There are six for profit corporations controlling over 90% of national media, and most of the remaining media is also controlled by for profit corporations, often owned by billionaires, like The Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, and many others, including The New York Times which is controlled by a wealthy family, although they might not be billionaires, but some of their leading stockholders are, including at least one billionaire, Carlos Slim Helú, who already owned 6.9% of their stock, bailed them out on at least one occasion, after this he owned between 8% and 17% of their stock. On top of that, Social Media companies, like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the owner of Blogspot, etc., where people at the grassroots level might have a chance to share information these wealthy corporations don't want to promote, are also owned by billionaires; and they can and do use this control to censor those they disagree with, or move them down the feed so fewer people see opposing views.
This means the vast majority of speech is partly or completely controlled by a small fraction of one percent of the wealthiest people in the country.
And they refuse to provide much if any promotion for books or research that expose how the economy is rigged in favor of the rich, why we fight one war after another based on lies, how wealthy people profit by polluting and killing the poor or middle class, how wages are suppressed, prevention of violence, and many other issues that benefit the majority, but cut into profits of the wealthy.
Jeffrey Sachs once rightfully said "History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything," which is certainly true; however, at times he helped develop policies heavily rigging the economy in favor of the rich. When rich celebrities make statements like this, they often get much more media attention than when a poor person, or an educated person more sincerely concerned about the interests of the poor. For example, Kwame Nkrumah was once the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana who did much more than Western leaders to help the poor, and wrote "Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism" in 1965 which exposed the economic system supported by Jeffrey Sachs years before he was a well known economist praised for trying to help the poor, yet hardly anyone ever heard of him now, since he gets no media attention. When he was still alive he was demonized by the press, but those who had access to alternative media knew he was being smeared.
It's not uncommon for establishment spokespeople to use statements like this for propaganda purposes, and some people suspect that's what Sachs is doing, although his statement stands on it's own merits and many others made similar statements long before he did, and they often follow it up with much better research. Sachs actually got much more media attention before he started advocating for the poor to some degree. And, as Naomi Klein and several other good researchers pointed out, in the eighties and nineties he supported privatization for many governments around the world, including former Soviet Republics, and IMF loans that had strings attached often requiring countries to buy products or services at outrageous prices, while cutting services to the poor or middle class, which left them destitute and in debt they could never keep up with, which means he's partly responsible for the poverty he claims he wants to eliminate.
The best research almost never comes from the establishment controlled by the wealthy, and even without adequate financing good researchers to a much better job exposing the truth, simply because they're actually trying to do a good job, yet these good researchers get very little promotion or airtime from traditional media, especially when they're exposing fraud by the establishment, and in some cases they're demonized like Kwame Nkrumah, who exposed how Neo-Colonialism works in his book. Books supported by the establishment get an enormous amount of coverage, often enabling them to be best sellers, including Anderson Cooper's recent book “Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune,” which surged onto the best sellers list based on pre-ordered, and he probably would have gotten much more promotion if he hadn't been caught copying someone else's work according to several sources including Anderson Cooper called out by bestselling author over ‘copycat’ book on Brooke Astor 09/12/2023 which explains how he relied heavily on Meryl Gordon, a New York Times bestselling author who published “Mrs. Astor Regrets” in 2008, but wasn't quite plagiarism, since he did cite her as a source, but he didn't do nearly as much of his own work and they try to give him credit for. Not that she's one of the best authors, and she did get far more media coverage than those doing a better job exposing the establishment; but this does clearly show how celebrities and rich people, like Anderson Cooper have major advantages over everyone else.
Mark Crispin Miller made a very similar point when he created a list of about books for what he calls The Forbidden Bookshelf. In most cases there's some effort to suppress these books, including an implied threat from the DuPont family when Du Pont Dynasty was scheduled to be on the Book of the Month Club, and Harold G. Brown Jr. called the Club and told them they considered the book "actionable" and "scurrilous," and they backed out of the deal; when told why, instead of taking legal action for breaking the deal, the publishers cut the first addition from 15,000 to 10,000 copies, and cut the advertising budget by almost two thirds, according to "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You" by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. However, when some of these books get labeled as "banned" or "forbidden" that often serves as an advertising for them, especially if traditional media reports on how they're being banned, which they do for many books, but not for the ones on Mark Crispin Miller's book list or my own which begins below.
Frederic Bastiat once said "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." This is exactly what's been happening for decades, if not hundreds of years, and this isn't a conspiracy theory since conspiracies are done in secret, and the most important evidence supporting this conclusion isn't secret, although it doesn't get much if any promotion from traditional media, and few people pay attention to the best evidence about how our political and economic system is rigged by wealthy elites controlling powerful institution.
Several of the books reviewed below, or pother ones that will be added soon confirm how the economic system is rigged by wealthy elites creating what Kwame Nkrumah called Neo-Colonialism, including those written by John Perkins, Tom Burgis, Graham Hancock, Naomi Klein, and more. Other researchers like Randall Sheldon research how the court system is controlled by the wealthy and the vast majority of those in court on any given day are all poor, followed by middle-class people, with very few rich people being held accountable to the rule of law, partly because laws are rigged heavily in their favor, but even when they do commit crimes they're much less likely to be held accountable. Other books expose additional details about how mass incarceration are driven by policies created by the wealthy.
Other books, including those by Robert McChesney, Upton Sinclair, and more expose how the media is all owned by a small fraction of one percent of the public, and how they used their control to ensure that media would remain all in private hands of a small percentage of the public without providing educational material on many subjects, including the most effective ways to reduce violence and the fact that a rigged economy is a major cause of crime and violence. The media is also pro war when it serves the interests of the wealthy, and as Eugene Debs said over a hundred years ago, in his Canton Ohio speech, "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives." Some books exposing wars based on lies are classics and can be downloaded free on the internet like Smedley Butler "War is a Racket," and the lesser known classic "The Merchants of Death" by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen and many more recent ones, but whether they're classics available free or more recent they get no media promotion while the establishment promotes one war after another.
Other books show how they rig the education system so only the wealthy can access good education and the poor are often subject to indoctrination disguised as education, including advertising in school and efforts to enable corporations to control education so that it's not critical of their power, including when they profit off of massive environmental destruction. More books show how the wealthy profit by polluting the poor and aren't held accountable.
There are also books showing how drug companies are subsidized by tax payer money and even though we pay for research they get patents based on the false assumption they're taking a risk, and they're often protected from liability. Furthermore, while rich people receive the vast majority of benefits from medical research the poor are almost always the ones used as human guinea pigs, and don't even get access to good health care in return. This includes efforts to criminalize drugs when poor people do it, but not when rich people do it, which brings it back to a rigged criminal justice system.
And, of course there's also the true stories about labor conflict which traditional media will never report to the public, because they're controlled by the wealthy, but there are almost forgotten books exposing how the government routinely worked on behalf of the wealthy, initially after the Revolutionary war, for the benefit of white male property owners, and now on behalf of multinational corporations. Or, if you pick any other subject, there's no doubt that one version of it is controlled by the wealthy while another more honest version is written by honest researchers who get little or no media attention, and if they disagree with the establishment they're often falsely portrayed as being "radical" or "fringe."
I'm certainly not recommending you limit book reading to my choices, any more than Mark Crispin Miller recommended people limit their book reading to his; but allowing traditional media promotions to control what books we read is a disaster. Ideally more people would learn to find the best books on their own, which for a long time I didn't do. But once I realized the establishment was only promoting the worst books, and I found a few good books, I found checking their sources, or learning my way around alternative media was far better than looking at Big-Box stores or the NYT best seller list, which is mostly based on the books that the establishment promotes the most, not the best quality.
If you haven't already figured that out, some of the following might help you get started.
The following are some of my own reviews of books MSM doesn't promote, and it won't take long for it to grow as long, if not longer than Miller's list.
Another problem is that Social Media outlets like Facebook or Twitter are steadily increasing efforts to censor the public, perhaps often by automated programs, which is why I re-posted these reviews on my own page, Books MSM Doesn't Promote as well. I was blocked from my main Facebook account, at least temporarily, for what they claim are "security reasons," even though there doesn't appear to be a security threat at all, so I may post these on two different accounts.
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Robert McChesney "Rich Media Poor Democracy" 1999 and "The Problem Of The Media" 2004
Upton Sinclair "The Brass Check" 1920
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Kwame Nkrumah, "Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism" 1965
John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" 2004 Also Tom Burgis "The Looting Machine" and Susan Williams "White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa" U.N. power broker Jeffrey Sachs’s happiness project might be easy to dismiss if it didn’t confer legitimacy on a repressive government.
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James Carroll "House of War" 2006
Alan Friedman "Spider's Web" 1993
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Radley Balko “Rise of the Warrior Cop” 2013
Randall Sheldon "Controlling the Dangerous Classes" 2018
"Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics" By Marie Gottschalk 2015
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Susan Linn "Consuming Kids" 2004 and Juliet Schor "Born to Buy"
Marion Nestle "Food Politics" 2007
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Marcia Angell "The Truth About Drug Companies" 2004 & Harriet Washington "Deadly Monopolies" 2011
Sonia Shah "The Body Hunters" 2006
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Jonathan Kozol "Savage Inequalities" 1991
Sidney Lens "The Labor Wars" 1973
Susan Clark and Woden Teachout "Slow Democracy" 2012
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David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz "Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children" 2013
Graham Hancock "Lords of Poverty" 1989
Merrill Singer "Drugging the Poor" 2008
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"The Merchants of Death" H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen 1937
John J. Mearsheimer and. Stephen M. Walt "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" 2007
Ilan Pappe "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" 2006
The following are some additional related articles, but not my own reviews:
History Isn’t Just About Rich, Educated Males 03/04/2018 A challenge most historians face, whether they study ancient Rome or the American Revolution, is that historical texts were largely written by upper-class, educated males. Privileged men were often the only literate group, plus they had the leisure time to devote to writing.
“History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.” ― Jeffrey Sachs “We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.” ― Jeffrey D. Sachs “The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.” ― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty “The rich control our politics to a huge extend. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich.” ― Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Price of Happiness 12/29/2021 U.N. Power Broker Jeffrey Sachs Took Millions From the UAE to Research “Well-Being” “I always had the sense that Jeffrey was not a person concerned about human rights and that he was often an apologist for abusive governments,” said Aryeh Neier, former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union and co-founder of Human Rights Watch.
The New York Times Company (NYT) Largest stockholders? Vanguard Group Inc; Blackrock Inc.; ValueAct Holdings, L.P.; .... 9th State Street Corporation;
Mexican Billionaire Invests in Times Company 01/19/2009
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim reportedly will cut his stake in New York Times nearly in half 12/19/2017 The report said the trust securities will convert into New York Times shares in three years. Following the conversion, Slim will own 8 percent of the company. ..... Slim owned 17 percent of the company as of July 28, according to FactSet. (It's unclear if his share was cut back to 8% as they anticipated.)
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