Astonishing how Johnstone churns out first-rate, extremely well written substack posts, that even include a good amount of citations, and does so on a near daily basis. She's like the Van Gogh of substack writers - we know Van Gogh in a short period of 10 years painted about 900 paintings. Will Caitlin surpass Van Gogh?!
Well done Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley. An inspired piece of writing and research, such a comment coming from an experienced horse rider, 90 years of age.
Such detailed writing keeps we younger readers well acquainted with the path that this foolish world is taking. And yes, we do know why, evident in today’s writings.
However, on a positive note, I have submitted my application to be the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, as an experienced rider is desperately needed when all we have seen
in my lifetime has been Conquest, War, Famine and Death.
As a horseman, my name will be ‘Rationality'…. a horseman there to counter the other Four, but primarily to promote the supremacy of reason, logic and truth.
I will disagree with the assumption that they believe their own lies. Some if not many of them anyway. Otherwise why do they repeatedly refuse debate and discussion with actual honest journalists and others? Which raises the questions like Gary Webb, Danny Casalaro and many more like them. Gary who I spoke with a few times had two entry wounds to the back of the skull I believe and he death was declared a suicide. Read his book the dark alliance.
Definitely read Gary Webb’s book. Another reason they refuse debate with honest journalists is that in doing so the honest ones get a tiny platform for a tiny amount of time. Media ownership wants them to be completely invisible and unheard. Finally, I have read before that Gary Webb was murdered, but have never seen anything as detailed as what you say in your comment. If you have a cite I could look at, I would really appreciate it if you could share it. Thank you.
Here's a short Reddit convo on the matter of Gary Webb dying with two bullet holes to the brain (fwiw; I don't have any definitive info, but good points are made all around here): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940768
I read the thread. Don’t know what would be worse. The thought that the bastards drove this young man with a family to suicide, or that they killed him. But, where were the entry points of the two shots? If they were in the back of his head, it makes the official suicide determination seem a lot less plausible to me. In any case, thanks again, Karen.
Reminds me of the Enron executive who supposedly ran his car off the road, shot himself twice in the back of the head, and then threw the gun three meters away. Another suicide, of course.
I always took Chomsky's response as not just saying they believe in what they're "saying" - rather, they believe in what they're "doing". Which includes saying and behaving the way they're expected to.
Yeah... uh huh... God gives you free will but will burn your soul forever if you don't do what he wants. That's why I don't buy into the story about such a colossal dill hole. Stay on your knees for your sky daddy.
I spent over a decade in government and longer than that on accountability work.
So I can tell you that many of exactly the same class and careerism and power dynamics determine who rises and who is appointed to powerful government positions. Also, who is ostracized as "a problem", marginalized, ground down, forced out, and/or fired.
I worked on a case where the State's lead nuclear regulator blew the whistle and immediately was stripped of work, demoted, re-assigned in retaliation- literally - to a broom closet. State officials then pursued sham disciplinary actions. They were so stupid that they claimed that toll receipts from the Garden State Parkway were evidence that the whistleblower was spending time gambling in Atlantic City, when he really was driving to the nuke plant!
An excellent and extraordinarily detailed article, although the structure he described is very familiar to me, since I was a reader of Pravda and other Soviet state-published press, not to mention the former communist centrally published and proofread printed and broadcast media published in my own country !
I can already feel the "smell" when press hyenas inform the public in biased, state-controlled articles dictated by secret services in no small part ! Well, around the US press, I feel a stinking dead smell like the last time I smelled in an American forest, I found a badger that had been dead for days !
If someone seriously wants to delve into how the US uses its secret services to control, for example, German press workers, I would wholeheartedly recommend Udo Ulfkotte's book "Bought Journalists"! I would like to note that the author has left this world as if by order, after his pacemaker failed, what a coincidence!
Noam Chomsky wrote a piece in what used to be Progressive Magazine (I think), in which he cited a TV news reader in Russia who was removed from his job to attend re-education classes because he called the Russian troops in Afghanistan an “invasion.”
Chomsky contrasted the incident with the virtual impossibility of a similar occurrence in the U.S., with respect to the American war with Vietnam, precisely because, as he stated in the interview from Caitlin’s post, any American reporter who thought (correctly) that the U.S. had “invaded” Vietnam would never be in a position to make such an embarrassing (accurate) report.
All these things are tied together and are not by accident obviously. These things wouldn't bother me if these things were so effective. That people know these things and just shrug. They are used to it. Another psyop. Just like the movement against progressive ideas and those not supporting war.
Why is every mainstream journalist sound like a war hawk? The US government is a war machine. So when you are dealing with the US you make the country sound like the good guy in all cases, that they are right and just. Simple. That's what happens, especially at the start. Afterwards when things go on, you're allowed some criticism just to give the illusion of dissent. That's the part of feeding the journalists the narrative, imagine being paid and someone else already done your journalism for you. Easy.
This also ties to media influence and why voting is meaningless. You will never vote on anything meaningful. Like Clinton or any other mainstream politician or political party influencer, you are given candidates to represent you. They represent the empire. We are told which ideas are popular, even if they are absurd like your article about republicans and their perception of transgender influence. Democrats are no better with their identity politics. All minorities-all people should have equality. They stunk when it came to their campaign championing women's rights recently.
We are told what to think, what our values are to align with the party. Even if it is the antithesis. Both parties are antiintellectual. Schools are failing in the US. Both parties are pro war and pro wealth hoarding for the rich. You mentioned that the western left doesn't exist in any meaningful numbers. That's by design. Imagine two parties claiming to be opposites always end up agreeing on the same issues, producing them same results.
Journalists in the mainstram are just the tools used to advance the empire's interests. You call it manufacturing consent, that's what the mainstream journalists job is. Who are they talking to? Us. Who are they working for? The government. They sound like war progandists because everything boils down to pro war in a totalitarian state. Free speech is meaningless if there is no platform to be heard on. It is all geared to alter our perception to be pro war. Removing the knowledge of anti-us government regime change, alters people's perception.
These 15 points are tied together purposefully, as I mentioned.
To your point about every mainstream journalist (oxymoron alert) sounding like a war hawk, I think the effect of the rise of social media has been to necessitate more rigidity throughout the MSM. No American war has had a lockstep recitation of lies and disinformation to the extent that the Ukraine War has featured.
On antiintellectualism, that is a thread that goes back to to this country’s beginnings. Religion has no business in politics, and it has been not only tolerated, but encouraged and promoted and used for pandering by hucksters. Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer 59 years ago for Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in which he traced the predominant attitudes of many Americans’ irrational attraction to self-defeating policies. From Wikipedia:
Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.”[6]
Also, he described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."
I think this helps to explain blue-collar Trump loyalists.
Politics is just religion for people who wish to believe they've transcended politics. Charismatic competition, ignorance, and violence are the elements of which the state is built and no amount of feelings changes that fact.
Wikipedia's definition of anti-intellectualism is classist pro-PMC trash and any class that generates agency-free religious blather like "those who are considered to represent it" frankly deserves to be anti-ed.
Almost all mass media employees are merely public relations instruments for thinly shrouded power brokers. They launder and massage approved narrative information for public consumption and decant it to the masses like Kool-Aid, gladly doing the bidding for 30 pieces of silver and a Junior Membership in The Club.
If anyone doesn’t understand why Assange is locked away, prevented from defending himself in a court, Caitlin’s many examples of the media’s selective coverage explains it well.
The news networks and the national newspapers are sophisticated instruments of disinformation and cannot survive as such if the public fully grasps this.
Great effort is taken to dress the package as if it is the real thing. And these owned media have the benefit of past examples of real journalism. I.F. Stone, Edward Murrow, Martha Gellhorn all worked in a commercial medium that was not owned by oligarchs, and journalism was still a relatively apolitical calling. The NYTimes published The Pentagon Papers, which, to be fair, was inside information about the complete fabrications upon which the Vietnam War was based, and that was the work of a whistleblower, not of investigative journalism. And the Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal, which, to be fair, was only made possible when another insider leaked sensitive information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
So for all Millennials and X-gen readers and younger, if you want democracy, start with baby steps, and just close the doors of government to private money. If enough people demand it...
We need an uncorrupt "representative" government. That's what the US was founded on. What the US Constitution is all about. Representative government.
If you get rid of representative government, or shrink it to the point where it becomes entirely impotent, you will then end up with a society run by monopolistic corporations, ponzi scheme Wallstreet bankers, and privatized police and a corrupt judicial. The US is headed in that direction already, because the US government is corrupt and not representative. Getting rid of the government, or shrinking it to impotency, won't fix the problem.
I don’t think there’s any shame in recognizing the Constitution falls short of adequately protecting human rights. It’s become a quasi-religious article of faith that the Constitution cannot be improved upon. If it began with the Bill of Rights, and made property secondary to individual rights, we’d probably be living in a socialist state!
I think we arrived in the ‘90’s, when the DP became RP lite. Isolated voices like Sanders or RFKjr can be featured as evidence that democracy still lives, but they can easily be marginalized, smeared and erased. We are in oligarchy-hell, and that bears recognizing and repeating...over and over.
Yes. It very much appears as if the 200 year experiment in a constitutional, representative government "Of and For the People" is coming to an end, or as some say, (such as Jimmy Dore) - it has already ended, and Americans just don't know it yet.
And it looks like what will succeed it is some form of corporate Libertarianism masquerading as individual freedom. Or worse, a religious demagogue like DeSantis comes to power. It's not looking very good - the future. Heck, it may even be too late to save the planet from a horrific collapse of most life and the ecosystem - because of human corporate greed. Not only may the experiment with American democracy be over, but the (relatively short) evolutionary experiment with human consciousness.
With respect, I find that suggestion laughable. We have massive economic machines which run our lives, and having weak government is exactly why. In a democracy, the government has a responsibility to protect the vulnerable from the predatory. Our government is owned by private interests that don’t give a damn for how their policies wreak havoc on the majority. Small government has long been Republican-speak. Now it’s the ideology of the oligarchs.
OMG, If you believe our government is small and weak, that is ridiculous. It is more powerful, more authoritarian than ever and only gaining. Corporations have no power over an individual except THROUGH the government. They help write the legislation to protect themselves and the status quo, this squashes new competition. Without that kind of governmental protection we would see more competition and more turnover long term. And republicans are talk only, basically just democrats in reality who favor status quo and more power. Whatever reductions in govt power or budget excess they have ever actually produced are so minuscule to be unmeasurable.
I agree: government is neither small nor weak. But I think we may also agree that in the modern neoliberal world, government is merely a handmaiden of private power. Our governance system includes government, but it extends to—and is dominated by—the private sector, including the cleverly named Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), think tanks and other privatized national-security-state cutouts, lobbyist organizations, political parties, all global capitalist corporations, and, of course, those oligarchic social clubs for our ruling elites, like the WEF and Bilderbergers.
Our rulers are hardly going to rely on government bureaucrats and bought-and-paid-for politicians to protect their vital interests and preserve their dominance over the masses.
My beef is with some libertarians who want to blame every evil on government alone instead of realizing that there is actually almost no separation at all between public and private power.
The line that you see between the “authoritarian” state and the private sector exists in your mind. The two-party system is a charade. The elected Senators and Representatives and the President are the paid minions of those with the deep pockets. You see a lack of competition as the crux of the problem, and I say this country needs to give democracy a shot. More competition won’t inspire the Washington lackeys to faithfully represent their constituents. When money is removed from the electoral process, the lackeys can’t be bought. Democracy cannot be achieved by having more alphas vying for control that never should be up for grabs.
They'll be devout True Believers, which is even worse.
Nobody needs a state except slavers and rentiers. Those relations don't actually need to exist. We need to be destroying gods, not "reforming" them to keep the middle class slavers in the style to which they are accustomed.
I can remember the days when there were those who expressed concern over not only the corporate ownership of the media but the CONCENTRATION of corporate ownership. Today we we are seeing the full night mare.
Where I used to avidly follow Canadian politics, it now makes my skin crawl and I have turned to the international and independent media where there are very capable world class journalists, analysts and academics willing to speak truth to power.
Fortunately the total collapse of the Western MSM has spawned a whole wave of independents globally, sinking the MSM into irrelevance.
Americans can feel fortunate you still have an independent progressive media-- I do a lot of cross border shopping. In Canada we are a propaganda ghetto where the government subsidizes the MSM prestitutes know exactly where and when to shave their content.
We have a few outlets that claim to be progressive and speaking truth to power; but they do creme puff journalism.
Thank you for this excellent report!! It would be wonderful if this piece would be published in all the major newspapers in the world, and covered on all the mainstream television news program, but we know better. These "so-called journalists" of the MSM will never admit to any of these reasons why they act like propagandists. They just won't. More reasons to support independent journalism (and Substack writers)!
Astonishing how Johnstone churns out first-rate, extremely well written substack posts, that even include a good amount of citations, and does so on a near daily basis. She's like the Van Gogh of substack writers - we know Van Gogh in a short period of 10 years painted about 900 paintings. Will Caitlin surpass Van Gogh?!
Well done Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley. An inspired piece of writing and research, such a comment coming from an experienced horse rider, 90 years of age.
Such detailed writing keeps we younger readers well acquainted with the path that this foolish world is taking. And yes, we do know why, evident in today’s writings.
However, on a positive note, I have submitted my application to be the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, as an experienced rider is desperately needed when all we have seen
in my lifetime has been Conquest, War, Famine and Death.
As a horseman, my name will be ‘Rationality'…. a horseman there to counter the other Four, but primarily to promote the supremacy of reason, logic and truth.
Probably should have also mentioned that Van Gogh died penniless. Just saying ...
If you haven't already, read Caitlin's stance on being paid - I find it inspirational.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/my-experiments-with-hacking-capitalism?s=w
Great money management. My plan too.
Real artists are usually penniless—or so it seems
I will disagree with the assumption that they believe their own lies. Some if not many of them anyway. Otherwise why do they repeatedly refuse debate and discussion with actual honest journalists and others? Which raises the questions like Gary Webb, Danny Casalaro and many more like them. Gary who I spoke with a few times had two entry wounds to the back of the skull I believe and he death was declared a suicide. Read his book the dark alliance.
Definitely read Gary Webb’s book. Another reason they refuse debate with honest journalists is that in doing so the honest ones get a tiny platform for a tiny amount of time. Media ownership wants them to be completely invisible and unheard. Finally, I have read before that Gary Webb was murdered, but have never seen anything as detailed as what you say in your comment. If you have a cite I could look at, I would really appreciate it if you could share it. Thank you.
Here's a short Reddit convo on the matter of Gary Webb dying with two bullet holes to the brain (fwiw; I don't have any definitive info, but good points are made all around here): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940768
I read the thread. Don’t know what would be worse. The thought that the bastards drove this young man with a family to suicide, or that they killed him. But, where were the entry points of the two shots? If they were in the back of his head, it makes the official suicide determination seem a lot less plausible to me. In any case, thanks again, Karen.
Reminds me of the Enron executive who supposedly ran his car off the road, shot himself twice in the back of the head, and then threw the gun three meters away. Another suicide, of course.
Thank you , Karen.
I always took Chomsky's response as not just saying they believe in what they're "saying" - rather, they believe in what they're "doing". Which includes saying and behaving the way they're expected to.
"Otherwise why do they repeatedly refuse debate and discussion with actual honest journalists and others?"
Without expressing an opinion on your larger point, that question may be answered by cognitive dissonance.
Just go ahead and call them presstitutes.
And whorespondents.
For these people I REALLY hope there is a hell (I am an atheist)!!!
I have that same feeling, There is no afterlife but for them I hope for a hell.
Who cares what "written" in a bronze age fan fiction.
Yeah... uh huh... God gives you free will but will burn your soul forever if you don't do what he wants. That's why I don't buy into the story about such a colossal dill hole. Stay on your knees for your sky daddy.
Caitlin and Tim: this article knocks it out of the park. Thanks for your continuing dedication to actual journalism.
I spent over a decade in government and longer than that on accountability work.
So I can tell you that many of exactly the same class and careerism and power dynamics determine who rises and who is appointed to powerful government positions. Also, who is ostracized as "a problem", marginalized, ground down, forced out, and/or fired.
I worked on a case where the State's lead nuclear regulator blew the whistle and immediately was stripped of work, demoted, re-assigned in retaliation- literally - to a broom closet. State officials then pursued sham disciplinary actions. They were so stupid that they claimed that toll receipts from the Garden State Parkway were evidence that the whistleblower was spending time gambling in Atlantic City, when he really was driving to the nuke plant!
It's even worse in the corporate world.
Absolutely top notch essay...in analysis and evidence and clarity. Bravo Caitlin Johnstone! This is a keeper as a standard reference. Many thanks!
An excellent and extraordinarily detailed article, although the structure he described is very familiar to me, since I was a reader of Pravda and other Soviet state-published press, not to mention the former communist centrally published and proofread printed and broadcast media published in my own country !
I can already feel the "smell" when press hyenas inform the public in biased, state-controlled articles dictated by secret services in no small part ! Well, around the US press, I feel a stinking dead smell like the last time I smelled in an American forest, I found a badger that had been dead for days !
If someone seriously wants to delve into how the US uses its secret services to control, for example, German press workers, I would wholeheartedly recommend Udo Ulfkotte's book "Bought Journalists"! I would like to note that the author has left this world as if by order, after his pacemaker failed, what a coincidence!
Noam Chomsky wrote a piece in what used to be Progressive Magazine (I think), in which he cited a TV news reader in Russia who was removed from his job to attend re-education classes because he called the Russian troops in Afghanistan an “invasion.”
Chomsky contrasted the incident with the virtual impossibility of a similar occurrence in the U.S., with respect to the American war with Vietnam, precisely because, as he stated in the interview from Caitlin’s post, any American reporter who thought (correctly) that the U.S. had “invaded” Vietnam would never be in a position to make such an embarrassing (accurate) report.
Ha just looked him up and literally the first sentence on wikipedia calls him a conspiracy theorist. I’m intrigued…
All these things are tied together and are not by accident obviously. These things wouldn't bother me if these things were so effective. That people know these things and just shrug. They are used to it. Another psyop. Just like the movement against progressive ideas and those not supporting war.
Why is every mainstream journalist sound like a war hawk? The US government is a war machine. So when you are dealing with the US you make the country sound like the good guy in all cases, that they are right and just. Simple. That's what happens, especially at the start. Afterwards when things go on, you're allowed some criticism just to give the illusion of dissent. That's the part of feeding the journalists the narrative, imagine being paid and someone else already done your journalism for you. Easy.
This also ties to media influence and why voting is meaningless. You will never vote on anything meaningful. Like Clinton or any other mainstream politician or political party influencer, you are given candidates to represent you. They represent the empire. We are told which ideas are popular, even if they are absurd like your article about republicans and their perception of transgender influence. Democrats are no better with their identity politics. All minorities-all people should have equality. They stunk when it came to their campaign championing women's rights recently.
We are told what to think, what our values are to align with the party. Even if it is the antithesis. Both parties are antiintellectual. Schools are failing in the US. Both parties are pro war and pro wealth hoarding for the rich. You mentioned that the western left doesn't exist in any meaningful numbers. That's by design. Imagine two parties claiming to be opposites always end up agreeing on the same issues, producing them same results.
Journalists in the mainstram are just the tools used to advance the empire's interests. You call it manufacturing consent, that's what the mainstream journalists job is. Who are they talking to? Us. Who are they working for? The government. They sound like war progandists because everything boils down to pro war in a totalitarian state. Free speech is meaningless if there is no platform to be heard on. It is all geared to alter our perception to be pro war. Removing the knowledge of anti-us government regime change, alters people's perception.
These 15 points are tied together purposefully, as I mentioned.
To your point about every mainstream journalist (oxymoron alert) sounding like a war hawk, I think the effect of the rise of social media has been to necessitate more rigidity throughout the MSM. No American war has had a lockstep recitation of lies and disinformation to the extent that the Ukraine War has featured.
On antiintellectualism, that is a thread that goes back to to this country’s beginnings. Religion has no business in politics, and it has been not only tolerated, but encouraged and promoted and used for pandering by hucksters. Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer 59 years ago for Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in which he traced the predominant attitudes of many Americans’ irrational attraction to self-defeating policies. From Wikipedia:
Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.”[6]
Also, he described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."
I think this helps to explain blue-collar Trump loyalists.
Politics is just religion for people who wish to believe they've transcended politics. Charismatic competition, ignorance, and violence are the elements of which the state is built and no amount of feelings changes that fact.
Wikipedia's definition of anti-intellectualism is classist pro-PMC trash and any class that generates agency-free religious blather like "those who are considered to represent it" frankly deserves to be anti-ed.
Almost all mass media employees are merely public relations instruments for thinly shrouded power brokers. They launder and massage approved narrative information for public consumption and decant it to the masses like Kool-Aid, gladly doing the bidding for 30 pieces of silver and a Junior Membership in The Club.
I've been waiting for an article like this for years. Thanks! To show gratitude, I signed up for a month paid (substack really needs a tip function).
I would appreciate some follow-up on: "Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret." What are examples of this?
Also editors seems to wield a lot of power behind the scenes. What is their role in propagating the pro establishment media system?
Cutouts such as the National Endowment For Democracy and Bellingcat.
Awesome overview!
And this is what's goin' on:
"It can also take the form of encouraging the public to fight a culture war so that they won't start fighting a class war."
If anyone doesn’t understand why Assange is locked away, prevented from defending himself in a court, Caitlin’s many examples of the media’s selective coverage explains it well.
The news networks and the national newspapers are sophisticated instruments of disinformation and cannot survive as such if the public fully grasps this.
Great effort is taken to dress the package as if it is the real thing. And these owned media have the benefit of past examples of real journalism. I.F. Stone, Edward Murrow, Martha Gellhorn all worked in a commercial medium that was not owned by oligarchs, and journalism was still a relatively apolitical calling. The NYTimes published The Pentagon Papers, which, to be fair, was inside information about the complete fabrications upon which the Vietnam War was based, and that was the work of a whistleblower, not of investigative journalism. And the Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal, which, to be fair, was only made possible when another insider leaked sensitive information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
So for all Millennials and X-gen readers and younger, if you want democracy, start with baby steps, and just close the doors of government to private money. If enough people demand it...
we also need the size and strength of government massively reduced. Make the government NOT WORTH buying.
We need an uncorrupt "representative" government. That's what the US was founded on. What the US Constitution is all about. Representative government.
If you get rid of representative government, or shrink it to the point where it becomes entirely impotent, you will then end up with a society run by monopolistic corporations, ponzi scheme Wallstreet bankers, and privatized police and a corrupt judicial. The US is headed in that direction already, because the US government is corrupt and not representative. Getting rid of the government, or shrinking it to impotency, won't fix the problem.
I don’t think there’s any shame in recognizing the Constitution falls short of adequately protecting human rights. It’s become a quasi-religious article of faith that the Constitution cannot be improved upon. If it began with the Bill of Rights, and made property secondary to individual rights, we’d probably be living in a socialist state!
It was a big step up from King George. But yes, it was far from perfect.
I think we arrived in the ‘90’s, when the DP became RP lite. Isolated voices like Sanders or RFKjr can be featured as evidence that democracy still lives, but they can easily be marginalized, smeared and erased. We are in oligarchy-hell, and that bears recognizing and repeating...over and over.
Yes. It very much appears as if the 200 year experiment in a constitutional, representative government "Of and For the People" is coming to an end, or as some say, (such as Jimmy Dore) - it has already ended, and Americans just don't know it yet.
And it looks like what will succeed it is some form of corporate Libertarianism masquerading as individual freedom. Or worse, a religious demagogue like DeSantis comes to power. It's not looking very good - the future. Heck, it may even be too late to save the planet from a horrific collapse of most life and the ecosystem - because of human corporate greed. Not only may the experiment with American democracy be over, but the (relatively short) evolutionary experiment with human consciousness.
With respect, I find that suggestion laughable. We have massive economic machines which run our lives, and having weak government is exactly why. In a democracy, the government has a responsibility to protect the vulnerable from the predatory. Our government is owned by private interests that don’t give a damn for how their policies wreak havoc on the majority. Small government has long been Republican-speak. Now it’s the ideology of the oligarchs.
OMG, If you believe our government is small and weak, that is ridiculous. It is more powerful, more authoritarian than ever and only gaining. Corporations have no power over an individual except THROUGH the government. They help write the legislation to protect themselves and the status quo, this squashes new competition. Without that kind of governmental protection we would see more competition and more turnover long term. And republicans are talk only, basically just democrats in reality who favor status quo and more power. Whatever reductions in govt power or budget excess they have ever actually produced are so minuscule to be unmeasurable.
I agree: government is neither small nor weak. But I think we may also agree that in the modern neoliberal world, government is merely a handmaiden of private power. Our governance system includes government, but it extends to—and is dominated by—the private sector, including the cleverly named Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), think tanks and other privatized national-security-state cutouts, lobbyist organizations, political parties, all global capitalist corporations, and, of course, those oligarchic social clubs for our ruling elites, like the WEF and Bilderbergers.
Our rulers are hardly going to rely on government bureaucrats and bought-and-paid-for politicians to protect their vital interests and preserve their dominance over the masses.
My beef is with some libertarians who want to blame every evil on government alone instead of realizing that there is actually almost no separation at all between public and private power.
The line that you see between the “authoritarian” state and the private sector exists in your mind. The two-party system is a charade. The elected Senators and Representatives and the President are the paid minions of those with the deep pockets. You see a lack of competition as the crux of the problem, and I say this country needs to give democracy a shot. More competition won’t inspire the Washington lackeys to faithfully represent their constituents. When money is removed from the electoral process, the lackeys can’t be bought. Democracy cannot be achieved by having more alphas vying for control that never should be up for grabs.
They'll be devout True Believers, which is even worse.
Nobody needs a state except slavers and rentiers. Those relations don't actually need to exist. We need to be destroying gods, not "reforming" them to keep the middle class slavers in the style to which they are accustomed.
I can remember the days when there were those who expressed concern over not only the corporate ownership of the media but the CONCENTRATION of corporate ownership. Today we we are seeing the full night mare.
Where I used to avidly follow Canadian politics, it now makes my skin crawl and I have turned to the international and independent media where there are very capable world class journalists, analysts and academics willing to speak truth to power.
Fortunately the total collapse of the Western MSM has spawned a whole wave of independents globally, sinking the MSM into irrelevance.
Americans can feel fortunate you still have an independent progressive media-- I do a lot of cross border shopping. In Canada we are a propaganda ghetto where the government subsidizes the MSM prestitutes know exactly where and when to shave their content.
We have a few outlets that claim to be progressive and speaking truth to power; but they do creme puff journalism.
We have one outstanding lone wolf journalist who has been called "Canada's Noam Chomsky". Yves Engler is his name and his blog is at: https://yvesengler.com/2023/06/01/ukraine-supporters-attack-free-speech-in-name-of-democracy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ukraine-supporters-attack-free-speech-in-name-of-democracy
Thank you for this excellent report!! It would be wonderful if this piece would be published in all the major newspapers in the world, and covered on all the mainstream television news program, but we know better. These "so-called journalists" of the MSM will never admit to any of these reasons why they act like propagandists. They just won't. More reasons to support independent journalism (and Substack writers)!
This post can serve as an abstract for "Manufacturing Consent".