Category Archives: corporate news

Media Pseudo-Debates and the Silence of Leftist Critics The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings.  Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned.  They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence.  They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail.  They never see the storm coming, even as they create it.  Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof.  They are innocent.  Always innocent.

They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at age thirty-nine by Hitler, called cheap grace: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.  Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…”

These incompetents are, in the immortal words of the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

Except they could and can.

They’ve actually shot a lot of people, here and abroad.  It’s one of their specialties.  But they mean well.  They screw up sometimes, but they mean well.  They care, even while they kill millions with their guns and bombs. But they have their followers.

As another dissident thirty-nine-year-old pastor, executed by the American state, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Mainstream Media Pseudo-Debates

The U.S. rulers have their defenders.  Most are corporate mainstream journalists whose jobs are to defend the ruling elites of both political parties.  They will criticize across the political divides depending on their organizations’ political leanings at the moment. But they will never attack the fundamentals of the oligarchic war system since they are part of it. Their jobs depend on it.  So CNN and The New York Times will obsessively attack Trump while Fox News will do the same to Obama or Biden. This is a game.

These days such massive media conglomerates are seemingly starkly divided and basically serve as adjuncts of one political party or the other.  They are essentially political propagandists for either the Democrats or the Republicans and have abandoned any pretense to be anything else.  They speak to their respective audiences in self-enclosed vacuums. They promote the divide that runs down the middle of the USA, a divide they helped to create.

Some have argued that this radical division of the media turf is because of economic and business factors; that the media organizations and their “journalists” have seen this strategy as the path to greater profits. There is probably some truth in this.  But it is a small part.

For all sides of the corporate media serve the same overarching political function: to divide and conquer the population; to set the so-called left against right; middle America against the east and west coasts; white against black; working class against middle-class; men against women; husbands against wives, etc. To keep people, who in reality should be allies, fighting with each other.  It is a classic strategy of divide-and-conquer that is carried out by the mainstream media pursuant to their unstated mandate. It is not an accident and has been conducted with a vengeance in recent years.

And crucially, it is anchored in the false premise of the myth of left vs. right with a reasonable center somewhere between.  Such a center has never existed. While left and right might once have been useful categories, they have long since outlived their usefulness. They now just serve to engender pseudo-debates.

Pseudo-debates are not new but they are highly effective.  They are debates based on false premises. In this case, the premise is that the massive corporate media conglomerates are not part of the same system of control and containment of the population, but are genuine opponents in the battle for truth and democracy.  Accept this premise and you have entered into endless debates leading nowhere.  It is a classic method of intelligence agencies to sow uncertainty and confusion and to have people following Alice down the rabbit hole, tumbling and tumbling into an endless void as they argue continually about nothing.[1]

Dr. E. Martin Schotz has brilliantly explicated this trick in the case of the assassination of President Kennedy (“Certainly no honest person could ever accept the ‘single bullet theory’.”) where people are still debating a false mystery almost sixty years after the fact.  He writes:

The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false….Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This premise—that there is uncertainly to be resolved—seems so benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water. But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.[2]

The entire corporate media ideological spectrum operates under the umbrella of oligarchic control, something that is not new, just more egregious with every passing day. More in your face. The corporate media serve as the mouthpieces for those oligarchs, but they try to convince their separate audiences that this isn’t so. They give people enemies – false ones. Objects to hate.

But just like symptoms are not the disease, they give people a focus upon which to rivet their attention while the disease goes unattended. As with a drug addict, the taking of drugs is not the fundamental problem, although it becomes one and might kill you.  The problem is why one takes drugs; what is it that is one feels needs to be tranquilized and silenced.  Or, as the writer William Saroyan once flippantly said regarding the claim that smoking causes cancer: “You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke, not from the smoking itself.”

The corporate mainstream media are the drug that serves to hide the core truth of an oligarchic cancerous warfare state drunk on power and using propaganda to play both sides. Everyone has become pawns in their game.

A recent example serves to illustrate a method in their madness.  There is a new, ongoing Spotify podcast – “Renegades: Born in the USA” – featuring Barack Obama and the singer Bruce Springsteen in conversation. Two rebels – it’s of course ridiculous – but there it is.  Two super rich celebrities stroking each other’s egos in an upper class setting.  One a singer, who rose to prominence out of nowhere as the voice of the small-town beleaguered working class; the other, a mixed-race politician who rose to prominence out of nowhere from a family background redolent of the CIA. Two icons of popular and political culture crossing over with a smooth patina of mixed-arts bullshit telling listeners they we need to return to the good old days when political centrism served the great American ideal that they both share.  People are supposed to take this conversation between “buddies” seriously, as the two sit mask-less with their feet seemingly touching at a time when people are told to wear masks and avoid close contact with those outside their households.  As Bruce strums his guitar, any half-way sentient person would realize he was being played, even while the meaning of the song was so twisted that he was enjoying it.

Left-wing Gatekeepers

Then, if we switch from the mainstream corporate media to alternative voices, especially prominent ones on the left, we notice something even stranger.

I think most readers would agree that the two seismic events of the last twenty years are the current COVID- 19 issue and the September 11, 2001 attacks.  The latter, not only because of all the victims that died that day, but for how it led to so much death and destruction around the world, the endless war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., the ensuing loss of basic liberties and privacy via the Patriot Act, etc. The former for obvious current reasons of death and further loss of basic liberties under the lockdowns as governments throughout the world institute unprecedented  measures of control, etc.  Clearly these two events stand out over the decades. They bookend twenty years of massive U.S. war crimes, the growth of the national security complex, an obscene increase in wealth for the wealthiest, and the loss of privacy and civil liberties for all.

And as everyone knows, September 11th and COVID-19 have resulted in great controversies and much debate because of their serious implications and the obvious questions about the official story lines raised by many respectable writers and researchers of varying political perspectives.  At the very least, one would expect that leftist/liberal critics of the so-called Deep State and the machinations of the elite’s wars and propaganda would have engaged in these discussions about these two seminal events or written analytic articles about them.

But for a core group of prominent left/liberal critics, these two subjects have been avoided like they are of no importance. No debates, no discussions, no analyses – simply silence, as if they didn’t happen and there was nothing to discuss. Cases closed: the government has spoken. Let us move on to more important matters.

But that is wrong.  For example, in about a dozen closely reasoned books of his own and with other international researchers, David Ray Griffin has raised innumerable questions that show that the official September 11 story is full of holes.  Canadian writer Graeme MacQueen has written a devastating exposé of the linked anthrax attacks that followed September 11, showing clearly that they were a U.S. government operation.  I myself have raised significant questions about what I call the linguistic mind-control associated with the attacks in “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore.”  The dissident literature is enormous.

A few of Griffin’s points are illustrative of the many anomalies in the official account. There are so many, and not just from Griffin but from other researchers, that  I will mention just a few about the building collapses, what Griffin calls “miracles of science.”  The contradictions about the hijackers are also voluminous.

Here are a few such scientific miracles:

The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the only steel-framed high-rise buildings ever to come down without explosives or incendiaries.  The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires.  WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires.  These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds.  Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies.   In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical pattern.  The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair.  This 30-floor block then disintegrated in midair.

I could go on and on with examples.  The simple point is that there are so many absurdities in the official story that to ignore them is an act of intellectual and moral betrayal.  Anyone who has closely studied the government’s 9/11 Commission Report knows it is highly fictional.

The same is true for dissenting voices on the COVID-19 issue.  Three publications in particular have published an enormous amount of well-reasoned critiques of the official version of the COVID-19 narrative: Global Research, Off-Guardian, and Children’s Health Defense.  All present many articles by serious writers who raise innumerable questions and make irrefutable points about this matter.

And again, the point is not simple agreement with the dissenters’ arguments, but the need to engage their critiques.  Here too the silence is resounding, for it says “we buy the official account.”

Consider these few:

The man who invented the test used to determine the so-called COVID positive test results, the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Kary Mullis, has said that the test cannot do that, it is not a diagnostic test, and therefore all the test results are meaningless.  Additionally, there is serious doubt that the virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease called COVID 19 since there is no evidence that the virus has ever been isolated.  Assuming for argument’s sake, however, that the PCR test can detect  a specific virus, even Anthony Fauci himself, and the World Health Organization (one hour after Biden was sworn into office), have both said that the PCR test in order to have any accuracy must be performed at cycles below 35 thresholds while for a year those tests have been done at thresholds much higher, resulting in vast numbers of false positives.  Cycle thresholds are the level at which the PCR test is said to detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus.

Furthermore, eminent voices such as Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Koenig at Global Research, Robert Kennedy, Jr. at Children’s Health Defense, and Catte Black and Kit Knightly at Off-Guardian have for a long time been vociferously objecting to the official narrative with a vast amount of additional analyses involving the consequences of the wide-spread lockdowns.  Such dissidents have had to fight against an organized campaign of censorship that should raise the alarm for anyone who cares about truth.

For leftists who remain silent on these fundamental issues, I can assure them that these critiques of the official explanations of September 11, 2001 and COVID-19 are not right-wing conspiracies but are the work of leftists digging deep for truth.

It is therefore more than odd that certain left/liberal writers completely avoid these issues.  One must assume, therefore, that they accept the official explanations for these events, just as this coterie of  leftist/liberal critics dismiss the voluminous and detailed critiques of the Warren Commission and the assassination of President Kennedy.  From their silence one can assume that these matters are of no importance because the authorities have given us the truth.

One such deceased left-wing writer, who can stand in for the group of living writers I allude to, was the well-known and often brilliant journalist Alexander Cockburn, the founder of Counterpunch Magazine.  In Cockburn’s case, however, and to his credit even though he had no idea what he was talking about regarding September 11, 2001 and the JFK assassination, he did not remain silent but expressed his bile in ways he thought piercing but which made him appear quite ignorant.  Cockburn had a sharp tongue and liked to ridicule anyone who disagreed with him.  He excoriated all who questioned the JFK assassination or September 11 as “conspiracy nuts,” “lunatics” involved with “kookery.”

Echoing the CIA’s conspiracy meme, his name calling was offensive and his ignorance of these matters extraordinary.  But he was a star leftist, an untouchable. Few wished to criticize him.  He started with the assumption that government stupidity, incompetence, and screw-ups allow these terrible events to happen, and then without a shred of evidence, concluded that is why they happened.  All evidence and logic to the contrary, he derisively dismissed as the work of fools. Only Cockburn and a government that admits mistakes were made were right.  His arguments on these matters were pseudo-debates based on a premises he conjured out of thin air.

He was a master incompetent of the incompetence theory, one that many prominent leftists follow today, such as a recent passing comment by one of them on the COVID-19 matter as a mishandling by the ruling elite.  The implicit assumption being that the basic government and mainstream media tale is correct and all would be far better if the Trump administration hadn’t screwed up. Nothing further is forthcoming or necessary. Let us proceed on the assumption that the official account is true and that the government’s  inept response is the problem. Failure of leadership.  Government negligence.  Incompetence.

And anyone who even harbors a suspicion that there may be more to the story is engaging in conspiratorial thinking.  Of course this is the same response given to those who for twenty years have researched and questioned the government’s account of September 11, 2001.  The 9/11 omission story. The fictional account that will dominate the news as the twentieth anniversary approaches this September.  Will any of those liberal/leftists who have remained silent all these years let it pass as truth?  I suspect so but hope not.

The Need for Dialogue

So we have pseudo debates on one hand and silence on the other when what is required is not self-censorship but open critical dialogue on these fundamental matters. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” said Martin Luther King from the pulpit of Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 when he condemned the Vietnam War and broke his own silence in opposition to many of his advisers. A year later to the day, like JFK, he was murdered by the warfare state he condemned. Like Senator Robert Kennedy two months later.  They were killed by very competent people.

Dr. Martin E. Schotz wrote twenty-six years ago in History Will Not Absolve US that those he had in mind for their defense of the Warren Commission were “such individuals as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, the editors of The Nation magazine, and, if everyone remembers, I.F. Stone as well.  I think the positions of these individuals are very important because in their surprising (to us) dishonesty and willingness to cooperate with the warfare state in covering up the crime, there is obviously something to be learned.”

Yes, there is. It is time for all people of good will to stop finding excuses for the ruling elites, whether through incompetence theories or the silent refusal to publicly engage the government and its critics on the most important issues of our time – September 11, 2001 and COVID-19.  Those Schotz names above are heroes for many on the liberal/left today who follow in their stead.  It’s as though they have found it necessary to mimic their teachers’ lessons.  Better logic would have them analyzing the premises of September 11 and COVID-19.  Start with the basics.  Be explicit.  Tell us why you are silent.

It’s time to graduate from this school of denial.

 

 

[1] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/letterToVJS.html#partIa

[2] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/COPA1998EMS.html#s2

Mainstream Media Exposed Coordinating Identical Mass Shooting Narratives for Different States

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

In case you haven’t noticed, after taking a hiatus during the COVID-19 lockdowns, mass shootings are back in the limelight and the establishment media can’t wait to use them to their advantage. In fact, they have already started.

One of our researchers here at the Free Thought Project, Don Via, Jr. discovered an oddity this week consisting of headlines that were identical in content but written for various states and published by entirely different news outlets. If you Google, “mass shooting surge,” you will be returned results with exactly the same headlines, but for different states.

The headline reads follows: “Mass shootings surge in South Carolina as nation faces record high.” As you continue to scroll down the results, you see this exact same headline for other states like Florida, North Carolina, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Colorado, Louisiana, Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, and others.

In states which didn’t see a rise in mass shootings, a different title was used but with the exact same point. For example, “Mass shootings fall in Georgia, but nation faces record high.” This title was applied to states like George, Indiana, California, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Alabama, and others.

Identical headlines for what appears to be entirely different news outlets is definitely sketchy, but when you click the articles, you see that the text is identical with only numbers and state names plugged into them to tailor it to that specific state.

Below are a few examples:

Mass shootings in Florida increased to 34 in 2020 from 15 the year before, while nationally mass shootings jumped nearly 50% during a pandemic with crippling unemployment, violent protests and idle youth.

Mass shootings in Tennessee increased to 19 in 2020 from seven the year before, while nationally mass shootings jumped nearly 50% during a pandemic with crippling unemployment, violent protests and idle youth.

Mass shootings in South Carolina increased to 22 in 2020 from 10 the year before, while nationally mass shootings jumped nearly 50% during a pandemic with crippling unemployment, violent protests and idle youth.

Mass shootings in Wisconsin increased to 10 in 2020 from three the year before, while nationally mass shootings jumped nearly 50% during a pandemic with crippling unemployment, violent protests and idle youth.

The rest of the article follows a similar template with the authors simply filling in the names and numbers which apply to that state but pushing the identical narrative in each article.

At the end of every one of these articles, the second to last paragraph is a plug for gun control and the Biden administration’s plan for it.

police departments likely will have to step up their efforts to get the estimated 50 to 100 million illegal guns in the country out of circulation. The gun control measures often touted by President Joe Biden’s administration may also come into play, he said. These include measures aimed at keeping guns from people who are a danger to themselves or others, and creating a standard for gun storage.

It is important to point out that these news outlets are all under the USA Today Network and the articles are all written by the same two people, Marco della Cava and Mike Stucka. While it is certainly not surprising for a news network to push similar stories to its various outlets, the way this is done is not at all transparent.

Not one of these news outlets is named USA Today. Outside of the small text which says they are apart of the USA Today Network, they all appear entirely independent and have vastly different names like the Tallahassee Democrat or Greenville News, The Elmwood City Ledger, and The Chronicle Express.

When multiple news outlets, who put on the appearance of independence, all run the exact same piece which essentially calls for gun control by fear mongering over mass shootings, this is not a free press. This is a controlled press who is apparently being given narratives to push out to their readers based on some entity’s centralized vision.

Given the current draconian gun bans up for vote in Washington, the idea of a centrally controlled push for gun control by the mainstream media becomes that much more unscrupulous. Unfortunately, it is par for the course and USA Today is not alone in their tactics.

In 2018, TFTP reported on multiple local media outlets who all ran identical scripts going after “fake news.”

A compilation of the outlets regurgitating their talking points went viral and exposed dozens of media outlets all parroting the exact same script.

“Our greatest responsibility is to serve our [insert location here] communities. We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [insert station here] produces,” the news anchors read from the script.

Then nine stations were featured on the screen and they all said in unison, “But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.”

“More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first,” the videos continued, as at least 36 stations filled the screen at one time. “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’”

Then the video highlighted one important line that was parroted by each station:

“This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

One could make the argument, however, that news outlets reading a centrally controlled script to millions of people is a far greater threat to democracy than some conspiracy theorist spreading fake news.

As The Free Thought Project has reported, while there was once a time when the mainstream media was run by dozens of companies, it is now controlled by six corporations. Hundreds of channels, websites, news outlets, newspapers, and magazines — making up ninety percent of all media — is controlled by very few people—giving Americans the illusion of choice.

While six companies controlling most everything the Western world consumes in regard to media may sound like a sinister arrangement, the Swiss Propaganda Research center (SPR) released information in 2018 that is even worse.

The research group was able to tie all these media companies to a single organization—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

In January 2018, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange called attention to this control in an damning tweet.

For those who may be unaware, the CFR is a primary member of the circle of Washington think-tanks promoting endless war. As former Army Major Todd Pierce describes, this group acts as “primary provocateurs” using “‘psychological suggestiveness’ to create a false narrative of danger from some foreign entity with the objective being to create paranoia within the U.S. population that it is under imminent threat of attack or takeover.”

A senior member of the CFR and outspoken neocon warmonger, Robert Kagan has even publicly proclaimed that the US should create an empire. 

The narrative created by CFR and its cohorts is picked up by their secondary communicators, also known the mainstream media, who push it on the populace with no analysis or questioning.

When looking at the chart from SPR, the reach by this single organization is so vast that it is no mystery as to how these elite psychopaths guide Americans into accepting endless war at the expense of their mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.

While this may seem like a bleak scenario, the fact is that this battle over information is centuries old. Just as the Anti Federalists fought to inform early Americans over the dangers of a constitution without a bill of rights, those who’ve longed for freedom and liberty have continued this information war up into the 21st century — affecting massive changes in their wake.

Indeed, as Samuel Adams famously said, “It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

These brushfires have been so effective at maintaining the ideas of freedom that the establishment control over information has continued to clamp down to prevent them. We are currently witnessing this control increase at an ever accelerating rate.

Ideas that threaten the establishment, like calling out the corruption in both parties (alternative media) are quickly finding themselves in the cross-hairs of the Praetorian guard who wishes to keep the flow of information under the grip of the status quo.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have all recently moved to clamp down the control even harder and outlets like TFTP have to fight tooth and nail just to survive — all the while, mainstream media can shove a single talking point down the throats of millions of Americans and disguise it as local independent media.

This is the very definition of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” which the tech companies pretend to be so hell bent on preventing, yet when it comes to pushing a narrative on gun control, these outlets are all given a pass. Must be nice.

Biden’s and America’s Mental Illness is on Full Display

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By Dave Lindorff

Source: CounterPunch

It was just three weeks ago that our new “transformative” President Joe Biden joined that long almost unbroken list of war criminal presidents stretching back to George Washington.

Biden joined this disgraceful list by ordering a bloody aerial bombardment by US warplanes in eastern Syria.

The US bombs, which were reportedly dropped on a a location in the city of Erbil, according to the British daily The Independent, killed as many as 22 people in the targeted buildings (assuming all the bombs atually landed on their intended targets). Most if not all of the victims were Iraqis described by the US as being part of two “Iranian-backed militias,” which were accused of being behind a rocket attack 10 days earlier that killed a US mercenary and wounded a Louisiana National Guardsman . The Pentagon called the attack, which employed seven 500-1b bombs, a “proportional response” to that earlier attack, which raises questions about the meaning of “proportional” (or about what the hell dictionary they use in the White House).

The Oxford Dictionary defines “proportional” as meaning “corresponding in size or amount to something else,” but it seems unlikely that a rocket attack by a militia group or two could come close in explosive power to seven bombs totalling nearly two tons of explosive, and besides, 22 deaths is unarguably way out of proportion in relation to a casualty toll of one dead and one wounded.

Aside from the ludicrous misuse of that term by the Pentagon and the reporters who dutifully scribbled it own in their notes and quoted it in their reports of the briefing without comment, there is another point that was left out: That those who were killed, even if Iraqi, were there in Syria at the behest of the Syrian government. The US mercenary killed and the US soldier wounded in Syria were in that country as invaders, in violation of both Syrian national sovereignty and international law.

That is why Biden made himself yet another US war criminal president.

But Biden didn’t stop there. After killing those 22 people, who could well have included innocent civilians, maybe even kids, who might have been in some of those buildings, a few weeks later he went on to label Russia’s Vladimir Putin a “killer” in a classic pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment.

Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst and Russia expert who co-founded the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, points out that ABC News talking head George Stephanopoulos provided Biden the opportunity for that name calling during an interview when he asked the stupid and pointless question: “Do you think Russian President Putin is a killer?”

Biden of course stupidly and hypocritically replied, “Yes.”

In McGovern’s view, that whole incident was likely a set up deliberately by someone in the State Department or the Pentagon who wanted to further bung up US-Russia relations, and I think Ray’s got a point. It’s not hard to imagine that being the case, given the way ABC, like the other major TV network news programs, employs retired Pentagon and State Department officials as paid news “commentators.” You can just imagine one of them saying, “Hey Steph, why don’t you ask Biden whether he think’s Putin’s a killer?”

Now Putin’s pissed off, Biden can’t back down, and we’re off to the races at the start of a new term with a childish deadlock that will make any kind of serious negotiating to ease tensions between the world’s two nuclear super-powers difficult if not hopeless. Nice job George, you thumb sucking imposter of a real journalist! You just gave an example of the workings of what Ray calls “MiciMatt “(that’s for Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank).

If the gambit of insulting Putin works, it’s worth at least another $100 billion for the Pentagon’s already record large coffers for the next fiscal year.

It’s just another sign of the madness of all involved — Biden, Stephanopoulos and, what the hell, Putin too.

The US at least is well and truly mad. Earlier this past week we had the madness of an angry white guy in Atlanta deciding, at least as he explained it to police, that seven Asian women in several licensed mall spas, including some old enough to be receiving Social Security benefits, had to be blown away by him because he felt they were taunting him with their beauty and making him have “bad thoughts.” He had no alternative, he said, but to kill them to stop them from tormenting him like that.

I really can’t decide who’s loopier, President Joe Biden or Robert Aaron Long. Biden is crazy to be trash-talking a foreign leader with whom he surely knows he must engage in serious negotiations, at least if there is to be any hope of lowering the risks of war and the certainty of spending this nation into bankruptcy, not to mention worsening a human rights disaster in civil war-torn Syria. And Long is crazy, like a lot of Americans, for thinking a bunch of Asian women trying just to make a living by easing people’s joint and muscle pains deserve to die (along with an unfortunate young bride who was, along with her husband, getting a his-and-hers, side-by-side massage wedding gift, and happened to be in his way.

The truth is that the whole US needs mental health counselling. Half the country is celebrating at having just installed in the White House a man who apparently is still living in the 1960s Cold War era with a foreign policy and appointees in national security posts that together seem hell-bent on creating two massive enemy nations, Russia and China, both armed to the teeth, instead of trying to achieve peaceful relations with both those countries. Meanwhile, the other half of the country are mostly white racists who want to prevent people of color from voting, and view anyone who is non-white regardless of birth or US citizenship as interlopers with no right to be here, and as deserving to be being beaten up, harassed or even killed. They are also, for the most part, people caught up in a delusional fantasy that the last election was “stolen” away from their hero, Donald Trump, a huckster so preposterous that it’s difficult to see how anyone — at least anyone sane — could take him seriously.

With the globe careening towards a disaster that could lead to the extinction of humanity, or at least the collapse of what we call civilization, and perhaps to the extinction of much of the earth’s entire biome, this is a crisis situation.

The US may represent only some 4.25% of the earth’s population but it is by far the world’s primary purveyor and inciter of violence. It’s also one of the the world’s greatest and most unapologetic producers of pollution (particularly if you include the share of pollution produced in China, Indonesia, India and other third world countries in the making and shipping of goods purchased by US residents). For this country to be focused on such misguided issues as a wholly unnecessary arms race, military confrontations and imaginary threats, and internal affairs that are not its own business, with such an existential crisis actually facing the US and all of humanity is not just depressing. it’s infuriating.

The Mainstream Bubble

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By Ralf Arnold, translation by S. Robinson

Source: Off-Guardian

At the beginning of the already memorable year 2020, a term forced its way into public and private consciousness, which should increasingly determine and overshadow all of our lives: The “novel corona virus”, also called SARS-CoV-2. The name was officially announced by the WHO on February 11th. After that everything happened in quick succession.

At first I saw the pictures of Chinese people with masks only in the Tagesschau (the flagship evening news program by ARD, one of the two main public broadcasters in Germany; S.R.), which was not an unusual sight, but soon corona also reached our newsroom.

On the day when the first suspected corona case surfaced in our region, I was urged by our news chief to use it as a “lead story”, i.e. as the first report in the next news program.

At that time I was already extremely skeptical and found it excessive to use a mere suspected case as the lead story. However, I couldn’t escape the general excitement around me and put the message on “one”. But a bad feeling remained and that should intensify massively over the next few weeks.

A dynamic set in that seemed unstoppable.

More and more suspected cases, then confirmed corona cases, at some point the first death in Germany, some time later the first in our region. And more and more I noticed that not only colleagues, but also people in my private environment let themselves be infected by a vague fear and even panic.

Not that I dismissed the deaths, the so-called “corona deaths”, but didn’t we have many deaths in every flu epidemic, especially among the elderly? I checked our archives and found that we had only a handful of reports in three months during the 2018 flu epidemic. More than 25,000 people are said to have died of the flu at that time.

The now famous Johns Hopkins University dashboard was quickly featured on all television and online news. The so-called “new infections” were simply accumulated on this. It became clear to me that the graph with the constantly rising curve contained more psychological effects rather than factual information. In this way the curve could never sink again, in the best case it would stay horizontal. But that didn’t seem to bother anyone.

Part of the basic training of a journalist is that he never reports figures without meaningful reference. He must always provide comparisons, references and proportionalities so that the viewer / listener / reader can contextualise the information. I stuck to it for many years, and it seemed a matter of course for other journalists too. However, I saw this basic principle practically vanish into thin air in the first weeks of the pandemic. Absolute numbers, always only absolute numbers, without any meaningful reference.

To this day, people like to say that the USA is the country most severely affected by corona, with mere reference to the absolute numbers of infections and deaths, regardless of the size of the population, to which the numbers are rarely put in relation.

An ominous alliance

Our newsroom also adopted all these counting methods with a sleepwalking naturalness. Everything that was communicated by the health authorities, the district administration and the regional government was adopted and reported without questioning and without doubt. Almost all critical distance disappeared, and the authorities became supposed allies in the fight against the virus.

I have to point out, however, that I have never been called or written to directly by politicians to influence me in any way. There were only the usual press releases from the ministries and offices, which are of course written from their point of view. Nor have I been pressured by superiors, at least not directly. The whole thing is far more subtle, as will be shown.

March was the start of the first restrictions: major events were banned and soon after the first lockdown was imposed. Almost all journalists of the “mainstream”, so the so-called “leading media”, including my editorial team, seemed to immediately develop an ‘inhibition to bite’ towards politicians and the authorities. Why this uncritical reluctance among journalists?

I can only explain it to myself that particularly the pictures from Bergamo and New York also put the experienced editors and reporters into an emotional state of shock, even if they might not admit it. But they, too, are only people who are afraid of illness and death, or who worry about elderly or sick relatives; this was repeatedly an issue in conversations with colleagues. They rallied around the government, the RKI (Robert-Koch-Institute; the German equivalent of the CDC; S.R.) and the health authorities, as if one really had to stick together now to combat this dire, external threat.

You couldn’t throw a club between the legs of those in charge, who were having a difficult time already, by fundamentally questioning their measures – that was how the attitude seemed to me.

In our conversations, too, it was said more and more frequently that “the government is really doing a good job”. Most were firmly convinced that the lockdown and the restrictions of our fundamental rights were necessary and certainly only temporary. I heard only a few skeptical voices.

And then there were the TV interviews with politicians. Esteemed journalists, who in conversation with politician XY eagerly nodded and verbally agreed when they presented their assessment of the situation and made their demands. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears!

What was the motto of the legendary television journalist Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs?

You can recognize a good journalist by the fact that he does not make common cause with anything, not even with a good cause; that he is everywhere, but doesn’t belong anywhere.”

There was nothing left of this guiding principle, and very little in the way of tough and critical inquiries. But even that didn’t seem to bother anyone, yes to not even attract attention.

A decay of reporting language

In the news of all the leading media, including ours, important, little words like “alleged”, “supposed”, “apparently” suddenly died out. For example, the Tagesschau said that Twitter wanted to delete “false information about corona” in the future. There is clearly no “alleged” or “supposed” as an addition, because it is assumed that Twitter can judge without any doubt what is false and what is correct information in terms of the corona virus (or in general). Which of course is absurd.

Sometimes I made my colleagues in the newsroom aware of such things and sometimes even earned a nod of approval, but often just a helpless shrug.

In this day and age, news need to be short, easy to understand, and interesting. We have been trained to do this for many years. This has a lot of advantages, namely the ease of understanding on the part of the consumer. But there are also significant disadvantages, namely that the news are written more and more simplistic. Deeper connections and backgrounds or complicated differentiations are increasingly disappearing. The trick is to shorten and leave out.

From early summer, one could increasingly observe the phenomenon that the corona virus and the measures against it were equated in the media. For example, it was said: “Because of the corona pandemic, the municipalities are collecting significantly less taxes” or: “The WHO fears that the corona pandemic will plunge one and a half million more people into poverty.”

This is wrong, because not the pandemic, but the lockdowns have this effect, regardless of whether they are justified and appropriate. By ignoring this distinction, however, the anti-corona measures of the governments are being turned into something inevitable and without alternative and are no longer called into question.

The cause and therefore the scapegoat is always the virus, not politics.

This practice also crept into our newsroom. Advice from me was kindly noted, but nobody really took it to heart. I had the freedom to formulate this differently, but again nobody seemed to notice the small but subtle difference.

It is also often said that Covid-19 patients in the intensive care units “have to be ventilated”. Have to? They are being ventilated, that’s the fact. The attending doctor has to decide whether this is really medically necessary, and this question is quite controversial. There are a number of well-known experts who warn against intubating too quickly. So here too, as a journalist, you should remain neutral.

The dreadful number of “new infections”

In spring 2020 I began to increasingly question the counting method of the RKI and thus also of the government. I pointed out to my superiors that all numbers such as the “new infections” reported daily or the “R-value” were basically worthless if we did not relate them back to the number of tests performed. They took note of this, but thought no further verification or inquiries were necessary, because the trend of rapidly increasing numbers could not be misunderstood, regardless of how much was tested, it said.

The number of so-called “new infections” rose from week 11 to week 12 from 8,000 to 24,000. At the end of March, the RKI announced (after multiple inquiries by the online magazine Multipolar) that the number of PCR tests had almost tripled from 130,000 to 350,000 during the same period. The relative increase in new infections was thus far less than the absolute. There had been no “exponential increase”.

When the number of “new infections” continued to fall in early summer, the politicians still constantly conjured up the risk of the “second wave” if one were to ease the efforts – that is to say, the restrictions contrary to fundamental rights. In fact, most of my colleagues also agreed with these fears, while to me – who was no less of a medical and epidemiological layperson – it was pretty clear that there would be no second wave in summer, but an even bigger in autumn / winter because that is when the number of respiratory diseases routinely increase sharply. It was easy to foresee.

The whole issue of the PCR tests and the alleged “new infections” has to this day not been questioned by the leading media. Although over time there have been more and more studies and statements by virological and epidemiological experts harshly criticising the PCR test and its particular use, hardly any of it has penetrated our mainstream bubble. The CT values ​​that were probably far too high in the tests, which give ample room to possible manipulation, were not an issue at all.

I suspect a lot of my colleagues haven’t even heard of it.

In general, the terms continue to be mixed up in this context. Even after ten months of corona, many colleagues still do not seem to know the difference between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the lung disease Covid-19. “Infected” (that is, those who have tested positive) are often equated with “sick”, regardless of whether they have symptoms or not.

The term “recovered” is also adopted uncritically by the authorities, although it implies that those affected were actually all sick, which is highly doubtful: On the one hand because there is most likely a proportion of false-positive test results that should not be underestimated, and, on the other hand, because many “infected” people do not develop any symptoms at all and it is therefore very dubious to call them sick.

Selective perception and herd instinct

In the meantime, all kinds of regulations have been introduced in our broadcasting corporation: mask requirements, physical distancing between desks, many colleagues have moved to home office, disinfectants everywhere and so on. This and the regular, ominous-sounding situation assessments by the management, of course, still exert a psychological influence and pressure on every employee. A subtle fear is built up here too, whether intentionally or unintentionally. There is literally an invisible threat in the air that is difficult to shield yourself from.

In addition, television screens are running in the newsroom and in other offices, on which reports about corona are broadcast almost continuously.

Everywhere reporters, pictures from intensive care units, running texts with the latest, ever higher numbers – it is almost impossible to avoid this influence. In addition, there are the newspapers and agency reports that also constantly report on corona, here a study, there another apocalyptic warning from a politician, and again and again sad individual stories which are particularly highlighted.

Although we continue to have daily conferences, now mostly by telephone, right from the start – at least during the conferences in which I participated – the current narrative of the national and regional government was never fundamentally questioned, namely that we have an extremely dangerous pandemic that can only be controlled, or at least slowed down, by tough government measures. Why is that?

Everyone probably knows the effect of “selective perception”. For example, if you or your wife are pregnant, you will most likely see more and more pregnant women on the street. Or if you fall in love with someone who drives a certain make of car, then you suddenly discover that make of car, in the same color, permanently on the streets. This effect also occurs in journalism.

Years ago, for example, there was a serious incident in Germany with several attack dogs biting a three-year-old girl to death. At that time there was great shock, a political discussion about the consequences was set in motion, a “character test” for dogs and stricter rules for dog owners were demanded, the media reported about it for days and weeks. And at the same time, suddenly more and more cases of dog attacks were reported. Sudden reports of even very minor incidents came from the police.

One would have thought that all dogs in Germany, like Hitchcock’s birds, would have agreed to meet for a general attack.

What happened? The general perception had become sensitised and extremely focused, on all levels. A dachshund bit someone in the calf in the park, they immediately reported this to the police and reported the owner, the police immediately passed the report on to the press, which turned it into a news report, although it was ultimately a triviality.

Due to the alarmed attitude and the narrowed perception of all those involved, however, the triviality that would normally have fallen under the table was given an oversized significance. And the readers, listeners or viewers noticed and thought: “Not again! This is piling up now.”

The same effect can of course also be observed in crime reporting. The media user can get the impression, for example, that the situation in the country is getting worse and more dangerous and that you can hardly dare go out in the streets. It might very well be that the pure statistics show that the total number of violent crimes continues to decline. That contradicts the subjective impression, but strangely enough, hardly anyone calms down. The pictures and reports of individual fates weigh far more than the sober numbers.

You can guess what I’m getting at.

In my opinion, in the corona crisis we are basically experiencing the same effect in a global, completely exaggerated and downright paranoid dimension. And that affects just about everyone: the common man, the police officer, the journalist, the politician and even the doctor and the scientist. Nobody is per se free from it. Unless he breaks free and dares to think for himself and think outside the box.

But there is a widespread journalistic herd instinct. Most journalists look at the daily newspapers that are delivered to the editorial office every day. And of course these are all newspapers that are mainstream: Welt, FAZ, Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche [the leading national papers; S.R.] and the regional newspapers.

In the evening, one watches “heute” [the evening news program of ZDF, the second of the two main public broadcasters in Germany; S.R.] and the “Tagesschau”, followed by the relevant talk shows, from Anne Will to Maischberger [two of the leading talk shows; S.R.] Mainstream almost always dominates there too. Real critics of the corona narrative are, with rare exceptions, categorically not invited.

Still, most of the journalists I know are of the opinion that the discussions there are quite controversial. But they do not notice – for lack of comparison – that these controversies are only fig-leaf discussions. It is only discussed when and to what extent the measures should be relaxed, but the corona narrative itself remains untouched.

All of this is not to say that there is no disease or death, but the perception of this is downright neurotically excessive. There are many reports on the Internet from the last few years that describe completely overcrowded hospitals, intensive care units at the limit and overburdened crematoria. With appropriate media support, one could have caused great panic in the population back then.

Another effect is that the media now also present their journalistic content online. There it is easier and faster for everyone to access than would be the case with hardcopy newspapers and broadcasts on radio or television. This means that this content can be easily copied and adopted.

As long as it is not personal, lengthy reporting or comments, but “only” news reports, it is easy to copy-paste these into your own reports, at least parts of them. Again and again you can find almost identical formulations and messages from different providers. Even if one does not copy-paste, one is tempted to orient oneself at the selection of topics by colleagues from other leading media.

A perfidious framing

I cannot say for sure whether the corona virus can be proven with the PCR tests, where it ultimately comes from, how dangerous it really is and what the right measures are to be taken against it. But this not what this is about. I do not deny that there is a bad illness, that people die from it and that you have to take it seriously.

And that brings us to the next emotive word, the so-called “corona denier” (Corona-Leugner). A term that has been gaining ground since the summer and is now regularly used by the mainstream media to label critics of the government’s anti-corona measures. The comparison with the “God denier” and the “Holocaust denier” is obvious.

While the term “God denier” has long been history, at least in our society, the term “Holocaust denier” is still relevant and it is no coincidence that the “corona denier” is involuntarily associated with it. There is now broad consensus that one cannot deny God at all, but only not believe in him. The “Holocaust denier” is the only generally recognized exception in which journalists use the word “deny”. Otherwise it is a taboo, at least it should be. Quite simply because it contains “lie” (lügen) in the stem of the word and thus implies a lie.

Responsible journalists know that defendants never deny the allegations in court, they contest them. This should be the case even after a final judgment, because courts can also be wrong and lawsuits can be reopened.

The term “corona denier” is now infamous in three ways. Firstly because of the linguistic similarity to the socially ostracized “Holocaust denier”, secondly because the corona critics are generally claimed to deny the existence of the virus (which is not the case with the vast majority of them) and finally because they are also accused of conscious lying. This is not just bad style, it is perfidious and ensures that the rifts in society are deepened even further.

An equally dubious term used as defamatory framing is that of the “conspiracy theorist”. It basically says everything and nothing. It can be someone who believes in chem trails or that the Americans’ moon landing was only staged, but it can also be someone who exposes a Watergate scandal or who claims (as happened) that Iraq did not hoard any weapons of mass destruction, and who is later confirmed in his assumptions.

Basically every investigative journalist has to be partly a conspiracy theorist, because of course the rulers of this world do not want to have all their activities published and therefore keep them secret. In this respect, it is somewhat grotesque that the media adopt the rulers’ fighting term and use it thoughtlessly.

Alleged conspiracy theorists are also made fun of internally. Many colleagues are joking that they are crazies, who believe that Bill Gates wants to open a vaccination station with Hitler on the back of the moon. Or similar childish nonsense.

A negative highlight was the reporting of the “leading media” about the large demonstrations in Stuttgart, Leipzig and especially Berlin in the summer. It started with the number of participants. Actually, it is common for journalists to name both the number of demonstrators as announced by the police and the number of demonstrators as announced by the organisers (which is naturally always higher) at rallies.

On August 1st 2020 in Berlin, however, these details diverged so widely that one had to become suspicious. The “leading media” solved the problem by only naming the small number from the police and ignoring the high numbers that the organisers and participants mentioned. How high the number actually was is still unclear today, but here too the media acted against journalistic practices.

Were a few right-wing radicals and Reich citizens among the demonstrators? Were there many or were they even dominating the action? Numerous video streams showed that a large, if not overwhelming, proportion of the demonstrators apparently came from the middle of society. On average a little older, educated and from a middle-class background. There are also surveys and studies that confirm this.

Of course, you can argue about it, but in our editorial team, too, the matter was clear: the focus of the reporting was clearly on the right-wing radicals and Reichsbürger.

One reason for this can be found in the increasingly important part of online media. In contrast to newspapers, television and radio, it is possible to analyse exactly how many hits an individual post has, or how many “likes” on the Facebook pages, which are now also operated by all leading media.

As a result, the spectacular, and the supposedly scandalous, comes more and more to the fore because it promises more attention and thus more clicks. Various media critics say that almost everything in our society is increasingly being scandalised, no matter how casual. If so, then it is surely largely due to the “leading media” (including their tabloids).

A sealed bubble

Why is the “mainstream media” a closed bubble? Because they always get their information from the same, pre-sorted sources – and that is largely the news agencies that belong to the same bubble. They are like the gatekeepers of published opinion. That has always been the case, of course, but in the corona crisis it has become clearer than ever.

The major agencies mainly report on what supports the official corona narrative and what is propagated and implemented by the vast majority of governments around the world.

For example, almost only studies from around the world are reported which highlight the danger of the virus and the effectiveness of tough government measures. A Chinese study of around ten million people in Wuhan, which found that non-symptomatic transmission of the virus (almost all government measures are based on this assumption) was as good as irrelevant, did not feature in the agencies. It could only be found in the alternative online media.

By contrast, a study by the US-American CDC, which had contrary results, was reported. Numerous studies that showed that government lockdowns have virtually no impact on the infection rate have also been ignored by the agencies so far.

For me personally in my work this means that I cannot use any studies or information that I have found by myself on the Internet, because I would almost certainly be accused of using an uncertain source. But if DPA, AP, AFP or Reuters reported the study, I would be more or less on the safe side and could report it. If there were inquiries, I would refer to the agency. This could still lead to discussions as to whether the study is credible and whether it is worth reporting, but that would be part of a normal journalistic decision-making process.

Yes, it does happen again and again that critical experts or politicians are interviewed in the leading media or that the RKI and the federal government are criticized. But mostly it’s just fig leaves and they don’t really get to the heart of the matter.

There are statements from leading editors-in-chief of the public services that say that people like Wolfgang Wodarg or Sucharit Bhakdi [two high-profile critics with an accomplished medical / research background; S.R.] are generally not to be invited to talk shows on the subject. The bubble should stay as tightly sealed as possible.

An attempt at an explanation

Again and again I wonder why almost all of my colleagues so willingly and uncritically adopt this narrative from the government and from a few scientists (selected by the government) and disseminate it further. As already mentioned, concern for your own health or that of relatives certainly plays a role. But there is more.

In the last few years, something called “attitude journalism” has emerged. It is an intellectual and moralising arrogance that I think is spreading more and more. You simply belong to the “good guys”, to those who are on the “right side”. One believes that one has to instruct the mistaken citizen.

It is no longer a question of neutrality, but of representing the “right cause”, and surprisingly often this coincides with the interests of the government. The sentence by Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs mentioned above has even been completely reinterpreted in the meantime, in the sense of “attitude journalism”.

But this is increasingly alienating journalists from a good part of their clientele.

In the 1990s, the red carpet was rolled out to us reporters, editors, and presenters when we showed up anywhere in the country. Today we almost have to be happy when people don’t shout “Lying press!” [Lügenpresse; a term adopted by the Nazis in the Third Reich for the Jewish, communist, and foreign press; S.R.]. Of course, this term is wrong and should be rejected because of its history, but we journalists play a large part in the increasing alienation.

To be fair, the aforementioned “attitude journalism” only applies to some of the journalists, but mostly to their prominent representatives. Many of my colleagues seem to be overwhelmed by the complexity of the subject. Not intellectually, but rather because there is no time to dig into these things alongside the daily routine work. Close to impossible if you still have to do homeschooling with the children in the evening. Others simply lack interest in the subject.

In any case, one reason is the fear of attracting negative attention through overly critical statements. The self-reinforcing momentum of the mainstream bubble ensures that hardly anyone wants to swim against the current. Although a good number of the editors are on permanent contracts, there is great concern about the consequences. As I can observe in myself.

A fundamental problem with the mainstream bubble is that it either ignores or suppresses what is outside the bubble or perceives and interprets it from within that bubble. And so most mainstream journalists know the statements and positions of critical thinkers like Wodarg and Bhakdi (to name just two of many) only from reports in the mainstream media, which are of course biased accordingly. Hardly anyone takes the trouble to actually draw from the numerous alternative sources.

An afterword

This report is of course only a subjective assessment. Most of my fellow journalists would see it completely differently. However, I am not so concerned here with assessing the danger of the corona virus or the appropriateness of government measures. My concern is that in the corona crisis, in my opinion, journalistic standards and principles have been increasingly thrown overboard, as I have tried to at least indicate.

This in turn ensures that the media have become virtually meaningless as a democratic corrective, which in turn plays into the hands of political aspirations to power.

George Orwell is reported to have said that journalism is when you publish something that someone does not want published. Everything else is propaganda. Measured against this claim, it has to be said that the mainstream media in the corona crisis to 99 percent only deliver propaganda.

I myself have the naive hope of still being able to make a difference, in whatever way, because freedom of the press is in and of itself an extremely important asset in a democratically free society. I still believe in that.

 

The author of the following text has been an editor and newscaster for public broadcasting for many years and writes here under a pseudonym. He reports from the inner workings of a newsroom during the corona crisis. The article was originally published by the German online magazine Multipolar. Culture-specific explanations have been added by the translator.

Post-Pandemic Landscapes: Behavior Modification as the New Consensus Reality

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

The ‘Covid Event’ gave the unreal world its great coup over the place of the real. This perception intervention gave the final stimulus necessary to tip the twenty-first century into an awaiting technologically manipulated reality. A new landscape is emerging where, for the first time, the human mind is finding itself out-of-place within its own territory. What are now being termed the emerging ‘post-pandemic’ landscapes are likely to be hazardous territory for our mental, emotional, and physical states. The human condition is under modification.

New forms of power are on the rise, embedded within structures of health security, that are re-imagining our social lives, living and workspaces, and our physical and digital movements. Until now, the spider’s web of social control mainly operated below the waterline in a space where an almost intangible world existed beyond governance or accountability.  Now the Kraken awakes and is unashamedly coming to the surface. The beast of behavior modification is spreading its tentacles through our most established social and cultural institutions without shame – all in the name of health security (the new nom de plume of social management).  These institutions include the media, city life, the office, and – perhaps most of all – the online-digital world. The modification of these spaces is set to further desensitize, anesthetize, and dehumanize us. It is as if the collective human mind is being groomed and prepared for a new consensus reality of ‘normalized dissonance.’

The post-pandemic landscape is merging physical pandemics with its own viral digital epidemics that are infecting the human psyche. The Italian philosopher Franco Berardi has noted that our ‘electronic mediascape’ is putting ‘the sensitive organism in a state of permanent electrocution.’[1] The social body is being deliberately targeted by strategies that cause anxiety, fragmentation, exhaustion, confusion, polarization, and fear. We can see this through national and local lockdowns; social distancing; anti-social interaction; social ostracization; loss of economic independence, and more. In early July, Prof Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society (the UK’s national academy of science) stated publicly that face masks should be worn in all public spaces (as they already are in many places in Europe and worldwide). Not wearing a face covering, he added, ‘should be regarded as “anti-social” in the same way as drink driving or failing to wear a seatbelt.’[2] This is nothing short of encouraging a regime of public shaming. The human condition is being subjected to a new rhythm of the modern power-machine that is breaking down our social alliances.

The established conditions that created a sense of social reality are being dissolved and replaced with processes aimed at managing the masses through forms of separation and quantification. That is, the techniques necessary to begin the formation of a technologized humanity. These processes seek to reduce human life, and its environment, to something measurable and predicable – a life ordained by algorithms. These imposed changes are creating a disequilibrium in the human psyche – a fragmentation of the human self. Furthermore, they are seeking to break down our trusted social relations.

There is something insidious creeping up into the global collective that is attempting to create a world of sleepwalkers, plied with fear-pills, updated with vaccines, programmed with nonsense, and dismissive of alternative thinking. As a conscious, biological organism we are being prepared to mimic the automation of the machine. Humanity is mentally sleeping and slipping into the void where a new form of the ‘social collective’ awaits us.

Techniques are being devised and employed to produce normalized and standardized behavior in order to create a socially managed populace. The collective human mind is being adapted and adopted into an infrastructure of control that operates largely through modes of digital connectivity. I refer to this rising mechanism of social engineering as the modern power-machine (MPM) that exerts control over human expression and autonomy of behavior. To enact this, a consortium of institutions have been selected to structure contemporary societies toward specific functions that give the promise of security and human well-being whilst developing increased social dependency. This is the post-pandemic landscape now rapidly arising and to which all future generations shall be born into.

Childhood’s End

Luciano Floridi, a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, believes that human civilization is shifting into a phase of ‘hyperhistory.’ A hyperhistorical society that is dependent upon integrative technologies, says Floridi, could also become human-independent – that is, not needing us. Life on this planet is being developed into an infrastructure that favors machinic intelligence and artificial organisms, thus de-territorializing the human experience. Our urban environments may soon be more conducive to artificial life than biological ones. No one is yet ready for the mutation at hand. We are being programmed to take on a new position in the world that will erode the possibility of human transcendence; a world where the ‘flesh robot’ will eventually become the reality consensus.

We are witnessing an unprecedented migration of humanity from its physical space to the digital-sphere – an environment of surveillance and technocratic social management. The incoming generations will recognize no fundamental difference between the digital-sphere and the physical world as this mergence will form the reality they are born into. To the new generations, the digital-physical-sphere will be their only reality for they will have been born without the offline-online distinction. In the words of Luciano Floridi, they were born onlife. This is now their reality, and it is ‘onlife.’ The world that many of us recognized as being human will never be the same again. With the ‘onlife’ mode, a new era of history begins. Childhood comes to an end when they stop being a child and become a user. It is then that they inhabit whole new realities – realities they may believe to be ‘user-generated’ when in fact the reverse is more the case.

Connectivity and access will be part of the regime of the new power-machine. And the rights of access are going to be a matter of consensus health security (as addressed in New Dawn 180/181).  To be a part of the power-machine will mean opting-in to its sanctioned, and on-surveillance, connections. Soon, opting out will be made an almost impossible alternative. Connecting into the power-machine will become the new cartography of the ‘human reality.’ Living ‘manually’ will become one of the last few remaining sites of resistance as human life becomes regulated-by-automation.

The City as Machine Cradle

Modern living, especially within dense urban metropolises, as well as within poverty-stricken neighborhoods, severely affects the human psychological condition, as well as affecting the nervous system. Journalist Naomi Klein has noted how a form of ‘Pandemic Shock Doctrine’ is emerging where city metropolises are forming suspicious partnerships with large tech conglomerates to re-design city living. Klein has stated that the quarantine lockdowns were not so much to save lives ‘but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.’[3] One tech CEO that Klein interviewed commented that: ‘There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology…Humans are biohazards, machines are not.’[4] Several local city governments are in negotiations with large private tech companies to create a ‘seamless integration’ between city government, education, health, and policing operations. Further, the individual home will become a smart-enclosed hub for the urban dweller. All this, and more, as a ‘frontline pandemic response.’

Online learning, the home office, telehealth, and online commerce are all now a part of an emerging investment landscape to convert existing physical-digital infrastructures to cloud-based ones that will be incorporated into the arriving fully-completed 5G network. All in the name of providing citizens with a securitized ‘virus free’ landscape. Erich Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google/Alphabet and now chair of the Defense Innovation Board that advises the Department of Defense on military A.I., announced publicly with a straight face:

‘The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon.’[5]

Schmidt has now been hired to head up the task force commissioned to reimagine New York’s post-Covid reality. And he won’t be alone. High-tech is now jumping to get into partnerships with local governments in order to bring a safer, more ‘securitized’ landscape into civil society – all for ‘our’ benefit.

The business office landscape is also under re-organization to further regulate and isolate the social interactions of working colleagues. It can be said that a new form of business behavior modification is in the works. In a recent business analysis published in Bloomberg by Jeff Green and Michelle F. Davis, they suggested that:

The pre-Covid workplace, with its shared desks and common areas designed for “creative collisions,” is getting a makeover for the social distancing era. So far, what employers have come up with is a mash-up of airport security style entrance protocols and surveillance combined with precautions already seen at grocery stores, like sneeze guards and partitions.[6]

The authors of the report also foresee that the newly returned office worker will likely be encased in a makeshift cubicle made of plexiglass sheets. A new mode of anti-interaction is clearly in the works.

Hundreds of major companies, at least, are planning what they call ‘employee re-orientation programs’ and have already hired ‘thermal scanners’ to monitor employees for fevers, according to the article’s sources. The authors also noted that there has been a spike in job postings for ‘tracers,’ who would track down the contacts of anyone who tests positive for the covid-19 virus. In short, companies are now looking for a range of solutions to keep people away from one another throughout the working day. IBM, for example, is looking into using existing sensors or finding new technology to detect when people are too close together or ‘trending’ in that direction. Another report from the UK[7] noted how companies were looking into developing their own specialist employee smartphone apps that would operate elevators hands-free. The language employers are using includes creating ‘safe bubbles’ around employees and monitoring so that these ‘safe bubbles’ do not overlap. How would they manage such monitoring?

Various companies, the UK report goes on to say, are looking to teach artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the video cameras that are monitoring the employees. Dr Mahesh Saptharishi, Motorola Solutions’ chief technology officer (based in Boston) explained that AI algorithms can offer feedback about ‘pinch points’ where people are too close together. Instead of employers (read ‘humans’) having to spend time (read ‘waste time’) watching the actual video, they can ‘ask’ the AI how well social distancing is being observed overall, and where problem points are.[8] So that’s the issue solved then. We’ll just rely on AI algorithms to tell us how to ‘social distance’ in our non-interacting bubbles and we can modify our behavior accordingly. Job done!

What this also signifies is that in order to be able to modify our behavior, machine intelligence will need to gather ever greater datasets about us. That is, ‘smart cities’ and ‘secure offices’ equals increased surveillance which equals expanded datasets. The ‘Black Iron Prison’ that Philip K. Dick saw coming is now hitting us squarely in the form of surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance Capitalism

Professor Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the widely acclaimed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has said that digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. With the rapid rise of data collection for commercial gain, Zuboff says that: ‘The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information.’[9] People are reduced to being less than products because they are rendered into being a mere ‘input’ for the creation of the real product which is the data. Predictions about peoples’ futures are sold to the highest bidder so that these futures can be profited from or altered to favor better commercial gains. Zuboff considers surveillance capitalism to be, at its core, parasitic and self-referential – a parasite that feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.

Human experience is considered free to be taken as raw material and it is this that becomes the product of value. From this material, organizations decide to intervene in our lives to shape and modify human behavior in order to favor the outcomes that are most desirable for commercial gains. Behavioral modification is now in the hands of private capital – and undertaken with the minimal amount of external oversight. At its most basic, humans have been reduced to ‘batteries’ that produce datasets for algorithms and machine learning to process. What is most worrying is that, by and large, the general populations are ignorant of what is going on quite literally beneath their fingertips. As Zuboff notes, people unknowingly end up funding their own forms of domination.

Through its operations of technocratic ‘normalization’ and the deliberate breaking up of social alliances, the power-machine age is manufacturing a new standardization of the human body and mind. With the encroachment of socially managed interventions, people are made vulnerable to the increased destabilizing of the human self. The human sense of ‘self’ and identity has become a fragile thing; it is analyzed, scrutinized, and criticized through social media; it is modified through surveillance capitalism; and it is increasingly being rendered by AI facial recognition systems such as Clearview. As these post-pandemic landscapes become increasingly rolled out in more social environments, we are likely to see, as a consequence, an ever-greater fragmentation of the human self.

The Fragmented Self

It is no exaggeration to say that humanity is entering a period of existential crisis that has perhaps not been last witnessed since the Middle Ages. Only this time, we don’t have our religious institutions to offer us salvation. The responsibility is upon our shoulders of finding salvation through becoming fully human in the face of dehumanizing forces. At present, we are being bombarded with such contradictory information that many people are unable to find coherence or to make a whole picture out of the shards. That is, the human mind is finding it increasingly difficult to see the patterns and to connect the dots. Many people will also now be experiencing forms of cognitive dissonance. One definition of this state is: ‘Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.’[10]

The result of this is that the mind desperately wishes to reduce this discomfort and restore balance by seeking – or being provided with – a coherent picture, or closure. The danger here is that this ‘closure’ or ‘coherent picture’ may be provided by an external source, institution, or body (a structure of orthodox ‘authority’) and many people will jump onto it as a way of gaining closure, and thus comfort. When, in truth, we need to find this coherence and closure within ourselves, through our own resources. With the increasing breakdown of social relations and an interactive human environment, people’s consciousness is being further pushed into compartmentalization where events are seen as random rather than interrelated and meaningful. This lack of meaningfulness will be compensated for by the rise of virtual attractions as the digital-sphere increasingly becomes the ‘safe and secure’ home that people turn to. Critical thought, perceptive observation, and intuitive knowing will be under the onslaught of nullifying behavior modification.

As we are now seeing in the public space, self-identity (race, sexuality, etc) is becoming a target of division, further creating doubt, anxiety, and social polarization. Psychologically, people are being pushed to acquiesce, submit, and accept the measures that are being implemented as the ‘new normal’ post-pandemic landscapes. And the more we submit, the more we become vulnerable to further submission and disempowerment. Bureaucratic regimes and administrative structures will creep further into our living, work, and leisure lives until a form of what French philosopher Michel Foucault calls disciplinary power will dominate over the human condition. New forms of social discipline and collective obedience are fostering an artificial and engineered state of perception. We are right in the middle of a time of intense ‘enforced socialization,’ or what Edward Snowden recently referred to as an ‘architecture of oppression.’ For some, the only response to this overwhelming ‘architecture of oppression’ will be to find their comfort zones – such as sitting in their chairs at home with their ‘surrogates’ roaming the digital-physical landscape on their part.[11] Or, as the 2008 computer-animated sci-fi film Wall-E depicted, growing lazy and obese while robots cater to all their needs, while indulging in infantile entertainments. We can only hope this shall never be the case.

Humanity has entered unprecedented times. Such times demand an unprecedented response. It appears that we are now being asked to ‘step up’ to accept our responsibility for our human becoming, and so to become fully human. By doing nothing, we are allowing our behavior to be modified and our self-identities to be splintered. In these post-pandemic landscapes, the choices we make will be choices that, like never before, determine our future as a human species. I suggest it is time now for declaring our unity as an empowered fully human species – by not accepting the push of the power-machine into distanced and disempowered individuals.

The Mechanism of Invisible Empire

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“The invisible hand has created an invisible cage…blinding us and dividing us, allowing the ruling class to exploit us and subjugate us.”

By Hiroyuki Hamada

Source: Off-Guardian

When the whole society becomes a theater of absurdity, the puppeteers become kings and queens of insanity. The society loses its logic, history, facts, honesty, sincerity, creativity and imagination, as the monstrous imaginations of the deranged ruling class devour humanity and nature.

The invisible cage of authoritarianism comes in the shape of a bottomless pyramid. Fear and hopelessness fill the dimly lit bottom layers. Layers and layers separate us, alienate us and dehumanize us. The​ pain of “others” becomes your gain. The power of oppressors becomes your safety: The safety of living in the dangerous imaginations of the kings and queens.

But​ such a thought vanishes as quickly as our minds get flooded back with the numbing noises of the insane theater, while our remaining logic, seriousness and honesty are ridiculed and attacked by fearful fellow humans with cynicism, hopelessness and cowardliness.

The world doesn’t look like that at all for those who belong to the club of kings and queens. The unruly mass with no understanding of the righteous path of “humanity” has been inherently expendable for them. This has been shown over and over: colonization of natives by Europeans, enslavement of African people, genocides of many sorts.

But one also sees the same blunt inhumanity embedded among us today: homelessness, deaths by treatable diseases, hunger, deaths by substance abuse, suicide, poverty, refugees, mass incarceration, state violence, the psychological torture of alienation. The kings and queens don’t recognize those as issues to be solved with their resources.

Instead those issues represent forms of punishment for those who fail to secure viable positions within the capitalist hierarchy. The fear of the punishment and the fear of the authority work together to lock us in positions in the hierarchy, forcing us to protect our positions which systemically and structurally threaten our wellbeing 24/7; we live in a system of structural extortion.

As we have become free-range people in the “divine farm” of modern-day kings and queens, we have lost our access to the fundamental material reality. A sterile cage with screens, mandatory injections, electronic tracking within the invisible fence; human mice for profits, feed for data harvesting, an ever greater degree of spiritual death. It is not hard to start connecting the dots to see how things can lead into a grim future.

But what does such a fear do to the population, which has tolerated an assortment of abuses as their “punishment”? To those who manage to ignore their fellow humans living on the streets as invisible beings or fail to feel the pain of those being cornered into substance use and desperate acts of self-destruction?

Would they believe the words of those who question, or the words of the ruling class promising a glorious future of AI, green capitalism, genetic engineering, digitization and financialization?

And before we ask such a question, one must wonder if such a question is even allowed when the socioeconomic/political trajectory of the empire has been firmly within the imperial framework of the two capitalist political parties.

The capitalist hierarchy absorbs what it needs by allocating special positions within it: Natural resources, narratives, facts, history, people, political ideologies or anything that sits in time and space. The kings and queens monopolize them— material resources as well as people with skills and knowledge are captured to serve. Once monopolized, the valued items are commodified, to be distributed in ways that benefit those same kings and queens.

Meanwhile such a process occurs in layers and layers, projecting myths, exploitive narratives, false history and erroneous facts onto our collective consciousness—a fake reality which covers our eyes while we push our mortal bodies around in the real world.

The images projected onto our psyche vary according to our positions in the hierarchy. Each narrative validates and justifies our positions in the hierarchy. Kings and queens find themselves to be worthy rulers of the universe, while the masses see themselves as freedom-loving people who do their best in a world of opportunities.

In such an equation authoritarianism presents itself as a swinging pendulum between fascism and social democracy as it moves forward on the capitalist path in space and time. The carrot and stick carefully manage projected images to stay within the capitalist framework of acceptable ideas. Corporate politics and corporate activism play crucial roles in making the pendulum swing, therefore ensuring that the capitalist interests always go forward while appearing to be “democratic”.

Those who rely on terrorist tactics of various sorts attempt to resist the system by attacking the valuable, captured elements that work for the system. The damage compromises social dynamics in ways that deprive those who are already deprived, while dividing the population that should be uniting to dismantle the oppressive system.
Guided by agent provocateurs and corporate NGOs, righteous anger against oppressors turns into a justification for draconian measures, destruction of communities for urban renewal, and a catalyst for new projects of exploitation.

As a set of capitalist imperatives pushes the capitalist contradiction to the limit, completely depriving people’s ability to reconcile the false perceptions and the material reality, it is time for an urgent mobilization to change the trajectory of exploitation into a new field with a new set of rules. We are told that enemies are coming, a natural disaster is coming or a disease is coming, forcing us to mobilize ourselves to adjust to a new path of plundering for the kings and queens.

Any crisis, real or not, against the backdrop of a hierarchical structure imposes two sets of momentum that keep us within the capitalist farm. The first set has to do with fear of the authority, which keeps our frustration directed against ourselves, each other and oppressed “others”, while firmly gripping the destabilized psyche of the population—creating an ironic psychology of supporting oppressive authority against our own interests.

The second set has to do with the material constraints imposed by the particular crisis—we become enemies to each other fighting amongst ourselves to survive. We are put in the capitalist cage. And we are forced to protect our cage, which is constructed with vertical strength to withstand fear of the authority, horizontal strength to withstand attacks by competitors, and a solid floor to prevent one from falling down from the position in the hierarchy. The whole structure is held together with violent force of exploitation and subjugation.

THE GREAT RESET

”The Great Reset” is packaged as a “great solution”. Just like how the ruling class has marketed “green capitalism”—carbon trading, carbon capture, reforestation, and other resource exhausting green schemes and technologies for profit, it’s designed to prop up capitalism but it is also intended to transform capitalism to have more effective control of social relations while keeping the capitalist hierarchy intact.

Capitalism is getting a new OS, and it needs to be restarted. Just as “green capitalism” has destroyed real environmentalism in the name of saving the planet, it is designed to destroy anti-capitalist activism in the name of “revolution”.

One of the prominent leftist tools under a capitalist framework has been grass roots activism to affect state regulations and state guidelines to contain momentums of exploitation and subjugation created by Wall Street as well as capitalist social institutions. The stock market guided economy (falsely advertised as the only system that works) allows the ruling class to dominate social policies according to their interests; it prioritizes ruling class wealth accumulation while sacrificing social relations among the general population; it is extremely inefficient, unstable and economically unjust.

The capitalist state has been a great tool in ensuring the interests of the ruling class to be a priority. The socialist revolution takes over the capitalist state, it nationalizes corporate entities and sets up the economy, education and the rest of social institutions and social relations to be guided by people’s interests. Various incarnations of the above strategies to counter capitalist exploitation and encroaching imperial hegemony have attempted to do two major things.

First, they have prioritized people’s interests by emphasizing projects that benefit the general population while providing social safety nets, infrastructure for the people, environmental regulations and so on. Second, they have allowed economic activities based on people’s needs which can grow organic community dynamics based on humanity and nature.

“The Great Reset,” on the other hand, is a project of the ruling class meant to take away those measures from the people and utilize them to further solidify their dominance over the people. Since the owners of the farm are plenty rich already, they won’t need a big farm. Their social engineering skills as well as the greater control over the economy will be put to a test in building a sustainable farming business with a smaller herd.

This is why it seems that all activism has turned into enforcing or defying the various virus lockdown measures which have been instrumental in enforcing the trajectory of “The Great Reset.” Remember how all environmental activism was swallowed by the single idea of reducing carbon emission? Fearmongering slogans of apocalyptic narratives involving climate change, strong NGO guided activism, and corporate science emphasizing the topic of global warming have created the huge snowballing momentum to fight climate change at all costs, sidelining and coopting all other important environmental activism.

This has also contributed to the idea that it is no longer relevant to insist on being a part of systematic efforts in dismantling the capitalist system and building an alternate system which allows humanity and nature to prevail in harmony; we are told that we don’t have time to build socialism anymore. We are encouraged to be a part of green solutions by the capitalists as a result.

We are being told that casino capitalism for profits must end to introduce “stakeholder capitalism”. But of course, since the notion is coming from the profiteers who have colonized, corporatized, militarized and financialized, we can presume that they are talking about ensuring their own interests by directly guiding the economic decisions instead of continuing the show called the economy by the “invisible hand.” We are told that we should be provided with universal basic income, free housing and other social services as long as we follow the regulations and policies of public-private partnership.

What sort of conditioning will we be subjected to after being deprived of our inherent relationships to ourselves, to each other, to our communities and to nature, forced to be a part of destructive industrial farming, digitalization of everything with massive resource extraction, colonization of our communities with multinational franchises and enslavement of our souls in the invisible cage of indoctrination and propaganda?

We already have such a system in the US—it’s called mass incarceration in the private prison system. We are being told that the economy must not be merely guided by growth and it must be replaced by a sustainable one.

However, coming from those who have greatly restricted meaningful economic growth among the general population in order to subject livelihoods to the brutal capitalist framework, what they really mean is to restrict productive social relations among the people so that they must subsist with bare minimum requirements, eventually cornered to be a smaller herd, more manageable with less resources—an economic solution which can only be conceived by criminal minds. Who knows what role vaccines will play in it.

Who knows what sort of living hell people will be subjected to as our lives are treated like numbers in high frequency trading, or our entire lives are put on hold by AI customer representatives.

Note how the policies will be designed to be achieved by co-opting leftist agendas. The invisible hand has been busy building a brand new invisible cage to perpetuate the violent reign of kings and queens in the name of “revolution”—a fascist revolution that is.

Now, I would like to emphasize that these trajectories are not set in stone. The problem is that those possibilities are highly unlikely to be examined by concerned people within the capitalist framework. There is a structural problem in the system. Let me go back to the pendulum. Just like any other capitalist social institution, the capitalist political institution serves the ruling class; it can serve as a crime laundering devise. As soon as a topic involving criminal activities is destined to be “political”—it dissociates itself from criminal elements and becomes “legitimate”.

Various social institutions kick in to support such a view since they are all funded by the ruling class—media presents it as such, legislature codifies it as such, executive branch executes it as such, judicial branch judges it as such, academics support it as such, educational institution cements it as such and so on. It becomes normalized to be a part of social policies.

Once the topic is on the political table embellished with a glorious history and myths of the nationhood of the United States of America, the topic becomes officially “political”, not criminal, and it is now safely and generously handled by the corporate entities.

The rendered topic floats in an artificial realm of political myths, tradition, and the gladiator battle culture of political authorities as a commodified symbol representing a fictitious version of the actual topic. Ordinary people can’t approach it coherently for what it is anymore unless they are rich and influential enough to access all moneyed social institutions. Moreover, all the criminal records of officials are discarded, forgiven and forgotten as a new regime comes in every four years.

This is how destructive foreign policies of colonialism, corporatism and militarism, and exploitive predatory domestic policies of all sorts have been implemented against people in the name of freedom, justice and humanity. This is how environmental concerns have turned into “green capitalism”. This is how we are being mobilized today under the guise of virus lockdowns.

People watch and cheer the pendulum swing between political extremes within the capitalist framework. Bits and pieces of awareness beyond the imperial framework can only be perceived with tools approved by the framework, effectively keeping those with the awareness within the ideas of the ruling class.

If you hold a world view that does not fit in it, you end up being categorized as a supporter of a political villain or simply labeled as “fascist”, “communist” and so on. Needless to say those terms are solely defined by acceptable ideas, acceptable history and acceptable myths of the capitalist hegemony.

The fact that the US government has supported fascist regimes across the globe while brutally intervening against socialist countries across the globe won’t be admitted for instance.

HOW CAPITALIST HIERARCHY SHAPES IDEAS

If one holds a view that defies the prevalent narrative, the individual can become a target of the authority as well as a target of multiple political extremes within the capitalist hegemony. For instance, if you oppose Israeli war crimes from an anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist position, you can be persecuted as a dissident by the establishment, while being labeled as anti-Semitic by supporters of Israeli policies. (You may also be labeled a Zionist shill by those who believe that Jews are taking over the world and so on).

The position that points out that Israel is a crucial part of the imperial structure, serving the imperial hierarchy while benefiting from its generous support, cannot be fully discussed due to how narratives are formed by the network of the imperial institutions.

The political pendulum doesn’t only create an illusion of “democracy”, it also defines what is acceptable while tearing communities apart. It utilizes its violence as a springboard to perpetuate and strengthen its grip on the exploited.

That’s why the living hell for Palestinian people keeps functioning as a devise for imperialism—the more Palestinians suffer, the more anti-Semitic sentiment emerges, which in turn justifies Israeli violence, which in turn serves the imperial agendas. That’s why victims of Katarina had to be victimized by “urban renewal” after going through the gravely tragic event.

Capitalist hegemony does not allow an honest discussion because imperialism is kept invisible by default, the capitalist cage is invisible and the guiding hand of capitalists is invisible. The capitalist framework simply corners people into having dead-end arguments. Period.

With the virus situation, we are told that there are good people who wear masks and stay home and bad people who selfishly defy the rules and spread “conspiracy theories”. The dynamics among acceptable narratives within the capitalist framework create the circular arguments of a screaming match. These dynamics exclude and belittle any understanding which goes beyond the artificial range of ideas created by the capitalist institutions: you are fake news, you are a denier, you are a conspiracy theorist, you are a grandma killer, communists are taking over and so on. Without recognizing this mechanism, any attempt to unify the momentums will result in a populism which emulates the existing social structure—another reactionary revolution at best, but more likely it will create more divisions and destabilization among the people, resulting in perpetuation of the capitalist hierarchy.

This is why there is no discussion of accountability for the death and suffering created by lockdown measures and there is no discussion about the meaning of why we are going through a structural shift. And when the deaths and sufferings will be put on the political table, financial vultures will devour them in the emerging social impact bond markets (see studies by WRENCH IN THE GEARS).

The invisible hand that is supposed to guide us to freedom, justice and humanity has created an empire ruled by the unprecedented accumulation of power for the few. The invisible hand has created an invisible cage over us, and it has been blinding us and dividing us, allowing the ruling class to exploit us and subjugate us.

Now, it must be clearly stated that what we perceive as the dystopian future of The Fourth Industrial Revolution—AI, blockchain, digitalization, financialization, green capitalism and so on—can’t be separated from the invisible hand and the invisible cage. It cannot be allowed to be defined by capitalist institutions as a “legitimate political topic” instead of what it really is.

The newly built cage hasn’t been built, but if we fail to see it for what it is in its context, we will simply be forced to embrace some version of it as one of the “legitimate” capitalist trajectories. That’s how it works when our society is a theater of absurdity.

I want to live a life that breaks open the invisible cage and firmly shake hands with nature and humanity. If you have stuck around this far with me, I trust that you feel the same…or not. Either way, we must start our conversations.

What “Normal” Are We Returning To? The Depression Nobody Dares Acknowledge

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Perhaps we need an honest national dialog about declining expectations, rising inequality, social depression and the failure of the status quo.

Even as the chirpy happy-talk of a return to normal floods the airwaves, what nobody dares acknowledge is that “normal” for a rising number of Americans is the social depression of downward mobility and social defeat.

Downward mobility is not a new trend–it’s simply accelerating. As this RAND Corporation report documents, ( Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018) $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

Time magazine’s article on the report is remarkably direct: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% — And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure.

“The $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn’t inevitable; it was a choice–a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people.”

I’ve been digging into downward mobility and social depression for years: Are You Really Middle Class?

The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the top 5%–if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as a baseline.

The downward mobility isn’t just financial–it’s a decline in political power, control of one’s work and ownership of income-producing assets. This article reminds us of what the middle class once represented: What Middle Class? How bourgeois America is getting recast as a proletariat.

This reappraisal of the American Dream is also triggering a reappraisal of the middle class in the decades of widespread prosperity: The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?

Downward mobility excels in creating and distributing what I term social defeat: In my lexicon, social defeat is the spectrum of anxiety, insecurity, chronic stress, fear and powerlessness that accompanies declining financial security and social status.

Downward mobility and social defeat lead to social depression. Here are the conditions that characterize social depression:

1. High expectations of endlessly rising prosperity instilled as a birthright no longer align with economy reality.

2. Part-time and unemployed people are marginalized, not just financially but socially.

3. Widening income/wealth disparity as those in the top 10% pull away from the bottom 90%.

4. A systemic decline in social/economic mobility as it becomes increasingly difficult to move from dependence on the state or one’s parents to financial independence.

5. A widening disconnect between higher education and employment: a college/university degree no longer guarantees a stable, good-paying job.

6. A failure in the Status Quo institutions and mainstream media to recognize social depression as a reality.

7. A systemic failure of imagination within state and private-sector institutions on how to address social depression issues.

8. The abandonment of middle class aspirations: young people no longer aspire to (or cannot afford) consumerist status symbols such as luxury autos or conventional homeownership.

9. A generational abandonment of marriage, families and independent households as these are no longer affordable to those with part-time or unstable employment.

10. A loss of hope in the young generations as a result of the above conditions.

The rising tide of collective anger arising from social depression is visible in many places: road rage, violent street clashes between groups seething for a fight, the destruction of friendships for holding “incorrect” ideological views, and so on.

A coarsening of the entire social order is increasingly visible: The Age of Rudeness.

Depressive thoughts (and the emotions they generate) tend to be self-reinforcing, and this is why it’s so difficult to break out of depression once in its grip.

One part of the healing process is to expose the sources of anger that we are repressing. As psychiatrist Karen Horney explained in her 1950 masterwork, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization, anger at ourselves sometimes arises from our failure to live up to the many “shoulds” we’ve internalized, and the idealized track we’ve laid out for ourselves and our lives.

The article The American Dream Is Killing Us does a good job of explaining how our failure to obtain the expected rewards of “doing all the right things” (getting a college degree, working hard, etc.) breeds resentment and despair.

Since we did the “right things,” the system “should” deliver the financial rewards and security we expected. This systemic failure to deliver the promised rewards is eroding the social contract and social cohesion. Fewer and fewer people have a stake in the system.

We are increasingly angry at the system, but we reserve some anger for ourselves, because the mass-media trumpets how well the economy is doing and how some people are doing extremely well. Naturally, we wonder, why them and not us? The failure is thus internalized.

One response to this sense that the system no longer works as advertised is to seek the relative comfort of echo chambers–places we can go to hear confirmation that this systemic stagnation is the opposing ideological camp’s fault.

Part of the American Exceptionalism we hear so much about is a can-do optimism: set your mind to it and everything is possible.

The failure to prosper as anticipated is generating a range of negative emotions that are “un-American”: complaining that you didn’t get a high-paying secure job despite having a college degree (or advanced degree) sounds like sour-grapes: the message is you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t get the right diploma, etc.

It can’t be the system that’s failed, right? I discuss this in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform: the top 10% who are benefiting mightily dominate politics and the media, and their assumption is: the system is working great for me, so it must be working great for everyone. This implicit narrative carries an implicit accusation that any failure is the fault of the individual, not the system.

The inability to express our despair and anger generates depression. Some people will redouble their efforts, others will seek to lay the blame on “the other” (some external group) and others will give up. What few people will do is look at the sources of systemic injustice and inequality.

Perhaps we need an honest national dialog about declining expectations, rising inequality and the failure of the status quo that avoids polarization and the internalization trap (i.e. it’s your own fault you’re not well-off).

We need to value honesty above fake happy-talk. Once we can speak honestly, there will be a foundation for optimism.

Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime. 

This is true.  The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience.  We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.

Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.

For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket.  All this is documented and not disputed.  It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.

With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive.  It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.

Just the other day The New York Times had this headline:

Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.

Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.”  This is guilt by headline.  It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook that owns Instagram. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook.  Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow.  What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy.  We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.

First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc.  They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically.  Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.

Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned. Greenwald says:

They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’

Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.

In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.  These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so.  If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core. For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many.  The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense.  These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc.  They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media.  Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations.  Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc.  The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.  All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work?  Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell.  It is a symbiotic relationship. As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc.  They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.

As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell:

There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director. 

It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA.  He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.”  This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.

Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short.  Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey.  Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.

The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case.  His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues.  To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassinations of his father and uncle, JFK.  It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces. These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be.  They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.

So they killed him.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi.  He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual.  The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.

To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it.  That’s where the true stories lie.  That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.