Tag Archives: Oligarchy

Government propaganda: deflecting public attention from the most serious crimes of the oligarchy

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By Carla Binion

Source: Intrepid Report

People of the U.S. often fail to notice the methods their own government uses to do what amounts to brainwashing them. The book Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Hermann and Noam Chomsky details how U.S. corporate-controlled mainstream media outlets (today that includes mainstream TV “news” networks, most mainstream magazines, newspapers, etc.) act as propagandists. Another excellent source on U. S. media propaganda is Michael Parenti’s book, Inventing Reality.

When mainstream TV, magazines, newspapers and mainstream Internet sites all repeat the same false talking points over and over, they’re often deliberately attempting to brainwash, rather than inform, the public. Their motive is usually to gain mass public support for something that brings dishonest politicians and the oligarchy money and power. For example, they often propagandize the public to support illicit war for profit.

Today’s political propagandists pretend only the right wing criticizes them, but many on the left oppose misleading propaganda as well. I’m politically progressive, don’t like Biden or Trump because they are both far too right wing in my view. However, I think the extremist push to “get Trump” and paint him as inciting the January 6 protest are obvious efforts to manipulate the public’s thinking. Trump encouraged the protesters to “fight”, but to “fight” politically has traditionally been used to simply mean to battle verbally, to argue, or to boycott or strike. He didn’t specify or urge physical violence.

This opinion piece has nothing to do with minimizing the harm done by any actual violence on January 6. Violence should never be condoned and is a separate issue from protests in general. Instead this is about being aware of ways the U.S. government is now employing methods long used to promote propaganda, to discourage even peaceful protests, and to influence the public mind. The current government manipulation is a way of manufacturing consent, or as Michael Parenti called it, inventing reality.

What is the U.S. government likely to gain by manipulating the public into dropping their critical thinking skills and becoming lost in emotional rage, and by turning the public against protest and implying that all forms of dissent are possibly “insurrection” or sedition?  (1) The focus on Trump and January 6 turns the public’s attention away from the country’s many other problems, including the fact that we’re the world’s only advanced nation without an adequate healthcare system. It also distracts us from the urgent need for environmental reform. (2) If the powers that be can get most Americans to focus on only Trump, there will be no focus on the U.S. politicians responsible for turning the U.S. into an oligarchy, with much money funneled away from the middle class to the wealthiest one percent. [Source]    (3) If the powerful corrupt politicians can increase penalties for even peaceful protests, they’ll frighten and shame innocent people and prevent them from needed legitimate protesting, (4) If the public can be manipulated into believing that only right-wing racists and fascists refuse to accept government propaganda and authoritarianism, the left can be intimidated through guilt by association and through fear of being identified with the right wing.

People should walk the fine line between too much skepticism and not enough. Excessive suspicion is doubt not supported by evidence. Healthy skepticism is based on reality, including the U. S. government’s characteristic way of using disinformation to control public opinion throughout history. The thing that should give people pause and keep them aiming toward a balance of skepticism is the fact that the U.S. government has a long and well documented legacy of using widely-known propaganda techniques on the U.S. public. For anyone who doubts the U.S. government routinely propagandizes the public, at least read the two books mentioned above, which provide many additional reference sources and essentially prove this is true beyond any doubt. If the U.S. population likes to be maneuvered and more or less brainwashed by their own government, they’re free to do that. However, thoughtful skepticism, independent research and honest scrutiny are preferable.

Twitter’s ban on Trump will only deepen the US tribal divide

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By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

Anyone who believes locking President Donald Trump out of his social media accounts will serve as the first step on the path to healing the political divide in the United States is likely to be in for a bitter disappointment.

The flaws in this reasoning need to be peeled away, like the layers of an onion.

Twitter’s decision to permanently ban Trump for, among other things, “incitement of violence” effectively cuts him off from 88 million followers. Facebook has said it will deny Trump access to his account till at least the end of his presidential term.

The act of barring an elected president, even an outgoing one, from the digital equivalent of the public square is bound to be every bit as polarising as allowing him to continue tweeting.

These moves threaten to widen the tribal divide between the Democratic and Republican parties into a chasm, and open up a damaging rift among liberals and the left on the limits of political speech.

Claims of ‘stolen’ election

The proximate cause of Facebook and Twitter’s decision is his encouragement of a protest march on Washington DC last week by his supporters that rapidly turned violent as several thousand stormed the Capitol building, the seat of the US government.

Five people are reported to have died, including a police officer struck on the head with a fire extinguisher and a woman who was shot dead inside the building, apparently by a security guard.

The protesters – and much of the Republican party – believe that Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, “stole” November’s presidential election. The storming of the Capitol occurred on the day electoral college votes were being counted, marking the moment when Biden’s win became irreversible.

Since the November election, Trump has cultivated his supporters’ political grievances by implying in regular tweets that the election was “rigged”, that he supposedly won by a “landslide”, and that Biden is an illegitimate president.

The social networks’ immediate fear appears to be that, should he be allowed to continue, there could be a repetition of the turmoil at the Capitol when the inauguration – the formal transfer of power from Trump to Biden – takes place next week.

No simple solutions

Whatever we – or the tech giants who now dominate our lives – might hope, there are no simple solutions to the problems caused by extreme political speech.

To many, banning Trump from Twitter – his main megaphone – sounds like a proportionate response to his incitement and his narcissistic behaviour. It appears to accord with a much-cited restriction on free speech: no one should be allowed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

But that comparison serves only to blur important distinctions between ordinary speech and political speech.

The prohibition on shouting “Fire!” reflects a broad social consensus that giving voice to a falsehood of this kind – a lie that can be easily verified as such and one that has indisputably harmful outcomes – is a bad thing.

There is a clear way to calculate the benefits and losses of allowing this type of speech. It is certain to cause a stampede that risks injury and death – and at no gain, apart from possibly to the instigator’s ego.

It is also easy to determine how we should respond to someone who shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. They should be prosecuted according to the law.

Who gets to decide

Banning political speech, by contrast, is a more complicated affair because there is rarely consensus on the legitimacy of such censorship, and – as we shall see – any gains are likely to be outweighed by the losses.

Trump’s ban is just the latest instance in a growing wave of exclusions by Twitter and Facebook of users who espouse political views outside the mainstream, whether on the right or the left. In addition, the tech giants have been tinkering with their algorithms to make it harder to find such content – in what amounts to a kind of pre-censorship.

But the critical issue in a democracy is: who gets to decide if political speech is unreasonable when it falls short of breaching hate and incitement laws?

Few of us want state institutions – the permanent bureaucracy, or the intelligence and security services – wielding that kind of power over our ability to comment and converse. These institutions, which lie at the heart of government and need to be scrutinised as fully as possible, have a vested interest in silencing critics.

There are equally good grounds to object to giving ruling parties the power to censor, precisely because government officials from one side of the political aisle have a strong incentive to gag their opponents. Incitement and protection of public order are perfect pretexts for authoritarianism.

And leaving the democratic majority with the power to arbitrate over political speech has major drawbacks too. In a liberal democracy, the right to criticise the majority and their representatives is an essential freedom, one designed to curb the majority’s tyrranical impulses and ensure minorities are protected.

‘Terms of service’

In this case, however, the ones deciding which users get to speak and which are banned are the globe-spanning tech corporations, the wealthiest companies in human history.

Facebook and Twitter have justified banning Trump, and anyone else, on the grounds that he violated vague business “terms of service” – the small print on agreement forms we all sign before being allowed access to their platforms.

But barring users from the chief means of communication in a modern, digitised world cannot be defended simply on commercial or business grounds, especially when those firms have been allowed to develop their respective monopolies by our governments.

Social media is now at the heart of many people’s political lives. It is how we share and clarify political views, organise political actions, and more generally shape the information universe.

The fact that western societies have agreed to let private hands control what should be essential public utilities – turning them into vastly profitable industries – is a political decision in itself.

Political pressures

Unlike governments, which have to submit to intermittent elections, tech giants are accountable chiefly to their billionaire owners and shareholders – a tiny wealth elite whose interests are tied to greater wealth accumulation, not the public good.

But in addition to these economic imperatives, the tech companies are also increasingly subjected to direct and indirect political pressures.

Sometimes that occurs out in the open, when Facebook executives get hauled before congressional committees to explain their actions. And doubtless pressure is being exerted too out of sight, behind closed doors.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple all want their respective, highly profitable tech monopolies to continue, and currying favour with the party in power – or the one coming into power – is the best strategy for avoiding greater regulation.

Either way, it means that, in their role as gatekeepers to the global, digital public square, the tech giants exercise overtly political powers. They regulate an outsourced public utility, but are not subject to normal democratic oversight or accountability because their relationship with the state is veiled.

Censorship backfires

Banning Trump from social media, whatever the intention, will inevitably look like an act of political suppression to his supporters, to potential supporters and even to some critics who worry about the precedent being set.

In fact, to many it will smack of vengeful retaliation by the “elites”.

Consider these two issues. They may not seem relevant to some opponents but we can be sure they will fuel his supporters’ mounting sense of righteous indignation and grievance.

First, both the department of justice and the federal trade commission under Trump have opened anti-trust investigations of the major tech corporations to break up their monopolies. Last month the Trump administration initiated two anti-trust lawsuits – the first of their kind – specifically against Facebook.

Second, these tech giants have chosen to act against Trump now, just as Biden prepares to replace him in the White House. Silicon Valley was a generous funder of Biden’s election campaign and quickly won for itself positions in the incoming administration. The new president will decide whether to continue the anti-trust actions or drop them.

Whether these matters are connected or not, whether they are “fake news” or not, is beside the point. The decision by Facebook and Twitter to bar Trump from its platforms can easily be spun in his supporters’ minds as an opportunistic reprisal against Trump for his efforts to limit the excesses of these overweening tech empires.

This is a perfect illustration of why curbs on political speech – even of the most irresponsible kind – invariably backfire. Censorship of major politicians will always be contested and are likely to generate opposition and stoke resentment.

Banning Trump won’t end conspiracy theories on the American right. It will intensify them, reinforce them, embolden them.

Obnoxious symptom

So in the cost-beneft calculus, censoring Trump is almost certain to further polarise an already deeply divided American society, amplify genuine grievances and conspiracy theories alike, sow greater distrust towards political elites, further fracture an already broken political system and ultimately rationalise political violence.

The solution is not to crack down on political speech, even extreme and irresponsible speech, if it does not break the law. Trump is not the cause of US political woes, he is one obnoxious symptom.

The solution is to address the real causes, and tackle the only too justified resentments that fuelled Trump’s rise and will sustain him and the US right in defeat. Banning Trump – just like labelling his supporters “a basket of deplorables” – will prove entirely counter-productive.

Fixing a broken system

Meaningful reform will be no simple task. The US political system looks fundamentally broken – and has been for a long time.

It will require a much more transparent electoral system. Big donor money will have to be removed from Congressional and presidential races. Powerful lobbies will need to be ousted from Washington, where they now act as the primary authors of Congressional legislation promoting their own narrow interests.

The old and new media monopolies – the latter our new public square – will have to be broken up. New, publicly funded and publicly accountable media models must be developed that reflect a greater pluralism of views.

In these ways, the public can be encouraged to become more democratically engaged, active participants in their national and local politics rather than alienated onlookers or simple-minded cheerleaders. Politicians can be held truly accountable for their decisions, with an expectation that they serve the public interest, not the interests of the most powerful corporations.

The outcome of such reforms, as surveys of the American public’s preferences regularly show, would be much greater social and economic equality. Joblessness, home evictions and loss of medical cover would not stalk so many millions of Americans as they do now, during a pandemic. In this environment, the wider appeal of a demagogue like Trump would evaporate.

If this all sounds like pie-in-the-sky idealism, that in itself should serve as a wake-up call, highlighting just how far the US political system is from the liberal democracy it claims to be.

The Coming War on Wealth and the Wealthy

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Here’s looking at you, Federal Reserve–thanks for perfecting ‘legalized looting’ and neofeudalism in America.

The problem with pushing a pendulum to its maximum extreme on one end is that it will swing back to the other extreme minus a tiny bit of friction.

America has pushed wealth/income inequality, unfairness and legalized looting to the maximum extreme. Now it will experience the swing back to the other extreme. This will manifest in a number of ways, one of which is a self-organizing populist war on wealth and the wealthy.

To say the system is rigged to benefit the already-wealthy and powerful is a gross understatement. Take the tax code as an example–thousands of pages of arcane tax breaks and giveaways passed by a thoroughly corrupted Congress and thousands more pages of arcane regulations and legal precedents.

How many pages apply to the bottom 95% of American taxpayers? Very few. There’s the standard deductions for mortgage interest, healthcare costs, etc., but virtually no other tax breaks. Very few pages apply to even the 99%–go talk to a CPA and you’ll find there are no more tax breaks for a sole proprietor making $500,000 in earned income than than there are for a sole proprietor making $50,000.

99.9% of the tax code benefits the top 0.1% and the corporations, LLCs and philanthro-capitalist foundations and trusts they own / control. Stripped of artifice and spin, America’s tax code is nothing but legalized looting. This is only one small slice of the entire pie of legalized looting, of course, but it’s one we can all understand.

A sole proprietor pays 15.3% in Social Security and Medicare taxes. Why don’t America’s billionaires pay 15.3% in Social Security and Medicare taxes? Aren’t Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid the bedrock social safety net programs of the American people? Then why does a struggling sole proprietor pay 15.3% tax to support these essential programs and billionaires pay essentially zero?

There’s a term for this disparity / injustice / unfairness: legalized looting. The super-wealthy pay essentially zero percent of their income and wealth to the programs that provide basic economic security for the disabled/elderly citizenry, while Jose the sole proprietor pays 15.3% of every dollar he earns.

So explain to us again why Mr. Buffett can’t afford to pay 15.3% of every dollar of his income to help fund basic economic security for the disabled/elderly. In a system of even the most basic fairness, every dollar of income would be taxed at the same rate. In a system of even the most basic fairness, those with incomes of $100 million would pay the same 15.3% Social Security and Medicare tax as the sole proprietor earning $100,000.

Needless to say, if this most basic fairness was applied to America’s wealthy and powerful, these programs would not be facing insolvency.

If Joe the sole proprietor hits the bigtime, he pays 32% federal tax over $165,000, 35% over $210,000 and 37% over $524,000. If we add 15.3% to 37%, we get 52.3%. How many of America’s super-wealthy / billionaires pay 52% in Social Security-Medicare and income taxes? Zero.

Could America’s super-wealthy / billionaires afford to pay 52%? Of course they could–they own the majority all financial assets and skim the majority of all income. But they won’t, because the system is rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many via legalized looting.

It isn’t just the inequality of ownership of capital and power that enrages the oppressed; it’s the blatant unfairness of our neofeudal / neocolonial system. As I explained in Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012) and Welcome to Neocolonialism, Exploited Peasants! (October 21, 2016), the Financial Nobility have “come home” and applied the same rapacious exploitation they perfected in colonialism to the domestic populace.

Here’s looking at you, Federal Reserve–thanks for perfecting legalized looting and neofeudalism in America.

The gulf between the lavishly praised American ideals and the putrid, corrupt reality of America’s neofeudal system is wider than the Grand Canyon. As the pendulum accelerates to an extreme equal but opposite to the current extremes of unfairness, exploitation and legalized looting, those who have suffered the consequences of this systemic inequality will find expression in whatever ways are available.

Since it’s difficult to get to the protected compounds of the super-wealthy, the signifiers of the merely wealthy will offer readily available targets. The new Tesla won’t just get keyed; it will be “reworked,” to the great satisfaction of the “workers.”

Please note that I am not promoting a war on wealth and the wealthy, I am merely pointing out that it is as inevitable as the gravity pulling the pendulum.

The war on wealth and the wealthy will manifest politically, socially and economically. It won’t be a tightly controlled, top-down movement. It will be spontaneous, self-organizing and unquenchable.

If you don’t understand why a war on wealth and the wealthy is inevitable, please study this chart: the way of the Tao is reversal.

Why do hypocritical officials violate their own COVID rules?

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By Jon Rappoport

Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com

The latest example of hypocrisy is Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus advisor. It turns out she traveled to meet her family for Thanksgiving after telling Americans not to travel, not to gather with family outside their immediate households.

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, told the public they should celebrate Thanksgiving outdoors. Then he was caught having dinner, indoors, at a restaurant, unmasked, with 12 people.

There are other examples.

The usual explanation: these officials are arrogant and believe they’re above the law. They want to thumb their noses at the little people.

Yes, no doubt. But a more direct reason is staring us in the face.

The hypocritical officials know the whole COVID pandemic is a fraud.

They know there is no danger.

They know the lockdowns are unnecessary.

That’s why these officials break their own rules.

Why would they expose themselves to “the virus,” unless they knew they were safe?

Some of them believe they’re trapped in a political apparatus that offers no exit. They must go along with the show. They must participate in the fraud because, for example, federal dollars flow into their states, and those dollars are contingent on “playing the COVID game.”

Other officials have been bribed, blackmailed, threatened.

Regardless, they know they can flout their own rules because there is no health risk, no danger.

The risk is on the level of betting on a boxing match, when the bout is fixed, and you know who will win.

People will say, “These officials aren’t smart enough to figure out COVID is a fraud.”

You don’t have to be smart, you don’t have to understand all the intricate details of the fake test, the fake case and death numbers based on the test. You just need to understand enough.

You just need to be clued in.

This would suggest the COVID fraud is an open secret, shared by many in power. I believe that is exactly the case.

For purposes of comparison, consider a level of “secret understanding” slightly above that of politicians. Government scientists.

These scientists are fully aware that the PCR test for COVID is a complete hoax—for reasons I’ve detailed over the past nine months. Therefore, the scientists also know the case numbers based on those tests are fraudulent. And they know the case numbers are used as the rationale for the lockdowns.

That’s a lot of knowing. That’s a lot of “open secret.”

Here’s another comparison. PCR techs in labs all over the world, who are running the test, are fully cognizant of the crimes they’re committing every day—by utilizing “too many cycles” and therefore destroying any shred of validity when diagnosing ANYTHING.

Sharing this open secret among themselves, they otherwise remain silent.

Getting the picture?

The open secret of the COVID fraud isn’t confined to a dozen people in a sealed room. It’s high and wide. It’s understood by many in positions of power and responsibility, all over the world.

You can add your own lists of “secret sharers.” Mainstream physicians, for example. Physicians who are in charge of administering the COVID vaccines they know are unnecessary and dangerous. They also remain silent. So do certain news media people.

And since there are so many people who know the real score, we can begin to see the degree and extent of complicity that is driving the whole pandemic hoax.

This isn’t only a small conspiracy of movers and shakers who planned it and launched it.

This is a very wide-ranging conspiracy of silence.

“Don’t blame me. I’m just following orders.”

“But you know COVID is a total fraud.”

“Of course I know.”

“And you know others who know.”

“Many others.”

“Case closed.”

Which is to say, case WIDE OPEN.

The COVID situation is directly analogous to the Nazi, USSR, and Chinese bureaucracies; faceless workers passing on and obeying orders.

Many of the workers know those orders, no matter how they are dressed up, are arbitrary and evil.

The orders are initiated to destroy lives and freedom, and are transferred through the human machinery of The Complicit Silent Ones.

The Top 10%’s Bubble Is About to Burst

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

When the top 10%’s bubble pops in 2021, the loss of illusions/delusions of security and wealth will be shattering to all those who believed artifice and illusory “wealth” were real.

A great many people are living in bubbles that are about to pop. The largest bubble is the one inhabited by people who complacently believe in time travel, i.e. that the world of 2019 is about to replace the nightmare of 2020 and we can all go back to our carefree debt-funded consumption frenzy and illusions of ever-greater wealth forever and ever.

The greater one’s sense of security, the more durable the bubble. Those in America’s top 10% who have reaped virtually all the gains in income and wealth of the past 20 years live in a bubble that they view as unbreakable: no matter what problems arise, their personal income and wealth is secured by the government, central bank, etc.

Put another way, the top 10% are confident their position atop the wealth-power pyramid is secure no matter what happens. Any dip in stocks, bonds, real estate, bat guano futures, etc. that causes their personal wealth to decline (horrors!) will be instantly bought because the Federal Reserve will print another couple trillion dollars and funnel it into risk assets, as it has done for the past 20 years.

Any spot of bother in the gravy trains that fund the top 10%–local and state government, universities, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Department of Defense, Wall Street, hedge funds, venture capital, etc.– will be doused with trillions of dollars borrowed or printed into existence by the Treasury or Fed. No matter what spot of bother arises, the solution–more trillions–is just a few keystrokes away.

The top 10% are supremely confident in the godlike powers of these agencies and solutions: the idea that these “solutions” become insoluble problems does not compute, just as a decline in asset valuations that doesn’t rebound within three weeks thanks to Fed intervention is firmly outside the realm of possibility.

The top 10% are also supremely confident in the rightness of their position atop the heap. That their position atop the heap is largely the result of a web of privilege and a long run of extraordinarily good fortune does not enter their bubble at all; in their bubble, their wealth, status, prestige and income are all the result of hard work and merit.

While this is certainly true for some, it is not true for all, and even those who scraped their way to the top the hard way do not recognize that their success over the past 20 years (and arguably the past 50 years) has been largely the result of a financialized rising tide raising all boats. In a Bull Market in virtually everything (except commodities), everyone is a hard-working genius who got it all via merit.

On top of this myopic belief that their success is all the result of their own endeavors rather than a tide of financialization, the top 10% are equally blind to the toxic consequences of the wealth/income inequality that has so richly benefited the few at the expense of the many. The idea that the bottom 90% might rebel against the financial / political system that has favored the already-wealthy for a generation is outside the top 10%’s realm of possibility.

But tides do not run in one direction forever, and a revolt against the unprecedented inequality that heavily favors the top 10% is not “impossible,” it’s a certainty. The top 10% are accustomed to being admired and respected for their accomplishments, expertise, wise investing and professional acumen. They are accustomed to viewing themselves as the essential technocrat class that keeps the U.S. system functioning.

The problem with this self-congratulatory perspective is the U.S. system is now in thrall to process rather than results. The technocrat class has been trained to follow needlessly complex procedures and compliance processes as the path to professional advancement while avoiding accountability for the increasingly dismal results of America’s bloated, sclerotic, insider-dominated systems.

All this needless complexity will be jettisoned once printing/borrowing trillions become the problem rather than the solution. The bottom 90% will demand not just a fairer distribution of income and wealth, they will also demand a system that actually functions for the greater social good rather than for insiders, parasites, leeches and technocrat processors who declare victory not from results but from their success in following approved processes / narratives.

Once costs must be cut and results take precedence over process, much of the technocrat class will find itself replaced by automated software. Those that remain will be valued for getting results by whatever means are available, up to and including ignoring all compliance procedures and bureaucratic box-ticking.

The top 10%–the rentier-technocrat class–will find the bottom 90% can no longer pay their rent, insurance, etc.–all the “services” that employ and enrich the top 10%. In other words, the losses as unproductive complexity unravels will finally fall on the top 10%, many of whom have been protected from exposure to market forces and risk.

Lastly, the top 10%’s ownership of assets will be crushed by asset deflation as insolvency can no longer be papered over by liquidity. Assets that are the foundation of top 10% wealth (that the bottom 90% own very little of) will go bidless as phantom wealth dissipates into the thin air from whence it came.

The top 10% reckon they’re untouchable, safe and protected in their asset lifeboats, and the sinking of the 90% won’t affect them. The top 10%’s bubble is about to burst. Not only will their lifeboats prove unstable, every level of government will come after whatever is left as taxes will soar on virtually every form of income and wealth.

Unlike the bottom 60%, who have few illusions about the rampant unfairness and predation of real-world America, the top 10%’s bubble is 90% illusion seasoned with 10% absolute delusion. The comfortable are about to experience some of the discomfort that is everyday life for the bottom 60%, and an increasing percentage of the next 30% who still aspire to fantasies of middle-class security will find social mobility is an escalator down.

We cannot print wealth, or borrow it into existence. All we can print/borrow is artifice, phantom representations of illusory “wealth” that will vanish into thin air, in a reverse of how the “money” was created–out of thin air.

When the top 10%’s bubble pops in 2021, the loss of illusions/delusions of security and wealth will be shattering to all those who believed artifice and illusory “wealth” were real. What’s real is the tide of financialization and globalization reversed over a year ago. The tide is now running out, but few loading their “wealth” into lifeboats have noticed–yet.

In An Insane World, Revolution Is The Moderate Position

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose mass murder for profit and power.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the globe-spanning power alliance that is perpetrating most of that mass murder on the world stage today.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of secretive government agencies which have extensive histories of committing horrific crimes.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to say that everyone ought to have a basic standard of living instead of being deprived of food, shelter and medicine if they have the wrong imaginary numbers in their bank account.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of a small class of elites who use their vast fortunes to manipulate our entire society toward their advantage.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want plutocrats and government agencies to stop deliberately manipulating people’s minds using mass media propaganda.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want everyone to have an equal chance of getting their voice heard in our information ecosystem instead of a few select power-serving lackeys.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want a society that is ruled by the many for the benefit of the many instead of one that is run by the few for the benefit of the few.

It is very normal, sane and healthy to want a world where everyone has what they need to live, where everyone is free to do, say and think whatever they like as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else, and where nobody is being murdered by powerful governments. This is a very basic, intuitive, common sense desire to have for yourself and for your fellow human beings; it’s wanting for your society what you want for yourself.

Yet people who promote policies which are aimed at creating this kind of world are consistently marginalized and dismissed as radicals and extremists. It’s okay to say you oppose war in principle, but if you oppose any specific acts of warmongering being perpetrated by your government you’ll get labeled a Russian asset, a dictator apologist and all sorts of other pejorative labels which exist solely to justify keeping you off of mainstream platforms. It’s okay to think we should live in peaceful collaboration with each other and our ecosystem, but if you promote specific policies to make that happen you’re an evil commie, a class warrior and a moonbat in the same way.

Simply advocating sanity over insanity gets you shoved out of sight and out of mind by the narrative managers responsible for preserving a world order that is stark raving insane from top to bottom. If you oppose the systems exploited by the ruling power establishment which murders, exploits and oppresses people at home and abroad all day every day while destroying the very ecosystem we depend on for survival, then you are branded a lunatic and your wrongthink quarantined so as not to infect the mainstream herd.

This dynamic is made possible by the fact that the powerful are constantly pouring their wealth and influence into manufacturing the collective delusion that madness is sanity and sickness is health. The plutocrat-controlled political class and the plutocrat-owned media class feed the public an unceasing stream of propaganda aimed at convincing them that capitalism is totally working, that western imperialism is a kooky conspiracy theory, and that the military, police and politicians are our friends. This is what’s constantly being done by mainstream news media, and with varying degrees of subtlety it’s what is being done by every show on television and every movie churned out by Hollywood as well.

But that’s all it is: a collective propaganda-induced delusion. In reality it is the mainstream promoters of the establishment-authorized status quo who are the violent extremists, and it is those who desire health and sanity who are the moderates.

The madness of our world will necessarily continue for as long as we are unable to collectively find our way out of it, and we will be unable to collectively find our way out of it for as long as they are able to keep us collectively confused about what is madness and what is sanity. About what is normal and what is abnormal. About what is moderate and what is extreme.

If you oppose the madness of our world, don’t make an identity out of being a “radical”. Don’t build an egoic structure around life on the fringe. You are not radical, and your ideas should not be fringe. To live a revolutionary life, you should insist on the normality and mundaneness of your own position. Sanity should not be special and unusual, and we should not participate in the delusion that it is.

Let your life be an expression of the common sense ordinariness of revolution.

The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump

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The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom.

By Glenn Greenwald

Source: The Unz Review

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.

But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.

A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.

Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was far more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.

The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.

The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.

The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).

The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.

Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.

Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.

But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.

The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:

The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.

Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”

Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants which are thriving, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”

These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.

Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”

What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.

Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.

That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate in October: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”

https://twitter.com/CalebHowe/status/1321490281896812545

As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.

These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.

The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.

The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.

All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.

2021 is Already Optimized for Failure

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

One sure way to identify a system “optimized for failure” is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is “optimized for my success”.

I often discuss optimization here because it offers an insightful window into how systems become fragile and break down. When we optimize something, we’re aiming to get the most bang for our buck: maximize our efficiency, profit, productivity, etc., while minimizing our costs.

To maximize our goal, whatever it is–profits, power, whatever– we strip away redundancy and buffers because these add costs and don’t boost our desired output. They create resilience, i.e. the ability to survive disruptions, but the logic of optimization is relentless: get rid of all extraneous costs, because resilience doesn’t boost the bottom line.

This trade-off–trading resilience for optimization–looks brilliant when everything goes according to plan. But when events veer outside the narrow parameters of the optimized system, the system breaks down: supply chains break, safety procedures fail, and so on.

Even more consequentially, optimization strips away anti-fragility, Nassim Taleb’s term for the ability to not just survive disruptions but emerge stronger and more adaptable.

What happens when inflexible, sclerotic systems optimized to benefit self-serving insiders encounter chaotic turbulence or conditions outside the expected parameters? They collapse because the system is optimized for failure. Put another way: when a system is optimized to benefit insiders at the expense of resilience and anti-fragility, it is effectively optimized to fail because life is not programmable to a steady-state, predictable stability.

2021 is already optimized for failure in key ways:

1. The mRNA vaccines have not been properly tested to answer essential questions such as: can a vaccinated individual retain enough of the virus to infect an unvaccinated individual?

As I explained before, the only way to really test a viral vaccine is to put the vaccinated volunteers in a controlled setting saturated with the virus for many hours. If none of the volunteers have any virus in their post-exposure serological tests, then the vaccine works. If the volunteers still have the virus but didn’t become severely ill, this doesn’t mean they can’t infect others.

One of the problems is the goal of the Covid vaccine trials wasn’t to determine if the virus was eliminated by the volunteers’ immune system; the goal of the trials was to determine whether the vaccinated individuals became severely ill with Covid or not–with “severely ill” being conveniently left undefined.

Individuals who’d already had Covid and who took the vaccine were not tested separately for safety and after-effects, so this remains an unknown.

The unanswered questions about the vaccines’ real-world results will be answered in due time, but not in the lab; they’ll be answered in a public-health “experiment” without precedent.

If you wanted to design a testing process that was optimized for failure, you’d end up with this haphazard, hurried process careening toward approval. The trials and testing of the Covid vaccines are not equivalent to those applied to previous generations of vaccines.

The bigger the claims and the harder the sell, the greater the number of red flags raised. If a product works as wonderfully as advertised, it will sell itself. If “consumers” have to be coerced into buying the product, that speaks volumes–whether we’re free to discuss it or not.

2. The fiscal-monetary “solution” being readied for 2021–print/borrow as many trillions as needed to prop up zombie corporations and obsolete institutions–is optimized for failure. The unstated goal here is to save everything that’s been rigged to benefit self-serving insiders and never mind the consequences: we’ve “proven” we can print infinite trillions with no ill effects.

This appears to be true until diminishing returns hit the wall and linear dynamics suddenly spin into non-linear semi-chaos. At that point, all the levers that we reckoned were god-like in their stability and power–the Treasury selling bonds which the Federal Reserve then buys, and all the other financial tricks and manipulations–no longer work as expected.

3. The sacrosanct “solutions” that we worship as secular gods–central bank-dominated “markets” and the machinery of politics–are both optimized for failure. The “market” and politics have both incentivized extremes of indebtedness, leverage, corruption, fraud and waste, all under the happy belief that the banquet of consequences will never be served. Alas, the tables are groaning with consequences that have been piling up for 12 long years of excess speculation, manipulation and happy-talk PR.

The policies of the past 20 years boil down to this: if we keep blowing ever-larger private-sector asset bubbles, rewarding the few who own most of these assets, this “wealth” will magically restore our economic health. This is of course completely delusional: by concentrating wealth in the hands ofthe few, the policies have also concentrated political power in these same hands.

Ours is a system perfected for extremes of inequality and corruption.

If you set out to design a social-political-economic system that was supremely optimized for failure, you’d end up with America’s status quo. Today’s financiers are like French nobles being led off in chains discussing their next glorious party, oblivious to the end-game just ahead. The political class are like the elites haggling over games in Rome’s Forum in 475 AD, months before what was left of the empire collapsed in a heap.

4. America’s social cohesion has been lost, leaving only empty platitudes, suppression and coercion. “We’re all in this together” shouts the captain of the galley as those chained to the oars are flogged to keep a thoroughly corrupt and illusory “growth” alive. With civic virtue lost to the moral corruption of maximizing private gain by any means available, the foundations of society have crumbled, as I explained in Moral Decay Leads to Collapse.

One sure way to identify a system optimized for failure is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is optimized for my success regardless of how many policies serve the infinite greed of insiders and how many red warning flags are ignored.