ISSUE CULTURE
by Peter Moss

"Issue culture" is my new phrase for two realities: the ruling class and conservative think tanks create phoney, cultured issues to manipulate the unrich; and our culture is manipulated by cultured issues. Recent examples follow.

The Bushist regime has cultured phoney issues to attack Iraq: gthe weapons of mass destruction hoax,

the failed attempt to link Iraq and Al Qaida,

"liberating" Iraqis.

George The Liberator (as he should go down in U.S. history) has not liberated Iraqis. He has liberatored Iraq. Liberatoring is my phrase for occupation for exploitation, intensively misrepresented as liberation. George The Liberator has been accused of lying, but that is a gross understatement. He has created and implemented cultured issues for public manipulation with malicious intent. George The Liberator is of course not alone; the in-bed media [I- BM], formerly corporate or mass media, have been complicit in this. The Iraq disaster would not have been possible without the active help of the I-BM.

Of course George The Liberator did not invent issue culture.

Fraudulent campaign finance "reform" has invented "hard money" and "soft money" to protect bribers who buy politicians and their votes

Medicare "reform" was made up to protect overpriced drug manufacturers and to trick beneficiaries into private HMOs. According to a study published in the August 2003 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, private bureaucracy eats up one third of U.S. health care expenditures, and if replaced by a national health care program, the administrative savings alone would suffice to provide coverage for everybody, pay for full drug coverage for seniors, and upgrade coverage for tens of millions now under- insured. But the bosses in Congress do not permit debate on national health care, only phoney "reform" that protects drug and health insurance profits.

Social Security "privatizing" to enrich stock brokers and bolster the stock market

Globalizing to export good jobs to low wage countries and to help depress wages for remaining U.S. jobs

Privatizing schools, to enable big business to make a profit on education. School vouchers and parental choice are additional cultured issues to promote school privatizing for private profit

Right-to-Life, cultured as a political, emotional, judiciary, moral, and religious issue to recruit and retain conservative in the Republican Party. For destitute pregnant females who desperately need it and seek it, abortion is a financial,

medical and survival issue, and a real issue, not a cultured issue for ulterior political motives.

The war on drugs, one of the older cultured issues, is not to help addicts, as most people believe. The war on drugs was started to fight a communist insurgency in Colombia at U.S. taxpayer expense, and there is a fair collection of books exposing this but most people are exposed mostly to I-BM broadcasts and newspapers and magazines, so few people realize they are being duped. In addition, Colombia has some oil reserves owned by U.S. oil companies, so some of the U.S. taxes for the "war on drugs" subsidizes the oilocracy. Plan Colombia, a recent addition, is to make Colombia attractive to international investors eager to exploit Colombia's natural resources and low wage labor.

Economic stimulus, a Bushist excuse to give the rich tax cuts and to cut the interest rate to 1%, a 42-year low, to make banks more profitable.

All of these underhanded cultured issues are vigorously debated in Congress and piously reported by the I-BM as for-real, and insure that nothing happens to help the 98% unrich or hurt the top 2% rich. Perceptive readers have, no doubt, come up with many other cultured issues, but the main thing is to notice that the situation is not as bad as it appears from the I-BM; it is much worse.