This is NOT the News..

Do you ever get the feeling that nobody is listening? You are not alone. A couple of new polls shed light on how public opinion today differs sharply from government decision-making and the way those decisions are reported in the mainstream media.

First we have a new CBS poll which found that US citizens think the war in Iraq is still by far "the most important problem facing this country today".

Polling Data

What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?

War in Iraq 26%

Economy / Jobs 15%

Terrorism 6%

Social Security 6%

Health Care 4%

Budget Deficit / National Debt 4%

Poverty / Homelessness 3%

Moral Values / Family Values 3%

Education 2%

Defence / Military 2%

Foreign Aid 2%

The President 2%

Crime 2%

You gotta love that 2 percent who rated Bush himself as the country's biggest problem!

Now let's look at another revealing poll from Australia. Australians Speak: 2005, a survey commissioned by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, found that the USA's relationship with Australia is nothing like the rosy picture our governments would like to pretend it is.

More than two-thirds of Australians polled (68%) said Australia took too much notice of the US in its foreign policy deliberations. Worse yet from a government point of view, Australians are "just as concerned about United States foreign policy as Islamic extremism." 57% were "very worried" or "fairly worried" about the external threat posed by both US foreign policy and Islamic extremism.

In other words, to put some standard media spin on it, the citizens of one of George Bush's strongest international allies believe he and his cronies are just as dangerous as Osama bin Laden and his cronies!

By comparison, only 35% of respondents had concerns about China's growing power.

Asked if they had positive or negative feelings about a list of 15 different countries, institutions and regions, respondents rated the US only 11th. Only 58% viewed the US positively, compared with 94% for New Zealand, 86% for Britain, 84% for Japan, and 69% for China. 51% thought a free-trade agreement with China was a good idea, compared with only 34% for the US deal.

What about Australian foreign policy goals? In a country which refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol, 75% said "improving the global environment" was the most important goal. Despite all the media hoopla, "Promoting Democracy" rated bottom.

This is a total rejection of the Australian Government's position towards the USA.

So how come the media always present government decision-making as if it had widespread public support? Could it be because of things like this?

So now we have governments that lie to us repeatedly without accountability, let alone apologies; we have a media that rakes in profits by reporting these lies without even blinking; and we have supposed "opposition" parties that provide no serious opposition at all. As an angry Matt Taibbi writes in Alternet today:

A merely cynical opposition party would be emboldened by poll numbers showing majority opposition to the war to court those votes. And a moral one would seize upon news of the sort coming out of Britain to argue to not only to their own voters (who would unanimously support them in this aim), but to the country at large, that the invasion of Iraq was based upon a fallacy, illegal and impeachable.

But the Democratic leaders do neither. Instead, they tell 53 percent of the country that they are mistaken, and throw their chips in with the other 47 percent, who incidentally support the other party and are not likely to ever budge. They then go further and try to argue that fighting the war on terror requires abandoning health care, education and Social Security – an idea that, let's face it, makes no fucking sense at all.

Franklin Roosevelt never argued anything like that, and he fought a global world war against two mighty industrial powers. But now 4,000 retards in caves are going to close down the entire American school system. If that is the Democratic idea of looking "strong," one hates to imagine what weakness would look like.

Taibbi's anger is wholly justified - this is the sort of environment which once would have brought people out into the streets with pitchforks!