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All these things are so intertwined, it is hard to know which came first, and which things allowed others to develop--capitalists subverting the political system to their interests, by the infusion of money, and Parties needing to placate them, or Parties perverting themselves for the money, by deregulating everything as corporations want. By now, corporations, rich people, have become so powerful, their interests so merged and organized, so lobbied, that it doesn't seem possible to defeat them anymore; they have the whole (previously) "political" system so reworked, to favor only them. Not just oil and gas, of course, but all industries, are now so merged that even their most fascist abuses are commonplace now. Sometime during the '80s, and from then on, the center of society shifted from the citizens and their culture, to commercial corporations and their self-interest. What was presented to us as "natural" or "popular"--"We are living in a global economy, the whole world is going that way, you'd better adjust to it or be left behind"--was actually the result of many, many years of highly-financed lobbying, bribery, law-changes, and propaganda designed to manipulate people away from thinking of themselves as citizens with a government that will respond to their needs and their will, to cogs in the global corporate machinery; employees and consumers.
All we have been hearing, for all these years since the consolidation of media, is everything told from the corporation's perspective, and if not everything from them, then everything all about them--told from only their perspective. The most ordinary, commonplace opinions--such as that we are the government, that government works for people, and that commercial enterprises need to be regulated--now began to be presented as "left-wing" offshoot notions, as "not pracrical," as "naive," or as a part of the "culture wars," whatever the hell that means. Even the expectation that taxes should be collected and used for people during times of hardship is laughed at or treated as some "immoral" attempt to weaken people and make them "overly reliant on government" as a "crutch"--on and on and on. The emphasis shifted at some point, from the understanding that direct cash payments were the most effective and efficient way to stimulate the economy and get people back on their feet, to pretending that it doesn't work, or that people "don't deserve it," or something, and directing all relief now, only to corporations. Tax breaks, subsidies, "loans" that are never paid back, all kinds of deals, only for them. When I heard Clinton, all during the '90s, do the same thing, I knew something had been killed by these people, and that the Democratic Party was gone. These "Empowerment Zones" in depressed slum areas, to start businesses, are still poor and destitute today.
It was like Hoover--the people have nothing, yet you give money only to the capitalist, to do what? Hire and keep employees in a depressed area where there are no sales? How? There have been tax cuts for rich people and corporations, almost steadily, since the Carter years, and all getting more disastrous all the time, as now we do not even have money for "operating expenses" anymore. They affect the curriculum in schools now, by "generously" providing books, video courses, computers, and by sponsoring activities that used to be covered by taxes, before these same corporations lobbied to have them cut; propaganda for a captive, impressionable audience. The whole liberal arts approach of a wide-ranging education designed to enrich and elevate the mind with literature, social studies, music, an understanding of democracy and government, etc., has been replaced with almost total emphasis on math and science--to work in the corporate world; until they outsource your job.
Both Parties have been devoting themselves so completely to their efforts to increase commercial profits, no matter what it takes or costs, since corporate donations have become the life-or-death of their campaigns, that there is no real connection, as a whole, between them and us. They don't even respond to natural disasters anymore. The corporate treatment, as they have taken over the only public expression of most societal things, has sapped the life and individual spirit out of things, and replaced them all with a kind of slick, TV production sameness, that is emotionally deadening. Filtered sound, quick cuts, endlessly moving camera, extreme close-ups that destroy the world of its meaning and context--in time and the world, not in the post-production studio. No future, no past, only endless sales and re-programming, of us. All fast-paced--not because it was exciting, but because it was attention cut short--trivial, "entertainment," no education or actual reference to our interests. The entire corporate era, with all of our culture turned over to their "production," has been complete, violent, disaster. It has to end.
The more politics and our whole society gets turned over to the corporate way, the more you will find deeper, intelligent thinking being replaced by jargon, slogans, superficiality, and everybody smiling all the time; a complete society that makes and manufactures things, with the possiblility to good, stable jobs for most people, replaced by fewer and fewer jobs, more concentrated wealth in the hands of only a few, and an economy that cannot meet the basic needs of its people, but will cater to rich people's every vanity, an economy that produces only fads and increasingly violent and humiliating exploitation. It is like a sentence in Hell: all grinning simpleminded superficiality masking a ruthless exploitation of all creatures, and all you can do is sit at home like a spectator, disconnected and shut out of the process, and watch it happening on (THEIR) TV. The more corporate things get, the more this horror will increase.
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