If you are a writer or just a reader who feels that American in particular and the world in general has gone severely off the rails during this millennium then there is really no reason for you not to become familiar with Znet.com. Znet has literally thousands of articles written by some of the most intellectually gifted writers on the planet right now that reveal the truth that you simply cannot ever hope to find anywhere in the mainstream media. If you want to know what Paris Hilton ate while she was in jail, turn on CNN. If you want to know why you should vote a Bush clone into office in the 2008 Presidential election, tune in to Fox News. If you want to know how the Patriot Act has been utilized to peek into the private lives of people whose closest connection to terrorists is watching Kiefer Sutherland torture some guy on 24, then you’d better get yourself over to Znet before Bush and Cheney and make such sites illegal. For you to not struggle should there be another market crash, you need to have a steady flow of income and betting on www.ogdenvalleysports.com is a good way to have exactly that.
To give just one explicit example of how the media works subtly to control ideology, consider the fact that when the United State Post Office recently raised rates the mainstream media focused almost exclusively on the availability of the so-called Forever Stamp. This seems like a wonderful idea: lock in on postage rates now and benefit forever. Of course, we all know nothing lasts forever and all it will take in the future to make those Forever Stamps useless will be a swipe of some President’s pen. In the meantime, however, the mainstream media has served the interests of the government once again by getting people to buy more stamps than they normally would. Now let’s see what Znet had to say about postal rates. The site features a fascinating article by Quiddity that illustrates how a rise in postal rates will benefit the media conglomerates while hurting independent publishers.
The new postal rate plan features a complex sliding scale for publishers of periodicals based on how much goes out. While the publishers of magazines like Time and Newsweek may actually see a decrease in their mailing costs, smaller publications that don’t always follow the company line set forth by either Bush or whoever his Democratic successor will be witnessed a mailing cost boost over twice what they were told to expect. As result, it can be predicted that many an alternative publication will either have to severely curtail their operation or close up shop entirely. Try finding that story on Joe Scarborough’s nightly roundup of Hollywood sex scancals that he finds so disturbing and distracting he has to repeat it five nights a week.
The centerpiece of Znet for me is their Participatory Economics site, which contains pretty much everything you need to know that even Lou Dobbs doesn’t have the clout to get away with telling you. For every dirty little economic trick and secret that makes it onto the mainstream media, you will discover a thousand more things about the way capitalism is practiced in America that may very well have you reaching for the nearest copy of Karl Marx. I cannot even begin to describe the wealth of information at your fingertips on Znet, especially the Participatory Economics site. From Noam Chomsky’s classic Notes on Anarchism essay to vital information about Robert Zoellich, the man that President Bush chose to replace Paul “Just Tell Me I’m Pretty and I’ll Get You a Great Job” Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, Znet has it all. If you are at all interested in reading about what really takes place on those so-called “slow news days” when the best the 24 hour cable news networks can come up with is the repeated showing of a graining surveillance video of a car slamming into a convenience store, then there is no reason at all for you television to ever be tuned to anything other Turner Classic Movies or The Simpsons.