Dominant United States media and policymakers express apprehension about the dangerous prospect of "nuclear weapons in the Middle East."  By this they mean the prospect that Iran might be able to develop one or two such weapons at some point in the future. The interesting fact that Israel is already precariously armed to the teeth with thermonuclear weaponry is not for them a cause for trepidation.

There is considerable expressed "mainstream" unease over the death and injury experienced by American soldiers in Iraq.  The fact that America's occupation of that nation has killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians elicits no remotely comparable alarm. 

White Americans are concerned with appropriate moral behavior on the part of public and private officials and leaders.  They remain relatively disinterested, however, in the moral character of leading public and private institutions that all too commonly spread death, destruction, misery, and hierarchy at home and abroad.  Thus, Bill Clinton was placed in the public pillory for playing around with Monica Lewinsky but got a free pass for ravaging public family cash assistance, cutting back other social programs needed by the poor, and advancing racially disparate mass incarceration in the world's leading prison state.  He got in historic trouble for lying about what he did "with that woman," but paid no serious price for launching a murderous and unjustified missile strike on Sudan or raining bombs and Depleted Uranium on the people of Belgrade in the false name of humanitarian concern.        

Mainstream America has become somewhat critical of those who voice racist sentiments.  Jimmy the Greek loses his job and Trent Lott is demoted for making racially insensitive comments. While the majority congratulates itself on its opposition to open bigotry, however, it has little to say about the richly racist character of numerous social processes, practices, and policies it continues to sanction in the "post-Civil Rights era." Persistent strong de facto racial school and housing segregation, racially disparate policing, imprisonment, and felony-marking, and savage educational race inequity march on without skipping a beat. They face no serious reckoning with public morality. They are more firmly entrenched by constant celebration of past and ongoing civil rights victories over open racial bigotry and legal segregation, which lead many Americans to conclude that racism is over as an obstacle to black advancement. 

Dominant white U.S. opinion is agitated by the "problem" of affirmative action policies that provide some compensatory avenues to higher education and middle-class employment for some relatively fortunate people of color.  But it is nearly mute about rampant legacy admissions granted to under-qualified Ivy League (and other elite higher-educational) applicants like the dangerous and moronic George W. Bush, whose youthful drug conviction was expunged from the criminal record thanks to family name and wealthy connections. 

Here in Chicago, local policy and media authorities are shocked by "terrible" outcomes on the culturally biased and anti-intellectual standardized tests that are administered in the city's hundreds of desperately impoverished, under-funded, under-staffed, and hyper-segregated public schools.  They do not worry, however, about miserable "educational [and moral-intellectual] outcomes" over at the prestigious University of Chicago, a leading contributor to elitist neo-liberal and neo-conservative doctrines and a notorious bastion and agent of race and class privilege.

City policy and opinion-architects are angry at "overpaid" public school teachers and "failed" public schools. Ghetto schools are denounced and targeted for closure and corporate-capitalist takeover under the city's aggressive new privatization-heavy "Renaissance 2010" Plan.  But nobody seems to express much concern about the education-disabling impact of racial isolation and related socioeconomic failure produced by corporate-capitalist abandonment and hyper-segregation in the inner city. 

The public is officially upset when white firemen make racially bigoted comments over the fire department's radio system and applauds the Mayor for denouncing those comments but few authorities or commentators have much to say about the way City Hall's zoning policies and contract award practices feed racial separatism and hierarchy in the city.

The Chicago's area's predominantly white automobile commuters are bothered by escalating highway tolls but the white majority rarely speaks about the massive expense of their state's sprawling, racially disparate prisons, which house more than 45,000 inmates – two thirds of whom are black in a 15-percent black state. It does not spend much time worrying about the tens of millions of city and state taxpayer dollars spent to lure gigantic job-eliminating corporations to bring their headquarters to, or keep their headquarters in, Chicago's global downtown. It does not overly concern itself with the way its expensive, publicly financed highway system subsidizes the nation's ecologically destructive automobile addiction and at the same time pushes economic resources, population, and opportunity and political power yet further away from the disproportionately impoverished and nonwhite inner-city.  

Two Thursdays ago, my fellow Chicagoans and I watched a large and dramatic mid-day press conference where the chief of our "global city's" police force filled us in on the latest details regarding the investigation of the recent murder of the husband and mother of federal judge Joan Lefkow.  The crime in question was a horrible double-homicide I was glad to see solved.  

But I don't recall any comparable mid-day media extravaganzas being held to explain city efforts to solve the killing of others among the very disproportionately black and Latino group of 1,773 people who have been murdered in Chicago since January 1, 2002.  I've seen no equivalent high-profile law-enforcement briefings about the fact that the black homicide rate in the city is more than 10 times higher than the white rate. This is an invisible little fact, lost amidst recent celebration over the fact that the city's overall murder rate is falling.  Meanwhile, we are relieved that the Lefkow killings appear to have nothing to do with imprisoned white supremacist Mathew Hale, who is supposed to have threatened Judge Lefkow – another opportunity to disregard racism as a factor in American life.      

It's one thing, of course, for a relatively voiceless and invisible black or Latino teenager to get gunned down on the city's West or South Sides.  That "happens all the time" in forgotten neighborhoods where ex-prisoners outnumber legitimate jobs, where full-service grocery stores, coffee shops, and sit-down restaurants are non-existent, and where children carry levels of trauma that would be recognizable by battlefield doctors.

It's another thing, unfortunately, when violent tragedy visits the family of an affluent white agent of high state power living in comfortable, tree-lined streets on the city's predominantly Caucasian North Side.        

Also two weeks ago, to give a local example with a stronger imperial and global dimension, we were told by local media authorities to fret over the fact that the CEO of the Chicago-based Boeing Corporation, Harry Stonecipher, had an adulterous affair with an unnamed female executive within his firm.  This was the front-page story in the March 8th Chicago Sun Times, which reported Stonecipher's resignation, and the lead story on local television news.    

Deeper in the Sun Times, we learned from a Loyola University business professor why the CEO had to go. "The stakes," the professor notes, "were too high for Stonecipher to stay."  Those "stakes" are the "good graces" and "absolute trust" of the U.S. Defense Department, which "did about $30 billion of business with Boeing in 2004" – equaling nearly 60 percent of the company's revenue that year.

I have yet to hear citizens or media fret about the thoroughly legal but terribly lethal nature of Boeing's activities. Those activities in recent years have included the company's emergence as the main contractor for the Pentagon's dangerous, destabilizing, and costly Star Ways System, a key part of the United States' open plan to extend its total domination of the planet through the militarization of outer space. 

Beyond working to wreak havoc from the stars, Boeing has contributed to the killing and maiming of countless world citizens with such monumentally expensive high-tech tools of death and destruction as the notorious Apache AH-64A helicopter and the F-15 (an "air superiority fighter" with what Boeing calls "first look, first-shot, and first-kill capability") and F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets. Boeing's famous B-52, the longtime "backbone of the manned-strategic bomber forces in the United States," (according to Boeing's web-site in 2002), includes among its accomplishments the "anti-terrorist" bombing of Afghanistan, conducted from heights guaranteed to produce significant deadly civilian "collateral damage."

Boeing and Northrop's B-2 Stealth Bomber is one of the most terrifying technological creations to date. It is a monument to the Dark Side of Star Wars (the movie) fame – a "multi-role bomber, capable of delivering both nuclear and conventional munitions," in Boeing's words, "to strike targets all over the world from bases in the United States." It is perfectly matched to the White House's quest for permanent US military supremacy and unlimited global offensive capacity even in the absence of a single remotely threatening rival state.

One of Boeing's other productions is the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV), dedicated to the proposition that "the only way to completely protect the person flying a combat mission is to have them fly it from somewhere else." With the UCAV, Boeing takes the appropriate lesson from Vietnam: efficient dispensation of death and destruction for Evil Others with minimum risk for the agents of imperial mayhem. "We build UCAV and other innovative defense products," wrote the Orwellian content providers of Boeing's web site in 2002, "because they do one thing and do it very well – they save lives." Yes: War is Peace, Love is Hate, and Death is Life.

All of these lovely, taxpayer-financed killing machines were deployed in the illegal, bloody (mainly for Iraqis), and (for Boeing) profitable seizure of Iraq. According to USA Today business writer Byron Acohido in the fall of 2003, "profits from the military sector" "pumped up" Boeing's third-quarter returns. That historic year of triumphant imperial war criminality challenged Boeing's ability to meet investor expectations with a "soft commercial jet market."  But 2003 "pleasantly surprised" Boeing with a "38 percent pop in profits for Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems division, which supplies mostly military products." According to Acohido, "defense contractors Northrop Gruman and Lockheed Martin" joined Boeing in "beating earnings estimates, largely on the strength of supplement war and homeland defense spending," leading analysts to note that "the airplane maker's emphasis on military programs is paying off."

Consistent with its commitment to "saving lives," if course,  Boeing is a major world arms dealer, with its products widely used in deadly conflicts and by repressive regimes around the world. "Its Apache AH-64A," Kevin Martin noted in 2001, "has been sold to Egypt, Greece, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. Israel has used the helicopter in raids against the Palestinians. Boeing's F-15 Eagle has been sold to Israel, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, and its F/A-18 Hornet has been sold to Australia, Canada, Finland, Kuwait, Malaysia, Spain, and Switzerland."

To deepen its life-saving mission, Boeing capitalizes on its overseas sales to drive demand at home. "In a perverse manifestation of the pursuit of its interests above national or international security concerns," Martin observed, "Boeing uses its weapons exports to help perpetuate demand for its future planes. New weapons...developed for the U.S. military...are sold to allies around the world. (Often, the potential export market is factored into and helps justify research and development costs.) These weapons exports, in turn, fuel the push for higher and more expensive technology to be developed by U.S. weaponeers to maintain our military superiority." (Kevin Martin, Tim Nafziger, Jeremy Shenk, & Mark Swier, "The Boeing Corporation," Z Magazine, November 2001).  You don't read about this in the Chicago Sun Times or the Chicago Tribune. 

The fact that all this is not generally understood as scandalous has little to do with the natural inclination of most citizens. The main problem is that it isn't generally understood at all. Chicagoans and other Americans are generally fair minded people. Few of them actually think that it's a bigger deal that Boeing's CEO fooled around than it is that he is (or was) a key member of a class of imperial war masters.  Few consciously believe that a poor black person's murder is less morally relevant than the killing of a well-off white or that stupid rich white people with felony convictions should receive covert record expungements and privileged access to the best universities while poor black young adults pay for their often nonviolent "crimes" by rotting in the nation's racist prison complex.

The primary trouble is that local and national society is significantly misinformed about the nature and sources of evil and misery in the world. Many citizens of all races don't know because they generally don't hear or read in dominant media about Iraqi victims and about other, disproportionately nonwhite people on the wrong ends of American empire and inequality. US client state Israel's nuclear arsenal is a rarely mentioned subject in "mainstream" (corporate-state) media, but officially designated "enemy states" North Korea and Iran's efforts to obtain their first nuclear weapons is frequently discussed. United States casualties receive frequent and often detailed, sensitive coverage but Iraqis die nameless, faceless, and without serious ongoing notice in that media. The real nature and consequences of Boeing and other "defense" contractors' deadly trade do not receive serious coverage. The same goes for the nation's stunning class and racial inequities. Rich white legacy admissions probably do not receive one hundredth of the media attention that goes to affirmative action for people of color. Transportation racism, favoring suburban roads and automobiles over public city transit, is relegated to the distant margins of journalistic interest.

Dominant corporate white-run and white-owned media select the scandals and problems the populace "chooses" to see. It tells people about the individual moral failings of certain individuals but says next to nothing about the deeper and broader scourges of structural inequality - the dangerous, unjust, interrelated, and highly racialized concentrations of wealth and power at home and abroad.

That unfortunate reality is hardly accidental. Expecting dominant media to tell the truth and whole truth about current events is like expecting the company newspaper at the Ford Motor Company to give the full scoop on working and living conditions in and around its far-flung global auto plants. That corporate-state media is not simply beholden to the corporate-imperial global establishment.  It is also and quite fundamentally a part, and a fairly major one at that, of that very establishment, with dangerous political and moral consequences that ought to put media reform at the top of every progressive's agenda.

Paul Street ([email protected]) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder,CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004).  His book Segregated Schools: Race, Class, and Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005) will be available later this year.