book launch: hearts and mines: the us empire's culture industry
TRANSCRIPT
WELCOME!
US Empire and communications, 1969“American power, expressed industrially, militarily and culturally has become the most potent force on earth and communications have become a decisive element in the extension of United States world power” - Herbert I. Schiller
US Communications and Media Power
Data derived from Forbes 2000 2015 list of the biggest public companies in the world, as determined by four metrics: sales, profits, assets and market value, as of April 6, 2015
National security for capital• The US is home to the most concentrated private wealth on the planet
($63.5 trillion in total).• The US has the largest wealth inequality gap between the rich and the poor. • The .01% super rich takes in upwards of $25 million a year while more than
half of US citizens scrape by on under $30,000. • As the US’s share of world GDP has gone down, the compensation for US
CEOs has gone up. • US top CEOs now make an average more than 300 times the typical worker.• The CEO of McDonalds takes 644 times more than the average McDonalds
worker.
National security for capital• $3 to $7 trillion on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, killing an estimated 1.3 million civilians• 15.3 million American children under the age of 18 currently living in hunger. • It allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to the R&D of technologies of death made by
Lockheed Martin and other security firms (e.g., the F-15) while its own infrastructure crumbles and public schools get defunded.
• The working poor signs up to be sent off to war in exchange for tuition, but many return home with PTSD and are unable to live, let alone go back to school. In 2014, approximately 22 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans killed themselves each day.
• Since 1962, the US State has funneled more than $100 billion in aid to Israel ($38 billion over the next ten years) yet still can’t find the cash to build public housing capable of caring for America’s poorest.
• It bailed out Wall Street with $16.8 trillion, yet can barely fathom a living wage to lessen the hardships of workers.
The US Empire’s Culture Industry: what is it?• Two organizations: US government (politics) and US-
based communications and media-entertainment firms (economics).
• “a nexus of the government (striving to promote itself and engineer public consent to dominant ideas about America and US foreign policy around the world and US-based yet globalized media corporations (seeking to make money by producing and selling cultural commodities to consumers in world markets)”(Mirrlees 2016, 7).
• The interests and goals of these organizations “do not always march lockstep, and at times they conflict” yet the book highlights “a more collusive relationship [ . . . ] than is often recognized”(Mirrlees 2016, 7).
The Man of Steel Shills for the F-35
Reality TV for a TV War
Digital militainment: play-kill with virtual guns, buy guns
Organize, mobilize, internationalizeRobert W. McChesney:“If a viable pro-democracy, anti-imperialist movement can emerge” in the US, “it will improve the possibilities dramatically for socialists and progressives worldwide.”