speakingcorpse writes:

This ("The gathering storm around Richard Perle") is a very revealing article, one that gives us a good idea of what we have to hope for. We CAN hope for the eventual humiliation and possible imprisonment of Richard Perle. (He will be implicated in the implosion of Conrad Black's media empire.) We CANNOT hope for peace and justice on this earth, because world affairs are run by remarkably simple and yet impossibly entrenched feedback loops of money and power. The fact that Conrad Black's utterly corrupt arms-dealing/newspaper-selling operation will go under is good news. But just think what its very existence says about the way things work: you get a board of friendly businessmen, most of whom are arms dealers (like Perle); you buy already profitable newspapers, and find brain-damaged professional ideologues to justify war and mass death, perpetrated by soldiers using your weapons. That's it. That's all you do. There's no vast network of contacts and influences and subtle ideological justifications that ramify across the public sphere, rendering invisible the material base of our systems of thought. All you do is pay people to say, "We must buy weapons and kill people with them," and you've got yourself a media-industrial war machine. Do you think the Washington Times is that different? The Washington Post, for that matter? How many degrees of separation are there between the corporate board that governs the Post and the one that governs Martin Marietta? Not many. That's the essence of corporate conglomeration: blood-money.

As ever,
speakingcorpse