The Media-Industrial Complex

The Media-Industrial Complex is a term I made up for what used to be called the Military-Industrial Complex.

Back when the cold war was in full swing, the military-industrial complex would propose multi-billion dollar "defense" projects to Congress, hoping that Congress would allocate billions of tax dollars to fund these projects.

Congressional members who voted for these projects received campaign funds from the military-industrial complex so they could get re-elected. The factories, military bases, and research institutions that these billions of dollars paid for ended up being located in the home districts of the same influential congressmen and senators who voted for the projects in the first place.

Any member of Congress who did not vote for these projects would be labeled "soft on communism" or a "pacifist" or a "traitor to the American Way Of Life". When the next election came around, people who voted against these projects would find that their opponents were suddenly much better funded than they'd been in the past.

Some of these projects were actually useful in the defense of our country, but their success or failure in obtaining funds had more to do with who got the money and power generated by the projects, rather than the usefulness of the projects themselves. The shareholders of the big defense corporations received millions and sometimes billions of dollars in profits. The senators and congressmen got re-election funds and managed to hold on to power for as long as they wished. The American people got a first-rate defense system, although they'd paid billions more for that defense than they probably needed to, and ended up putting their great-grandchildren into debt in the process.

In this post-cold war world, the military doesn't have the power it once did to create multi-million dollar projects that were easily sold to a willing Congress. We just don't have the same threats to the American Way of Life that we once did. However, the same defense contractor shareholders who siphoned off billions of tax dollars using the "defense" scam are still out there and they're still the same greedy bastards they always were. As the cold war wound its way down these people sold off their defense stocks and started buying media companies.

We no longer have real threats to the American Way of Life, but if the media tells you day after day of some new danger, real or imaginary, you can bet that Congress will be only too happy to allocate the funds to fight that danger. The cycle will continue, campaign funds will be given, and stockholders will get rich off of American taxpayer dollars. That's why a defense contractor like General Electric bought NBC, and another defense contractor named Westinghouse bought ABC. Those are the well-known cases, but they're just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

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