Neil and I just watched Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media yesterday and it was very good and definitely worth the time (it runs about three hours). Mostly what Chomsky aruges is a fairly standard structural approach which leans heavily on Marx and Althusser: Marx for the economic critique and Althusser for the ideological one. Mostly, what Chomsky does is to argue how institutions mask reality by feeding the public watered-down or more pleasurable instances of events so that the public remains diverted. A democracy must deceive in this way because (in theory at least) political decisions must be made with public approval. A dictator just goes to war. A president must "manufacture consent" and this requires sophisticated and deceptive methods. Although this doc was produced in 1992, it has obvious applications for today.
Chomsky takes a specific intance in the media, that of East Timor, and aruges that the media downplays this particular instance of genocide for the more poltically favorable Cambodia.
I think there can be obvious parrallels with how big business affects and produces desire in certain products and convinces us to favor some over others. It also makes me think about the line in Brave New World: "ending is better than mending." Big Business doesn't necessarily want us to be independent. They want us in a circle of consumption, endlessly toiling on the wheel like rodents, always diverted and never independent, locked into this prison of consumerism.
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Check this article out. It's a critique of the ethical problems of the environmentalists within a capitalist structure. Real good stuff, I'm thinking of assigning it to my STS class.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/233
Sounds interesting. We'll check it out!
Neil, you should see Michael Moore's Sicko which gels with what the article was saying about our health care system--but not the peak oil component.
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