Category Archives: media

How Billionaires Took Over Liberalism and Destroyed It

Posted on by
Reply

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

They’ve done it via the ‘news’-media — their propaganda-operations. So, this is about how billionaires do that; how they’ve done it.

Ever since at least the time of Thucydides in the 5th century BC, the wealthiest have ruled, and did it by conquest and plunder. The acquisition of exceptional wealth was by theft: it was coercion, which could be either physical against the body (violence), or mental against the mind (deception). Exceptional wealth was acquired by some form of theft. The wealthiest controlled the government, which then enforced that theft as legal “ownership.” That’s how the economy worked. The government is the ultimate authority on who owns what. None of this has changed over the millennia. However, the technologies today are different, depending less on the wielding of steely weapons, and more on the statement of stealthy words, than in the ancient past. Increasingly, control is being achieved by deceiving the public. (For example, America’s leading liberal politician, Joe Biden, was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists and back-room opponents of the NAACP, but claims to be a supporter of “civil rights”, and is thus voted for by the overwhelming majority of America’s Blacks — but America’s press hides his segregationist record, and so they don’t know about it. Those voters’ ignorance is that politician’s strength, and it all comes from America’s billionaires.) Today’s methods of deceiving (and thus controlling) the public are considerably more sophisticated and professional than in the past. The aristocracy (the billionaires) do it nowadays mainly by means of their buying and selling, and hiring and firing, of the news-media, which thus have far more importance than in ancient times, because deceit is today’s main way to control the public.

Whereas conservative media rely unashamedly upon the existing popular mythology, liberal media need to rely upon that but to pretend not to, and to be instead ‘humanitarian’ and ‘enlightened’ in a more tolerant and open-minded sense: they specialize in hypocrisy — it’s liberal aristocrats’ particular style of art-form; they’re the ‘not conservative’ type of aristocrats. They pretend to be what they aren’t (champions of democracy — which they actually despise and crave to overcome, if it exists at all).

Progressive media (to the extent they exist at all, which is only very slight, anywhere) avoid both hypocrisy and mythology: they are openly anti-aristocratic, and rejecting also any mythology — they are populist, while not affirming the popular (or any) mythology. (By contrast: conservative ‘populists’ are committed to the existing popular mythology, and can therefore be manipulated by openly conservative aristocrats — they can be “Tories,” or even “Nazis,” and they can therefore vote against their own “class interests.” It’s stupid, but conservative ‘populists’ nonetheless do it routinely.)

As a result of this (since the progressives’ appeal — rejecting both the aristocracy and the mythology — is so small), politics almost invariably pits conservatives against liberals, and therefore promotes dictatorship (rule of the nation by its aristocracy), either way.

This means that, almost invariably, it’s either the conservative aristocrats, or else the liberal aristocrats, who rule a country. (Democracy — rule by the public — is thus very rare.)

Perhaps the most famous of all liberal news-media during the Twentieth Century was Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which was anti-imperialist — and that’s a core component of progressivism, because the aristocracy derive wealth not only by exploiting their domestic public, but also (if they are internationally successful, meaning control vassal-nations) by exploiting foreign publics. These aristocrats exploit foreign publics by controlling foreign governments. That’s called “imperialism.”

The Guardian newspaper was widely considered, until recently, to be not only liberal, but even progressive. It promoted government-expenditures for the benefit of the people, instead of for international conquest (which billionaires much prefer). Consequently, the aristocracy hated it, and wanted to take it over.

Tragically, that newspaper was, in fact, taken over, culminating in 2016, by American billionaires’ ‘charities’, and promptly it became perhaps the world’s most-rabidly pro-imperialistic propaganda-sheet (even worse than America’s own Washington Post and New York Times, both of which were infamous villains, which had, for example, helped to promote George W. Bush’s lies to invade and destroy Iraq for WMD that didn’t even exist except in their own lies about the matter — and those were definitely lies, not mere errors such as the liars and their propaganda-media claimed afterward). They are constantly whipping up hatred against Russia’s Government and against any nations (like Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012, Ukraine 2014, and Venezuela 2015, were, and like China and Iran are now) that were friendly toward Russia — because Russia is the main country that America’s billionaires want to conquer and control that they don’t yet control. So, they constantly propagandize against Russia, where they all want “regime change” (meaning, actually, conquest).

Just as for at least the past 2,500 years, conquest is the aristocracy’s chief goal. All aristocrats support imperialism. (Any who would oppose it would no longer be accepted within the aristocracy. It would hurt them in their business-dealings with other aristocrats. Amongst their fellow aristocrats, they would be rejected.)

This journalistic transformation at the Guardian, from anti-imperialist, to becoming a champion of the Military-Industrial Complex (which is owned and controlled by the billionaires), is typical.

Understanding this transformation toward pure propaganda is helpful in order to understand the functioning of today’s most destructive Government, the U.S. Government — the country (whose Government is controlled by its billionaires — no democracy) that has perpetrated far more invasions and coups, and done far more damage in and to the world, than all other Governments in the world combined, ever since the end of World War II. It has mass-murdered tens of millions of people, not only via invasions, but by coups that were followed by U.S.-imposed brutal dictatorships (which served the U.S. aristocracy) — and all the while with the U.S. regime pretending to advance ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ (such as in Iraq 2003-, Libya 2011-, and Syria 2012-). (After all: it’s liberal; it is hypocritical — it pretends to be progressive but isn’t.)

Though this incredibly hypocritical global-tyrannical U.S. regime is accepted world-wide, as if it weren’t today’s equivalent of Nazi Germany (only bigger than that), it is by far the world’s most evil Government, much as Nazi Germany’s Government was, in its time. Whereas America under President FDR (who was sincerely an enemy of Nazi Germany) was largely a democracy, America is now an aristocracy of its billionaires — a dictatorship by its own super-rich (and they are vicious, comparable to what Germany’s Nazis were, though using far more-liberal rhetoric).

A typical example of today’s Guardian (which is no longer a newspaper but just an online propaganda-site funded by those billionaires’ ‘charities’, and by readers who are stupid enough to donate and pay in order to be deceived by ‘news’ they read there) is two ‘news’-reports that were published in the Guardian on the same day, and unconnected with one-another except that they were both fact-less, undocumented, and rabidly hateful against Russia’s Government — that’s to say, against the bête noire of American-and-allied (such as UK) billionaires.

On 16 July 2020, the Guardian headlined both “Russian state-sponsored hackers target Covid-19 vaccine researchers” and “UK says Russia sought to interfere in 2019 election by spreading documents online”. Both were probably lies, but certainly unverified by any clear facts — totally uninformative, and just strings of allegations, pure war-propaganda — much of it stenographically citing from official government sources in the U.S. and UK dictatorships (just like the “WMD in Iraq” lie was).

The Guardian is now a typical liberal ‘news’-medium, which means that it is at least as imperialistic as the openly conservative ‘news’-media (such as Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London) are.

To show how such propaganda is created and spread, and has been used with enormous success by the millions of hired agents (including publicly elected governmental officials) of the U.S. aristocracy, a few examples will be cited here that have already been sufficiently studied and exposed to be frauds — such as those two ‘news’-stories in the July 16th Guardian have not yet been exposed, but (based on that ‘news’-medium’s record) probably also are frauds.

On August 7th, I headlined “‘Russiagate’ Hoax Unravels, but Their Anti-Russia Sanctions Don’t,” and documented, in considerable detail, the fraudulence of the main U.S. Government hoax against Russia, a hoax that was promulgated in the Mueller Report and in all of the Democratic-Party-created “Russiagate” case against America’s current atrocious (Republican-Party-billionaire-representing) President, Donald Trump (accusing him of being ‘a puppet of Putin’).

What’s stunning there is that, with such a horrid President as Trump, the Democrats selected this hoaxed case to bring against him, in order to force him out of office — as if there weren’t authentic crimes that he had been perpetrating during his Presidency (and even before). They refused to bring any of the authentic cases against him, because they — the Democratic Party itself, its own Senators and Representatives and the Democratic National Committee — were themselves participating in those crimes (such as this and this and this and this). So, they instead brought this “Russiagate” case (which had been manufactured by the prior, Democratic Party, President’s Administration, in conjunction with MI6; and, so, Democratic Party officials could bring it), which is entirely disprovable. All of their ‘news’-media (such as the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and even the formerly British Guardian) therefore hid the hoaxiness of the charges, so as to sucker the Democratic Party’s voters (their readers) into supporting their own Democratic-Party-billionaire-serving politicians, instead of the Republican Party ones, who instead represented Republican Party billionaires. The villain was Russia (their bête noire), instead of Hillary Clinton and their own controlling aristocracy.

That “Russiagate” case in the United States was co-created by America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6; so, not only was it a real crime by the (traitorous) U.S. Government against its own American public, but it was a fictitious crime also by a foreign Government (Russia, ‘the enemy’), against the American people. And, as I have also documented, there are many such governmental crimes. And the more that they can be blamed against countries that America’s aristocracy wants to conquer (such as “Russiagate” was), the better it is for America’s aristocrats. So, this is the routine reality now (and under Trump it has increasingly been also against Iran and China), so as to pump up the Military-Industrial Complex, which is virtually owned by the aristocracy.

I document many things that are consistently denied in America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, and therefore none of those media will publish these articles (though all of my articles are submitted to all of them); but, just today as I am writing, a webmaster at a non-mainstream site objected because I provide “too many” links. Even though he operates an online news-site, he fails to know or respect the fact that ONLY online text-articles possess even the ability to enable their readers to check out easily — just by the reader’s clicking onto a link — the evidence for any reasonably questionable allegation that is being made in the given article (such as this one). Broadcast journalism doesn’t do that. Paper-and-ink journalism also doesn’t. Therefore, all of the traditional ‘news’-media don’t empower their audiences to be intelligently skeptical, and to have easy access to the actual evidence behind any reasonably questionable assertion that is being put forth by them.

Furthermore, even when traditional ‘news’-media establish online sites, any links there are often uninformative, such as to that site’s own archive of references to a given term that is being linked in their article. They assume that you trust one Party or the other, and they provide no easy means of digging deeper — because they don’t want their audience to be able to understand. Those are all billionaire-controlled ‘news’-media. So, all of them lie routinely, in order to advance the business-interests of those owners and control their audience. It’s like they are just nonstop advertisements instead of real news-media. And, since there are no links to their ultimate sources, those audiences would have to become investigators, themselves, in order to separate out which allegations are facts and which allegations are frauds. Readers don’t have the time to do that; and listeners don’t have any way in which they can do it, even if they did have the time. In other words: those audiences will choose to believe and to disbelieve whatever they want. This is the reason for the increasing political-Party polarization. It has become so bad in America now, so that the current U.S. Presidential election is between two rabidly racist contenders: the openly conservative one, Donald Trump, who hardly even tries to hide his racism, versus the other, Joe Biden, who does try to hide the fact that he was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists and was even allied on segregation-issues with the Senate’s leading segregationist, the Republican Party’s Senator Jesse Helms. Only by means of the ‘news’-media’s hiding Biden’s White-supremacist background, can they pretend that the two Parties are offering the electorate a ‘progressive’ option, in the billionaires’ 2020 Presidential (s)‘election’. Non-racist Americans are offered, by the billionaires’ two Parties, only White-supremacist options (the overtly segregationist Trump, or else the covertly segregationist Biden) to vote for to become the next President.

The entire national public then increasingly consists of people who are prejudiced in whatever ways that they are — increasingly set in their existing false beliefs — their existing myths. To allow billionaires to place their heavy thumbs upon the scales of truth and justice that they own, by means of their control over ‘news’-media, is a sure way for any democracy to degenerate into dictatorship, so that the public are fighting more against each other than against the aristocracy. This is what billionaires want and what has happened. Some things change, but others remain the same. And rule-by-the-richest seems to be in the latter category.

So: this is how one of the very few remaining progressive news-media became switched, in just the past few years, to being whored to the liberal aristocracy. The Guardian, RIP, was almost the opposite of today’s Guardian.

On August 10th, Jonathan Cook, who used to be a Guardian journalist when it was its previous, progressive newspaper, headlined “How the Guardian betrayed not only Corbyn but the last vestiges of British democracy”, and he exposed his former employer as the opposite of what it had been and as having become perhaps even the chief tool by billionaires to destroy the post-Tony-Blair Labour Party which had been led by the progressive Jeremy Corbyn, and as having reflected the Labour Party billionaires’ preference instead to defeat Corby’s Labour Party, in order to help to install as Prime Minister the far-right Tory Boris Johnson so as to restore, as being that Conservative Party’s opposition, the pro-imperialist Labour Party that had joined itself full-force to George W. Bush’s lie-based invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Racism was endemic in the language and behaviours of Labour’s senior, rightwing officials,” whom today’s Guardian had helped to make the Labour Party’s current leaders. This new Guardian was the opposite of the old Guardian, which had given a voice “for control of the Labour party so that it might really represent the poor and vulnerable against rule by the rich.” Today’s Guardian was instead instrumental in killing–off that Labour Party, and thereby leaving UK with no progressive party at all, and without even a single Party that has any actually functioning progressive wing to it, at all.

The way that billionaires took over liberalism and destroyed it is by their having taken control over non-conservative media (most of which were liberal, but a few of which were even progressive, as the Guardian used to be) and stripped out of them any opposition that those media previously had had toward imperialism, and replaced that by championing imperialism, so long it’s of the ‘right’ kind, namely sanctions and coups and invasions by ‘our’ country, against countries that never even threatened one’s own country (but that are friendly toward Russia). By definition, attempting to conquer a country that isn’t attempting to conquer that aggressor-country is the biggest of all international war-crimes; it’s “aggressive war” — and Nazi leaders were hanged for it at Nuremberg — but it’s entirely unpunished when the world’s most powerful country (and its allies) are doing it, such as now. A popular term for it (i.e., for the supreme crime that was being prosecuted at the Nuremberg Tribunals) today is “neoconservatism,” and the only way in which it differs from the Nazi Party is that America’s aggressions are aiming at different targets to destroy.

The easiest way to end democracy is to take control over the news-media so as to make them instead ‘news’-media; and, therefore, that’s the way it has been done.

Abnormalize The Status Quo

Posted on by
1

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

If we’d been living in a healthy society and then suddenly had this society’s sick, insane status quo thrust upon us by powerful people, we’d have all been out in the streets making life very hard for those powerful people in an instant.

We are in the same situation now. We are having a wildly insane status quo thrust upon us by the powerful and for the benefit of the powerful. Only difference is we’re not all out in the streets, and instead of thrusting this horrible situation upon us suddenly, they’ve been doing it this entire time.

Which is precisely why we’re not out in the streets. We were born into this mess, so we assume it’s normal and that things are supposed to be this way. But it isn’t, and they aren’t.

What is normal is health. Health is the normal default condition. If you wake up with a fever and stabbing pain in your abdomen you don’t say “Ah well I guess that’s normal now, you can’t expect to just not have a fever and stabbing abdominal pain,” you recognize that there’s an urgent problem and you take action to fix it.

Even if you’d been sick your entire life, you would understand that your situation is not normal. You would understand that the basic default condition is health, but some dysfunction in your specific system has deprived you of that normal state of being.

In order for us to begin pushing back on the dysfunction of our current system, we need to begin looking at it in the same way. We need to clearly come to see how spectacularly divergent it is from the basic default condition of health. How sick it is. How abnormal it is.

We need to see clearly that health is normal and sickness is abnormal, whether you’re talking about an individual or a society.

It’s not normal for a civilization to be dominated by plutocrats and secretive government agencies and to only get offered the choice between two authoritarian corporate warmongers in a pretend election to a position of leadership that is almost entirely fake.

It’s not normal for there to be enough wealth to feed and care for everyone and yet instead have people with unfathomable amounts of money while others die of lack.

It’s not normal for a globe-spanning empire to dominate our species with endless military violence and starvation sanctions for the sole purpose of maintaining and expanding the unipolar hegemony of a few sociopathic manipulators.

It’s not normal for us to be destroying our ecosystem in order to grow an economy that is ultimately an imaginary construction in our minds instead of learning to collaborate harmoniously with that ecosystem.

It’s not normal for us all to be competing against each other at the expense of the entire world instead of collaborating with each other for the good of the entire world.

We need to get crystal clear that these things are not normal, because our entire society is completely saturated with skilful manipulations telling us that they are.

I write a lot about the more egregious, incendiary lies that the mass media have notoriously promulgated like WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, the imaginary Labour antisemitism crisis etc. But the most destructive lies the mass media tell us are not the ones that stand out the most in our collective memory. The most damaging lies they tell us are the little ones they tell us many times every single day by way of spin, omission, half-truth and distortion in order to give us the impression that this status quo is normal and inescapable.

You see it in the way they talk about politicians who stand even a tiny bit outside the warmongering oligarchic beltway consensus like they are radical extremists. You see it in the way they’ll focus on protests in Belarus or Hong Kong while ignoring them in Bolivia or France. You see it in the way they ignore Yemen when it’s the single most horrific thing happening on our planet right now. You see it in all the sitcoms and movies where debt and low wages and other symptoms of status quo dysfunction are almost never a featured concern.

You see it in innumerable other ways, day in and day out, and they add up. They add up for someone who was born into a gravely dysfunctional system and has never known anything resembling health to compare it to. They’re like someone who has always been sick, who has also never known or heard about anyone who is healthy.

You can tell me we’ve never had a healthy society since the dawn of civilization all you want. All you are telling me is that we have always been sick. Being sick all your life doesn’t mean health isn’t normal or that health shouldn’t be urgently sought; if anything it means it should be sought more urgently.

It is not human nature to be this sick, and anyone who tells you it is is lying. Anyone who tells you it’s human nature to be greedy, violent, domineering and abusive isn’t telling you about humanity’s nature, they’re telling you about their own nature. And it’s probably a bad idea to turn your back on them.

We can have health. We can have normality. But just as you won’t return to health by pretending that your fever and abdominal pains are normal, we can’t create a healthy society as long as we allow ourselves to be manipulated into the belief that our backwards, insane status quo is what normality looks like.

So abnormalize the status quo. Abnormalize it every chance you get. Abnormalize it by holding a clear idea in your mind of what a healthy society would look like, then point out all the bizarre deviations from that vision at every opportunity. Remind people that this is crazy. Assure them that it doesn’t have to be this way. That the only thing keeping it this way is the fact that the powerful keep pouring vast troves of wealth into manipulating us into thinking that we should.

Help people see what health is so that they can see what sickness is. Interrupt conversations about which flavor of sickness would be preferable this election season to point to what real health would look like. Disrupt all attempts to normalize our status quo, and use whatever reach you have to help abnormalize it.

If you are reading this, you might be a conspiracy theorist

Posted on by
2

By John Steppling

Source: Off-Guardian

…a permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms…and it doesn’t occur.”
Susan Sontag, AIDs and its Metaphors

“I should not misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about, say, logic. I call this a misuse, for to explain a scientific matter to you it would need a course of lectures and not an hour’s paper. Another alternative would have been to give you what’s called a popular scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science. I rejected these alternatives.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Lecture on Ethics

If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably been called a conspiracy theorist. Also you’ve been derided and shamed for questioning the “science” of the Covid debacle.

The idea of science is now a badly corrupted idea. In a nation, today, (the USA) which in educational terms ranks 25th globally in science skills and reading, and well below that in math; all one hears is a clarion call to science. In reading skills the US placed below Malta, Portugal, and right about the same as Kazakhstan.

But in a nation that no longer reads, and *can* no longer read, it is not surprising that knowledge is absorbed via the new hieroglyphics of gifs (interestingly the creator of gifs wanted it pronounced with a soft g the more to sound like a peanut butter brand) and memes.

So-called ‘response memes’ are the new version of conversation, and most register and communicate (sic) confusion. As beer ad marketers know, the state of your brain after consuming a six pack is pretty much the standard target ideal for advertising. And it relays a message that six pack confusion is actually a good and perhaps even sexy state in which to find oneself.

Education is for those with money, those who can afford the proper foundational skills to get into Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech and the Stanford. For everyone else science is Star Trek.

But I digress. The point is that most Americans imagine that they revere science, and they ridicule anyone they think of as unscientific. But they think of it in cult terms, really. Its a religion of sorts. The only people who don’t are those ‘real’ religious zealots, Dominionist and Charismatic Christians (like Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos et al) who hold positions of enormous power in the US government under the least scientific president in history.

The Christian right doesn’t like any science, ANY science. But for most of that target demographic (the educated mostly white 30%), the cry is to “trust the science”…even the great Greta says to “trust the science”.

The problem is, science is not neutral, its as politicized as media and news and the pronouncements of celebrities.

In May 2020, The Lancet published an article revisiting the 1957 and 1968 Influenza pandemics.

The 1957 outbreak was not caused by a coronavirus—the first human coronavirus would not be discovered until 1965—but by an influenza virus. However, in 1957, no one could be sure that the virus that had been isolated in Hong Kong was a new pandemic strain or simply a descendant of the previous 1918–19 pandemic influenza virus.

The result was that as the UK’s weekly death count mounted, peaking at about 600 in the week ending Oct 17, 1957, there were few hysterical tabloid newspaper headlines and no calls for social distancing. Instead, the news cycle was dominated by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik and the aftermath of the fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in the UK.

By the time this influenza pandemic — known colloquially at the time as “Asian flu” — had concluded the following April, an estimated 20 000 people in the UK and 80 000 citizens in the USA were dead. Worldwide, the pandemic, sparked by a new H2N2 influenza subtype, would result in more than 1 million deaths.

To date, Covid 19 has not reached the million death marker in the US And yet we are seeing the most draconian lockdowns in modern history, the total suspension of democratic process and a level of hysteria (especially in the U.S. and UK) unprecedented. I wrote about some aspects of this on my blog here, mostly touching on the cultural effects

Allow me to quote The Lancet again.

The subsequent 1968 influenza pandemic — or “Hong Kong flu” or “Mao flu” as some western tabloids dubbed it — would have an even more dramatic impact, killing more than 30 000 individuals in the UK and 100 000 people in the USA, with half the deaths among individuals younger than 65 years — the reverse of COVID-19 deaths in the current pandemic.

Yet, while at the height of the outbreak in December, 1968, The New York Times described the pandemic as “one of the worst in the nation’s history”, there were few school closures and businesses, for the most, continued to operate as normal.

I remember the 68 Hong Kong flu. I was in my last year of high school. The summer after was Woodstock, the ‘summer of love’. Not a lot of social distancing going on. But we are past numbers and statistics having any real meaning. The Covid narrative is now in the realm of allegory.

The media perspective is utterly predictable. Liberal outlets that have the inside track to government are seen to be reinforcing the mainstream story (VOX, Slate, Huff Post, The Guardian and Washington Post). In a recent VOX article the message was only a sociopath would NOT wear a mask and that the ‘science’ was unanimous.

Of course its no such thing. But the message of sites like VOX, or Daily Beast, or Wa Po or the truly reprehensible Guardian, are always going to be to hammer away ‘on message’. The same is true for what passes for moderate news organs like the NY Times, ABC News, The Hill, and BBC. There has been virtually no dissenting opinions expressed in these rags.

All these news outlets are given clear messages by the spin doctors in government, by the White House, and by contacts within the State Department and Pentagon. And by the advertising firms employed by the state (such as Ruder Finn).

“Ad agencies are not in the business of doing science.”
Dr. Arnold S. Relman (Madison Ave. Has Growing Role In the Business of Drug Research, NY Times 2002)

The WHO, the CDC, and most every other NGO or government agency of any size hires advertising firms. The WHO, which is tied to the United Nations, is a reasonably sinister organization, actually.

Just picking up a random publication from the WHO, on what they call ‘the tobacco epidemic’ and you find on page 33 the following chapter heading “Objective: Effective surveillance, monitoring and evaluation systems in place to monitor tobacco use.”

Reading further and all this is really saying is that the populace of any country is best put under surveillance. It’s for their own good, you see.

But back to the science. Here is a small trip down memory lane…

Institutions of medicine, global and national possess no more integrity than your average NGO (Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam et al). And that means not very much.

To understand the nature of institutional corruption one must understand Imperialism. The institutions of Imperialist nations are going to further Imperialist ideology. (see Antonio Gramsci, ideological hegemony). The US is not in the business of helping Americans.

Modern monopoly forms better reflect that scientific knowledge, and its advanced application to production, are concentrated, ultimately, not in physical objects but in human beings and human interaction with those objects. It is monopoly of the labour power of the most highly educated workers, by both imperialist states and Multi National Corporations, that forms the ultimate and most stable base of imperialist reproduction.

– Sam King (Lenin’s theory of imperialism: a defence of its relevance in the 21st century, MLR)

The idea of super-exploitation needs to be conceptually generalised at the necessary level of abstraction and incorporated in the theory of imperialism. Super-exploitation is a specific condition within the capitalist mode of production […] the hidden common essence defining imperialism.

he working class of the oppressed nations/Third World/Global South is systematically paid below the value of labour power of the working class of the oppressor nations/First World/Global North. This is not because the Southern working class produces less value, but because it is more oppressed and more exploited.

– Andy Higginbottom (Structure and Essence in Capital 1, quoted by John Smith Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century)

The US jobless rate just hit 2.1 million. Officially. Making the total something over forty million. Its much higher in reality. Nobody has work. There is no work and we are at the start of a period of massive evictions, foreclosures, and delinquencies — and the homeless population will soon reach Biblical proportions (in some cities, such as Los Angeles, its already Biblical). Will be simply of a magnitude never before seen.

Hence the authoritarian policing of lockdowns in, for example, New Zealand, suggests something like a practice run. The ruling class in western nations knows full well this is coming. And one wonders if it’s not, in fact, a part of the plan (oh here is where someone says conspiracy theory…probably Louis Proyect).

Yes it’s a fucking conspiracy theory. It is a theory based on evidence, however.

Why are the US and UK and a host of other countries deliberately ensuring a massive depression? Because they care about your health? They are worried we all might catch the flu? Has the US ever demonstrated a concern with your health and well being before?

Remember how many discretionary tax dollars go to health care and how much to defense. Conspiracies do occur. The denial of that fact seems to be a hallmark of the pseudo or false left. Does the suspension of democratic process not cause this soft left any problems at all? Look at Sweden, at Belarus…no lockdown and no problem.

It should be noted that there are a great many terrific doctors in the US. Dedicated and brilliant, often. But they are not the system. The system is run for profit.

With about three-fourths of Americans under lockdown, the unintended consequences will be vast. There has been a notable decrease in the number of heart attack and stroke patients arriving at hospitals, presumably because they are afraid of catching the coronavirus or of not finding a hospital bed.

As the economy spirals downward, we can also expect an increase in mental health crises, domestic violence and suicides. While lockdown supporters say that to have a functioning economy, we must have good public health, the reverse is also true: To have good public health, we must have a functioning economy.

– Alex Berezow PhD (Geopolitical Futures, 2020)

Alfred Willener wrote an interesting book in 1970, analysing May 68 in France. He analyses the answers students gave to various questionnaires they responded to. The section regarding science is worth quoting.

‘The scandalous fact is that, for all the means that science has put at our disposal, most people live not much better than in the Middle Ages’. The system benefits from science in the following way: through the atom bomb, through ‘the power of statistical research’, through computers, through the chemical industry being ‘in the hands of the state’, through space research.

‘In the end, you realize’, concludes one reasonably logical reply, ‘that technological progress, which makes economic growth possible, does not satisfy the fundamental needs of man and is used above all to maintain and strengthen the system’.

Lastly, I should like to quote one quite unexpected reply, which forms the extreme point of pessimism: ‘ Everyone is oppressed by science.’

– Alfred Willener (The Action-Image of Society on Cultural Politicization)

I doubt seriously one would get such responses today in any European or North American country. The contemporary indoctrination regards science is acute. And the media abounds in junk science. Click bait science. And this is where most people have their opinions formed for them.

There is a paper put out by one of the founders of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, called The Great Reset. The conclusion of the book reads…

…at a global level, if viewed in terms of the global population affected, the corona crisis is (so far) one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced over the last 2000 years.”

In other words, a mortality of .06% is simply not commensurate with the extreme measures the governments of the world (the West in particular) are taking.

There is no question, none, that those measures, the lockdown, the masks, the distancing, and the attending *diseases of despair*, will kill more people by a factor of ten than the virus itself.

This is not even to begin discussing the psychological harm done, in particular to children. And not just harm to children, but severe harm to the most vulnerable.

What is being internalized by children is three fold. One, there is something inherently sick and contagious about ME. Two, everyone MIGHT be a threat to my health. And three, obey authority, because you don’t want to end up like those smelly homeless people were are trying to hard to avoid.

Children take things personally. They tend to blame themselves. Even in the comparative sanity of Norway, where I reside, children are increasingly anxious about the world. How could they not be? All this for a health risk of .06%.

But it is more than just the decimation of the economy in the US and UK. It is a dismantling of the culture. One in three museums closed because of Covid will not re-open. Ever. Where does all that art go?

Just a guess but probably very wealthy collectors will gobble it up at wholesale prices.

The predictable outcome of these lockdowns, certainly in the US, is a guaranteed minimum income. Very minimum. Restrictions on travel, all freedom of movement in fact, will not soon return to normal. Various forms of surveillance and tracking, as well as health certifications, are the goal of the state.

Also, if this pandemic succeeded so well, with so little resistance, why not have another? And there is another aspect to the SWAT mask police, and that is that western society is becoming alarmingly hypochondriacal. Children are kept out of school for runny noses. If all kids with snotty noses were kept out of class, nobody would get an education.

There is a dire future of two or three generations now developing and maturing with very weak immune systems. So that if a natural mutation takes place one day, from a Corona virus or any other, a genuinely serious pandemic could kill tens of millions.

It is not a speculation that there are people who prosper and even benefit during an economic crisis—as smaller business owners struggle, large corporations and banks benefit from huge government subsidies, giving them more power to buy failing small businesses, for example. And it is a fact that many of those people have enormous economic power to shape the policies that can benefit themselves.

It is not a speculation that they would appreciate having strict measures of control against the people by limiting their freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to travel, or by installing means of surveillance, check points and official certifications for activities that might give freedom to the people beyond the capitalist framework.

It is not a speculation that they would benefit from moving our social interactions to the digital realm, which can commodify our activities as marketable data for the advertising industry, insurance industry and any other moneyed social institutions Including education, political institution, legal institution, and financial institution.

Such matters should be seen within the context of the western history being shaped by unelected capitalists with their enormous networks of social institutions.

– Hiroyuki Hamada (Wrong Kind of Green, April 2020)

The collapse of retail is accelerating. This is emerging as a monopolization of retail. Few shops will remain, in fact, except luxury stores in select gated areas. The rest will be online and probably rudimentary. The culture and the economy are being strip-mined and recreated for a select clientele. The collapse of the economy means the collapse of the bottom 90% or so.

The very richest men and corporations on the planet are making huge profits.

And yet, there are precious few voices of dissent to the master narrative in the US. In Norway, the lockdown was about five weeks. But its a sparsely populated country and one hardly noticed it save for the kids being home and not in school. But schools reopened and the Prime Minister actually made a speech apologizing, in effect, for an *unnecessary* lockdown. She had been frightened.

But now, with a mild uptick in positive cases the country is considering stricter limitations on travel. Why?

There is no uptick in deaths, only in positive test results. The fact remains the virus attacks the aged and the already sick. But this is very telling, I think. The Norwegian government doesn’t want to be seen as disobedient. They don’t want to not follow the grand plan provided by western agencies and experts. Even if they seemingly don’t really believe it.

(The saddest aspect is the voice of Dr. Mads Gilbert, a known advocate for Palestinian rights, who has weighed in on the side of fear. Why? I have no idea. But it is worth noting his predictions from March 2020 were staggeringly wrong.)

But clearly the groupthink pressure is powerful and small nations do not want to be singled out for bucking the *science*. There are economic coercions threatened, tacitly, as well. The pressure to conform is huge and it takes a Herculean effort — both individually and as a nation, to resist. And *experts* seem to have a hard time admitting they were wrong.

The science has been consistently wrong from day one.

As I say, this is now allegory. Or fable. There is nothing reasonable or rational in the lockdown measures of the US and UK and NZ. Or anywhere. And this is not even to touch upon the criminality of the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates buying public influence and visibility. Not trained in any medical discipline, Gates has somehow made himself one of the faces of the pandemic.

And to deconstruct Gates’ language is to find a disturbing quality of authoritarian hubris. Gates utters declarations as if he were God speaking to his flock. All from a man who has done little save steal from his partners and exploit the poor of India and Africa. One of the most striking aspects of this whole last few months has been the enormous and coordinated effort the Gates machine has put into rehabilitating his image.

If you google “Crimes of the Gates Foundation” for example, you will get ten different fact-checkers officially denying any crimes and another half dozen articles ridiculing those who question Gates motives, his profit from vaccines, or even his alignment with eugenicists (depopulation adherents)– all are derided as, yes, conspiracy theorists.

If you dare to question the rushing of an untested vaccine you are called an anti-vaxxer.

My children are vaccinated. I just don’t like the idea of a hurried untested vaccine produced for a virus that needs no vaccine. And one promoted by a creepy millionaire.

But clearly the Gates charm offensive is in overdrive. The pastel cardigan is everywhere. And yet, his favorable rating in recent surveys is around 56%. That is actually not very high given the amount of self-promotion involved. It’s better than Mark Zuckerberg and Joe Biden, though. Gates is not likeable. No amount of spin can change that.

The final factor to note is the Trump effect. Many liberals would literally rather see dead in the street if it meant discrediting Trump. It is no longer quite a zero sum game, though. But overall the hatred of Trump is now at a religious level, too.

And behold, the opposition is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. If you want a window in the black heart of Biden, watch and/or listen to his testimony around the Waco inferno. The inherent sadism and lack of humanity is glaringly apparent.

As for Kamala Harris:

As a San Francisco social worker, I sat on the school district committee that met with families of chronically truant students. Once, when we asked a student why he didn’t go to school, he said there was too much police tape and shootings at his school bus stop.

Harris, as CA Attorney General, was putting parents/caregivers in jail if their child was chronically truant. Also as Attorney General, she denied a DNA test to Kevin Cooper, a very likely innocent man who came within hours of execution in 2004.

– Riva Enteen (Counterpunch Aug. 2020)

These are the servants of capital.

The left should be emphasising the economic aspect of lockdown because it is the working class who are the principal victims of lockdown.”
Phil Shannon (Lockdown Skeptics, June 2020)

A Downing street tweet today:

We’re putting tougher measures in place to target serious breaches of coronavirus restrictions. Fines for not wearing a face-covering will double for repeat offences, up to £3,200.”

This is a class-based assault. The wealthy will not be fined for not wearing a face-covering on their private beaches, or dinner parties at the yacht club.

If the “Market” Never Goes Down, The System Is Doomed

Posted on by
1

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The reliance on “good news” narratives dooms our financial system and economy to a death spiral once reality breaks through the induced euphoria.

“Markets” that never go down aren’t markets, they’re signaling mechanisms of the Powers That Be. Markets are fundamentally clearing houses of information on price, demand, sentiment, expectations and so on–factual data on supply and demand, shipping costs, cost of credit, etc.–and reflections of trader and consumer emotions and psychology.

If markets are never allowed to go down, the information clearing house has been effectively shut down. Whatever information leaks out has been edited to fit the prevailing narrative, which in this moment is “central banks will never let markets go down ever again, so jump in and ride the guaranteed Bull to easy gains.”

The past 12 years offer ample evidence for this narrative: every dip draws a near-instantaneous monetary-policy response that reverse the dip and gooses markets higher.

That permanent monetary intervention distorts markets doesn’t matter to participants. Who cares if markets have become “markets,” simulacra of real markets that are now nothing but signaling mechanisms that all is well so buy, buy, buy? If gains are essentially guaranteed, who cares that markets are not longer information clearing houses?

Indeed. There’s no reason to care until the fatal spiral downward surprises us all. Here’s an analogy of what happens when real information gets edited to fit a convenient narrative.

Unfortunately, the patient has cancer which is starting to metastasize, i.e. spread to other organs in the body. But unbeknownst to the patient, this accurate information is considered “bad news,” so the test results and other information is carefully edited to show the cancer is actually shrinking–the exact opposite of what the actual facts reflect.

The patient is naturally delighted with this false data because it appears he’s on the mend and doesn’t need any surgery or other drastic treatments.

If participants don’t have information that reflects actual conditions, they cannot help but make disastrous decisions. Falsified or heavily edited information is misleading, and so all decisions made on the assumption this information is accurate will be fatally skewed.

Symptoms of the fatal spread of the disease are masked by stimulants that not only mask the spread but give the patient a sense of euphoric power and supreme confidence.

Imagine the patient’s terrible dismay when symptoms break through the euphoria and he learns his cancer is now terminal. Increasing the tragedy is his awareness that had the authorities in charge of his care given him the real-world data instead of the carefully edited “happy story” version, treatments could have been undertaken that might have extended his life. Now those options have been lost forever.

That’s the situation in our economy and financial system. The information cleared in markets has been suppressed, distorted and edited for 12 long years of permanent and ever-increasing monetary interventions, as the “doses” of intervention required to maintain the cocaine-like euphoria and supreme confidence in central bank manipulation of “markets” so they always signal the “good news” of guaranteed gains ratchets higher on every intrusion of reality.

The reliance on “good news” narratives dooms our financial system and economy to a death spiral once reality breaks through the induced euphoria. Our last chances to clear the financial cancers eating away at our economy are slipping away forever, masked by the “market’s” cocaine-like euphoria and supreme confidence in central-bank guaranteed gains.

If the stock market is never allowed to go down, this is the equivalent of telling the cancer-riddled patient that their cancer has disappeared, even as the disease is leading inexorably to the patient’s needless demise.

Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever

Posted on by
1

By August Cole and P.W. Singer

Source: Slate

It hits you every so often.

When you when you tug on a face mask to go pick up food for your family.

When you witness the powerless suffer casual violence by a man with a sneer.

When you see riot police surround the Lincoln Memorial and protesters snatched off the streets by masked soldiers in unmarked cars.

And when you realize that it is all being watched by an unblinking eye of A.I. surveillance.

At times, it feels like we are living in a real-world version of dystopia. The strange outcome, though, is that it means we need dystopian fiction now more than ever, to help us sort and even make it through it.

You’d think with everything going on, now would be the last time to escape to a world of darkness. And yet books, including those of awful imagined worlds, are in deep demand.
Some of it has been a return to old classics. In a period of disease and lockdowns lasting for weeks, booksellers report the seeming irony that Albert Camus’ The Plague and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude have seen renewed demand. And some of it has been escaping into new worlds, as with Divergent author Veronica Roth taking readers into another post-apocalypse with her new novel Chosen Ones. People have even been willing to enter imagined worlds that seem not too far away, such as Lawrence Wright’s best-selling pandemic thriller The End of October.

Yet the value of the genre is as much in education as entertainment. It can elucidate dangers, serving the role of warning and even preparation. Think of the recent resonance of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 Handmaid’s Tale and its 2020 sequel The Testaments or the revival of interest in It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis in 1935. These are finely written works, not as indulgences, but as a pure expression of the idea that to be forewarned is to be forearmed. Even Susan Collins’ Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, might be interpreted in that light, showing how authoritarian rule can originate through the manipulations of an ambitious striver.

Our personal corner of this dark market is the meld of imagination with research. For our book Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution, we chose the setting of not a far-off imagined world like Panem or Gilead, but Washington, D.C., just around the corner. What happens as Silicon Valley’s visions of utopia hits our real, and very divided, country? What plays out in politics, business, and even family life as our economy is rewired by AI and automation? Yet to make our scenario more haunting, we back up everything that happens in it with 27 pages of endnotes.

When the scarier elements from an imagined world come to life in the real one, however, there is no gleeful “I told you so.” When the novel coronavirus accelerated the more widespread roll out of the robots, remote work, job automation, and AI surveillance projected in our book, we certainly weren’t happy. All it meant was that all the tough dilemmas that our characters face would come quicker for all of us. What was perhaps most disturbing of the last few weeks, though, were when some of the most dystopian scenes we had painted of a future Washington, D.C., also came true, from our book’s scene of riot police deployed around the Lincoln Memorial to the militarized fence thrown up around the White House being put exactly where we had it in Burn-In.

Yet what makes dystopian fiction different is that its creators are oddly optimists at heart, as we are. These works are not about prediction, but prevention. The stories warn of just how far things can go if action isn’t taken, wrapped in a package that is far more impactful than a white paper or PowerPoint. Indeed, research shows that narrative, the oldest communication technology of all, holds more sway over both the public and policymakers than even the “most canonical academic sources.” Our minds can’t help but connect to the “synthetic environment” that our fictional heroes and villains experience, living part of our lives through theirs, even if imagined.

Most importantly, though, the dark worlds are only the setting. The stories are really about the agency of the people in them. And that is perhaps the true value of the dystopian fiction. These stories are not about what those characters experience so much as how they act. At the heart of every story of darkness is a story of perseverance.

As we face our own difficult journeys through the reality of 2020, it is perhaps that lesson which is most important of all.

Twitter QAnon Purge Gives Bigger Monopoly to Corporate Media

Posted on by
Reply

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

News outlets like CNN reported on Twitter’s move to purge the QAnon movement from its platform.

Articles like, “Twitter cracks down on QAnon accounts,” would claim Twitter fears QAnon’s rhetoric online could eventually lead to “offline harm.”

There is no doubt that QAnon has been behind absurd conspiracy theories and verified lies circulating online – suspiciously absurd. Banning it from Twitter because of alleged fears its activity will lead to “offline harm” is even more absurd .
Despite making absurd claims that demonstrably never materialize or providing evidence that is later revealed to be clearly fabricated, nothing QAnon has done differs from what the corporate media does on a daily basis. In many ways they are one in the same – dividing and distracting the public while US special interests advance their agenda unnoticed and unopposed.
QAnon allegedly made false claims that Hillary Clinton’s arrest was imminent – she was never arrested. Conversely, the corporate media regularly claims that various world leaders in nations targeted by Western regime change have “fled,” are “dead,” or otherwise “ousted from power” – with lies spread by the Western media over the alleged “fates” of still incumbent leaders like Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un coming to immediate mind.
The Western corporate media also helps sell various wars of aggression.

This includes the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, US interventions in Libya and Syria from 2011 onward and US-backed regime change in Ukraine in 2013-2014.

Collectively these conflicts have killed over a million people and driven millions more from their homes. This “offline harm” – the direct result of lies told by the Western corporate media – has not only gone completely unaddressed by Twitter – it is enabled by Twitter.
Twitter – along with other US tech giants like Facebook and Google – aided the US government in sowing chaos across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, precipitating wars that are still raging today, claiming lives, and effecting “offline harm” impacting millions of people.
The banning of the more absurd QAnon movement will pave the way for other purges – eventually eliminating any alternative to the corporate media and its demonstrably dangerous and dishonest narratives. QAnon’s absurdity will make it easy for Twitter to justify its ban, but the momentum toward greater censorship across Western social media will eventually impact accounts and movements previously difficult to justify banning.
US-based “social media” platforms – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. – are no longer truly social media. They are clearly transforming into centralized programed media where corporate monopolies create content that is consumed, removing the public, independent organizations, and competitors’ role in creating content, contributing to discussions, offering alternative views, and interacting with one another.
It is important that this fact be fully recognized and exposed as well as the creation of alternative platforms – especially overseas where US-based “social media” has been fully weaponized and used to undermine sociopolitical and economic stability.

THE ONLY OBSTACLE TO A HEALTHY WORLD IS GOVERNMENT SECRECY AND PROPAGANDA

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

If people in power were no longer able to hide secrets and spin lies about what’s going on in the world, all of our major problems would come to an end. Because secretive and manipulative power structures are the source of all of our major problems.

If the public could see what’s actually happening in their world, they would immediately begin using the power of their numbers to overhaul our current system. This is why our current system pours so much energy into preventing the public from seeing what’s actually happening in their world.

If it weren’t for the constant campaign of obfuscation and manipulation of public perception via veils of government secrecy and propaganda, humanity would naturally find its way out of the power-driven tribulations it now faces, as surely as you’ll avoid obstacles and hazards in your path when you are walking with your eyes open. The only problem in this case is that our eyes have not been permitted to open.

It isn’t actually necessary to hold a bunch of hard, rigid ideas about exactly what kind of society we should have, what kind of political system we should have, what kind of economic system we should have. There’s nothing wrong with promoting ideas and having preferences of course, but really if you just gave humanity the ability to navigate through its own troubles by removing the blindfolds of propaganda and power opacity, it would organically create a healthy society, and realistically such a society probably won’t look a whole lot like our mental models.

You do have the option, then, of simply promoting the end of government/political/corporate/financial opacity and the end of establishment perception management. Wanting humanity to see with clear eyes so that it can make its own informed decisions about where to take itself is a complete political position, in and of itself. You don’t have to hold any other political preferences of any kind if you don’t want to.

The desire for an end to the obfuscations and manipulations of the powerful so that humanity can find its own way is the most anti-authoritarian position you can possibly take, because it also protects the world from your own authoritarian impulses.

I personally am very leftwardly inclined and believe that if humanity had its perception management blindfolds removed it would naturally create a world where we’re all truly equal and everyone is taken care of by the collective each according to their need, but what the hell do I know? Maybe if the blindfold is removed I’d be proven wrong. I respect human sovereignty enough to want to find out, free from my own political preferences. I should not be the one making such societal decisions, society as a whole should. I just want human perception to be freed up enough to make that call.

If you choose to make the end of perception management your foremost priority, that means you push for government transparency at every opportunity and support any movement to take away secret hiding places from the powerful.

It means opposing the way the powerful bolt shut all the doors on public scrutiny of their behavior, smear anyone who speculates about what they might be up to as a crazy conspiracy theorist, and imprisons anyone who leaks information about what they’re really doing to the people.

It means you support whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden who help shine light on the things power tries to keep hidden in the dark.

It means you support WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and any journalist who helps expose the secrets of the powerful.

It means you fight the empire’s propaganda machine at every opportunity to break public trust in its manipulations.

It means you support breaking up the monolithic mass media and giving everyone the equal ability to influence the dominant narratives.

It means opposing internet censorship, since Silicon Valley plutocrats propping up the establishment their kingdoms are built upon by censoring anti-establishment voices is another way of keeping people from being shown the truth about their world.

I personally would add that it means supporting the decriminalization of psychedelics, because seeing within ourselves is just as important as seeing what’s happening in our world and entheogens can facilitate this seeing, but maybe that’s just me.

Again, there’s no harm in engaging in politics and pushing for the changes you’d like to see in your world, and there can be many benefits to doing so. But as long as people are successfully prevented from seeing and understanding what’s really happening in their world by the obfuscation of information and by the manipulation of people’s perception of that information, the status quo will always remain in place.

So in my opinion this is the most sensible point upon which to converge our energy. I personally have no interest in controlling what humanity does, and desire only that people come to see freely enough to make their own decisions.

It’s absolutely insane that information which affects us all is kept hidden away from our clear vision by secrecy and propaganda. It’s even crazier that they shame us when we wonder what’s really going on and throw us in prison when we try to find out. We must liberate ourselves from this madness so we can create a healthy world together.