At 12:34 ðì 14/11/1996 -0500, Mark M. wrote: (in response to me saying):

...

Man you're nutts. There are very few and quite vast Media Companies in the world, and they're on the verge of becoming monopolies.

Even your American President is in reality a puppet of the Trilateral Commission, who effectively also control CNN, the Washington Post, and many many many other things all over the world.

And you are saying that control of the media by ownership is impossible? You're far out maaan! :-)

Only in America such a naive opinion could actually be _believed_. (here I go again... aga! :-) )

Is this a troll?

Nope; It's the truth. Expressed like a sarcastic joke as well, but it's _true_. And not intended to be a troll at all. As regards the "gullibility", it's plainly dangerous; And cultivated by the Media, apparently stronger in the U.S. than in many other places. But: How many times do I have to state explicitly that my grumbles about America are not "anti-American" (troll) propaganda? Nope; They're grumbles about _freedoms_, that if you Americans lose, the rest of the world will _also_ lose, (even quicker, I think)... Here is a REAL example: (written by E. Francis, on the "Trilateral Commission", and distributed to all members of his own -private- mailing list, of which I'm a part).

THE LAND OF SHADOWS

Early this month is the last presidential "election" before the year 2000. As of this writing and long before, the election was decided in favor of Bill Clinton. It works out astrologically, but the real reason is because Clinton's bosses control the corporations that control the nation, and they also happen to own the major media which, shall we say, help the public make up its mind about who to vote for -- media like CNN, NBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tribune Co., Time-Warner and others. This is not speculation, and if you would allow me to pre-empt this astrological column with a brief exposé, I will explain. All of these news organizations are members of an international institution called the Trilateral Commission (which is listed in the Manhattan phone book, by the way). Bill Clinton and more than 20 of his cabinet ministers are also on the list. Bob Dole isn't a member, and neither is Jack Kemp, so in a very real sense, they are the outsider candidates. Since the organization's creation in 1973, every White House has had Trilateral Commission representation, starting with former Vice President Nelson D. Rockefeller, the brother of the Commission's co-founder, David Rockefeller. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a member of the Commission and close associate of the Rockefellers, was "elected" president, and so on down the line in an unbroken chain through Bill Clinton. In one presidential election in the 1980s, all three candidates were Trilateralists! And in the election right before the current one, it was Trilateralist George Bush versus Trilateralist Bill Clinton. It's a little like both candidates in the old Soviet elections coming from the Communist party. You may wonder, "What's the big deal?" But look at it this way. What if every president or vice president for the past 22 years had been an executive of Grumman Aerospace or a graduate of Harvard University? You might suspect that Grumman or Harvard had a little extra influence and was getting its people into positions of power. But since the nation's most powerful media are also represented on the Commission, its existence rarely gets reported, and its true nature is never accurately reported except in the alternative media. Check the National Newspaper Index in any library and you'll find, at most, one or two references to the Commission, and both seek to belittle its importance. And people who are involved in the organization don't like to talk about it. I recently caught up with Secretary of the Interior (and Trilateral Commission member) Bruce Babbit while he was on a speaking engagement at the posh Mohonk Mountain House in my area. A number of newspaper reporters were gathered around him asking him the usual trivia. When I asked him directly about his involvement on the commission, and the president's, and that of some two dozen other cabinet members, with the red light of a video camera coming from behind me, Bruce cracked a joke about how I would be a popular guy "out west" (ostensibly where everybody has weird political theories), then he turned tail and ran away from the news conference. Commission membership also includes key federal legislators, people on the incredibly powerful Federal Reserve Board, major bankers and the CEOs of numerous corporations of the General Electric and General Foods ilk. And it's an international institution as well, _majority-dominated by business and political interests in other lands, particularly Germany and Japan_. Consider the implications. It is arguable that the Trilateral White House is dominated by government and business interests of foreign nations, which is clearly, blatantly unconstitutional. The above-mentioned national media directly involved with this organization, which set the national news agenda here in the U.S. and for much of the western world, are the same ones which are manipulating the current election by sanitizing all the news that should be coming out of Washington and elsewhere, by not tallying the impressive pile of corpses collecting around the President, and most of all, by bombarding us with PR-generated trivia and commercials 24 hours a day when there are somewhat more significant things to concern ourselves with. And of course, the economy keeps getting better. But just in case you ever wondered just how it happened that some unknown governor of Arkansas ended up tooling around the globe aboard Air Force One, now you have a clue. And in case you thought people were stupid, well, this makes a good case for people just being manipulated. But of course, you'd have no way of knowing this if the only place you got your information was a television set or newspaper. Perhaps this is why big government is so interested in censoring the Internet. I don't believe that the Trilateral Commission is a conspiracy, I believe it's just one fact of how the ruling class of the Western world organizes itself. There are other levels of aristocratic shadow- government organization, and they're quite worth while to study, but this one sure points to some interesting possibilities, and boy, the fact that you never hear it mentioned should make really you wonder. Not that there isn't enough to wonder about already, and not that any of it matters. After all, nothing really happens nowadays. Flight 800 got shot down, but nobody did it. It just sort of exploded and fell out of the sky. Not only wasn't there a perpetrator, there wasn't even a cause determined for the explosion! We have wars -- safe ones, where nobody comes back with their arms and legs blown off. The federal budget deficit increased by a few billion dollars in the time it took me to write this article, and yet it's meaningless. There is no public mention of the Constitutional amendment, the famous 14th Amendment, which explicitly states, "The validity of the public debt of the United States...shall not be questioned." It's the law of the land! So, lest I blow a few too many of my brain cells thinking about this, I will now go back to being an astrologer. End of exposé