Tag Archives: corporatocracy

Slaves and Bulldozers, Plutocrats and Widgets

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By Kristine Mattis

Source: CounterPunch

There is not an industrial company on earth, not an institution of any kind – not mine, not yours, not anyone’s – that is sustainable. I stand convicted by me, myself alone, not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the earth. But not by our civilization’s definition. By our civilization’s definition, I’m a captain of industry and in the eyes of many, a kind of modern-day hero.

— Ray Anderson, (1934-2011) CEO of Interface, Inc.

We are living a collective illusion known as the civilized world. We feign concern for our horrendous conditions of poverty, socioeconomic inequality, deteriorating public health, and severe environmental degradation (to which climate change is merely one factor), but everything we do belies that distress. These issues comprise the largest risks to the survival of the human species, as well as the most significant amoral atrocities on the planet. Both individually and as a species, our health, safety, and ability the live a decent, dignified life have always been imperiled by these predicaments. Yet, we continue along with complete cognitive dissonance in that the crux of our lives – our jobs, our consumer culture – all contribute to, perpetuate, and exacerbate the unsustainable and morally reprehensible conditions of our existence. But while we are all marginally responsible for the multitude of calamities befalling us, the one group who bears the brunt of the blame for our social and ecological decay is the wealthy.

Have you looked around and seen just what humanity has done to our stunning Earth? We’ve bulldozed the beauty for bucks. Far too much of what was once a glorious paradise is now a complete disaster of unfathomable proportions. A disaster wholly of our own making. In America, and in most places around the world, from the moment we are born we are preparing for a future career, and  more specifically, for the lifelong goal of making money. But on the whole, most of the jobs we do end up being more detrimental than beneficial to society and the environment. We characterize work through measures of productivity, but producing more and more unnecessary, meaningless, and often useless products compromises our physical environment, which in turn, compromises the health of humans, other beings, and our entire planetary ecosystem.

So many of the things that form the basis of our civilization should not, and perhaps cannot, exist in a just and sustainable world. Items like arms and artillery, synthetic chemicals, concentrated animal feeding operations, plastic, smartphones and other electronic gadgetrydo not feed a sustainable and equitable world but create more needless havoc. The irony, though, is that the very people who run the systems that incessantly construct and promulgate these harmful, redundant, or unnecessary products are the richest and most successful people on earth.

We define success in our society almost exclusively in terms of wealth, with its attendant power and sometimes, fame. Rich people are the recipients of adulation and reverence for nothing more than their accumulation of wealth and material products. We like to think that riches come by way of great intellect, talent, skill, and a strong work ethic, but in reality, monetary success is more a matter of inherited socioeconomic status, ambition, and determination, rather than ability and aptitude. Most of all, to achieve wealth means to have a myopic resolve, not only to look away from how the sausage is made, but to not care how the sausage is made.

The wealthy in our society then become the people with the most power and influence. While ironically, they are the people least deserving of our respect. They are the exact people whom we should look upon with the utmost skepticism and even disdain. They should not be in the position to make decisions about our collective lives and the workings of our society, because their financial success is completely antithetical to societal justice and sustainability.

It doesn’t take great acumen or diligence to make a lot of money; it takes a narrow-minded, insular, immoral, sometimes psychopathic view of life, in which personal pleasure and profit are the primary variables. It’s quite easy to do well financially and find personal satisfaction if the exploitation of humans, other animals, and the entire biosphere is left outside of the realm of your career consciousness. As Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpet admitted,“For 21 yearsI never gave a thought to what we were taking from the earth or doing to the earth in the making of our products.” He built his fortune without consideration to the effects of his enterprise until someone brought the deleterious consequences to his attention.

We like to believe the cream rises to the top, but the truth is that the top is actually full of scum. We have seen in recent weeks, if we did not know already, that entertainment, politics, and indeed, all of the wealthiest industries are cesspools of moral depravity, especially at the apex.

There may be some exceptions, but scum is the rule. Some might call these people ambitious, some might call them razor-focused, others would call them sociopathic. It takes a careful regimen of willful  ignorance and/or denial to not consider all the harms that directly and indirectly result from avenues toward career achievements in the process of our normal lives – harms such as exploitation of labor, torture of animals, and toxic contamination and of food, water, and natural resources.

Material success requires rape and pillage, figuratively and literally. Donald Trump bragged that when you have the kind of wealth he has, you can treat women as objects and just “grab ’em by the pussy.” You can also exploit resources, exploit labor, befoul the environment, and endanger public health with few or no consequences. On a purely moral basis, only scum could have the hubris to consider others as mere playthings for their own enjoyment, to feel superior enough to warrant their extreme wealth which they did not earn but stole from the commons, and to believe that they deserve obscene riches when the majority of others do not even have basic life necessities.

How often have you heard the phrases “not that there is anything wrong with being rich,” or “I don’t begrudge him his wealth”? Wealth should be considered reprehensible. Wealth has always been in the hands of the few to the detriment of the many, and one’s access to it has always been almost wholly correlated with one’s socioeconomic status at birth. Yet we rationalize this immoral situation and pretend that the proverbial “pie,” of which we all need a slice, is infinite in size and that wealth is accessible to anyone. We assume that being rich is not only acceptable but aspirational. It is neither in a just and sustainable world.

On a finite planet every excess dollar, every excess material good, every extra home, car, garment, trinket, piece of food, or beverage that one person possesses essentially correlates to an item that another person does not have. When we normalize one person having more than he/she needs in a world where billions have far less than the bare minimum required to meet their basic needs, then we are obliged to rethink our morality. When a simple handbag can cost between $12K and $300K and we as a society see nothing wrong with that kind of excess in the face of poverty, hunger, homelessness, and disease, we are not only completely socially corrupt, we are spelling our own doom. Poverty only exists because excessive wealth exists and neither is compatible with a sustainable and humane civilization.

To achieve a sustainable world, we must relinquish our use of non-renewable resources, we must utilize renewable resources at a level in which they have the time and ability to replenish, and we must leave no waste that is not regenerative. To achieve an equitable world, we must relinquish our greed and desire for opulence, excess, and disproportionate influence. In fact, sustainability is also a function of equity. However, our current society is predicated on the antithesis of all such requirements.

Wealthy people gain their successes because they have tunnel vision. They are singularly focused on themselves, their careers, and/or on money. They do not take into consideration the externalities involved in their actions. They pay little mind to the exploitation involved in their pursuits. Ethics never supersedes ambition. Therefore, these are the exact people who should not be in charge of making policies for the benefit of society and should not be in charge of civic ventures. To be able to be so wealthy without shame, guilt, or acknowledgement that your own wealth impedes the lives of others is to be either ignorant or indifferent. We are facing global ecological and economic collapse. Who made this happen? The wealthiest people of the world. If you are rich you do not have the solution. You are the problem.

The world is run on slave labor, indentured servitude, animal and natural resource exploitation, and endless generation of waste and contamination. Material success comes with adopting a shortsighted view of the world – closing yourself off to your own connection to global anthropogenic climate change, toxification, and inequality.

So many of the wealthy who consider themselves socially and environmentally aware perceive no connection between their own wealth accumulation and the causes they claim to champion. Instead of curtailing their materialism, they rationalize it. Instead of acknowledging that their consumerism intensifies global resource extraction, they produce more products (often erroneously labeled “green”) to sustain their riches. When the wealthy are not hawking products for their for-profit activities, they have the audacity to solicit for charitable organizations that are only necessitated by the economic system that produces poverty and environmental devastation in the wake of their extravagant wealth. They ask donations from the majority of citizens who are barely making ends meet, when they themselves could surrender probably 90% of their accumulated wealth and not notice a marked change in their material status whatsoever. The elites who are not in denial about the problems we face want scientific and technological solutions – solutions that they can throw their money at and have others solve so they do not have to think about their own contribution to the problems.

But there are no silver bullets to end inequality and environmental destruction, while continuing with business as usual in civilized society. Science cannot save us. Scientific research itself relies on the same unsustainable production, consumption, use of resources, and waste as every other industry.

Technology mavens always tout the great social or biological service that their new technology will provide. Their innovations comes under the guise of helping the world, but the majority of the time, their creations are frivolous and do not do much more than use natural resources, create waste, and earn them exorbitant profit. At the university where I earned my doctoral degree there is a masters program in biotechnology and there’s a reason why their curriculum extends beyond just science, containing at least two required business courses. Of course, business is fundamental to their instruction because the principle purpose of our education, of our careers, is profit.

All of the harmful products and practices in our civilization – military arms, sweatshops, low wages, pesticides, plastics, throw-away items, excess of products, animal cruelty, overuse of medicine and surgery – only exist to increase revenue for the rich. None are fair or just or equitable or sustainable. Our societal justification of the above items just marks our collective delusion. These products and practices persist in the name of profit, and we rationalize their continuation just as we rationalize extravagant wealth.

When Senator Bernie Sanders was on TV decrying President Barack Obama’s half-million dollar speaking engagements on Wall Street, the anchors of the program said to him, “Wouldn’t you do it if you could?” Bernie replied, “I wouldn’t be asked.” Rather, he should have explained that anyone with integrity would not accept money they do not need for some sort of quid pro quo from a destructive and corrupt institution. The hosts of the show surmised that everyone would jump at the opportunity to earn money if they had the chance. It is precisely that sort of mindset that enables these broadcasters to inhabit their influential positions on a national television program and to earn millions of dollars. They demonstrate what unethical opportunists they, and most of the rich, actually are. Their lack of ethics is internalized and taken for granted by not only them, but most of the rest of our society. They are more than willing to be bought at whatever price for whatever service. “Just doing my job” does not serve as an excuse for immorality.

Nevertheless, there are people who have chosen lives based on conviction rather than money. Former Uruguayan President Jose Mujica and Seattle City Council member Kashama Sawant chose to earn the local average income for their official positions and donate the remainder of their salaries toward social justice work. Biologist and writer Sandra Steingraber donated a portion of her $100K Heinz Award prize toward the fight against hydraulic fracturing (fracking) rather than spend it on personal treats. Likewise, teacher Jesse Hagopian donated his $100K settlement for being unjustly attacked with pepper-spray by Seattle police toward social justice action. Not everyone is looking to cash in, and not everyone is seeking the next, biggest profit-making endeavor.

Living with integrity and simplicity is difficult. People do not choose to live this way because their personal sacrifice will change the world. They do so because it is the right thing to do. They do so because having too much means others don’t have enough. They do so because living by example allows others who care to see that a life of wealth and consumerism augments inequality and unsustainability; it is not the only way to live and need not be. They live this way because only by walking the walk rather than talking the talk will we ever start to achieve justice and sustainability to help preserve the future of our species.

In recent years there have been waves and wave of protests throughout the country and the world in response to myriad societal maladies. The best protest we can do in America now is to reject the bourgeois life – reject excessive wealth and the material components that come with it, reject profligate consumption, reject consumerism, reject wasteful holidays, reject wasteful trinkets,  reject all that is incompatible with what we purport to champion. For example, retired talk-show host David Letterman appears sincere in his dedication toward helping combat climate change, while at the same time, he remains co-owner of an auto racing team. In the world in which we currently live, auto racing is completely incongruent with climate change mitigation. We can’t pretend to value matters like justice and sustainability unless the way we live upholds those values. We can’t decouple our livelihoods from our lives.

The rich tend to ensconce themselves in their well-manicured communities, shop with abandon, and disregard the abject poverty, environmental degradation, and injustices all around them. They are in the process of spending small portions of their vast fortunes building survival bunkers to withstand either the revolutionary upheaval that may soon come as a result of immeasurable socioeconomic inequality, or the catastrophic ecological collapse that may result from reckless resource extraction and expenditure. How misguided or cynical are they to not realize that by renouncing their extreme wealth, they would need no such provisions and could play a large part in salvaging our civilization?

Need I even explain how the current tax scam pending on Capitol Hill will serve to enhance all of the socioeconomic, environmental, and public health calamities that are arising ever more rapidly and in quick succession? Need I elaborate on how our escalating climate-related weather catastrophes only reach the cataclysmic proportions they do because of the wealth disparities involved and because of the high-risk industrial components therein, that exist mainly to enrich the elite? Would these natural disasters be so disastrous if more people had the economic resilience that they deserve and if society took more precaution against the hazards of multibillion-dollar industries that manufacture products of questionable value while generating tremendous wealth to a select few?

We live n a time of unprecedented social disarray, ecological disrepair, public health decay, and moral depravity. Nearly every aspect of the way we live in modern industrial societies is completely unsustainable. Even if we were to transition to 100% solar energy tomorrow throughout the planet, the worst effects of climate change might be averted, but the plastic pollution that permeates the most far-reaching depths of the oceans would still remain, the persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) that harm our own health and the health of the entire global ecosystem remain. Not only do they remain, but they continue to be produced, not out of necessity, but for the financial profit of the privileged few. The production of, consumption of, and waste stream from our global industrial society continues unabated. This is the system that forms the foundation of all of our lives in the civilized world, and this is the system that bestows excessive wealth to some while leaving others fighting for survival.

While it is indeed the system of capitalism that generates and sustains our societal injustice and ecological degradation, the system is comprised of people – people who could abdicate their fictional obligation to happiness via indefinitely-increasing earnings, people who can choose better, Without a preponderance of such people, no countervailing just and sustainable system can ever compete.

In 1964, Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano interviewed the famous Argentinean hero of the Cuban revolution Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In the midst of a comprehensive conversation, Che stated to Galeano, ” I don’t want every Cuban to wish he were a Rockefeller.” To be sure, if we are remotely interested in a sustainable and equitable world, the attainment of wealth must be transformed from admirable to contemptible. With regard to the multitude of obstacles we face, Ralph Nader once wrote “only the super-rich can save us.” He’s right. They can save us by not existing.

Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy

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By C.J. Hopkins

Source: The Unz Review

Back in October of 2016, I wrote a somewhat divisive essay in which I suggested that political dissent is being systematically pathologized. In fact, this process has been ongoing for decades, but it has been significantly accelerated since the Brexit referendum and the Rise of Trump (or, rather, the Fall of Hillary Clinton, as it was Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for eight more years of corporatocracy with a sugar coating of identity politics, and not their enthusiasm for Trump, that mostly put the clown in office.)

In the twelve months since I wrote that piece, we have been subjected to a concerted campaign of corporate media propaganda for which there is no historical precedent. Virtually every major organ of the Western media apparatus (the most powerful propaganda machine in the annals of powerful propaganda machines) has been relentlessly churning out variations on a new official ideological narrative designed to generate and enforce conformity. The gist of this propaganda campaign is that “Western democracy” is under attack by a confederacy of Russians and white supremacists, as well as “the terrorists” and other “extremists” it’s been under attack by for the last sixteen years.

I’ve been writing about this campaign for a year now, so I’m not going to rehash all the details. Suffice to say we’ve gone from Russian operatives hacking the American elections to “Russia-linked” persons “apparently” setting up “illegitimate” Facebook accounts, “likely operated out of Russia,” and publishing ads that are “indistinguishable from legitimate political speech” on the Internet. This is what the corporate media is presenting as evidence of “an unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy,” a handful of political ads on Facebook. In addition to the Russian hacker propaganda, since August, we have also been treated to relentless white supremacist hysteria and daily reminders from the corporate media that “white nationalism is destroying the West.” The negligible American neo-Nazi subculture has been blown up into a biblical Behemoth inexorably slouching its way towards the White House to officially launch the Trumpian Reich.

At the same time, government and corporate entities have been aggressively restricting (and in many cases eliminating) fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, the right to privacy, and the right to due process under the law. The justification for this curtailment of rights (which started in earnest in 2001, following the September 11 attacks) is protecting the public from the threat of “terrorism,” which apparently shows no signs of abating. As of now, the United States has been in a State of Emergency for over sixteen years. The UK is in a virtual State of Emergency. France is now in the process of enshrining its permanent State of Emergency into law. Draconian counter-terrorism measures have been implemented throughout the EU. Not just the notorious American police but police throughout the West have been militarized. Every other day we learn of some new emergency security measuredesigned to keep us safe from “the terrorists,” the “lone wolf shooters,” and other “extremists.”

Conveniently, since the Brexit referendum and unexpected election of Trump (which is when the capitalist ruling classes first recognized that they had a widespread nationalist backlash on their hands), the definition of “terrorism” (or, more broadly, “extremism”) has been expanded to include not just Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or whoever we’re calling “the terrorists” these days, but anyone else the ruling classes decide they need to label “extremists.” The FBI has designated Black Lives Matter “Black Identity Extremists.” The FBI and the DHS have designated Antifa “domestic terrorists.” Hosting corporations have shut down several white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites, along with their access to online fundraising. Google is algorithmically burying leftist news and opinion sources such as Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, and Truthout, among others. Twitter, Facebook, and Google have teamed up to cleanse the Internet of “extremist content,” “hate speech,” and whatever else they arbitrarily decide is inappropriate. YouTube, with assistance from the ADL (which deems pro-Palestinian activists and other critics of Israel “extremists”) is censoring “extremist” and “controversial” videos, in an effort to “fight terrorist content online.” Facebook is also collaborating with Israel to thwart “extremism,” “incitement of violence,” and whatever else Israel decides is “inflammatory.” In the UK, simply reading “terrorist content” is punishable by fifteen years in prison. Over three thousand people were arrested last year for publishing “offensive” and “menacing” material.

Whatever your opinion of these organizations and “extremist” persons is beside the point. I’m not a big fan of neo-Nazis, personally, but neither am I a fan of Antifa. I don’t have much use for conspiracy theories, or a lot of the nonsense one finds on the Internet, but I consume a fair amount of alternative media, and I publish in CounterPunch, The Unz Review, ColdType, and other non-corporate journals. I consider myself a leftist, basically, but my political essays are often reposted by right-wing and, yes, even pro-Russia blogs. I get mail from former Sanders supporters, Trump supporters, anarchists, socialists, former 1960s radicals, anti-Semites, and other human beings, some of whom I passionately agree with, others of whom I passionately disagree with. As far as I can tell from the emails, none of these readers voted for Clinton, or Macron, or supported the TPP, or the debt-enslavement and looting of Greece, or the ongoing restructuring of the Greater Middle East (and all the lovely knock-on effects that has brought us), or believe that Trump is a Russian operative, or that Obama is Martin Luther Jesus-on-a-stick. What they share, despite their opposing views, is a general awareness that the locus of power in our post-Cold War age is primarily corporate, or global capitalist, and neoliberal in nature. They also recognize that they are being subjected to a massive propaganda campaign designed to lump them all together (again, despite their opposing views) into an intentionally vague and undefinable category comprising anyone and everyone, everywhere, opposing the hegemony of global capitalism, and its non-ideological ideology (the nature of which I’ll get into in a moment).

As I wrote in that essay a year ago, “a line is being drawn in the ideological sand.” This line cuts across both Left and Right, dividing what the capitalist ruling classes designate “normal” from what they label “extremist.” The traditional ideologicalparadigm, Left versus Right, is disappearing (except as a kind of minstrel show), and is being replaced, or overwritten, by a pathological paradigm based upon the concept of “extremism.”

* * *

Although the term has been around since the Fifth Century BC, the concept of “extremism” as we know it today developed in the late Twentieth Century and has come into vogue in the last three decades. During the Cold War, the preferred exonymics were “subversive,” “radical,” or just plain old “communist,” all of which terms referred to an actual ideological adversary. In the early 1990s, as the U.S.S.R. disintegrated, and globalized Western capitalism became the unrivaled global-hegemonic ideological system that it is today, a new concept was needed to represent the official enemy and its ideology. The concept of “extremism” does that perfectly, as it connotes, not an external enemy with a definable ideological goal, but rather, a deviation from the norm. The nature of the deviation (e.g., right-wing, left-wing, faith-based, and so on) is secondary, almost incidental. The deviation itself is the point. The “terrorist,” the “extremist,” the “white supremacist,” the “religious fanatic,” the “violent anarchist” … these figures are not rational actors whose ideas we need to intellectually engage with in order to debate or debunk. They are pathological deviations, mutant cells within the body of “normality,” which we need to identify and eliminate, not for ideological reasons, but purely in order to maintain “security.”

A truly global-hegemonic system like contemporary global capitalism (the first of this kind in human history), technically, has no ideology. “Normality” is its ideology … an ideology which erases itself and substitutes the concept of what’s “normal,” or, in other words, “just the way it is.” The specific characteristics of “normality,” although not quite arbitrary, are ever-changing. In the West, for example, thirty years ago, smoking was normal. Now, it’s abnormal. Being gay was abnormal. Now, it’s normal. Being transgender is becoming normal, although we’re still in the early stages of the process. Racism has become abnormal. Body hair is currently abnormal. Walking down the street in a semi-fugue state robotically thumbing the screen of a smartphone that you just finished thumbing a minute ago is “normal.” Capitalism has no qualms with these constant revisions to what is considered normal, because none of them are threats to capitalism. On the contrary, as far as values are concerned, the more flexible and commodifiable the better.

See, despite what intersectionalists will tell you, capitalism has no interest in racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, or any other despotic values (though it has no problem working with these values when they serve its broader strategic purposes). Capitalism is an economic system, which we have elevated to a social system. It only has one fundamental value, exchange value, which isn’t much of a value, at least not in terms of organizing society or maintaining any sort of human culture or reverence for the natural world it exists in. In capitalist society, everything, everyone, every object and sentient being, every concept and human emotion, is worth exactly what the market will bear … no more, no less, than its market price. There is no other measure of value.

Yes, we all want there to be other values, and we pretend there are, but there aren’t, not really. Although we’re free to enjoy parochial subcultures based on alternative values (i.e., religious bodies, the arts, and so on), these subcultures operate within capitalist society, and ultimately conform to its rules. In the arts, for example, works are either commercial products, like any other commodity, or they are subsidized by what could be called “the simulated aristocracy,” the ivy league-educated leisure classes (and lower class artists aspiring thereto) who need to pretend that they still have “culture” in order to feel superior to the masses. In the latter case, this feeling of superiority is the upscale product being sold. In the former, it is entertainment, distraction from the depressing realities of living, not in a society at all, but in a marketplace with no real human values. (In the absence of any real cultural values, there is no qualitative difference between Gerhard Richter and Adam Sandler, for example. They’re both successful capitalist artists. They’re just selling their products in different markets.)

The fact that it has no human values is the evil genius of global capitalist society. Unlike the despotic societies it replaced, it has no allegiance to any cultural identities, or traditions, or anything other than money. It can accommodate any form of government, as long as it plays ball with global capitalism. Thus, the window dressing of “normality” is markedly different from country to country, but the essence of “normality” remains the same. Even in countries with state religions (like Iran) or state ideologies (like China), the governments play by the rules of global capitalism like everyone else. If they don’t, they can expect to receive a visit from global capitalism’s Regime Change Department (i.e., the US military and its assorted partners).

Which is why, despite the “Russiagate” hysteria the media have been barraging us with, the West is not going to war with Russia. Nor are we going to war with China. Russia and China are developed countries, whose economies are entirely dependent on global capitalism, as are Western economies. The economies of every developed nation on the planet are inextricably linked. This is the nature of the global hegemony I’ve been referring to throughout this essay. Not American hegemony, but global capitalist hegemony. Systemic, supranational hegemony (which I like to prefer “the Corporatocracy,” as it sounds more poetic and less post-structural).

…

We haven’t really got our minds around it yet, because we’re still in the early stages of it, but we have entered an epoch in which historical events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped, not by sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests. Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments thereto. Forget about the United States (i.e., the actual nation state) for a moment, and look at what’s been happening since the early 1990s. The US military’s “disastrous misadventures” in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia, among other exotic places (which have obviously had nothing to do with the welfare or security of any actual Americans), begin to make a lot more sense. Global capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation, eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clear-and-holding” the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies have been militarized, their citizens placed under constant surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate media.

I’m not suggesting there’s a bunch of capitalists sitting around in a room somewhere in their shiny black top hats planning all of this. I’m talking about systemic development, which is a little more complex than that, and much more difficult to intelligently discuss because we’re used to perceiving historico-political events in the context of competing nation states, rather than competing ideological systems … or non-competing ideological systems, for capitalism has no competition. What it has, instead, is a variety of insurgencies, the faith-based Islamic fundamentalist insurgency and the neo-nationalist insurgency chief among them. There will certainly be others throughout the near future as global capitalism consolidates control and restructures societies according to its values. None of these insurgencies will be successful.

Short some sort of cataclysm, like an asteroid strike or the zombie apocalypse, or, you know, violent revolution, global capitalism will continue to restructure the planet to conform to its ruthless interests. The world will become increasingly “normal.” The scourge of “extremism” and “terrorism” will persist, as will the general atmosphere of “emergency.” There will be no more Trumps, Brexit referendums, revolts against the banks, and so on. Identity politics will continue to flourish, providing a forum for leftist activist types (and others with an unhealthy interest in politics), who otherwise might become a nuisance, but any and all forms of actual dissent from global capitalist ideology will be systematically marginalized and pathologized.

This won’t happen right away, of course. Things are liable to get ugly first (as if they weren’t ugly enough already), but probably not in the way we’re expecting, or being trained to expect by the corporate media. Look, I’ll give you a dollar if it turns out I’m wrong, and the Russians, terrorists, white supremacists, and other “extremists” do bring down “democracy” and launch their Islamic, white supremacist, Russo-Nazi Reich, or whatever, but from where I sit it looks pretty clear … tomorrow belongs to the Corporatocracy.

Perpetual Prosperity And The ‘Strategy of Tension’

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By Graham Vanbergen

Source: TruePublica

Marco Rubio, the American politician, attorney and former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives once said; “Every nation on the Earth that embraces market economics and the free enterprise system is pulling millions of its people out of poverty. The free enterprise system creates prosperity, not denies it.”

Statements such as these are common amongst politicians, especially wealthy ones who hold wealth driven values. But one man’s prosperity is another man’s misery in a world blighted by an economic model that demands eternal growth.

The only one constant that sits well with this model is that world population continues to increase, but even that is tailing off. Global population currently sits at 7.5 billion and rising at a rate of 80 million per year. The rate of population increase was 2.19 percent at its peak in 1963, which has now halved.

Concerns of the Fourth Industrial Revolution fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, and impacting all disciplines, economies and industries emanate from the corporations who now see their future declining revenue potential being rescued through reduced reliance on human labour.

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To keep prosperity on a perpetual upward trajectory in the backdrop of a continually shrinking and less well off consumer base, the most politically influential now work in concert with the corporate behemoths – the new rulers of the world.

The strategies adopted to keep the ball rolling over the last few decades centre around a financial architecture that requires drastic anti-democratic political support. As Noam Chomsky warns “The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.”

One does not have to look far to see these principles at work. Trillions of desperately needed taxes to support a decaying system of civil society are illegally offshored by household named corporations and individuals. Unfortunately, this form of extreme neoliberalism still isn’t enough to keep the ball rolling.

Naomi Klein’s 2007 book ‘Shock Doctrine, the rise of Disaster Capitalism’ exploded the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Klein highlights how the “puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades is the real story of how America’s “free market” policies came to dominate the world, through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.”

Then, one year later, Klein’s prognosis saw the 2008 financial crisis offering up more disaster shocked peoples at the global level as neoliberalism wriggled free from the remnants of regulation to reach a new pinnacle for the few and a created an even greater crisis of daily life for the hundreds of millions left behind.

This erroneous ideology delivered little more than world economic stagnation, crippling austerity, peak inequality, a global environmental crisis, the slowest economic recovery in history and monumental debt of every country it infected. This was no mistake, no unforeseen event, that we were told stunned our leaders and their captains.

The problem always existed that extreme wealth was never going to come from a global post-war peace through globalisation – so a ‘strategy of tension’, an Anglo/American innovation, was invented to keep the exploitation model alive.

The actual definition of this strategy is that “Western governments during the Cold War used tactics that aimed to divide, manipulate and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and terrorist actions in order to achieve their strategic aims.”

Amongst many, one of those aims was financial domination.

During the closing days of the Cold War, the UK, US and other western governments along with the secret services colluded to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on Russia. This is now so well documented it needs no elaboration here (1).

However, the objective was always clear. By mobilising public opinion against left-wing parties (and their policies) and legitimising war, capitalism was to be forever invigorated. Ultimately though, this required the denying of national independence movements, mainly in the third world, to fund new forms of Western wealth.

The Cold War, stoked and fuelled by a deliberate strategy of tension gave us ‘Red Russia’ and the potential for nuclear Armageddon. When that ran its course, imaginary foes such as Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi were invented. The war on terror was used as a means to an end. Today, Red Russia is back on the agenda once again.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed, the award winning investigative journalist wrote about this Strategy of Tension:

“The immense fear and chaos generated by the impact of this phenomenon throughout Western Europe was instrumental in legitimising the interventionist policies of the Anglo-American alliance throughout the Cold War period. The number of people killed across the third world as a consequence of this militarisation process is shocking, its implications genuinely difficult to absorb.” (2)

Ahmed goes on to say that 12 to 15 million people since WW2 have been sacrificed for this strategy with many millions more suffering as their economies were destroyed and denied the right to restructure whilst Western corporations made fortunes at their ultimate expense.

Dr Daniele Ganser, a Swiss historian who specialises in contemporary history, international politics, covert warfare, resource wars and geo-strategy confirms that this strategy is very much alive and in use to this day.

“What you may have, if you translate our experience from the Cold War to the current day situation, is that a strategy of tension is still being implemented, but this time against Muslims,” Ganser says. “We all know that the west is dependent upon oil, and a pretext is needed to develop more operations in Iran, Iraq etc. We can’t just go there and invade them, so we have to have this idea that they’re trying to kill us, then it’s possible, or at least imaginable that a strategy of tension in which the Muslims are playing the role that the communists played in the Cold War, is happening.”

The result is that the world is facing a new desperate multi-faceted game of thrones – as it morphs into something even more destructive.

Conflict and change is now the new norm. Global peace and domestic security is fading as the world order spirals out of control. This engineered spiral is going to prove to be a disaster for everyone, in what looks a lot like a coming global collapse on every front.

Civil society is now shrouded in a cycle of fear, terrorism, surveillance and experiencing a perpetual loss of rights and liberties as the world order disintegrates.

Today, we are now unable to make reasonable predictions of our near future as war, lawlessness, terrorism and now threats of nuclear annihilation become ever more real.

Even hope is diminishing. People of the West are now so afraid they want to stop perceived threats from foreigners, they want them expelled. Manufactured geo-political tensions have created a migration of people in the 21st century even greater than mankind’s greatest tragedy – the last world war. This is no mistake, no unforeseen event either.

China was once the greatest economic power on earth, followed by India, Britain and then America. Not once has the continent of Africa produced a global GDP exceeding 5% in its history, with 16% of the world’s population.

Having deprived this entire continent any possible chance of progression, a migrant surge is now destabilising the very regions responsible for pillaging it.

Alongside all of these pressures, environmental collapse seems inevitable when extreme capitalism sees natural catastrophic events such as the oil industry viewing melting ice caps as nothing more than an investment opportunity.

America is still fighting wars in the Middle East, threatening China, Iran, Korea, India, and even the European Union. The EU is breaking down into four distinct regions as the fifty-year unity project is visibly disintegrating. Is this just a fight for dwindling resources or something else?

Total global debt is now $227 trillion – or 327 percent of global GDP and something like 45 percent higher than the 2008 apex of the financial meltdown.

The Bank of International Settlements urged just two months ago that policymakers need to press on with rate rises notwithstanding the financial market turbulence it will cause.

The world’s six largest pension saving systems – the US, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Canada and Australia – are expected to reach a $224 trillion gap by 2050, a new study by the World Economic Forum shows. Implosion is its only obvious trajectory as there is nowhere near than amount of money anywhere in the world to plug such a gap as that (3).

Total US household debt surged by $460 billion last year, the sharpest one-year rise ever, with an eye-watering $13 trillion outstanding (4). Britain’s household debt is rising at 10 percent per year, five times the rate of earnings growth and has just surpassed the 2008 level of debt as households struggle to keep afloat (5).

The World Economic Forum has also determined that unemployment, an energy price shock, fiscal crisis, failure of national governance and profound social instability makes up the top five global risks to economic performance (6).

To rid the world of its debt’s, kick-start the world economy and take advantage of the shifting global chess board, some believe conflict is the only consequential route left. NATO’s threats to Russia supported by mass media hysteria only adds to the WEF global risks list.

We have a lot to be fearful of. The fact that any combination of the risk list could happen at the same time in today’s world is no longer the conspiratorial thinking of doom-mongers but the architecture of a strategy that the world has seen before.

Public intellectual Tariq Ali wrote a warning in his 2010 book “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad:

“This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.”

Seven years after Ali’s book we are experiencing a never-ending relay of crisis after crisis; democracy under threat, capitalism out of control and the very real threat of facing another human catastrophe.

In his sobering analysis, Professor Ugo Bardi, a professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence and president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), dissects historical statistics on war to unpick the patterns of the violence of the past. He warns that statistical data suggests we are on the brink of heading into another round of major wars resulting, potentially, in mass deaths on a scale that could rival what we have seen in the early 20th century. This is confirmation indeed that a ‘Strategy of Tension’, controlled or not, is heading towards its ultimate apogee. At this juncture, it is reasonable to conclude we are all in trouble.

 

(1) Operation Gladio (see Post war creation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

(2) Nafeez Ahmed – Strategy of Tension: http://www.nafeezahmed.com/2007/05/strategy-of-tension.html

( 3 ) Global pension funding gap: https://www.weforum.org/press/2017/05/global-pension-timebomb-funding-gap-set-to-dwarf-world-gdp/

(4) US household debt: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/20/debt-f20.html

(5) UK household debt: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/07/31/growing-risk-uk-household-debts-warns-moodys-amid-lending-boom/

(6) World Economic Forum – Global Risks: http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2017/global-risks-of-highest-concern-for-doing-business-2017/

I’ve Been Banned From Facebook For Sharing An Article About False Flags

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: OpEdNews.com

My personal Facebook account, which has the maximum 5,000 friends and an additional 5,000+ followers, has been blocked from posting for three days. My page hasn’t been blocked yet, but we’ll see; I shared the article there, too.

The reason given for this ban by the little pop-up boxes when I logged on just now was that a couple months ago I had shared an article about admitted false flag operations perpetrated by governments around the world. I don’t know what happened that made Facebook’s system decide to crack down on me now all of a sudden, but I do know I’ve been a bit naughtier than usual in my last couple of articles.

The article I got the banhammer for sharing is titled For Those Who Don’t ‘Believe’ In ‘Conspiracies’ Here Are 58 Admitted False Flag Attacks. According to the site’s ticker it has 50,667 shares as of this writing. It’s laden with hyperlinks for further reading, and lists only instances of false flag operations that insiders are on the record as having admitted to themselves. It’s a good compilation of important information. People should be allowed to share it.

The notifications say I can be permanently banned if I continue posting that sort of material. I’ve had that account since 2007.

So. Who wants to see my Barbra Streisand impression?

(Image by Caitlin Johnstone)

(Image by Caitlin Johnstone)

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there’s no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn’t make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

If they’re going to get us locked down and propagandized into their vapid brain boxes, this will be how they’ll do it. Not by government censorship, but by corporate censorship. Government can’t make an overt attempt to stop a dissenting voice from speaking, but the corporations who own the venue of their speech can.

In a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, plutocrat-sponsored senators spoke with top legal and security officials for Facebook, Twitter and Google in a very disturbing way about the need to silence dissenting voices.

Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii demanded that the companies adopt a “mission statement” declaring their commitment “to prevent the fomenting of discord.”

A former FBI agent Clint Watts kicked it up even further, saying, “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

“Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced”—“-silence the guns and the barrage will end,” he added.

This was on the Senate floor. Officials were speaking about the need to censor social media to prevent people from sharing dissenting ideas on the Senate floor.

World Socialist Web Site said of the hearing,

That such a statement could be made in a congressional hearing, entirely without objection, is an expression of the terminal decay of American democracy. There is no faction of the ruling class that maintains any commitment to basic democratic rights.

None of the Democrats in the committee raised any of the constitutional issues involved in asking massive technology companies to censor political speech on the Internet. Only one Republican raised concerns over censorship, but only to allege that Google had a liberal bias.

Former FBI agent says tech companies must “silence” sources of “rebellion”
US Congressional hearing: By Andre Damon 1 November 2017 Top legal and security officials for Facebook, Twitter and” www.wsws.org

I’ll admit right now that this really scares me. Ever the optimist, I’ve been reassuring my readers that the corporatocracy would never risk taking off the black hole sun mask of corporate cheerfulness and move into regular, overt totalitarianism. I’ve contended that they must remain covert in order to keep successfully manufacture consent.

But, here we are. Through a studious application of psy-ops they have their censorship and they have their consent. Remember, in the book “Fahrenheit 451” the public wasn’t unhappy about the book burnings. They cheered them on, and that’s what we have now. The herd is mindlessly clapping their approval at censorship and even volunteering to report naughty behavior like good little hall monitors for the oligarchy. I’m sure that even some of my close friends and family will silently approve of my banning and will meet my distress with the pursed lips of a church lady secretly pleased at my comeuppance.

I tried joining Gab when I saw this coming, but it’s really alt-righty there and the energy there is just gross. Finding a new social media outlet might not even matter anyway, since these creeps just target any place people gather in large numbers.

I don’t know. I always freak out a bit when the eye of corporate censorship focuses on me. I’ve recently been told by a number of people that they’ve been banned for sharing my articles, and now it’s hitting me.

I’m babbling. This is weird. I just really, really don’t want humanity to become what these people are trying to turn it into, you know? Help me make some noise about this stuff, please. Manipulators can’t do their job when there’s a big spotlight pointed at them.

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Hey you, thanks for reading! My work is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, and maybe throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal.

The conspiracy to censor the Internet

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By Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

Source: WSWS.org

The political representatives of the American ruling class are engaged in a conspiracy to suppress free speech. Under the guise of combating “trolls” and “fake news” supposedly controlled by Russia, the most basic constitutional rights enumerated in the First Amendment are under direct attack.

The leading political force in this campaign is the Democratic Party, working in collaboration with sections of the Republican Party, the mass media and the military-intelligence establishment.

The Trump administration is threatening nuclear war against North Korea, escalating the assault on health care, demanding new tax cuts for the rich, waging war on immigrant workers, and eviscerating corporate and environmental regulations. This reactionary agenda is not, however, the focus of the Democratic Party. It is concentrating instead on increasingly hysterical claims that Russia is “sowing divisions” within the United States.

In the media, one report follows another, each more ludicrous than the last. The claim that Russia shifted the US election by means of $100,000 in advertisements on Facebook and Twitter has been followed by breathless reports of the Putin government’s manipulation of other forms of communication.

An “exclusive” report from CNN last week proclaimed that one organization, “Don’t Shoot Us,” which it alleges without substantiation is connected to Russia, sought to “exploit racial tensions and sow discord” on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and even Pokémon Go, a reality game played on cell phones.

Another report from CNN on Monday asserted that a Russian “troll factory” was involved in posting comments critical of Hillary Clinton as “part of President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to influence the 2016 election.” All of the negative commentary in news media and other publications directed at Clinton, it implied, were the product of Russian agents or people duped by Russian agents.

As during the period of Cold War McCarthyism, the absurdity of the charges goes unchallenged. They are picked up and repeated by other media outlets and by politicians to demonstrate just how far-reaching the actions of the nefarious “foreign enemy” really are.

While one aim has been to continue and escalate an anti-Russia foreign policy, the more basic purpose is emerging ever more clearly: to criminalize political dissent within the United States.

The most direct expression to date of this conspiracy against free speech was given by the anticommunist ideologue Anne Applebaum in a column published Monday in the Washington Post, “If Russia can create fake ‘Black Lives Matter’ accounts, who will next?”

Her answer: the American people. “I can imagine multiple groups, many of them proudly American, who might well want to manipulate a range of fake accounts during a riot or disaster to increase anxiety or fear,” she writes. She warns that “political groups—on the left, the right, you name it—will quickly figure out” how to use social media to spread “disinformation” and “demoralization.”

Applebaum rails against all those who seek to hide their identity online. “There is a better case than ever against anonymity, at least against anonymity in the public forums of social media and comment sections,” she writes. She continues: “The right to free speech is something that is granted to humans, not bits of computer code.” Her target, however, is not “bots” operating “fake accounts,” but anyone who seeks, fearing state repression or unjust punishment by his or her employer, to make an anonymous statement online. And that is only the opening shot in a drive to silence political dissent.

Applebaum is closely connected to the highest echelons of the capitalist state. She is a member of key foreign policy think tanks and sits on the board of directors of the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy. Married to the former foreign minister of Poland, she is a ferocious war hawk. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, she authored a column in the Washington Post in which she called for “total war” against nuclear-armed Russia. She embodies the connection between militarism and political repression.

The implications of Applebaum’s arguments are made clear in an extraordinary article published on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times, “As US Confronts Internet’s Disruptions, China Feels Vindicated,” which takes a favorable view of China’s aggressive censorship of the Internet and implies that the United States is moving toward just such a regime.

“For years, the United States and others saw” China’s “heavy-handed censorship as a sign of political vulnerability and a barrier to China’s economic development,” the Times writes. “But as countries in the West discuss potential Internet restrictions and wring their hands over fake news, hacking and foreign meddling, some in China see a powerful affirmation of the country’s vision for the internet.”

The article goes on to assert that while “few would argue that China’s Internet control serves as a model for democratic societies… At the same time, China anticipated many of the questions now flummoxing governments from the United States to Germany to Indonesia.”

Glaringly absent from the Times article, Applebaum’s commentary and all of the endless demands for a crackdown on social media is any reference to democratic rights, free speech or the First Amendment.

The First Amendment, which asserts that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech,” is the broadest amendment in the US Constitution. Contrary to Applebaum, there is no caveat exempting anonymous speech from Constitutional protection. It is a historical fact that leaders of the American Revolution and drafters of the Constitution wrote articles under pseudonyms to avoid repression by the British authorities.

The Constitution does not give the government or powerful corporations the right to proclaim what is “fake” and what is not, what is a “conspiracy theory” and what is “authoritative.” The same arguments now being employed to crack down on social media could just as well have been used to suppress books and mass circulation newspapers that emerged with the development of the printing press.

The drive toward Internet censorship in the United States is already far advanced. Since Google announced plans to bury “alternative viewpoints” in search results earlier this year, leading left-wing sites have seen their search traffic plunge by more than 50 percent. The World Socialist Web Site’s search traffic from Google has fallen by 75 percent.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have introduced similar measures. The campaign being whipped up over Russian online activity will be used to justify even more far-reaching measures.

This is taking place as universities implement policies to give police the authority to vet campus events. There are ongoing efforts to abolish “net neutrality” so as to give giant corporations the ability to regulate Internet traffic. The intelligence agencies have demanded the ability to circumvent encryption after having been exposed for illegally monitoring the phone communications and Internet activity of the entire population.

In one “democratic” country after another governments are turning to police-state forms of rule, from France, with its permanent state of emergency, to Germany, which last month shut down a subsidiary of the left-wing political site Indymedia, to Spain, with its violent crackdown on the separatist referendum in Catalonia and arrest of separatist leaders.

The destruction of democratic rights is the political response of the corporate and financial aristocracy to the growth of working class discontent bound up with record levels of social inequality. It is intimately linked to preparations for a major escalation of imperialist violence around the world. The greatest concern of the ruling elite is the emergence of an independent movement of the working class, and the state is taking actions to prevent it.

Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights

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By Denis Rancourt

Source: Dissident Voice

SUMMARY: Societies of social animals, including humans, are dominance hierarchies. Civil rights are codified in law to protect mechanisms of essential counter measures against excessive exploitation of the hierarchy by elite classes, which destabilizes the entire society. Systemic pathology arises when elite classes can change the regulatory codes themselves, including civil rights protections, with impunity. Laws that quash civil rights are pathological in that they impede the system-repair mechanisms that are: free expression, free association, class opposition, and negotiated structural adjustments (otherwise known as democracy). Present anti-speech laws are extreme examples of pathological laws, the application of which is a measure of the degree of totalitarianism in the society. The history of the USA of recent decades is an eminent illustration of the concepts.

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The USA meltdown has been decades in the making and is the collateral result of an elite predation that has degraded structural elements needed for a healthy and resilient nation.

The aftermath is “too much regulation at the bottom, not enough at the top”: a pathological legislative and institutional structure in which elite interests have too much freedom to challenge and exploit democratic nation states, whereas middle, working and professional class actors, including small and medium-size private business, are economically, ideologically and politically constrained and suppressed to an excessive degree.

It has been a class war in which the predatory classes have barricaded themselves while inflicting humiliating defeat and loss of power, purpose and identity on the lower-stratum classes, which are incited to fight among themselves within the confines of new rules and the guarded illusion that these rules are an actuation of natural order.

In this way, personal and community motivation and inventiveness are sapped. The very motor of a vibrant modern society is jammed and the entire system becomes a system of debt-ransom extraction and management of globalized exploitation for the benefit of a secluded elite.

In this emergent system of excessive class exploitation, civil rights that protect critics and organizers become a threat against the exploiters rather than needed protections of personal and community emancipation that sustains economic production and innovation.

Allow me to explain, starting from fundamental considerations.

Arguably, the most fundamental statement that a social scientist can make is that humans interact by both violent and non-violent means, both individually and as groups, to establish and maintain societal dominance hierarchies. Call it by any name (tribalism, capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism…) humans always establish, maintain and grow dominance hierarchies, using whatever technology of the day.

The political end-point concept of “anarchy” is the theoretical absence of dominance hierarchy, which has never been ideally achieved and which is evidently unstable against growth of and replacement by dominance hierarchy. The reality of social animals is dominance hierarchy, which spontaneously adapts itself to environmental conditions and to the population size, while integrating accumulated knowledge and technological advances.

Within a dominance hierarchy (within a society), the essential counter against destabilizing excesses of dominance is push-back from individuals and groups — engendered by the individual desire for life, freedom and local influence — which acts in every stratum of the hierarchy.

In historically recent human societies, essential push-back is formalized with written laws that protect the individual against dominance encroachments that would be so severe that they would threaten hierarchical stability by increasing the potential for rebellion. These laws were at times deemed to be God-given and are now referred to as “civil rights”. They include both: (1) protections of the individual and of the nuclear and extended family against arbitrary attacks by the state or by rogue elements, and (2) protections for the individual and groups to seek redress and express grievances.

All laws are evolving codes to organise, stabilize and enforce an ever changing (often growing and complexifying) dominance hierarchy. “Good” laws find a “balance” between the graded benefits of hierarchy and the stratified oppressions against individuals and groups, a balance which stabilizes the whole system against deterioration (“injustice”), complete overhaul (“revolution”), or extinction (“downfall”).

Predictably, the codes themselves are often “hacked” by upper-strata groups that are overly ambitious in seeking additional relative advantages. The hacking upper-strata groups will recklessly change the laws for their own advantage in ways that materially threaten overall stability. This produces “pathological” laws that destabilize the overall hierarchy by driving society towards an intolerable degree of totalitarianism.

A now recognized on-going example is the decades-long elite attack, by taxation and global-finance reforms, against the USA middle class, which has prematurely destabilized the USA-centered global empire and its domestic internal society. The blowback from and defences against the USA’s practice of aggressive global dominance has also contributed, where the latter practice is similarly enabled by hacked foreign-policy and global governance laws.

When law-makers themselves can be bought by selfish elites self-segregated from the broad or domestic society, it is a recipe for disaster. In the USA and Canada law-enactment errors are multiplying, and there are no substantial Senatorial safeguards. Law-makers are formed or trained into compliance by career-enabling elites, rather than informed, principled and concerned about public service. Political parties are systematically controlled and constrained by the highest hierarchical echelons, which control the economy and the media.

When the backbone structure of the dominance hierarchy is thus degraded, as with the present crisis of the middle class, there is an impulse for both societal groups and lawmakers to become frantic and for the barricaded elite to exploit and ride out the storm rather than participate in repair. Every new manifestation of rebellion is interpreted as a fire to be extinguished rather than as necessary pushback needing to be allowed to play out. Decades of built-up fuel in the underbrush and extended drought are conditions for a devastating inferno but our “representatives” are successfully goaded into superficially addressing every new spark and violently suppressing every outbreak rather than dealing with the fundamentals.

Over decades, a complete restructuring of the relation between the state and the economy has been engineered, which, in its oppressive excesses, has led to the present crisis. The assault was accompanied by massive propaganda campaigns regarding the security benefits of government control and the welfare benefits of corporate rule. For example, predatory corporate take-over “investment” in public-service infrastructure is now presented as a good thing that should be actively sought using public funds.

The restructuring included: rolling back taxation of the wealthy while maintaining taxation of the middle and working classes, reducing or eliminating corporate taxation, increasing capital mobility, allowing investment flight, allowing infiltration of government-oversight and regulatory agencies (especially in the finance sector), gutting corporate regulatory agencies while transferring to self-regulatory models, unprecedented ideological control of professional workers in the public service (teachers, police, scientists, public servants, judges…), unrestrained lobby and think-tank influence, and unprecedented limitations (regulatory burdens) imposed on small and medium-size private businesses.

Top-level elite desires and machinations have become embedded into the very institutional structure of the economy and of the “deep state” more than ever previously. This is the result of decadal erosion of democracy and continuous increase of integration of government itself into the hierarchical power structure. The global-scale project is enabled by owned military, surveillance, communication, transportation and resource-extraction technologies; and surveillance and projection-of-power capabilities are unprecedented in history.

The resulting decadal overhaul of Western nations — in the march towards USA-centered globalism and the neutralization of Western middle and professional classes — has built-in deleterious structural features, as follows.

Mega corporations and financiers and their deep-state partners have not only militarily and covertly occupied the exploitable globe, they have also installed predation against the Western middle classes and Western public infrastructures. They have gutted mass education and maintained only elite schools for their managers and engineers. And they have gutted the Western middle and professional class mind and ethos and replaced these with canned concepts devoid of emancipating political thrust. More importantly, the educational and societal-maintenance institutions themselves have been transformed by removing professional independence and responsibility and replacing them with ideological obedience and observance of dictated think-tank-produced mantras.

The consequential suicidal pathology of the system’s operational code is twofold.

First, the new freedom and power of the USA-centered mega entities are used to eviscerate the very nation state whose structure evolved to optimally stabilize the nation-based dominance hierarchy. Even the world structures of international relations are hijacked and eviscerated to a higher degree.

Second, the middle and professional classes palpably lose many of the benefits accrued from accepting hierarchical domination, including loss of influence, and consequently suffer a crisis of identity, meaning and outlook… driven by real economic threat (loss or degradation of job and home).

Macro-economic data reveal the decadal transformation since 1980 but do not explain its source or describe its cultural, psychological and class impact. The data are generally cast as the result of an accident that can be fixed by more of the same from one of the two front parties.1

In the real circumstances of the worsening middle-class crisis, it is natural that grievances are aired and solutions are sought to recover lost status. But at the same time, advocacy and the potential for an organized response are threats to the top-layer elites and embedded deep-state managers who have intentionally driven the system towards greater hierarchical control and increased upper-stratum gain.

That is why the system reacts by removing civil rights and sabotaging any technology or application venture that would enable communication and free association.

Whereas expression and grass-roots political response would repair the edifice, the needed remedy is aggressively quashed by those at the top who judge that the crisis is not one that can truly threaten them, is one that will dissipate with time or can be fixed synthetically, and that the distributed spontaneous solution is unacceptably risky in its potential to expose them.

There results the paradox that the system delays self-repair, builds up the pressure for repair, and creates worsening societal conditions rather than allow the proven natural remedy: free expression, free association, class opposition (based on the actual grievances rather than surrogates), and negotiated structural adjustments.

The pathology of the system in rejecting self-repair can be understood as follows.

Dominance hierarchies are both stable and evolutionarily advantageous only if effective balancing forces against creeping or runaway totalitarianism are admitted. A dominance hierarchy is doomed when its highest codes allow an elite class to have disproportionate power, including the power to modify the highest codes without restraint. In particular, in a society in which the state — controlled by an elite class — effectively has a technological monopoly on lethal force, the balancing mechanism of free expression, free association, and real influence — otherwise known as “democracy” — must be allowed.

It follows that any code that prevents free expression and free association is itself pathological. If all expression and all association are allowed, then the optimal conditions for self-repair are realized and a stable and resilient hierarchical structure will result. Since it is grounded in free expression and free association, then it will be optimally just. Justice is a thus self-organized and maintained hierarchy, not elite-given “equity” within a totalitarian matrix.

For free expression and free association to be meaningful many necessary conditions are implied: access to information, actual institutional transparency, access to the travel and communication infrastructures, absence of imposed barriers to association, absence of controls over personal choices, real opportunity for decent economic conditions that allow significant democratic participation, and the very novel concept of uniform application of just laws… Any rule that in-effect bars a necessary condition is also itself pathological.

I end this essay with a consideration of the special features that make anti-expression laws pathological, in the above sense of preventing self-repair of the societal dominance hierarchy.

The anti-speech laws, whether cast as “hate speech” criminal code provisions, or civil defamation law, or civility “codes of conduct” on campuses, have been manipulatively introduced by the elite because the elite are those most threatened by free speech and free association.

Speech is the means by which individuals use non-violent persuasion to acquire influence in society. It is the means that enables politics. In the USA, where citizens have a beneficial right even to bear arms for any required overthrow of the government2,3, freedom of expression was meant to be absolute, in that the USA constitution does not have a “balancing” clause as is common in other Western jurisdictions.4

Laws that enforce punishment for individual speech allegedly “causing” negative personal reactions in society at large are antithetical to democracy, and are immeasurably harmful to human emancipation and personal development. The above-mentioned examples are such anti-speech laws, notably including defamation law.5 They enforce punishments against individual speech that is alleged to “cause” an emotional or persuasive effect in others, which is deemed an unacceptable effect that must be targeted for elimination by state intervention against the presumed “cause”.

The said “emotional or persuasive effect” alleged to arise from the spoken words, in different laws, includes:

  • being induced to feel “hate” (anger, hostility, animosity) against a group in society
  • being induced to have a negative overall opinion about a specific person
  • being induced to adopt an ideology or political stance deemed impermissible (“hateful”)
  • being induced to commit suicide
  • being induced to participate in actuating a genocide
  • being induced to commit crimes of physical aggression or property damage

The underlying principle of these laws is that the person speaking words carries a punishable liability for what those words might induce in unspecified others, irrespective whether any actual physical crime occurs and irrespective of whether the words determinatively “cause” an actual physical crime. To be clear, under these laws, a judge arbitrarily (without needing evidence beyond the impugned words themselves and their method of delivery) decides whether the words induce deemed undesirable thoughts, opinions and attitudes in unspecified persons at large. Nothing else is required to establish liability or guilt, and by design it is impossible to disprove the charge, nor is an attempt to disprove admitted in court.

No matter how it may be masked with legalese or scholarly rationalization, this is precisely the nature of the anti-speech codes that are: “hate speech” criminal code provisions, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-historical-revisionism laws, anti-obscenity laws, the common law of civil defamation, and campus codes of conduct. One could add any “norms of expressive conduct” law.

For example, in defamation law, the impugned words are presumed to “cause” a low opinion of the plaintiff in the minds of unspecified others at large. In legalese: “general damage to reputation is presumed”. No causation proof is required of the claimant. Intent to harm is irrelevant (malice is presumed). No actual damage (loss of job, etc.) need be established. The words themselves as perceived by the judge are sufficient evidence. The judge must only opine, not on the intended meaning of the words, but on the meaning of the words in the mind of an imaginary listener. Such is civil defamation law, and there is no legal limit on the quantum of damages or the duration of gag orders that may be ordered under penalty of jail.5

These anti-speech laws, of course, are distinguished from laws that address harassment and intimidation of a specific target person (actual victim) or that address chain-of-command orders to commit crimes. They are also distinguished from the tort (law) of injurious falsehood, which “consists of the malicious publication of a falsehood concerning the plaintiff that leads other persons to act in a manner that causes actual loss, damage, or expense to the plaintiff,” irrespective of any effect on “reputation”.6

Thus, the anti-expression laws are eminently pathological from a systemic perspective. They directly impede repair of the dominance hierarchy, without providing any systemic benefit. They achieve this by suppressing the individual impulse to influence by communication, which is the elemental foundation of democracy.

As such, a study of the development of and pervasive use of anti-speech laws informs us both of the intensity of harmful elite efforts to protect illegitimate advantages and of the degree of totalitarianism in society. The present USA (civil) war on “hate expression” and its condoning by large swaths of society is a measure of a high degree of totalitarianism and a concomitant high degree of manipulation of public sentiment. It is an indicator of fundamental internal instability of the kind that accompanies the collapse of an empire.

  1. “Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart”, by David Leonhardt, The New York Times, 2017-08-07. [↩]
  2. “Negroes with Guns”, by Robert F. Williams, 1962 (Martino Publishing, CT, 2013). [↩]
  3. “How Nonviolence Protects the State”, by Peter Gelderloos, 2007 (South End Press). [↩]
  4. “Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 2016-11-15. [↩]
  5. “Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, by Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2016-02-01. (And published in Dissident Voice: Part-1, Part-2). [↩] [↩]
  6. “Injurious Falsehood”, mcconchie law corporation (legal encyclopedia), accessed on 2017-09-06. [↩]

Are Facebook and Google the New Colonial Powers?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

To qualify as colonial powers, Facebook and Google must effectively limit the choices and power of users, and punish or coerce those who question or resist their power.

I was struck by a phrase from a recent essay on advertising and social media, You Are the Product: As Taplin points out, that remark ‘unwittingly revealed a previously unspoken truth: Facebook and Google are the new colonial powers.’

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the dominance of Facebook and Google in online advertising is now “in the news” for a variety of reasons: the possibility that agents of other governments influenced U.S. elections with media buys on Facebook; anti-trust concerns; the potential for these advert-tech giants to effectively silence legitimate online voices under the guise of limiting “fake news”, and of course, the ongoing issues of click fraud and the underperformance of digital ads.

The phrase that captures this broad narrative is: When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.

In other words, if you’re not paying for the service or content, then your information (harvested by Google, Facebook, et al.), your time online (i.e. your attention, a.k.a. eyeballs) and the content you create and post for free (videos of your cute cat, etc.) are the products being sold to advertisers at a premium.

The characterization of the two dominant digital-advert giants as new colonial powers is interesting on a number of fronts. To get a handle on a few of the issues, I recommend reading these two essays:

A Serf on Google’s Farm

Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here?

And watching this video on the archiving of digital information on individuals–including meta-data, that is, data about your behaviors, transactions, posts, etc. that have been scrubbed of your identity markers (name, account numbers, etc.)

Haunted by Data – Maciej Ceglowski (via GFB)

The key dynamics of colonialism for the residents are 1) a lack of choice and 2) a lack of power: the colonial power imposes a regime, either formally or informally, that limits the choices enjoyed by residents and limits their power to bypass or replace the colonial regime.

In the classic Plantation Economy of overt colonialism–a topic I’ve discussed numerous times here–residents are stripped of any options other than working on the plantation and buying their goods at the plantation store. This coercion need not be direct; the colonial regime can strip residents of choice and power by making it impossible to live without cash, for example, and then providing one source of paid work: the plantation.

Once cash is necessary to live, then credit is introduced–but only if you buy at the company store.

I’ve also written extensively about the Neo-Colonial Model in which corporations and banks bring the colonial model of exploitation to the home country, stripmining the domestic populace via dependence on credit.

Welcome to Neocolonialism, Exploited Peasants! (October 21, 2016)

Greece and the Endgame of the Neocolonial Model of Exploitation (February 19, 2015)

The E.U., Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012)

This model is also used in the developing world, where it has replaced the old overt form of Colonialism with the new and improved credit-based version.

To qualify as colonial powers, Facebook and Google must effectively limit the choices and power of users, and punish or coerce those who question or resist their power. As the dominant corporations in search, social media and digital advertising, Facebook and Google limit the options of users simply by being essential due to their dominance.

As for punishing users–the potential to do so is what’s worrying observers. The cover for silencing or banning critics is opaque: non-compliance with guidelines. So who’s to say that users who criticized or questioned the policies of Facebook and Google aren’t silenced along with click-fraudsters, “fake news” purveyors, etc.? Who gets silenced is completely up to the companies, and there is no recourse to the corporation’s opaque judgment.

The Orwellian possibilities are real enough.

Here’s a look at the digital advert market:

And the dominance of Google/Facebook:

Played by the Ruling Elite’s Control System, It’s Time for a New Paradigm

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By Paul A. Philips

Source: Waking Times

People are waking up in droves, but the majority continue to be played by the ruling elite’s control system, unaware that almost every subject under the sun is rigged: In effect we are confined to living in a false or limiting paradigm. Against the ‘insurmountable odds,’ will there ever be a new paradigm experience? Having seen through the grand deception, will the awakened ever change the control system? Can we somehow go on to cultivate new theories and practices for a humane new paradigm experience, one that will create a world that truly makes a difference for everyone?

Before answering, here are just some of the ways in which the majority people in their ignorance are played by the ruling elite’s control system in the current false or limiting paradigm.

1. Fake science

Corporate/Banker sponsored pseudo-science has had a grip on humanity for quite some time, headed by highly dogmatic fake guru scientists. Try telling some followers in the church of scientism that these so-called Gurus are fake and wrong; they may look at you as if you have 3 heads, no matter how knowledgeable you are or good at communicating the real science.

(Hint:  Why were we taught very little or nothing about Nikola Tesla in school..?)

2. Fake Political Parties

Indeed, the awakened know that regardless of who’s in power all the major political party leaders are only puppets to the ruling elite puppet masters. Thus, the ruling elite make all the major political decisions regardless of who’s in power, making the parties and their leaders irrelevant. The masses are distracted from waking up to the realization of this: For instance, one of the latest tricks used to con the masses into giving their support has been to make the leader of a political party look like an ‘outsider’ who will not walk the dictated political white line.

As in the case of Trump during his presidential election campaign, he came across as an ‘outsider,’ telling the masses what they wanted to hear. He came across as anti-establishment. But in the end, his long lists of anti-establishment promises did not get fulfilled: The false promises were nothing more than gimmicks to win votes, while the same old same old still continues…

3. Fake Wars

Sadly, the majority are still falling for the fake wars narratives with their related psyops; false flags or divide and rule tactics, pushed on us for the ulterior motives of power, profit and political gains. The warmongers, aided and abetted by the mainstream media (real fake news) threaten the existence of not only every man, woman and child, but all life forms on this planet if nuclear war breaks out.

To find out what those war-hungry leaders don’t want you to know about go HERE.

4. Played by the ‘Beneficial’ Deception

As part of the deception, to get approval, the ruling elite present their agendas as ‘beneficial’ when, in fact, they are actually harmful or enslaving to the masses. The greater the difference between something that is perceived by the masses as ‘beneficial’ compared to the opposite of what it really is, the easier the elite can advance their agendas.

Agenda 2030 (Agenda 21 on speed), is a classic example. To take a look at how the perceived ‘benefits’ are presented, but, are in truth, extremely damaging, go HERE.

5. Played by ‘Confusion’

One of the tricks used to cover-up information and allow hidden crooked agendas to continue is to put the masses into a state of confusion or neutrality.

For example, through Big Pharma shills with their disinformation and/or the cover-up of scientific evidence in the elite’s owned and controlled mainstream media, the masses have been duped into confusion, not knowing what to do regarding choices on life-saving alternative health practices…

6. Played into Being Comfortably Numb

Are you comfortably numb or a truth-seeking activist?

Ruled and divided, wilfully ignorant and apathetic to the woes of the world, some people love their comfort zone so much they will do all they can to remain there. To avoid confrontation, they go into agreement with the general consensus of the masses while blindly accepting the rule of authority without ever questioning.

Labelled as Stockholm syndrome, some people even love their servitude under the rule of authority. Such individuals affected grovel away their lives in victimhood without ever realizing they’ve been ensnared in a web of deceit, while their cognitive dissonance and denial plays a major part in maintaining the status quo…

Many folks have been played into mindless habituation. For example, many spend endless hours languishing away, watching the T.V (moron box) brainwashed by mainstream media broadcasts…

 In effect, consistent with the Pink Floyd song these people have become “Comfortably numb…”

-Indeed the list goes on where so many are played by the ruling elite’s control system

Creating the New Paradigm

A major response to the imprisoning control system is to disconnect. Here are just a few examples:

Disconnect from giving your support to those power-drunk, dishonest, egomaniacal puppet politicians. All Western World government is a myth because it has been designed to give the illusion of choice or change. It’s the puppet masters we really need to get at not so much the puppeteered politicians. We need to expose their inhumane criminal activities to the world…

Disconnect from the increasingly health-threatening wireless technology and the internet of things. Stop using ‘smart’ technology (dumb technology). Stop using the electronic appliances: No longer giving these appliances to kids would be a good start. Stop using credit cards… Find alternative ways of bypassing the system…

Disconnect from consuming disease-causing food and water poisoned with GMO technology, toxic ingredients and additives, irradiated by nutrient-nuking manufacturing processes… Refuse toxic medicines such as vaccines. Foods and medicines are killing us. The select few belonging to the related establishments manufacturing the medicines are making trillions on us as a consequence of our increasing disease…

Disconnect from the greed-driven mega-corporations swallowing up small businesses while depriving the freedom of their owners in the monopolies. Support the small business man.

Reconnecting with our True Self

Humans have now reached unprecedented levels of selfishness. We are running amok with narcissism, materialistic greed and consumerism while the rich get even richer: It’s now been reported that 5 people nearly have as much wealth as half the world’s population. Around 90% of the world’s population lives in poverty. Mega-corporations are getting even fatter. Consider the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon as an example…

-In effect we have been pushed to the limits. All this only adds up to the realization that change has to happen. The control system’s imprisoning status quo has to end as it continues to be an ever widening mismatch compared to our ongoing awakening.

Besides making the effort to disconnect from the ruling Elite’s control system, to stop us from being dictated, we also need to change our ways by reconnecting with our true self.

Reconnecting with the true self means changing our inner world to make intended changes manifest in our outer world. We need to be a stand for truth, honesty, integrity, kindness, caring and compassion for governing ourselves in a new paradigm experience.

So many people eek away their daily existences in dissatisfaction, frustration and servitude: It’s time that we felt good about ourselves again; make the shift from victim to victor… A monumental task, of course, but for our survival we need an open mindedness and open heartedness to build the multiple layers needed for complete change so that the new system is solid enough to bring lasting peace. Peace for ourselves, our children and their children to be.