Hearts and Mines: The US Empire's Culture Industry From Katy Perry training alongside US Marines in a music video, to the global box-office mastery of the US military-supported Transformers franchise, it's clear that the US national security state is a dominant force in global media culture. How and why is this so? This book covers the production, profit and power of US Empire's culture industry -- a nexus between the US state and globalizing media firms and the source of entertainments that promote US Empire as a way of life around the world. With: * Tanner Mirrlees, Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and * Scott Forsyth, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts, York University. The launch was co-sponsored by the Centre for Social Justice, the Global Labour Research Centre, the Socialist Project, and Union for Democratic Communication. Recorded in Toronto, 20 October 2016.

1. WELCOME!

2. US Empire and communications, 1969
“American power,
expressed industrially,
militarily and culturally
has become the most
potent force on earth
and communications
have become a decisive
element in the extension
of United States world
power”
- Herbert I. Schiller

3. US Communications and Media Power
Data derived from Forbes
2000 2015 list of the
biggest public companies in
the world, as determined
by four metrics: sales,
profits, assets and market
value, as of April 6, 2015

5. National security for capital
• The US is home to the most concentrated private wealth on the planet
($63.5 trillion in total).
• The US has the largest wealth inequality gap between the rich and the
poor.
• The .01% super rich takes in upwards of $25 million a year while more than
half of US citizens scrape by on under $30,000.
• As the US’s share of world GDP has gone down, the compensation for US
CEOs has gone up.
• US top CEOs now make an average more than 300 times the typical worker.
• The CEO of McDonalds takes 644 times more than the average McDonalds
worker.

6. National security for capital
• $3 to $7 trillion on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, killing an estimated 1.3 million
civilians
• 15.3 million American children under the age of 18 currently living in hunger.
• It allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to the R&D of technologies of death made by
Lockheed Martin and other security firms (e.g., the F-15) while its own infrastructure
crumbles and public schools get defunded.
• The working poor signs up to be sent off to war in exchange for tuition, but many return
home with PTSD and are unable to live, let alone go back to school. In 2014,
approximately 22 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans killed themselves each day.
• Since 1962, the US State has funneled more than $100 billion in aid to Israel ($38 billion
over the next ten years) yet still can’t find the cash to build public housing capable of
caring for America’s poorest.
• It bailed out Wall Street with $16.8 trillion, yet can barely fathom a living wage to lessen
the hardships of workers.

8. The US Empire’s Culture Industry: what is it?
• Two organizations: US government (politics) and US-
based communications and media-entertainment
firms (economics).
• “a nexus of the government (striving to promote
itself and engineer public consent to dominant ideas
about America and US foreign policy around the
world and US-based yet globalized media
corporations (seeking to make money by producing
and selling cultural commodities to consumers in
world markets)”(Mirrlees 2016, 7).
• The interests and goals of these organizations “do
not always march lockstep, and at times they
conflict” yet the book highlights “a more collusive
relationship [ . . . ] than is often
recognized”(Mirrlees 2016, 7).

9. Global Teen Idol Katy Perry, from Break up to
Boot Camp

10. The Man of Steel Shills for the F-35

11. Reality TV for a TV War

12. Digital militainment: play-kill with virtual
guns, buy guns

13. Organize, mobilize, internationalize
Robert W. McChesney:
“If a viable pro-democracy, anti-imperialist movement can emerge” in
the US, “it will improve the possibilities dramatically for socialists and
progressives worldwide.”