CITIZEN KANE: by Orson Welles was fiction, but it had a message. The movie appeared to show the life and attitudes of media barrens William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. These two were similar to our present day Keith Rupert Murdoch and Peter Thiel, including Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Brian Roberts, and John Malone. They were and are all media moguls.

In a time when many citizens of the U.S. would tell you that they live in a democracy, the people just named herein, are the ones who dominate the thinking of the average citizen. At times, even independent thinkers have trouble weighing the “facts” against the cleverly phrased sentence that injects doubt, fear, false hope or national pride into the minds of otherwise peaceful, well-meaning activists.

The one experience that cannot be dictated to, the one element that media moguls cannot contrive to control is the every-day experience of the every-day citizen.  If we starve because we cannot find a job and obtain a pay-check, if we are facing homelessness because we are denied the right to housing, if we suffer because we cannot get health care, that feeling of pain will direct our actions, in spite of the world of words that the media babbles to us.

 The big corporations are now in a battle for control of energy: gas, oil, electric. For dominance and power, they will send the rest of us into economic chaos and war.  If we don’t feel like this is the solution to humanities’ problems, we will need to send a message back to the media moguls. Hear us loud and clear, we are not in favor of further suffering, poverty and war.