After three-plus decades, Paddy Chayefsky circa NETWORK is still a prophet.

Not sure how many people remember Ned Beatty's corporate titan "educating" Peter Finch's nonconformist newscaster ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!") near the climax of 1976's NETWORK.

But the Beatty speech begins like this: "There is no America.
There is only IBM, AT&T......"

Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision to make the corporate-contributed domination of political parties overt rather than covert, we're pretty close to Paddy Chayefsky's bleak vision
of the future.

Some people may moan about unlimited campaign contributions from labor unions. But the corporate culture in the U.S. is so successful at demonizing unions (and giving them rope-a-dope treatment when unions dare to go out on strike), that the labor movement is likely to have a few more teeth knocked out in this just-begun decade.

Add the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, Nancy Pelosi's gutlessness re health care (still hard to understand the conservative fury at her and the equally hacky, I-like-my-perks-and-hate-to-fight, Harry Reid--as if they were threatening to anyone), the Tea Party madness and President Obama's likeliness to opt for a heaping helping of pandering-to-GOP (or as the mainstream media defines it, "moving to the center"), and it might be safe to predict that America will be to China what the former Yugoslavia was to the old USSR.

SAG election results are in: The Richard Masur empire stikes back.

Just received an e-mail from the Screen Actors Guild--Ken Howard is the new president and Amy Aquino is the new Secretary-Treasurer.

Which means that the Richard Masur "merger with AFTRA is our only hope" mantra now rules the day with SAG.

Log onto http://www.sag.org/ to find out the rest of the election results.

Then take a look at http://www.deadline.com/hollywood to read the pro-and-con comments about the election. I especially enjoyed the comparisons of Ken Howard with George W. Bush and Masur with Dick Cheney.

Tom Hanks, like Richard Masur back in the day, wants Screen Actors Guild to awkwardly merge with AFTRA.

,http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/sag-election-video-support-by-tom-hanks-bill-macy-felicity-huffman-for-prez-candidate-ken-howard/

Richard Masur, when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild, was a tireless spokesperson for merging SAG with AFTRA (which handles both actors and radio/TV newspeople)--no matter how unwieldy and awkward the marriage would be.

Tom Hanks, who clearly cares a lot about his Playtone production company, is now espousing a SAG/AFTRA merger. With a merged SAG and AFTRA, it's safe to guess that AMPTP can demand more "reasonable" rates for hiring actors/background for filmed and videotaped "content."

If you're a SAG member, avoid voting for Unite4Strength unless you want to see your union become a pale whisper of what it began as in the 1930s.