Would You Like Your Happiness Gift-Wrapped?

“He’s talking about the power of desire in our minds, and how our culture conditions us to believe that the more pleasant experiences we have — sex, the movies, food, shopping trips, etc. — the happier we’ll be. He reads out some advertising slogans he’s collected over the years.

‘Instant gratification just got faster. Shop Vogue-dot.com.’

Everyone laughs.

‘Another slogan says, ‘I don’t let anything stand in the way of my pleasure.’

‘The best one of all,’ he says, pausing for effect, in a wait-for-it kind of way, chuckling to himself as he lets our curiosity build.

‘To be one with everything … you need one of everything.’”

— Dan Harris, Ten Percent Happier

When Freedom Isn't

Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness. The solution to the problem the Buddhists wisely identified as “dukkha.”

Freedom is insufficient to provide happiness to most people, because they are unprepared to be happy within the conditions of human existence. The next thing you want or must have will not provide happiness, any more than the last one did. This, by the way, is the opposite of the lesson that commercial television is employed to teach you. That sells freedom, or rather the illusion of freedom.

'I Was a Racketeer, a Gangster for Capitalism'

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

“I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

“I wouldn'’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

“There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ‘finger men’ to point out enemies, its ‘muscle men’ to destroy enemies, its ‘brain men’ to plan war preparations, and a ‘Big Boss’ Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

“It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

“I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

“During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

­ — Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933 by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

Kleptocapitalism Personified: Donald J. Trump

The fact that the Republicans actually chose, as their presidential candidate, a man who’s infamous for cheating people out of their wages, goods and services whenever he can is proof America is in the grip of what I call “kleptocapitalism.”

Republicans always regard contracts as a sacred free market principle — unless they have half a chance to f*ck somebody over and defraud them, of course.

Frank Lloyd Wright on American Wrongs

Frank Lloyd Wright’s sumac window, 1902,
Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois. 

By the dawn of the 20^th century, architect Frank Lloyd Wright had discovered something I didn’t learn until the 21^st century — that kleptocapitalism must finally and necessarily destroy the standards of every profession with which it comes in contact.

In his 1900 speech to the Architectural League of America in Chicago, titled The Architect, Wright “…reminded his colleagues that in this country commerce had triumphed over art,” wrote Robert C. Twombly in his book Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture. “The lust for money had reduced the architect to a servant of the business community.”

Wright charged that the American architect “…panders to silly women his silly artistic sweets,” trading experimentation and individuality for financial security.

“(The architect) now modeled commercial buildings after Greek temples and luxury homes after Louis XIV palaces, all because the businessman and his wife ‘knew what they wanted,’” Twombly wrote. “No longer an independent spirit, the architect had become a salesman, peddling prepackaged ‘styles’ from the files of huge ‘plan-factories.’

“At the height of the industrial revolution in America, Wright was painfully aware that the new corporate elite had usurped the status of the professional, reducing him to an employee at its beck and call.”

In 21^st century capitalism-gone-wild America, that sad state of professional degradation applies not just to architects but to physicians, educators, military officers, police officers, attorneys, journalists, you name it.

For pity’s sake, judges have been caught framing innocent American children because they’ve been bribed by private prison corporations to provide warm bodies in order to increase the corporation’s lucrative taxpayer subsidy.

Reaching Peak Kleptocapitalism

As Max Ibanez says, “This is the final result of unfettered capitalism. It’s the fascist state at its ideal. Unlimited labor willing to kill each other for the opportunity to mow lawns and scrub barnacles off yachts. How do you get unlimited labor? Get the priests and conservatives to resist contraceptives. Be careful you unwashed masses … if you start waking up, they’ll start wars for you to die in. Or they may just say fuck it and start bombing you right at home.”

Keeping Up in the Age of Kleptocapitalism

A decade or so ago, I coined the term "kleptocapitalism" is describe the 21st century America economic scheme pushed by Bush, Cheney and their co-conspirator cronies.

More and more people seem to be waking up to the concept, if not the word. This remark of mine recently got 242 “likes” on a Robert Reich thread: "This is pure kleptocapitalism — an economic system in which thieves are permitted to become so obscenely wealthy that they can bribe their government puppets into legalizing their larceny." Of course, there’s a terrific irony in the fact that a system that values property above people should devolve into embracing the systematic theft of property, but there it is. It is in the nature of corporations to place profit above all, including law and morality, so such piracy is inevitable unless governments prevent it.

My, How Times Change

This is an object lesson in kleptocapitalism — an economic system in which thieves are permitted to become so obscenely wealthy that they can bribe their puppets in government into legalizing their larceny. This is the 21^st century blight.

Ethics — Is It Merely a PR Slogan Now?

Has kleptocapitalism turned us all into psychopaths? Click here for the answer: “Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, ‘make’ something of ourselves,”writes Paul Verhaeghe. “You don’t need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics– a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?”

How the Cruel Love to Rule

Think of all the qualities that enable us to form a functioning and vital nation -- respect, compassion, tolerance, selflessness -- and you will see that they don't exist in the narcissistic personality (or culture).


— Dr. Jim Taylor

By Dan Hagen

Of course Little Lord Mittens’ idea of fun was to forcibly butcher a gay guy’s hair and maneuver a disabled teacher into slamming into a door. Of course Romney liked the idea of strapping his terrified dog to the roof of a speeding vehicle.

Remember how many of Romney’s campaign “gaffs” revealed his apparent inability to understand or consider the feelings of others? When your empathy is scripted and fake, you’re going to trip up.

Connect all the dots, and they spell “The GOP presidential candidate is a sadistic creep.”

Unless they happen to be giggling about the idea of hurting someone, American right wingers are often humor-challenged. That fact underlines their bizarre lack of emotional balance.

Remember when Fox News Business Host Eric Bolling asked his viewers to list people they'd like to see tortured? They targeted Joy Behar, President Obama and Senate Democrats, among others.

Note that this wasn’t even about torture falsely described as an intelligence necessity, but about the real reason right wingers love it — as a sadistic fantasy punishment of their innocent enemies.

Consider the obvious relish and frequency with which even the most prominent Republicans announce that they’d like to inflict pain and death on someone. Gov. Rick Perry said he wanted to lynch the Fed chairman, and Sen. Tom Coburn said he wanted to shoot his fellow senators.  Just out of curiosity, is there ANY problem that Republicans think can't be solved by torture and/or murder?

Remember how those “deregulated” Wall Street banks stole the homes of 50 active-duty U.S. troops with mortgage fraud? That’s good, old, deregulated GOP kleptocapitalism for you. Pat the vets on the back as you pick their pockets, then kick the chumps right out into the street with a contemptuous laugh.

“Corporations are people,” Romney famously said. Republicans deny humanity to actual human beings like illegal aliens, gays and Muslims, but grant it to legal fictions created by the rich solely to dodge taxes and evade responsibility.

“(T)he Republicans divert public attention from their culpability in destroying a sound federal financial regulatory system and gifting Wall Street crooks with a platinum get-out-of-jail-free card,” Robert Scheer wrote. “To listen to the GOP presidential candidates, the banking meltdown was caused by everyone except the bankers.”

Republicans will man the barricades of freedom to defend the power of multinational corporations to overwhelm U.S. elections with billions of dollars in lying propaganda and kick Americans out of their homes into the gutter. But they have no problem with the government imprisoning and torturing innocent people, and turning them into corporate slave labor for private prisons. In fact, they rather like the idea.

Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott spent $178 million of the taxpayers’ money in order to prove that 98 percent of welfare recipients don’t use drugs. He intended to prove the opposite, of course, but Scott’s witch hunt served its purpose anyway, which was never to save money but to demonize the poor in order to justify cruel treatment for them.

Welfare recipients make delightful targets for Tea Party venom. They are denied a voice, so they can’t fight back. And with the Republicans’ billionaire puppet masters busy wiping the American middle class out of existence, they desperately need to find somebody else to frame. Poor people make the perfect diversion.

Republicans worship only money and actively loathe people who do not possess it — including, ironically, themselves. They are fearful of a society in which money might not trump and crush all legal rights and social privileges.

Republicans worship hierarchy, and their contempt for those they’ve shoved to the bottom is palpable. They WANT to see the working class and minorities suffer. That suffering justifies their delusions, and tickles their barely concealed — or in Romney’s case, unconcealed — sadistic impulses.

The Tea Party crowds at the recent GOP presidential debates actually booed a gay veteran and cheered for wholesale executions and the idea of letting uninsured Americans die in agony without medical treatment. If that’s their “Christian compassion” at work, I'd hate to see their idea of cruelty.

Detect a theme here?

“Republicans go after the thinkers for thinking, the poor for being poor, the teachers for teaching, the gays for loving each other, and the Democrats for caring about their fellow man,” Mike Dennison observed.

To paraphrase Jon Faulkner, the Republicans are a political party that regards the unfortunate, the weak and the helpless as pests. Or perhaps as playthings.

Naturally, the cruel want to rule. And obviously, we’d have to be crazy to let them.

Glance Around

By Dan Hagen

Glance around at the “new businesses” in American communities.

What do you see? Pawn shops, temp agencies, tattoo parlors, cash advance loan sharks — the tacky, unmistakable signs of a rotting society. 

The American poor are just as poor as they were a quarter-century ago, except for the ones who are now unemployed. Corporate America is bulging with profits, but insists its CEOs require more tax cuts before they will deign to create jobs.


That's the country where you live, wracked and wrecked by deregulated derivatives and credit default swaps. That is the prosperity brought to you by years of kleptocapitalism and "free market" tax cuts for the rich. 


The airwaves are littered with the ugly ravings of religious fanatics who promise you a first-class ticket to redneck heaven in exchange for a generous contribution of mere earthly greenbacks. 


Americans do need to think about the big checkout time, though, because they have significantly higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, lung disease and cancer than the English, while paying a great deal more for health care and finally being bankrupted in the bargain. Even wages themselves are being stolen.


That's the real America circa 2012. I understand why the right wingers prefer to dwell in free-market Fantasyland.

Kleptocapitalism and Professionalism

The Chayefsy Man: George C. Scott in "The Hospital;" Peter Finch and William Holden in "Network."

By Dan Hagen

A prophetic 20th century figure I like to call “the Chayefsky Man” keeps resonating as a symbol of 21st century America for me.

Paddy Chayefsky.
Photo by biographer Shaun Considine

He’s an intelligent, late middle-aged professional who is slowly becoming unraveled by his increasing anger at the corporate greed and bovine public stupidity that is overwhelming the mission of the institutions to which he has dedicated his life. He was a central figure used by playwright Paddy Chayefsky in such prescient dramas as Network and The Hospital.

The Chayefsky Man might once have seemed to be freakish, even comic, but you see him all over the place these days. With a dramatist’s acumen, Chayefsky understood that if profit were permitted to trump all other values in American society, the result would be a kleptocapitalist juggernaut that must flatten everything else, including the honorable professionals. Such corruption is the inevitable result of a society whose single real moral imperative is that everything must have its price.

What do I mean by the term “kleptocapitalism?”

 I mean a system that effectively negates the benefits of capitalism by breaking all the restraints that actually enable a market economy to operate for the benefit of the society in which it exists.

I mean an accumulation of corporate wealth so vast that it is sufficient to buy or batter into submission all public officials, to overwhelm all government regulation and all legal and moral constraints, and to corrupt allegedly independent media into an echo chamber for corporate propaganda.

I mean a storm of corporate wealth so thunderous that it must necessarily degenerate into legalized theft, fraud, human trafficking, murder and sundry other evils, because its imperative to follow the money must drive it right down into the moral sewer. Martin Wolf, senior economic correspondent for The Financial Times, observed, "An out-of-control financial sector is eating out the modern market economy from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid."

Liberty creates wealth, as Henry Demarest Lloyd observed, and then wealth destroys liberty.

America of the 21st century is a hyper-commercialized society in which you can sell and buy anything, up to and including sex, drugs, homicide, a ticket to heaven, scientific conclusions, university faculty, public officials and children.

Americans swim, tread water, gasp and drown in a heaving ocean of advertising that reminds them, several hundred times each day, that buying things is all there is to life. There is nothing more, and if you believe anyone who tells you otherwise, you're a fool. Ancient Chinese secret, huh?

Those who are paying attention observe that America is run by and for corporations that regard all human beings as commodities and all human values as convenient but finally illusory public relations fictions, with the exception of a single one: money.

America is in desperate need of a space outside the commercial sphere in which to get itself what might be termed a grip.

The professions should provide one of those spaces for sane cultural breathing room — a societal safe room, in effect. But increasingly, they do not.

Professionals exercise specialized, arduously acquired skills on behalf of clients who cannot do what they do, and therefore cannot tell them what they should do. The clients, and the public at large, must rely on the professionals’ ethics to ensure that those professionals are, in fact, acting in their clients’ interests.

Professional ethics therefore provide a kind of superstructure that keeps a society standing.

The metaphor is literal. Professional ethics is what keeps highway bridges from collapsing, for example — or, as in the case of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis in 2007, fails to do so.

What professions have been corrupted by malign corporate influence? All of them. Let’s take a few examples.

The outrages of the private prison industry continue.

The judiciary — In 2009, Pennsylvania judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan pleaded guilty to having accepted $2.6 million in bribes from private prison owners. The judges’ job was to supply the lucrative private prisons with children for cash.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that Ciavarella had violated the constitutional rights of thousands of juveniles, ordering that hundreds of his juvenile convictions be overturned. Conahan wielded budgetary discretion to stop funding the county’s public youth detention facility in order to send teens instead to a lucrative private prison facility.

Innocent or guilty, it didn’t seem to matter. 

One child was jailed for throwing a sandal at her mother, another for slapping a friend at school and yet another for stealing a $4 jar of nutmeg. Hillary Transue, an excellent student who had never been in trouble, was railroaded into three-month private prison sentence for creating a spoof MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal in White Haven, Pa.

The case amounts to human trafficking in children for corporate profit by American judges. And the private prison corporate scum even have the audacity to lobby for harsher sentences to line their own pockets.
And the sold-out judicial situation continues to worsen. For-profit companies are effectively bribing politicians to expand their share of the prison “market,” requiring high occupancy rates for the prisons that effectively guarantee that defendants will be railroaded into them.

And worsen. And worsen. In 2013, an inmate claimed in court Corrections Corporation of America uses violence as a management tool at a private prison so brutal it's known as Idaho's "Gladiator School."
America has apparently decided that you can have slaves as long as you invent a nicer word for them. And the trend is accelerating.

Medicine — Prescribing drugs for which patient pay for the rest of their lives is a mouth-watering temptation for corporate America. So naturally corporations have courted physicians with gifts that range into the lavish.

In 2010, after the practice received greater scrutiny, a survey indicated that some doctors were cutting their financial ties to drug companies. The number who accepted drug company money for attending “medical meetings,” sometimes in exotic locations, reportedly fell from 35 percent in 2004 to 18 percent in 2009, for example, according to a study by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession.

Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, a critic of drug company-doctor relationships, said the study “reflects physicians’ growing awareness that industry is an inappropriate partner in patient care.”

For one chief of an academic medical department, industry “liaisons” added up to a tidy sum of more than $400,000 in a single year, according to a Boston Globe investigation cited byMother Jones.

Authors Jerome Kassirer and Marcia Angell, former editors-in-chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, argued that the pervasive pharmaceutical industry influence begins at the beginning, with clinical research on drugs.

“That means that the studies in scientific journals are increasingly likely to be designed, controlled, and even ghostwritten by marketing departments, Angell argues, rather than scientists,” journalist Shannon Brownlee noted in reviewing their conclusions. For example, GlaxoSmithKline was accused of burying evidence that its antidepressant Paxil can trigger suicide.

The morning as this article was being completed, I read new reports about shortages of life-saving drugs in American hospitals. Why? Because the pharmaceutical corporations weren’t bothering to manufacture the necessary generic drugs, but only the more lucrative drugs they can peddle exclusively. What are mere lives, after all, compared to corporate profits?

Science — In 2008, some 800 Environmental Protection Agency scientists reported that they had been pressured by superiors to distort their findings to effectively serve corporate interests, according to a survey by the Center for Survey Statistics & Methodology at Iowa State University commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Just under half the 1,600 EPA staff scientists said they had experienced political interference in their work. The greatest number of complaints about such interference came from scientists directly involved in writing regulations and those who conduct risk assessments such as determining a chemical’s cancer risk for humans.

Academics — The right-wing propagandist billionaires the Koch Brothers have been buying up what are effectively controlling interests in whole university departments.

For a mere $1.5 million, the Kochs bought themselves the power to indoctrinate students in the economics department of Florida State University. They get to screen all applicants, veto any they dislike, and sign off on all new hires. The department head is required to submit yearly reports to the Kochs about the faculty's speeches, publications and classes.

The Kochs have also made influential deals with Brown University's "political theory project," Troy University's "center for political economy," Utah State's Huntsman School of Business, Clemson University in South Carolina and West Virginia University.

In a kleptocapitalist society, the idea of liberal arts education itself — and the critical thinking it requires — is suspect.

“There is a growing effort to stigmatize the study of the humanities as a pedantic waste of time, and narrow the focus of academia down to a vocational school for corporate America,” Philadelphia journalist Daniel Denvir wrote. “Today’s political class does not, to be sure, readily accept the idea of the university as a public sphere for the critical working out of the ideas necessary in a functioning democracy.”

“The university is increasingly modeled after a corporation; presidents are CEOs set to raise money, and professors are judged by the ‘value’ they produce in the classroom. Students are consumers, expecting well-manicured lawns, fully equipped athletics and a high grade point average,” Denvir noted.

In addition to attempting to dictate the faculty and ideas taught at public universities, corporate America is simultaneously siphoning off their funds.

Federal student aid is, of course, too lucrative a target for corporations to pass up. A report from the National Center for Education Statistics concluded that for-profit corporate colleges devote less than a third of what public universities spend on educating students, even though the for-profit schools charge nearly twice as much for tuition. “For-profit” students are also much less likely to graduate, but are saddled with massive debt.

The bull’s-eye for right-wing corporate attacks on academic professionalism is tenure, which guarantees intellectual independence to professors.

“The movement to buy conservative beachheads within academia and vilify leftist professors is clearly not new,” Denvir said. “What’s new today is that universities are incredibly vulnerable to conservative encroachment and attack. A debilitating economic crisis has dried up state revenue amidst a long-term move to casualize academic labor so that part-time adjuncts scurry from school to school with no hope of tenure, while tuition continues to rise while household incomes plummet.” All this, while America's schools are becoming pipelines to prison.
And remember, the first thing that privatized, for-profit corporate schools teach is "lying."

Banking — Following the Great Depression, the "socialist" New Deal financial regulations were in place for 60 years of unprecedented growth in this country. In fewer than 10 years after they were repealed, the economy was ruined.

Examples of the fiduciary malfeasance of bankers and Wall Street CEOs are legion, and in fact wrecked the global economy in 2008. The deregulated Wall Streeters knew they could inflate the “value” of their arcane financial instruments by tricking them up into Ponzi-scheme derivatives, bribing or forcing rating agencies to lie about them, and using them to defraud their investors. So they did.

The corporate lobbyists and their legislative minions labored for decades to engineer the destruction of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from the securities business in order to prevent securities speculation from destroying bank capital. Glass-Steagall and other Democratic New Deal protections were obliterated so Wall Street predators could act freely while the Federal Reserve and Security and Exchange Commission remained neutered by safely corruption-friendly corporate-compromised managers. That left Countrywide, AIG, Citibank, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs completely free to loot away, plunge the global economy into freefall chaos and then — to add taxpayer insult to investor injury — to use Treasury bailout money to pay the highest salaries and bonuses in history.

They got away not merely with the crime, but with the trillions in loot. Just how corrupt is the system? Well, consider that during the 2008 global financial crisis, the people who CAUSED it were the ones bailed out by taxpayers.

American citizens were like the passengers on the Titanic, with their own federal government on an urgent mission to save the iceberg.

The military — Reporting in 2012, the Commission on Wartime Contracting noted that that in 2010 the U.S. had more contract employees – 262,000 – supporting the departments of Defense and State and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Iraq and Afghanistan than to total of military and federal civilian personnel in both countries. Also, “contractors” — i.e., mercenaries in many cases — were are handling duties that U.S. law supposedly required government employees to perform, the commission said. The commission said, for example that agencies often hire contractors to help evaluate or support its management of other contractors, creating massive conflicts of interest. The over-reliance on contractors essentially overwhelms the government's ability to manage them, the commission said.

Journalism — The ice-cold, deliberate destruction of my own profession has been heartache to me for the last decade.

Because the overriding responsibility of the profession of journalism is to provide honest, fair, relevant, factual reporting about matters of public importance and concern, you should not be able to hire a journalist to peddle partisan propagandistic lies as “fair and balanced” public truth.

Yet Fox News has been doing just that for years.

For example, which political party a politician belongs to isn't a matter of opinion. It's a fact Fox News lies about.

Fox News suddenly identified disgraced Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina as a Democrat on the very day he admitted his philandering.

A coincidence? But Fox News also suddenly changed Congressman Mark Foley's party affiliation from Republican to Democratic the very moment it was inescapably confirmed that Foley was sexually soliciting teenage male pages in Congress.

Fox News' White House correspondent Major Garrett was forced to apologize for another such “mistake” — his fake HBO-Obama story. During the Nov. 4, 2009, edition of America's Newsroom, guest co-host Martha MacCallum reported the fake story that President Obama watched an HBO special about himself instead of the Nov. 3 election returns. On the Nov. 4 edition of Studio B with Shepard Smith, Garrett apologized for "mishearing" press secretary Robert Gibbs and reporting the false information.

All just "mistakes," don't you imagine? But isn’t it funny how every "mistake" Fox News makes manages to falsely malign Democrats and/or shield guilty Republicans?

If lying about facts were a capital crime in journalism, the halls of Fox News would be festooned with funeral wreaths.

Although the actual practice of professionalism is anathema to the con-artist culture of kleptocapitalism, its veneer is always useful to help put over the con. Thus, someone like Juan Williams is paid to lend the professional legitimacy of National Public Radio to Fox News’ endless parade of lies and Republican propaganda. He’s a sellout who should have been axed from NPR years before he was.

Once, Fox News could not have gotten away with the lies they tell. But in the 21st century, they have two great advantages — a cowardly corporate media and a corrupted political culture that fear to expose them, and a low-information, poorly educated American audience that likes to be lied to.

Remember in 2009 when all the American cable news networks spent a full afternoon chasing the ludicrous story of “Balloon Boy?” Even when the “rescued” boy effectively blurted out the fact that the whole thing was a hoax live on CNN, host Wolf Blitzer hastily back-peddled in an effort to AVOID exposing the truth.

Entertainment values, driven by corporate greed, have smashed all but the pretense of professional journalism on television. The cable news channels DIDN'T WANT to reveal the truth, even when the lie was thrown right into their faces. 

The lie was just too lucrative.

And if they can't even expose the truth concerning an absurd hoax about a boy in a balloon, what kind of unmitigated, dangerous nonsense are they feeding us about Iraq, Afghanistan, Wall Street and health care?

Those nonexistent Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction were just a successful trial flight of Balloon Boy, as it turned out.

Contemporary American discourse is completely dominated by commercialism, not journalism. Everything is treated as an advertising campaign where truth is irrelevant even when it's not actually troublesome. Selling the product — whether it’s war, torture, economic Pollyanna pabulum or a Balloon Boy — is the only thing that matters, and the corporate news media always lays the groundwork for the ad campaign. Their alleged professional commitment to seeking the truth is itself no longer anything more than an advertising pitch. Makes a great slogan when your real interest is peddling the soothing lies of “conventional wisdom.”

“The most common and noticeable effect of the corporate noose on journalism is that it simply allows commercial values to redirect journalism to its most profitable position,” wrote Bob McChesney and John Nichols in their book Our Media. Not Theirs.

“As a result, relatively vast resources are deployed for news pitched at a narrow business class, and suited to their needs and prejudices; such news has come to dominate newspapers, specialty magazines, and cable television. Likewise, news for the masses increasingly consists of stories about celebrities, royal families, athletes, natural disasters, plane crashes and train wrecks. Political coverage is limited to regurgitating what some politician says.”
Nichols and McChesney nailed the source of the problem in “Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America.” They wrote, “The ultimate aim of Dollarocracy was, as James Brian McPherson put it, ‘to destroy the professionalism that has defined journalism since the mid-twentieth century.’ The core problem was that professional journalism, to the extent it allowed editors and reporters some autonomy from the political and commercial values of owners, opened space for the legitimate presentation of news and perspectives beyond the range preferred by conservatives. That professional journalism basically conveyed the debates and consensus of official sources and remained steadfastly within the ideological range of the leadership of the two main political parties — it never was sympathetic to the political left — was of no concern. It still gave coverage to policy positions on issues such as unions, public education, civil rights, progressive taxation, social security and the environment that were thoroughly mainstream but anathema to the right.”

Marketing values, and not the professional journalist's mission of providing accurate information to the public, now completely dominate the American news media. This sacrifice of journalistic credibility to propaganda and amusement finally adds up to a form of social suicide, like walking along a cliff’s edge drunk, with your eyes closed.

“The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world,” the late Neil Postman observed. 

Judging merely from the corporate entertainment media, American young people could be forgiven for assuming that the most common profession is that of “assassin.”

In 21st century America, news coverage on television is so completely compromised that the most honest journalism can only sneak into corporate TV if it is disguised as comedy. Jon Stewart, in his passion for and seriousness about real journalism, is a far more important and serious journalist than most of those who operate under that title in the corporate media.

Stewart, and his fellow satirist Stephen Colbert, understand that without open, honest, factual information, we've had it, and his satire makes that point day after day. The fact that they must do so in the guise of clowns is not a reflection on them, but on the deep corruption of our society, a place in which only jesters may speak the truth to the king.

The cowardice and complicity of the corporate media has been noted by the government and corporate powers that be, and they have accordingly upped the ante on their ruthlessness. They have learned that you can now, for example, poison the Gulf of Mexico, and simply silence journalists still foolish enough to try to report on that fact.

Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland detailed how local police and federal officials work with BP to harass, impede, interrogate and even detain journalists who are covering the impact of the spill and the clean-up efforts. She documented one incident which was particularly chilling of an activist who — after being told by a local police officer to stop filming a BP facility because ‘BP didn't want him filming’ — was then pulled over after he left by that officer so he could be interrogated by a BP security official,” Glenn Greenwald noted.

Having abandoned their professional journalistic watchdogs by the side of the road, Americans can now be counted upon to howl in petulant indignation as they are overtaken, without warning, by a string of disasters and criminal usurpations of power.

Spying  — Gee, having clandestine agents of private corporations wielding extraconstitutional government powers to spy on your every move — what could possibly go wrong there?

Physicians who peddle worthless drugs. Scientists who falsify data for their corporate clients. Judges who sell children to for-profit prisons. Journalists who lie to the public they’re supposed to inform. Corporation given secret police powers. Kleptocapitalism’s assault on the ethics of each profession is no coincidence. It’s a necessary corollary.

Kleptocapitalism’s only motive is profit, at whatever the cost — corrupted public officials, a lie-peddling media, defrauded investors, pension-robbed citizens, a ruined economy, poisoned Gulfs, nuclear meltdowns, wrecked global climates. But such examples of rapaciousness tend to add up and become painfully obvious, so what kleptocapitalism requires to keep the bad times rolling is trust.

Professional ethics exist in order to provide a society’s citizens with confidence in the soundness and benevolence of its institutions. Therefore the subversion of a profession’s ethics becomes irresistibly lucrative. Trust is, after all, the con artists’ chief asset.

So American professional ethics are shot. So what, reply the Americans who waddle through Wal-Mart daily. It’s not as if American Idol has been cancelled or something serious like that, right?

No, it’s merely that this is one more sign of the moral, ethical and professional rot of American society, that’s all. So enjoy it while you can, Wal-Mart Man, until your trusted financial advisor decides to steal all your money or you go under the knife with a surgeon who cheated his way through med school or you're flying in a plane with a pilot who's dead drunk. 

Then you may learn that a lack of professional ethics is more important than you think.

But then that’s the problem, isn’t it, Wal-Mart Man? You never did think. You didn’t want to.
Corporate "privatization" has even perverted the profession of lifeguard.
And as 2013 dawned, we learned that the FBI is the servant of "corporate security," which is pretty much the working definition of a fascist police state.

“Recall for a moment the situation in which Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009,” wrote Thomas Frank. “During the preceding decade, we had endured a tech bubble and a housing bubble; our accounting industry had been suborned in all sorts of ways; our prize stock analysts had been suborned in all sorts of different ways; our leaders and foreign-policy pundits had sold us a war in Iraq using completely bogus reasoning; our investment houses specialized in cooking up poisoned investments; our ratings agencies specialized in hanging blue ribbons on them; and the executives of our financial industry specialized in helping themselves to stupendous bonuses even as they lost billions—even as they blasted holes in the economy of the world.

“What Americans understood when we looked over this panorama of fraud and incompetence and self-dealing was that expert authority had been corrupted at every point where it was exposed to organized money. The meritocracy was obviously broken.”

Ironically, even a society devoted to pursuing the Almighty Dollar requires standards that transcend and trump profit if it is to survive. Not even its richest citizens are finally immune from a society's greed-driven degeneration. Gated communities can’t protect the people inside them if they deliberately choose to trigger a nationwide earthquake.

Chayefsky Man keeps shouting about all this. But Wal-Mart Man isn’t listening.

Haven't you seen how even lowly craftsmen accommodate laymen to a certain point, but all the time hold fast to the principle of their craft and never allow themselves to abandon it? 

— Marcus Aurelius

Copyright © Dan Hagen 2011

Even the police have joined the kleptocapitalist thieves.