reforming and strengthening the Commonwealth. The latter deteriorated
....from a European power into a state of anarchy.........-Wikipedia
....
The liberum veto seems to have been originally devised to cut short
....interminable debates in times of acute crisis, but it was generally used...
....by highly placed criminals, anxious to avoid an inquiry into their
....misdeeds...before the end of the 17th century it was used so frequently and
....recklessly that all business was frequently brought to a standstill. In later days
....it became the chief instrument of foreign ambassadors for dissolving
....inconvenient diets, as a deputy could always be bribed to exercise his veto
....for a handsome consideration. ........-A short History of Austria-Hungary and Poland
........
http://historicaltextarchive.com/books.php?op=viewbook&bookid=2&cid=26Back when they used to teach at least pre-1900 history in school, the Polish Veto was the quintessential example of bad government. That form of government was so paralyzed and inept that Poland was eventually partitioned by Germany, Austria, and Russia and ceased to exist - without even so much as a minor war to mark the occasion.
But even such ancient history has been stricken from our curriculum, because the powers that be discourage thinking (as opposed to rote memorization) on any subject. So, it is no surprise that people do not recognize that the corporate consolidation of the media has created America's very own version of the liberum veto. The media "issue of the moment" is the equivalent of "one deputy" who can nullify the will of the majority, simply by ignoring them, by writing and broadcasting a totally slanted view of reality and refusing to enter into honest debate. Can you say "missing white girl"?
As in Poland, this veto is wielded by "highly placed criminals" , and by foreign powers. As in Poland, the result is for the country to descend to a state of anarchy, in which a paranoid and delusional executive ignores catastrophes like Katrina, Iraq, and climate change while militarists loot our treasury and privatize our military, intelligence agencies, and police for their own authoritarian ends.
This being the 21st century, there are new kinds of "foreign" powers, such as the multi-national corporations and anti-democracy theocrats with media empires - the ones who put the current fraudulent puppet into the White House. There are also the same old kind of crooks that hamstrung Poland - "allies", such as Saudi Arabia or Israel, whose political action committees shamelessly bribe and intimidate Congressmen, bureaucrats, and even the corporate media itself.
Like Poland, America is also being partitioned. Our money is going to the corporations. So is all the Intellectual Property that their sharp lawyers can enclose: the genome of all plants and animals, perpetual copyright, digital rights management, etc. Our factories are going to China and India.
Our populace is being partitioned - artificial differences are being created by the corporate media to set American against American in order to distract all of us from the rot at the top. Social Darwinism is modeled for us on pathetic "reality TV" shows. Racism is back - not just Blacks and Hispanics, but now Moslems, too. Religious discrimination is being written into law, as news magazines trip over each other to put prayer and Bible study into the crumbling wreckage of our secondary and primary school systems. Sexism is alive and thriving, as looks and babies are the only thing women can call their own.
And, like the overly proud Poles (who had a large minority of titled, but penurious, nobles), Americans put on airs about how rich and democratic we are - even as our debt-ridden economy is sustained by massive bond purchases from Asia, asset liquidation, sub-prime mortgages, and credit card debt. The absolutely worthless "permanent campaign", foisted on us by the media, is the perfect poster child for such delusional grandiosity.
While average Americans have to chose between gasoline, food, or medicine, rich people can shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to their hand-picked front-people, two years before the next election. If this grotesque spectacle doesn't demonstrate that "rich" and "democratic" no longer go together, nothing will.
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When America soon goes down the financial and political drain, and when we are partitioned up like China was in the 19th century, I fully expect that we will be stereotyped in the world by the very worst characteristics of our society: willful ignorance, sanctimonious religiosity, rabid self-centeredness, naked bigotry, sadistic cruelty and voyeurism, and a perverted pride in our sheer wastefulness. For, surely, it is those characteristics that have kicked our better nature to the curb.
To close on a positive note, for the first time in a couple of decades, Americans will have actually earned something: their time as pariahs.
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