Why isn’t the news media covering Occupy Wall Street? Simple…

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Did you know that, before 2001, a company couldn’t own two television stations in overlapping markets?

The reason is obvious… if you control the airwaves, you control the news… and if you control the news, you control the people.

OccupyWallSt.org is consistently updating their site with the message that well over 1,000 protesters are still holding camp after five days of occupation, going into the sixth.  The pictures show a great example of one of our greatest political institutions:  Peaceful protest and assembly in a public area.  These images are powerful, so why haven’t you seen them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation

Above, you see a link to a list.  Everything you’ll see on this list is owned by one company which is ran by one person.  Newspapers, television stations, cable companies, movie studios, websites… the entire gamut of news media.  The news media has turned into a business, a for-profit enterprise instead of a concerned self-reporting citizenry exposing the corruption in our nation.  The duty of the journalist has been lost, altered beyond repair.  They can’t whistleblow on the corporations when they ARE the corporations.

The #OccupyWallStreet movement is about ending the income and wealth disparities, healing the middle class and putting people back to work.  It is about social equality and fairness, which means the rich will be required to pay their fare share once again.  When the rich is Rupert Murdoch, his company simply ignores the shouts.  He has no interest in reporting the actual news… if it doesn’t follow his narrative, it doesn’t air.

But what of “liberal” mainstream media like MSNBC?  What of them?  They supported the wars and ignored the protests then as well, but they’re doing an even better job of blacking it out this time around because this time, it’s not just aimed at the Pentagon… it’s aimed at all the billionaires who have not enough shreds of moral terpitude to consider the idea that they owe anything to the people who made them rich.  MSNBC is just another Fox News.

Break them up.  Repeal the changes to the FCC duopoly laws.  Lower the barrier of entry for new sources of news and information.  Al Jazeera English is a great place to start, but we need a local resource as well.

We’ll never end the corruption if nobody has a camera and a mic to give us a voice down on Wall Street.

I haven’t seen a single pair of twins in the Twin Cities

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Even the baseball team doesn’t have any twins.  Maybe they should go track down Jose and Ozzie Canseco.

I’m just being facetious, of course; I have never watched a Twins game and I know what the Minn/St Paul nickname is really all about.  I guess the toughest thing about being in a big new city like this, though, is that I have no idea where anything is or what I can get myself into on the cheap.  I’m trying to vastly roll back my drinking habit, so bars have suddenly become much less enticing, though I may head down to BW3’s tomorrow to watch the games and eat some parmesan garlic boneless wings… stuff is pure heaven.

What I need to know are those places you can go and hang out and lose yourself for a few hours but you don’t have to go broke to do it.  I’m talking record stores, bookstores, head shops, local rock shows, art galleries, open air markets, dives with good burgers… Where do people talk politics out here?  Who can help me out?  I’ve got a buddy, a sleeper agent named Erik Hess, that has offered to show me around in the past.  I think I’m going to have to take him up on it.

The alternative is to sit here complacent, and all that does is make me miss Kristin more.  It’s not exactly a secret that she’s better at this distance thing than I am and I really need distractions to keep me from worrying that she’s going to get bored or get swept off her feet, which is ridiculous after over eight years together but I never claimed to be perfect and I’m doing my best to do my best.

If you think I’m out of my mind, imagine being 22 with no job, no money, no hope, no will to try… and one day, out of nowhere, you meet the girl that’s going to make you want to succeed because she changed your mind that love was a myth and that you’d wake up in the morning with an actual smile on your face someday.  Imagine going from 60 to 120 in 3.2 seconds without even being in a car, because we’re talking BPM, not MPH… my heart was beating out of my chest and it still does and all this success I have today is hers.  It wouldn’t have happened any other way.

She likes to disagree but she’s modest.  I know where I’d be without her… still working at Cedar Point, cynical about love and life and leading myself down the same dead end because I thought it was the only road I was qualified to travel.

Slam poetry.  That’s what I need.  Is there slam poetry in Minneapolis?  Someone like Eric Darby or G. Watsky or something like that… the positive stuff, the insightful and thought-provoking stuff.  If you’ve seen this, tell me where I can.  It’s the best kind of distraction.

Either that or twins.

Hello world! Welcome to Rage and Love.

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Every good blog should start with a witty, dramatic introduction.  This is not one of those blogs.

The concept of Rage and Love is pretty straightforward.  The words were lifted from Green Day’s Jesus of Suburbia, where Jimmy (the main character in the American Idiot concept album’s lyrics) opens the song with the line “I’m the son rage and love, Jesus of Suburbia, from the bible of ‘none of the above.'”  I chose to use these as classifications for my posts, which I see fitting into two categories.

Rage.  While my political ideologies are not formed along party lines and I tend to disagree with at least a small part of anyone’s individual platforms (as any thinking person would), I do identify myself as a socialist.  I am very left-leaning on a majority of my stances and you will find that my concepts can and often do tend to lean toward the extreme.  Political, socioeconomic, or just general interest current events are a constant source of rage for me and I don’t have much of an outlet beyond Facebook, which doesn’t mix well when I have a very conservative family that probably doesn’t want to see my love of the writings of Marx mixed in with a recap of when I may be home for the holidays.  Therefore, posts tagged with Rage will be related to current events and/or politics.

Love.  I recently relocated to Bloomington, MN from Elyria, OH, where I have a beautiful, amazing girlfriend of over eight years.  Sadly, she was unable to make this move with me as she has another year of college classes and is taking care of the house we bought a couple of years ago, failing to predict this sudden move.  My friends and family are all still back there as well.  While I’m excited about this career opportunity, everything I truly love is back in Ohio.  There’s nobody to take in this adventure with me in person, so when a post is tagged with Love, I will just be sharing the mundane details of this new chapter in my life.

I’m not sure how often I’ll update the blog, but I imagine that it will be cathartic so I’ll probably be here at least a few times a week when my thoughts just won’t fit in 420 characters or less.  In between, though, you can catch me on Facebook and Twitter.  I’ll be updating the look and feel of the site, as well as a potentially detailed bio, as we go along so expect gradual improvement as I get the occasional urge to work on it.

As you read, always feel free to comment.  That’s what the internet is for.