I peruse the Tribune’s metro section and the Times’ business section. I read with pen in hand and scissor nearby to take notes and clip relevant items for future citation. I read each item them until the end because it is amazing how often the best information is found buried at the back of newspaper stories.

Lately, though, I’m not at my best.

I find myself going straight to the Tribune sports section and barely glancing at the rest. I look to see how the White Sox are doing (not good), how the Cubs are fairing (worse) and what’s going on in the NBA playoffs.

It’s the same with television. I can’t seem to stay on CNN, the Nightly News Hour (PBS) or the Ten O’Clock News for more than two or three minutes before I’m clicking over to look in on the really urgent stuff – the Honduran national football team’s game against Ecuador (thank God for that evil media mogul Rupert Murdoch) or some ESPN broadcaster holding forth on the San Antonio Spurs.

There’s something going on here besides an attachment to spectator sports that goes back to watching Chicago superstars Gale Sayers and Bobby Hull during the 1960s.

The non-sports “news” is just too limited and Orwellian to hold my attention these days.

I think I’m responding to the taboos in dominant media news coverage and commentary.

I’m talking about the big “Do Not Seriously Discuss” signs that prevent “mainstream” (corporate) media news and commentary from providing honest, intelligent, thorough and forthright information and reflection on current events.

It gets tiresome to read, view and hear coverage and commentary that repeatedly and systematically deletes critical aspects of the story in question because those aspects take things beyond narrow, doctrinally imposed parameters of permissible discussion.


IMMIGRATION WITHOUT THE WORLD SYSTEM AND CLASS CONFLICT

Look at the immigration issue in the United States , a recurrently hot news item over the last couple of years. The coverage and commentary is full of detailed descriptions and discussion of various aspects of different legislative proposals and how politicians, policymakers and advocacy groups line up regarding each clause and proposal. But the relevant overall context for understanding the issue is largely missing. That context is the spatially and socially unequal structure and operation and class basis of the world capitalist system, which creates both the “push” and the “pull” behind mass “illegal” (and legal) immigration to the U.S. and the fear so many working Americans feel about the presence of immigrants in the U.S. There’s no serious discussion of the critical roles that U.S. global trade, investment and foreign policy play in generating and sustaining poverty and repression in the “developing” nations that export so much cheap labor to the U.S. Also beyond the range of serious focus: the U.S. business community’s desire to exploit stateless – politically and institutionally disenfranchised – labor and the pivotal, profit-enhancing contradiction between (a) global capital’s freedom to roam the planet with “race-to-the-bottom” impunity and (b) global labor’s comparatively constricted movement across national borders..

Minus all this critical but generally forbidden material, the dominant immigration and immigration “reform” coverage and commentary tends toward grey and totalitarian emptiness.

I’d rather read or listen to a comparatively honest discussion of the White Sox’s latest pitching troubles.

INEQUALITY WITHOUT CAPITALISM

Growing economic inequality in the U.S. is another example. This topic is receiving welcome and increasing media attention after thirty five years in which the share of U.S. “earnings” appropriated by the richest 1 percent of American has tripled while incomes have stagnated and fallen for the nation’s working class majority. The most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world by far, the U.S. is now at pre-New Deal levels of economic disparity. The top 1 percent owns more than a third of the nation’s wealth.

You do see more and more pieces about this important subject in dominant media. Sadly, however, the relevant coverage and commentary generally comes with a key part of the story – the basic nature of the nation’s business-ruled (state-capitalist) political-economy – all but left out. You hear and read about various policy debates relating to whether growing inequality is about “technology” and/or globalization and/or deindustrialization and/or education and skills and/or about the erosion of union power and/or “free trade” and/or immigration and/or tax policy and/or culture and behavior (always meaning the culture and behavior of the poor, not the rich) and so on. Some of this discussion is useful and intelligent but there’s a giant taboo against honest discussion of the fact that the business-ruled state-capitalist system of socioeconomic management tends by its very nature to generate massive inequality combining opulence for the privileged few and relative poverty for the many. As the liberal economist Lester Thurow (no stark raving “Marxist” like yours truly) noted in the mid 1990s, “democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power. One believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man [sic] one vote,’ while the other believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. ‘Survival of the fittest’ and inequalities in purchasing power are what capitalist efficiency is all about. Individual profit comes first and firms become efficient to be rich. To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.” Even that noted Marxist text Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary reports that capitalism is “characterized by a tendency toward the concentration of wealth.”

This elementary fact is essentially unmentionable in the “mainstream” (dominant/corporate) media.

And so the discussion of economic inequality in the U.S. tends to send me over to the sports section where reporters do not feel compelled to deny that the essence of last Saturday’s football game was that rich and powerful Team A assaulted and subordinated poorer and weaker Team B.

IRAQ WAR TABOOS AND THE CHILDISH ASSUMPTION OF DEMOCRATIC U.S. BENEVOLENCE

The best contemporary example of dominant media taboos at work has to do with the Iraq War. Certain sections of “mainstream” media may have apologized for their power-serving role in propagating the big weapons of mass destruction (WMD) lie (and related deceptions about Saddam Hussein’s alleged connections to al Qaeda and 9/11) that the Bush administration cooked up to justify their invasion of Iraq. But so what? The apology came far too late to matter and dominant U.S. media has subsequently continued to disseminate numerous other administration deceptions, such as the preposterous claim (elevated by the White House public relations machine once the WMD fraud began to be exposed) that the real reason for the occupation of Iraq was the United States’ desire to export “democracy” and to create a free and sovereign Iraq.

Never mind that the preponderant majority of Iraqis have wanted U.S. troops to leave their nation from the start. Never mind that just 1 percent of Iraqis think the U.S. invaded to export democracy or that the great majority of Iraqis think Uncle Sam came to (imagine) grab their oil. Or that a recent poll conducted by “our own” State Department reports that almost three-fourths of Baghdad’s residents would “feel safer” if U.S. forces left their country. Or that one of the first actions of the U.S. occupation authorities was to open up much of Iraq ’s economy to multinational corporate ownership – an action that would never have been supported by the Iraqi majority and which violated core principles of national independence.

Never mind that 72 percent of Americans surveyed by the mainstream Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in 2004 said that the U.S. should remove its military from Iraq if that’s what a clear majority of Iraqis want. Or that the United States ’ own regressive, hyper-plutocratic domestic policy is highly unpopular with the U.S. majority. Or that America ’s “dollar democracy” has long been something of an open corporate plutocracy, raising critical questions about the United States ’ qualifications to implant something “democracy” abroad.

Never mind that the U.S. is a close ally and sponsor of the feudal, arch-repressive Saudi Arabian regime along with numerous other authoritarian state and political forces (including the Israeli occupation state) in the region and around the world. U.S. policymakers have long been willing to collaborate with the Saudis for one very simple and obvious reason: American access to, and control of, that regime’s unparalleled petroleum reserves.

Never mind that “most U.S. [occupation] soldiers interviewed by NEWSWEEK have long since stopped insisting that their greatest mission is to bring peace and democracy to Iraq . More and more,” Newsweek reported last month, “they talk about their desire to simply protect their buddies, and to get everyone home alive” (“Manhunt in Mesopotamia,” Newsweek, May 28. 2007. p.37).

And never mind that the notion of the Iraqi people doing whatever they wish with their own state’s critical petroleum resources – second or third only to those of Saudi Arabia – is completely unacceptable to U.S. foreign policy makers from either of the nation’s dominant two imperial business parties. The oil and related world-economic and strategic geopolitical stakes in Iraq and the region are simply too high for that. As James M. Lindsay, a vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations proclaimed last year, “it was always hard to sustain the argument that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam there would be immense geopolitical consequences. As we look at Iraq , it's a very different issue. It's a country in one of the most volatile parts of the world, which has a very precious resource that modern economies rely on, namely oil."

As the leading left critic of U.S. foreign policy Noam Chomsky rightly observes, "the U.S. invaded Iraq because it has enormous oil resources, mostly untapped, and it's right in the heart of the world's energy system." If the U.S. succeeds in controlling Iraq , Chomsky notes, "it extends enormously its strategic power, what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls its 'critical leverage' over Europe and Asia . That's a major reason for controlling the oil resources – it gives you strategic power. Even if you're on renewable energy you want to do that. That's the reason for invading Iraq , the fundamental reason," readily understood, Chomsky adds, by anybody who has "three gray cells functioning."

Even if the U.S. overcame its gasoline addiction and became fully energy- self-reliant (it currently receives just 20 percent of its oil from the Middle East), something else would still make U.S. officials positively obsessed with Middle Eastern petroleum: the ongoing and ever-worsening loss of America's onetime supremacy in basic global-capitalist realms of production, trade, international finance, and currency and the related emergence of the rapidly expanding giant China as a new strategic military (as well as economic) competitor. As the noted Left geographer and world-systems analyst David Harvey argues, the United States' long decline, reflecting predictable (and predicted) shifts in the spatial patterns of capitalist investment and social infrastructure gives special urgency for the U.S to deepen its control of Middle Eastern oil and use it as a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions like Western Europe and East Asia, homes to the leading challengers to U.S. economic power. That core objective would hardly be attained helping Iraq act in accord with the principles of democracy and national independence.

Dominant (“mainstream”) U.S. media coverage and commentary on Iraq continues to be hopelessly crippled by doctrinal observance of taboos against discussing five basic and intimately interrelated aspects of so-called “Operation Iraqi Freedom”:

1. The monumentally criminal nature of the invasion, which involved (in the words of the 2005 Istanbul Declaration) “planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.”

2. The brazenly imperialist and colonial nature of the occupation, which is richly continuous with earlier U.S. behavior within the beyond the Middle East and provides critical context for understanding why U.S. soldiers die on a regular basis in Iraq (where Americans are understandably seen as unlawful invaders).

3. The racist nature of the occupation, expressed in the false conflation between al Qaeda and a small group of predominantly Saudi hijackers on one hand and the broad Arab and Muslim worlds on the other hand. This racism has found expression also in U.S. ground forces’ recurrent description of Iraqi civilians and resistance fighters as “hajis” and “towel heads”(among other terrible designations) and in many Americans’ insistence on describing the entire Middle East as a den of primitive, barbarian and enemies of modern “civilization.”

4. The full and overwhelming extent of Iraqi civilian casualties, including more than 700,000 dead by now. The Iraqi body count dwarfs the U.S. death toll in Iraq , but dominant U.S. media remains primarily and narcissistically obsessed with U.S. fatalities in Mesopotamia . The mostly civilian Arab victims of U.S. imperial violence (a lovely expression of America ’s noble commitment to “civilization”) are unworthy victims of the Iraq War as far as dominant U.S. media is concerned.

5. The critical role of the American Empire Project’s longstanding core concern with the control of Middle Eastern oil in shaping the decision to invade Iraq and in ensuring that the U.S. will not completely or truly withdraw from that illegally occupied nation or indeed the region anytime soon, whichever corporate-imperial party happens to hold power in Washington.

These basic and unpleasant realities are essentially unmentionable in “mainstream” coverage and commentary of the Iraq War. At the “left” margin of dominant U.S. media’s narrow parameters of acceptable discourse (defined by the likes of the New York Times and militant centrists Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), the war is at worst a terrible “mistake” – a “strategic blunder” driven by a sincere but naïve drive to advance noble and democratic ideals and institutions.

It’s simply beyond the pale to note that the occupation is a racist and petro-imperialist crime against the Iraqi people, civilized norms and international law and that this crime is consistent with a long and bipartisan record of U.S. imperial violence.

As a result, dominant coverage and commentary on the war is childish, chaotic and nonsensical. Reading the leading papers and watching the corporate talking heads speak about “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is like listening to a deranged psychotic talking gibberish. The assumption of benevolent intention, the denial of criminal and imperial intent, the inability to grasp the role of petroleum, and the denial of racist and mass-murderous realities makes taking in “mainstream” war/occupation coverage and commentary like hearing a baseball game being called by a blind man.

According to a Washington Post “news” story (not an editorial) in January 2005, “spreading democracy around the world” was “one of [the Bush administration’s] top foreign policy goals for the new term."

Right and a strike out is a home run. Two plus two equals five. And the linebacker just stole home.

The Post has joined the Times in claiming to be sorry for its bad call on Iraqi’s WMD. When will it apologize for claiming to believe that Bush invaded Iraq in accord with U.S. goals to “spread democracy around the world”?

“The American empire is fighting to advance democracy, advance peace and quell violence in the Middle East ?” Sure – and the Chicago Cubs have the best record in baseball.

"BOLTS OF BEAUTY IN AN OTHERWISE GREY WORLD"

The “news” is on? Please give the clicker and let me watch the ballgame. The (White) Sox are having a lousy year but at least the announcers are allowed to understand the nature of the game and to call it with a reasonable amount of accuracy.

And there’s nothing like a perfectly turned double play to briefly take my mind off all terrible criminality and hypocrisy spewing from the corridors of U.S. power. “Amid the politics and pain that engulf and sometimes threaten to smother big-time sports,” David Zirin notes, “there is also artistry that can take your breath away. To see Michael Vic zigzag his way through an entire defense, or Mia Hamm crush a soccer ball past a goalie’s outstretched hand, or LeBron James use the eyes in the back of his head to spot a teammate cutting to the basket can be a glorious site at the end of a tough day. It is a bolt of beauty in an otherwise grey world” (Zirin, What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005, p. 22).

Nowhere is the totalitarian greyness of American life more evident to me than in “mainstream” media’s narrow, nonsensical and totalitarian take on current events.

-- Veteran radical historian, journalist, and activist Paul Street (paulstreet99 (at) yahoo.com) is an anti-centrist political commentator located in Iowa City , IA. Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 ( Boulder , CO : Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era ( New York , NY : Routledge, 2005), Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago ( Chicago , 2005) and the semi-weekly “ Empire and Inequality Report.” Street’s next book Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History ( New York , 2007) will be released this July