Counterpunch with action
Listen. Silicon Valley moguls Larry Ellison and son David are close to owning Skydance Media and Paramount Global. They could soon control “CBS News, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Pictures” and the content of everything from your “children’s cartoons to nightly broadcasts.” The Financial Express adds:
Paramount Skydance is now rumoured to be weighing a $70 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. That would bring DC Comics, Harry Potter, Barbie, CNN, and HBO under the Ellison umbrella…. Amid the Hollywood manoeuvring, Ellison has also resurfaced in Washington’s battle over TikTok. After U.S.-China talks in Madrid last week, President Donald Trump teased a deal that would “save” a company beloved by young Americans. A report by WSJ also suggests that the Oracle consortium is acquiring an 80% stake in TikTok in the US.
Media consolidation is on track to turn your information streams into the 21st century equivalent of Alien‘s 22nd-century “The Company,” a.k.a., the Weyland-Yutani Corporation:
In 2120, Weyland-Yutani’s sphere of influence emcompassed all of North, Central, and South America,[1] as well as Mars and Saturn.[3] Weyland-Yutani, along with Threshold and Dynamic, were known as the “Triumvirate” before becoming “The Five” with the addition of Lynch and Prodigy.[4]
This is happening now. Meta, News Corp., etc. and other billionaire-controlled media outlets are on track to control what constitutes news and reality as you know it. Inconvenient facts that already exist will be memory-holed. Other data that your tax dollars once captured and archived will vanish like water down a drain.
Hang in there with me as I shift gears.
Do not squander this moment. Those of you reading about ABC and CBS axing Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, about The Washington Post firing Karen Attiah, its last Black full-time opinion columnist, need to use this moment before it vanishes as well.
There is a lot of hostility in America about the impunity the rich enjoy in our corrupt system of economics and justice. Convicted felon Donald J. Trump, now president of the United States agaion, is the poster child for millionaire-billionaire impunity (with help from SCOTUS).
On that, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) hammered FBI Director Kash Patel on Wednesday in a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. Patel had told a Senate hearing that there was no credible evidence that multi-millionaire Jeffrey Epstein trafficked underage girls to anyone except himself (Miami Herald):
But Massie cited files used by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York which summarize interviews with witnesses and suspects.
The lawmaker claimed those files include “one Hollywood producer worth a few 100 million dollars, one royal prince, one high-profile individual in the music industry, one very prominent banker, one high profile government official, one high profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician, at least six billionaires, including a billionaire from Canada. We know these people exist in the FBI files, the files that you control.”
Americans know in their guts that the reason the Epstein files have not been made public — as Trump promised — is that there is a massive coverup to protect elite men like those Massie referenced, including Donald Trump whose name appears in them but may not have been inviolved in the trafficking. Those files will come out. Public pressure will build and you will help build it.
People are angry about how blatantly the rich flaunt flout the rules and evade accountability, including those behind media consolidation. Wednesday at drive time, I stood again at a major intersection rotating overhead a sign that reads “Grab him by the | Epstein files.
The response, especially from women, was loud and vigorous. There were not only horn toots, waves and thumbs-up aplenty. People cheered! Carloads of women cheered and applauded as they drove by. A passenger waiting at a light climbed out of his window to cheer and pump his fist over the roof of the car. A woman jogger told me all the bastards need to go, and then “the orange menace.”
They say never waste a good disaster. Don’t waste this one. Get out there and pump it up. Work the eye.
(h/t IW on my messsing up flaunt/flout. Not the first time.)
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