Well, since we go beyond the corporate ‘happyism’ let us just go straight to the reality of how this country was set up to protect people but then has been used and subverted by the criminals to have those laws and rights to protect their nefarious adventures because the right to privacy, the right to freedom, the right to lie, the right to frame others for one’s crimes, the right to make money, the right to free speech and now add the ‘corporate freespeech’ to that, just what in hell’s name would anyone think was going on here where laws are so easily twisted to protect the criminal to have his/her goddamn way to the point that now it is acceptable ‘way of doing business’ that protects the few and punishes the many.

Steal a little and you go to jail; steal a lot and you become the law, the king, the decider or the ‘too big to big held accountable for your crimes and now look at what we got, a rampant run on who can steal the most while at the same stroke of bankrupt morals, the crooks own and run this country while the vegged citizens show their approval by re-electing the same clap trap slime, continue to be deceived in empty lives, do absolutely nothing and worship a media/msm that is the worse ‘devil incarnate’ imaginable.

Never have so many done so little to do nothing to defend a democracy.

Chris’ pitch might might get more traction if he dropped that “moral decline” business. The idea of moral decline supposes a time when moral standards were better. One would have to be an historical revisionist, or else completely ignorant of history to believe that America ever had this golden age of Mayberry RFD’s from coast to coast Chris is imagining.

Slavery, Native American pogroms, land grabbing, imperialistic wars, inhumane labor practices, racism, xenophobia, sexual repression, witch hunts (religious and secular), and unbridled greed is what America is built upon. You’d have to be a beyond-hopeless romantic to see a golden age in that.

Go ahead, Chris, do what it takes to sell your book. It’s the American way. But remember, “moral decline” has always been the language of tyrants. Yes, America is in arrested development,  but this narcissistic adolescence has been with us for generations. Even a cursory glance at our history will lead to the conclusion that America has never been more evolved morally than it is today. Indeed, it is our growing collective conscience that allows us to put our history into an ethical context.

True justice is served when the real people are punished for their crimes.

And yes, Virgina777, it must start with those in the msm so the masses are shaken out of their stupor to join reality again.

I think Chris Hedges is right about the moral decline and right to pinpoint the Media as the main cause of it, but what he doesn’t talk enough about is that, all of this can be changed.

Yes, the Media has imposed stupidity and right-wing politics on America. In other words, the American people has been seriously f__ked with.

But how about a movement to alert people to that, to provide new sources of true information, to call the Media out more often for their abuses and even more important, to insist on change from them!

How about a movement that says the dumbing down, lying to and open manipulation of the American people is THE most serious crime possible to perpetrate in the Country (didn’t we learn that after WW II?)

And go after the clear culprits guilty of this (who cares if they have to be dragged out of their offices at Fox News?)

We don’t have bear-baiting or bull-baiting, and dog and cock fighting are frowned upon.  Humans remain stupid, ignorant, ill-schooled, lazy, and self-centered, but I don’t see moral decline in all this, just the continuation of a species which seems to be one of evolution’s dead ends.

Yeah, I read Chris’ article here of late about this bunch of claptrap corporate ‘happyism’ which is just another part of the corporatocracy’s unending endeavours to make a unified individual all cast to think, speak, live in a world that is based on, as Chris names it, illusion and this is intertwined in books by both orwell and huxley, ‘1984’ & ‘Brave New World’.

It is easy to make people sad, mad and fearfull but a bit more challenging to ‘MAKE’ them happy which would actually be along the lines of the use of fear but the probability ends up with what this country is, very saturated with now a dumbed down major part of the population that can’t think critically for themselves or their core groups where I would bet the discussion of real events and issues is a statement about either or both and the rest of the conversation made of all agreeing saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at the appropriate time while all smiling or frowning at the same time in lockstep and obviously with very very little differencing of thought or opinion.

All of that is contrary to what a human nature or actually all life is, different and not some robotic bunch of every thought, every life the exact same as each other, except of course for those puppet masters pulling the strings to keep them ‘separated from the ‘others.