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So yeah basically we’re watching sociopathic oligarchs shore up more and more control over the global population and our electoral systems are rigged to prevent us from doing anything about it and our information systems are stacked to prevent mass-scale direct action against it.

You can’t vote your way out of a problem you never voted your way into in the first place. You can’t have a revolution while everyone is being successfully propagandized into accepting things as they are. Any solution is therefore going to have to come from somewhere they haven’t secured.

So we’re all just kind of watching this happen and hoping for what amounts to a miracle, or really a stack of miracles. What gives me hope is that I know humans have a lot of surprises within themselves that they haven’t even begun to explore yet. We might just get some miracles.

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The behavior of global oligarchic power structures makes a lot more sense when you see that it’s not as much a lucid elite conspiracy as it is a few barely-conscious humans compulsively acting out psychological dynamics within themselves that they don’t really understand. Elite conspiracies happen to be sure, but what’s ultimately driving them is not a complete and coherent vision for the future which takes all things into account but rather the simple egoic impulses of barely-evolved primates blindly trying to shore up control like chimps asserting dominance.

The sociopaths who rule our world are no more conscious of their own inner processes than your average serial killer…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You Counter Trumpism By Ending The Conditions Which Created It, Not With Authoritarian Policies

January 22, 2021

You Counter Trumpism By Ending The Conditions Which Created It, Not With Authoritarian Policies

The US political/media class have been pushing hard for more authoritarian policies to stave off the threat of “domestic terrorism” in the wake of the Capitol riot. President Biden, who was already working on rolling out new domestic terror policies well before January sixth, confirmed after the riot that he is making these new measures a priority. Political internet censorship is becoming increasingly normalized, anti-protest bills are being passed, and now we’re seeing liberals encouraged to form “digital armies” to spy on Trump supporters to report them to the authorities.

And an amazingly large percentage of the US population seems to have no problem with any of this, even in sectors of the political spectrum that should really know better by now.

“What else can we do?” they reason. “What other solution could there possibly be to the threat of dangerous fascists and conspiracy theorists continuing to gain power and influence?”

Well there’s a whole lot that can be done, and none of it includes consenting to sweeping new Patriot Act-like authoritarian measures or encouraging monopolistic Silicon Valley plutocrats to censor worldwide political speech. There’s just a whole lot of mass-scale narrative manipulation going on to keep it from being obvious to everyone.

The way to stem the tide of Trumpism (or fascism, or white supremacism, or Trump cultism, or whatever term you use for what you’re worried about here) is to eliminate the conditions which created it.

Trump was only able to launch his successful faux-populist campaign in the first place by exploiting the widespread pre-existing opinion that there was a swamp that needed draining, a corrupt political system whose leadership does not promote the interests of the people.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Unspoken Premise Of Modern Capitalism Is That The World Will Be Saved By Greedy Tech Oligarchs

December 29, 2020

The Unspoken Premise Of Modern Capitalism Is That The World Will Be Saved By Greedy Tech Oligarchs

Psychopathic neocon Nikki Haley is greasing the wheels for her 2024 presidential campaign by screaming that America has been taken over by socialism.

“2020 was the year socialism went mainstream,” Haley tweeted today. “The dangerous ideology, which has failed everywhere it has been tried and ruined countless lives, is on its way to becoming the default economic policy of the Democratic Party. This terrifying trend threatens the future of every American.”

Ah yes, America. The country where Republicans spend all day screaming that socialism is happening and Democrats spend all day making sure it never does.

Meanwhile, outside of Nikki Haley’s magical fantasy world where Joe Biden is ushering in a Marxist world order and Bernie Sanders is personally guillotining billionaires in Central Park, Americans are being denied financial support and healthcare even as millions are thrown out of work during the pandemic.

In reality, the world is still very much locked into zealous worship of the great god known as capitalism. And it is choking the world to death.

We live on a finite planet of finite resources with a finite ecosystem that has a finite capacity to absorb punishment without becoming uninhabitable. Science tells us we are fast approaching the breaking point at a debatable rate of acceleration. Depending on what scientists you believe we could get there in several decades, or it could be a whole lot sooner.

Capitalism, the predominant driving force of human behavior in our world right now, offers exactly two potential solutions to this dilemma. The first is to pretend the dilemma doesn’t exist, which is why a Venn diagram of climate denialism and support for capitalism is always going to be a near-perfect circle. The second is the entirely faith-based hope that some kind of sustainable technological innovation is going to save the day before our behavior drives us off the cliff of extinction.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Political and Social Conflict Is Accelerating: Here’s Why

November 26, 2019

Political and Social Conflict Is Accelerating: Here’s Why

All the status quo “fixes” only hasten the collapse of the status quo.

That economic, social and political conflict is accelerating is self-evident. What’s open to debate are the core drivers of conflict / disorder /unraveling.

Here’s the core self-reinforcing dynamic in my view:

1. The status quo elites can no longer mask soaring costs of essentials nor soaring wealth / income inequality between the top .01% (Oligarchs), the top 9.99% who enrich the Oligarchs with their discretionary spending and technocratic/managerial labor, and the bottom 90% who are rapidly losing ground on all fronts: economic, social and political.

2. The elites’ “fixes” to the social / political conflicts unleashed by the rigged financial system and winner take most economic order are politically expedient, meaning they don’t actually address the sources of conflict, they merely paper them over with PR as a means of preserving the elites’ wealth and power.

3. The elites’ fundamental financial “fix” is to create trillions in newly issued currency and distribute it to the banks, financiers, super-wealthy families and global corporations– the top .01% Oligarchs.

4. This “fix” accelerates the asymmetric distribution of wealth by enabling the already-wealthy to buy more productive assets, fund stock buybacks, etc., while forcing the bottom 90% to borrow money from the Oligarchs to make ends meet: the rich get richer, the poor get more indebted.

5. The only possible output of these inputs (political expediency to preserve the elites’ wealth and power, the creation and distribution to the Oligarch class of trillions in new currency) is the acceleration of the very erosion that fueled social / political conflicts in the first place. In effect, the elites’ “fixes” are accelerating the conflicts that will ultimately lead to their downfall.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

About Trump

November 17, 2019

About Trump

The timing is right for everyone to understand what Donald Trump is doing, and try to decrypt the ambiguity of how he is is doing it. The controversial President has a much clearer agenda than anyone can imagine on both foreign policy and internal affairs, but since he has to stay in power or even stay alive to achieve his objectives, his strategy is so refined and subtle that next to no one can see it. His overall objective is so ambitious that he has to follow random elliptic courses to get from point A to point B, using patterns that throw people off on their comprehension of the man. That includes most independent journalists and so-called alternative analysts, as much as Western mainstream fake-news publishers and a large majority of the population.

About his strategy, I could make a quick and accurate analogy with medication: most pills are designed to cure a problem, but come with an array of secondary after-effects. Well, Trump is using medication solely for their after-effects, while the first intent of the pill is what’s keeping him in power and alive. By the end of this article, you’ll see that this metaphor applies for just about every decision, move or declaration he’s made. Once you understand what Trump is about, you’ll be able to appreciate the extraordinary presidency he’s conducting, like no predecessor ever came close to match.

To start off, let’s clear the one aspect of his mission that is straightforward and terribly direct: he’s the first and only American President to ever address humanity’s worst collective flaw, its total ignorance of reality. Because medias and education are both controlled by the handful of billionaires that are running the planet, we don’t know anything about our history that’s been twisted dry by the winners, and we don’t have a clue about our present world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Incredible Shrinking Overton Window

November 4, 2019

The Incredible Shrinking Overton Window

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
~ Noam Chomsky

The plutocrat-owned narrative managers of the political/media class work constantly to shrink the Overton window, the spectrum of debate that is considered socially acceptable. They do this by framing more and more debates in terms of how the oligarchic empire should be sustained and supported, steering them away from debates about whether that empire should be permitted to exist at all.

They get people debating whether there should be some moderate changes made or no meaningful changes at all, rather than the massive, sweeping changes we all know need to be made to the entire system.

They get people debating whether they should elect a crook in a red hat or a crook in a blue hat, rather than whether or not they should be forced to elect crooks.

They get people debating violations of government secrecy laws, not whether the government has any business keeping those secrets from its citizenry in the first place.

They get people debating how internet censorship should take place and whom should be censored, rather than whether any internet censorship should occur.

They get people debating how and to what extent government surveillance should occur, not whether the government has any business spying on its citizens.

They get people debating how subservient and compliant someone needs to be in order to not get shot by a police officer, rather than whether a police officer should be shooting people for those reasons at all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Humans Are Waking Up

August 26, 2019

The Humans Are Waking Up

You run into a lot of despair in this line of work. The more you learn about the mechanisms of power, the more hopeless things seem at first glance.

The political system is totally locked down, with anyone who tries to upend the status quo being aggressively sabotaged by the mass media and their own political party.

Technology, which futurists have long heralded as the deus ex machina which will liberate humanity from its self-destructive ways, is owned by plutocrats with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and is pervasively infiltrated by murderous intelligence agencies from top to bottom.

Even attempts to circulate information about the dangers of war, ecocide and oligarchy are consistently sabotaged by internet censorship, blanket de-platforming and mass media propaganda, and even imprisonment if one’s truth-telling becomes too successful.

Still, I remain unwaveringly hopeful. Not because I foresee any of those massive obstacles vanishing at any time in the near future, but because I see an escape route that none of them are blocking.

I have had a great many bizarre and utterly unanticipated experiences, some of them ongoing, which assure me beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity is capable of far, far more than our consensus worldview about ourselves accounts for. Most of those experiences I will probably never share publicly, because, while I often venture well off the beaten path in my commentary, if I discussed those experiences people will think I’m way more insane than they already believe me to be. But I don’t mind sharing here that I know from my own experience that humans are capable of radically and permanently shifting into a much healthier and efficacious relationship with mental narrative, which happens to be the mechanism by which existing power structures keep us locked down.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How a NeoCon-Backed “Fact Checker” Plans to Wage War on Independent Media

January 12, 2019

NEWSGUARD EXPOSED

How a NeoCon-Backed “Fact Checker” Plans to Wage War on Independent Media

As Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States.

MINNEAPOLIS — Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.

While a few, relatively uneventful months in the online news sphere have come and gone since Fly made this ominous warning, it appears that the neoconservatives and other standard bearers of the military-industrial complex and the U.S. oligarchy are now poised to let loose their latest digital offensive against independent media outlets that seek to expose wrongdoing in both the private and public sectors.

As MintPress News Editor-in-Chief Mnar Muhawesh recently wrote, MintPress was informed that it was under review by an organization called Newsguard Technologies, which described itself to MintPress as simply a “news rating agency” and asked Muhawesh to comment on a series of allegations, several of which were blatantly untrue. However, further examination of this organization reveals that it is funded by and deeply connected to the U.S. government, neo-conservatives, and powerful monied interests, all of whom have been working overtime since the 2016 election to silence dissent to American forever-wars and corporate-led oligarchy.

More troubling still, Newsguard — by virtue of its deep connections to government and Silicon Valley — is lobbying to have its rankings of news sites installed by default on computers in U.S. public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Surveillance State Moves: The U.S. Will Lose Liberty Before (And If) It’s Restored

December 3, 2018

More Surveillance State Moves: The U.S. Will Lose Liberty Before (And If) It’s Restored

In previous articles, I outlined the three methods the globalists are most likely to use (in order of preference) to finish off the U.S. and usher in their Globalist-Corporatist-Oligarchic world government. They are as such:

A lethal bio-engineered virus
An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) “Event” – defined as either an attack by a foreign entity (such as North Korea, China, or Russia), or a “domestic self-infliction” subsequently blamed on one or more of the listed former.
A nuclear war

For skeptics and rabid naysayers who attacked previous articles regarding the threat posed by North Korea outlined over the past several years, information from the U.S. Air Force was posted the other day that may make you want to “reanalyze” your stance. As I mentioned before, I’m just the messenger: the information has been gathered over the years by men such as Pry and Graham who headed the former Committee to brief Congress on the EMP Threat against the United States.

That same Committee was de-funded (in this administration), and rendered defunct. According to the Air Force 2018 report, the mothballing of the Committee was premature. The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard wrote an article released 11/30/2018 entitled, “Military warns EMP attack could wipe out America, democracy, world order.” Here’s an excerpt:

“In an extraordinary and sobering report meant to educate the nation on a growing threat, a new military study warns that an electromagnetic pulse weapon attack such as those developed by North Korea, Russia, and Iran could essentially challenge the United States and displace millions.

“Based on the totality of available data,” said the report from the Air Force’s Air University and provided to Secrets, “an electromagnetic spectrum attack may be a threat to the United States, democracy, and the world order.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sacrificing Children: Pesticides in the Time of Oligarchy

November 30, 2018

Sacrificing Children: Pesticides in the Time of Oligarchy

Photo Source Andy Powell | CC BY 2.0

Oligarchy is bad for children’s health

All past civilizations protected children. It was self-evident that healthy children assured continuity, security and happiness.

However, machine-powered civilizations give the illusion corporations, oligarchies, and the government control everything. Children fade in this confused vision. The disproportional power of the few dehumanizes everything, including children.

Oligarchs control medicine, drugs, chemicals, farming and politics. If their products harm children, their lobbyists, scientists and politicians cover up the truth.

Delaney Clause

In the United States, this oligarchic control has flooded the country with thousands of chemicals, most of them untested and potentially harmful to life. This fact angered Democratic Congressman James Delaney from New York. He found it intolerable that America in the 1950s was bathed in around 50,000 chemicals.

He convinced Congress to eliminate cancer-causing chemicals in food. He authored the 1958 Food Additives Amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act — the Delaney Clause.

Suddenly, agribusiness, chemical, and drug industries faced a law that challenged their monopolies to do whatever pleased them with food. They set up roadblocks to the enforcement of the law. They purchased scientists to denounce the controversial law.

The General Accountability Office, the least partisan organization in the federal government, took up the Delaney Clause. The December 11, 1981 GAO report put the controversy in this light:

“The heart of the issue centers on Delaney’s “zero-risk” concept that no substance, in any amount, may be intentionally added to food if it has been shown to cause cancer.”

Science lipstick

The Reagan administration of the 1980s did not enforce the law. And the Clinton administration of the 1990s killed it. But Bill Clinton marshalled the power of science to cover up his shameful policy. He paid the National Academy of Science to prepare the ground.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Does Any of This Make Sense?

November 16, 2018

Does Any of This Make Sense?

Does any of this make sense? No. But it’s so darn profitable to the oligarchy, it’s difficult to escape debt-serfdom and tax-donkey servitude.

We rarely ask “does this make any sense?” of things that are widely accepted as beneficial— or if not beneficial, “the way it is,” i.e. it can’t be changed by non-elite (i.e. the bottom 99.5%) efforts.

Of the vast array of things that don’t make sense, let’s start with borrowing from future income to spend more today. This is of course the entire foundation of consumer economies such as the U.S.: the number of households which buy a car or house with cash is near-zero, unless 1) they just sold a bubble-valuation house and paid off their mortgage in escrow or 2) they earned wealth via fiscal prudence, i.e. the avoidance of debt and the exultation of saving.

Debt has this peculiar characteristic: it has to be paid back with interest.Depending on the rate of interest and the length of the loan, this translates into a mind-numbing reality: borrowing $100 can cost $200 once interest is factored in.

One might reckon that people would be cautious about paying two or three times more for something by using debt rather than cash. But consumer economies are based not just on debt, but on TINA (there is no alternative) and on the timeless seduction of getting something now and paying for it later.

College students are frightened by scary stories of permanent impoverishment and social degradation if they don’t borrow a small fortune to buy a diploma (never mind if you actually learn anything remotely useful or wise; you’re not buying an education, you’re buying an accreditation of your ability to grind through a bureaucratic system without any unhealthy questioning if “higher education” actually makes any sense. Hint: it doesn’t, unless you’re skimming wealth off the poor students.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As the fracking protesters show, a people’s rebellion is the only way to fight climate breakdown

October 24, 2018

As the fracking protesters show, a people’s rebellion is the only way to fight climate breakdown

Our politicians, under the influence of big business, have failed us. As they take the planet to the brink, it’s time for disruptive, nonviolent disobedience

Illustration by Bill Bragg

It is hard to believe today, but the prevailing ethos among the educated elite was once public service. As the historian Tony Judt documented in Ill Fares the Land, the foremost ambition among graduates in the 1950s and 60s was, through government or the liberal professions, to serve their country. Their approach might have been patrician and often blinkered, but their intentions were mostly public and civic, not private and pecuniary.

Today, the notion of public service seems as quaint as a local post office. We expect those who govern us to grab what they can, permitting predatory banks and corporations to fleece the public realm, then collect their reward in the form of lucrative directorships. As the Edelman Corporation’s Trust Barometer survey reveals, trust worldwide has collapsed in all major institutions, and government is less trusted than any other.

As for the economic elite, as the consequences of their own greed and self-interest emerge, they seek, like the Roman oligarchs fleeing the collapse of the western empire, only to secure their survival against the indignant mob. An essay by the visionary author Douglas Rushkoff this summer, documenting his discussion with some of the world’s richest people, reveals that their most pressing concern is to find a refuge from climate breakdown, and economic and societal collapse. Should they move to New Zealand or Alaska? How will they pay their security guards once money is worthless? Could they upload their minds on to supercomputers? Survival Condo, the company turning former missile silos in Kansas into fortified bunkers, has so far sold every completed unit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russian Oligarchs are a Problem, But Let’s Not Forget American Ones

October 5, 2018

Russian Oligarchs are a Problem, But Let’s Not Forget American Ones

Photo Source Matt Brown | CC BY 2.0

Oligarchs the world over have long been destabilizing economies and shaping governing bodies for their own benefit. For instance, if we turn to the supposed ‘birth of democracy’ in Ancient Athens, elites (called ‘citizens’) of the polis ruled over the mass populace (the common people of the hoi polloi). Plato had instilled in many Greeks at the time (and this is an idea seen in practice from fascist lies of white supremacy to false justifications for criminal wars) a faith in the supremacy of ruling class that the elites could justify lying to the hoi polloi,masking the truth the public was too ‘stupid’, too ‘ignorant’ to comprehend behind pathos and logos. The specific role of the noble lie, as presented by Plato’s Socrates is to have a good effect on the polity by clearly defining social classes and position within the social hierarchy for all. Never a supporter of democracy, in the Politicsand in De Anima, Plato’s student Aristotle presents a model of an oligarchic meritocracy (or in his preferred term for the rule of the few, an aristocracy), a social organization that depends upon those with ‘lesser’ souls (or those less noble, less filled with virtue than with vice), and those of the working classes especially had to be less concerned with the metaphysical and more concerned with their material labor. Over centuries of European and Anglo-American ‘democracies’, such positions on the deliberate maintenance of popular ignorance (typically coupled with or contributing to widespread compliance or complicity) through administrative means and misinformation have been re-articulated from Machiavelli to Mandeville to McCarthy, Robespierre to Rumsfeld, Burke to Bannon, ‘Socrates’ to Stalin.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“No One Will Stop Us” – Venezuela’s Maduro Slams Trump’s UN Speech Which Hinted At Coup

September 26, 2018

“No One Will Stop Us” – Venezuela’s Maduro Slams Trump’s UN Speech Which Hinted At Coup

During his Tuesday UN General Assembly address President Trump held nothing back in terms of excoriating the socialist pariah state of Venezuela and leader Nicolas Maduro.

“Not long ago, Venezuela was one of the richest countries on Earth,” Trump said. “Today, socialism has bankrupted the oil-rich nation and driven its people into abject poverty.”

Trump continued, “Virtually everywhere socialism or communism has been tried, it has produced suffering, corruption, and decay. Socialism’s thirst for power leads to expansion, incursion, and oppression. All nations of the world should resist socialism and the misery that it brings to everyone.”

The US president blamed Venezuela’s collapsed economy and worthless currency, which has created a humanitarian crisis resulting in some 2 million citizens fleeing the country in recent years on the “Maduro regime and its Cuban sponsors”.

But a usually defiant Maduro, who didn’t attend the UN Assembly in New York for fear of his safety, slammed the speech via Twitter, stating in Spanish, “The empire points to us because it knows that we are on the socialist road to economic recovery.” He shot back at Trump: “And no one will stop us in our efforts to achieve self-sustainability.”

Also in response to Trump’s speech, Venezuela’s foreign minister Jorge Arreaza said Venezuela was a sovereign country and will continue to exercising the right to choose its own path. “It’s not the problem of the United States,” Arreaza said during a UN news conference in response to Trump’s listing a litany of the small Latin American country’s pressing problems.

Maduro has further called Trump’s mention of more sanctions to come against Maduro’s wife and his inner circle an “imperialist” intervention by “oligarchs”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Media and Our “Ignorant, Credulous and Propagandized People”

August 9, 2018

The Media and Our “Ignorant, Credulous and Propagandized People”

I find it sad and sickening that most Americans, and the corporate media that shapes them, are more concerned about the effects of Russian “meddling” on our “democracy” than they are about our own home-grown oligarchs, who are not only meddling, but have bought Congress and turned this wonderful democracy we’ve been told we have into a joke—an anti-democratic cesspool.

In my view, the Koch brothers, among a host of others, present more danger to the U.S. than Putin could ever dream of. Christ, when are people ever going to accept the truth; the real danger is home-borne?

Like any other disease on the Centers for Disease Control’sfluctuating, potentially terminal watch list.

All nations fail on their own accord—it doesn’t take meddling from abroad when the cards are stacked against the oppressed in their own nation.

People watch too much TV. It’s sad they choose to ignore how duped they are by corporate media.

A mass uprising against the American oligarchs would leave Putin with nothing. After all, his American friends are our real enemies. Trump doesn’t even register, because he’s an incompetent flailing in the wind. Paul Ryan counts. Mitch McConnell counts. They’re Koch friends and benefactors, and business with Russia counts for them. They’re all for it, as long as it’s done properly—oligarch-to-oligarch, and in a far-less messy tyle than Trump’s deals.

You simply cannot trust the wall of obfuscation that surrounds us now, filtered through corporate media. With the party elites fighting each other over the “spoils of globalization” and the press-release media following along, the situation is untenable for ordinary men and women who cannot keep up with the cost of housing, education, health care and a Sundae at the local ice cream parlor.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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