Thanks Caitlin. You are correct, of course. Jim Garrison came to understand this over the course of his investigation into the JFK assassination. From his May 27, 1969 interview: "The President of the United States is a transient official in the regard of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to act as master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals, to serve when needed as a salesman for the military hardware manufacturers, and to speak as often as possible about the nation's desire for peace. He is not free to trespass on the preserve of the war interests nor even to acknowledge that such an organism exists."
"Politics is show business for ugly people." -Bill Miller
Of course, we don't have to live in other people's dramas, but for some stupid Greek reason we keep letting them construct dramas around us and don't drag their trash to the dumpster where it belongs.
While individual voting is insignificant, organized mass voting is powerful. That's why propaganda is so important. If the people had no power they wouldn't bother.
The government has become unresponsive to even minor things. This inculcates a highly desirable state of learned helplessness. It's very effective.
I dunno. I figure if voting went to 10% the oligarchy would think it was great. All the better for targeting their propaganda. Fewer voters to pay off. Indeed the original 1787 voting system was like that. Only property owners could vote. It took forty years but the people organized and got that changed.
I advocate voting for candidates who stand for something you believe in. It works. Look how upset the Ds got about Nader getting those votes. Clearly they care, they care a lot. To this day they make a big deal out of Nader's votes, puny though it was. Then there was Perot. He didn't get elected but his anti-deficit agenda dominated politics for years so I say he won. It made a big difference.
Today the people are organizing to get ranked choice voting. Los Angeles and New York City have it. Maine is the first state. More will follow. This is how real political change is made, not by electing some rebel President. Runoff elections are much better than ranked choice,
>However this may be, the heroic complex, if one might call it that, had an enduring impact. The city-states and empires of the classical Mediterranean, to take one vivid example, could well be seen as a kind of fusion of heroic principles into a standard of urban life drawn from the far older civilizations to its East – hardly surprising, perhaps, in a place where all literary education began with Homer. The most obvious aspect is the religious emphasis on sacrifice. On a deeper level, we find what Alvin Gouldner (1965: 45–55) called ‘the Greek contest system’, the tendency to turn absolutely everything, from art to politics to athletic achievement to tragic drama, into a game where there must be winners and losers. The same spirit appears in a different way in the ‘games’ and spirit of aristocratic competition in Rome. In fact, I would hazard to suggest that our own political culture, with its politicians and elections, traces back to heroic sensibilities. We tend to forget that for most of European history, election was considered the aristocratic mode of selecting officials, not the democratic one (the democratic mode was sortation: see Manin 1997, Dowlen 2009). What is unusual about our own political systems is rather the fusion of the heroic mode with the principle of sovereignty – a principle with its own peculiar history, which originally stood entirely apart from governance, and which has quite different implications – but one which cannot be more than alluded to here.
That shit, right there. Stop larping. Do this instead:
* Make institutions boring again, if you must have them
* Distribute power by sortition, if you must have it
I'm repeatedly gobsmacked by folks who fall into the seemingly logical trap of nationalism, believing that the idea of countries and national hegemony has remaining significance on a planet where, for example, special economic zones have become a new norm; where corporations run little colonial enclaves of serfs. Any disguise that once partly shielded the reality of direct corporate investor power to rule chunks of this planet and its workers has been pulled back, such that the oft-heard phrase "BlackRock owns everything" has evolved from metaphor or approximation to harsh reality. Forget Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama et al. These figureheads are fully enrolled proponents of Mussolini's construction of Fascismo -- il matrimonio di commercio e governo.
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” -- Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa also predicted the election of Reagan as president twelve years before it happened. He had the soul of a businessman and thought the same way they did. Hence he was able to predict what they would do and how they would do it. He once said of politics, "I think I would be pretty good at it but look at the people I would have to associate with."
Vaclav Havel offered to make Frank a special envoy of the Czech Republic but Frank was too busy.
We're talking about an organization which interprets its mission expansively, is known to have run at least one major R&D project on psychoactive substances (MKULTRA), and has long stood accused of engineering such cultural interventions as post-Modernism, the term "conspiracy theory", and infiltratiing their bent action network into key places throughout the press.
An open research and development project on subverting youth culture in the context of mechanical performance, for example, might set about to develop cultural interventions with replay value that would be widely and repeatedly self-administered, as potential vehicles for mass sentiment engineering.
Neoliberal epistemology runs on the principle of producing maximum noise on which the market shall magically impose order and from which infallible *prior* truth is said to emerge. In the context of a religious crusade with which the youth not only avoided but positively resisted cooperation, the crusader would be happy to have the positive resistance doing something else somewhere else. Contemplating their navel and chemically exhausting their synapses, all while listening to Jim Morrison telling them they can only lose so get higher, would suit the Man fine.
In the logistical vein, how many people would you need to plant (or bend) to make that happen? A couple of A&R managers; a couple of executives; a couple of producers to maintain the project's direction; and the media network you already have to perform a show of discovery and write glowing reviews. They only need to be open to the idea and be exploitable (socially, romantically, professionally, criminally, etc.). The industrial system takes care of the rest. It's a relatively small operation, consonant with CIA's interests and competencies at that time, and well within the material limits of covert operations.
Mussolini also wrote that "fascism is imperialism," and the Fascists indeed built an empire. He also wrote that the Fascists were opportunists who didn't really have a philosophy. I get the feeling that that's the closest to the truth.
Gramsci pointed out that corporations and the state should only be separated as matters of study, implying that in fact they were never separate at all, and that Mussolini lies as much about his secret to success as any other politico.
That oft-repeated phrase is liberal mythology which deifies the two institutions, discourages us from interrogating their existence too closely, and encourages us to have faith in their dialectic because they *might* produce something less bad someday. Let me instead offer that fascism is the merger of bureaucracy and heroism.
Corporations are legal fictions and creatures of the state. They cannot exist without a system of law and a state, to recognize their distinct "personhood" and enforce it in the material, social, and mental worlds. States create corporate rights by recognizing the personhood of a corporation and extending rights to their corporate persons. This recognition has become normalized internationally through the WTO and multi- and bi-lateral treaties from GATT to RCEP, and therefore multinational corporations and their mores are certain to survive the end of US dominance mostly unscathed. Without all that recognition, there are no corporations, only dreams, and there are no general duties to other people's dreams.
The president is like a high school student body president, in that he has little real authority and mainly exists to distract attention away from the real mechanisms of power.
That's always seemed like such an American thing to me. I don't think I've ever seen somethinng like it in a high school inside the Netherlands myself, at most a class representative, maybe a student council. I wonder how much things like that are cultural, what's this like in other countries?
The US is a deeply, pervasively, but softly authoritarian country, much of which we inherited from New England's Puritan theocrats and their apprenticeship model of society. Much of the remainder, we inherited from aristocrats seeking to reenact Antiquity without King Dad cramping their style.
The Empire has never operated on the basis of morality, from the dropping of two A-bombs on civilians to the pardon of the butchers of Japanese Unit 731 in exchange for their human experiment data, to the syphilis experiments on Guatemalan peasants in 1947, the ends justify the means. Presidents? they are just puppets in the vast operation of the running of the Empire. Lately, we notice an increase in censorship which helps mask the illegal actions of the Deep State. As usual the public is oblivious.
I might add that the US is functionally an oligarchy and then even referring it to a "Country" is illusory. "Make the North American corporation great again"!
Armageddon of the U.S., seems to be the only way that change will take place for the surviving people to start a new attempt of governing from a free democratic honest government, without corruption.
We have been placated by the lever pullers offering free stuff everytime a political crisis develops. We have become an inherently lazy populus with a laissez faire attitude. Your house is on fire- oh ok. I'll address that right after I finish reading the latest Facebook posts.
Of course we don't get to vote on the major global issues. The propaganda the empire creates does two things well, it keeps us ignorant of much of the global issues. The second thing it does is as you say, manufactures our consent. It is created in a way that we seemingly agree with what the empire does always. Strange, no matter what, we have never said no to any war.
The president is the empire scapegoat, he really can't do anything the empire doesn't want him to, everybody knows that. Yet we seemingly can get angry at him. Blame him, sure he isn't faultless, his jobis to be the face of the nation, the poster boy. Thing is that we are so divided on everything that we couldn't make any meaningful change to the empire if we wanted to. Those issues we are given are trivial to the larger picture. The government doesn't care about those.
We have had wars going on decades through both parties presidents. It doesn't matter what party or platform it is as you stated. The reason we can't tell which is that the data remains the same despite the power transition. You stated Republicans are pro this while Democrats pretend to be anti that. Yet no change occurs on either side, that's because we are really just flipping a coin where both the heads are the same. We don't participate in the real US government. We get to participate in the exhibition of it.
When Trump tried to order the armed forces out of Afghanistan they said, you and what army? They compromised and said they would withdraw half the troops, reports Col. Douglas MacGregor who was on the scene. But I doubt the army would have even done that.
When the troops really did withdraw I knew it was because there was a bigger operation somewhere else. Gotta keep the milk flowing from that cash cow.
I believe that the withdrawal you are describing was Syria, although the "Russian bounties on muh brave men and women of muh armed forces!" story was clearly contrived to make it impossible for Trump to withdraw from Afghanistan.
As if Pashtuns had to be paid to kill invaders.
Trump twice ordered the military to leave Syria and twice the military openly defied his orders, to cheers from the MSM and foreign policy establishment.
Douglas MacGregor was appointed by Trump to help get the troops out of Afghanistan. He personally wrote the order, but Trump couldn't get the armed forces to accept it. The dispute was less public than the Syria one. I'd like to give a reference to the video where he says this but he makes at least one a day so there are too many.
Clinically accurate analysis in this article: the President is just the hood ornament, or even bumper sticker, of the Imperial Car. One development in the transition from Trump to Biden: It looks like the Carnival Barker in the Oval Office is getting weirder...
You'd think that more people would have learned by now that all politics and politicians are a scam and that the real power behind the throne does not have worry about pesky things like elections. But their blind faith in the process and in the possibility for change is unnerving and pathetic.
Empires throughout history have turned to war because that's where the money is. No human activity generates the level of profit that war does.
I'm not sure. An empire is an extortion racket. The ideal thing is to intimidate your subjects to obey without a fight. The wars are to conquer them in the first place and after that to "maintain credibility." Then you have the power of taxation, which is possibly the most profitable activity.
It depends. World War II was very unprofitable for France and the UK, even though they won. And a good thing to. War as a huge loss even when you win is unattractive. It was great for the USA because it knocked out their competitors. But this is not the usual result.
In the USA annual arms sales are maybe $350 billion while health care is $4.1 trillion. Fossil fuels are $210 billion.
Thanks Caitlin. You are correct, of course. Jim Garrison came to understand this over the course of his investigation into the JFK assassination. From his May 27, 1969 interview: "The President of the United States is a transient official in the regard of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to act as master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals, to serve when needed as a salesman for the military hardware manufacturers, and to speak as often as possible about the nation's desire for peace. He is not free to trespass on the preserve of the war interests nor even to acknowledge that such an organism exists."
That was truly a money quote.
"Politics is show business for ugly people." -Bill Miller
Of course, we don't have to live in other people's dramas, but for some stupid Greek reason we keep letting them construct dramas around us and don't drag their trash to the dumpster where it belongs.
While individual voting is insignificant, organized mass voting is powerful. That's why propaganda is so important. If the people had no power they wouldn't bother.
The government has become unresponsive to even minor things. This inculcates a highly desirable state of learned helplessness. It's very effective.
I dunno. I figure if voting went to 10% the oligarchy would think it was great. All the better for targeting their propaganda. Fewer voters to pay off. Indeed the original 1787 voting system was like that. Only property owners could vote. It took forty years but the people organized and got that changed.
I advocate voting for candidates who stand for something you believe in. It works. Look how upset the Ds got about Nader getting those votes. Clearly they care, they care a lot. To this day they make a big deal out of Nader's votes, puny though it was. Then there was Perot. He didn't get elected but his anti-deficit agenda dominated politics for years so I say he won. It made a big difference.
Today the people are organizing to get ranked choice voting. Los Angeles and New York City have it. Maine is the first state. More will follow. This is how real political change is made, not by electing some rebel President. Runoff elections are much better than ranked choice,
https://science1arts2and3politics.substack.com/p/why-runoffs-are-much-better-than
and the parliamentary system would be better yet, but ranked choice is what we are going to get. It IS a step up from what we have now.
>However this may be, the heroic complex, if one might call it that, had an enduring impact. The city-states and empires of the classical Mediterranean, to take one vivid example, could well be seen as a kind of fusion of heroic principles into a standard of urban life drawn from the far older civilizations to its East – hardly surprising, perhaps, in a place where all literary education began with Homer. The most obvious aspect is the religious emphasis on sacrifice. On a deeper level, we find what Alvin Gouldner (1965: 45–55) called ‘the Greek contest system’, the tendency to turn absolutely everything, from art to politics to athletic achievement to tragic drama, into a game where there must be winners and losers. The same spirit appears in a different way in the ‘games’ and spirit of aristocratic competition in Rome. In fact, I would hazard to suggest that our own political culture, with its politicians and elections, traces back to heroic sensibilities. We tend to forget that for most of European history, election was considered the aristocratic mode of selecting officials, not the democratic one (the democratic mode was sortation: see Manin 1997, Dowlen 2009). What is unusual about our own political systems is rather the fusion of the heroic mode with the principle of sovereignty – a principle with its own peculiar history, which originally stood entirely apart from governance, and which has quite different implications – but one which cannot be more than alluded to here.
That shit, right there. Stop larping. Do this instead:
* Make institutions boring again, if you must have them
* Distribute power by sortition, if you must have it
* Stop propagating fiction
* Abolish morality
* Make your share of food and get out of the away
I'll stick with "Renaissance man," thank you.
The P-word [peace] is no longer mentioned. Indeed it is more or less banned.
Get all the photo ops you can, eh?
I'm repeatedly gobsmacked by folks who fall into the seemingly logical trap of nationalism, believing that the idea of countries and national hegemony has remaining significance on a planet where, for example, special economic zones have become a new norm; where corporations run little colonial enclaves of serfs. Any disguise that once partly shielded the reality of direct corporate investor power to rule chunks of this planet and its workers has been pulled back, such that the oft-heard phrase "BlackRock owns everything" has evolved from metaphor or approximation to harsh reality. Forget Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama et al. These figureheads are fully enrolled proponents of Mussolini's construction of Fascismo -- il matrimonio di commercio e governo.
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” -- Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa also predicted the election of Reagan as president twelve years before it happened. He had the soul of a businessman and thought the same way they did. Hence he was able to predict what they would do and how they would do it. He once said of politics, "I think I would be pretty good at it but look at the people I would have to associate with."
Vaclav Havel offered to make Frank a special envoy of the Czech Republic but Frank was too busy.
I'm sorry but that's just too weird.
We're talking about an organization which interprets its mission expansively, is known to have run at least one major R&D project on psychoactive substances (MKULTRA), and has long stood accused of engineering such cultural interventions as post-Modernism, the term "conspiracy theory", and infiltratiing their bent action network into key places throughout the press.
An open research and development project on subverting youth culture in the context of mechanical performance, for example, might set about to develop cultural interventions with replay value that would be widely and repeatedly self-administered, as potential vehicles for mass sentiment engineering.
Neoliberal epistemology runs on the principle of producing maximum noise on which the market shall magically impose order and from which infallible *prior* truth is said to emerge. In the context of a religious crusade with which the youth not only avoided but positively resisted cooperation, the crusader would be happy to have the positive resistance doing something else somewhere else. Contemplating their navel and chemically exhausting their synapses, all while listening to Jim Morrison telling them they can only lose so get higher, would suit the Man fine.
In the logistical vein, how many people would you need to plant (or bend) to make that happen? A couple of A&R managers; a couple of executives; a couple of producers to maintain the project's direction; and the media network you already have to perform a show of discovery and write glowing reviews. They only need to be open to the idea and be exploitable (socially, romantically, professionally, criminally, etc.). The industrial system takes care of the rest. It's a relatively small operation, consonant with CIA's interests and competencies at that time, and well within the material limits of covert operations.
Gotta love Frank! I miss him!
In the words of Ralph Nader, "I'm not results oriented."
Mussolini also wrote that "fascism is imperialism," and the Fascists indeed built an empire. He also wrote that the Fascists were opportunists who didn't really have a philosophy. I get the feeling that that's the closest to the truth.
You'll have to translate that last line into English for me. My Italian's gotten a little rusty over the last eight decades. 😉
the marriage of commerce and government. I keep trying to refresh mine with mixed success.
Gramsci pointed out that corporations and the state should only be separated as matters of study, implying that in fact they were never separate at all, and that Mussolini lies as much about his secret to success as any other politico.
That oft-repeated phrase is liberal mythology which deifies the two institutions, discourages us from interrogating their existence too closely, and encourages us to have faith in their dialectic because they *might* produce something less bad someday. Let me instead offer that fascism is the merger of bureaucracy and heroism.
Corporations are legal fictions and creatures of the state. They cannot exist without a system of law and a state, to recognize their distinct "personhood" and enforce it in the material, social, and mental worlds. States create corporate rights by recognizing the personhood of a corporation and extending rights to their corporate persons. This recognition has become normalized internationally through the WTO and multi- and bi-lateral treaties from GATT to RCEP, and therefore multinational corporations and their mores are certain to survive the end of US dominance mostly unscathed. Without all that recognition, there are no corporations, only dreams, and there are no general duties to other people's dreams.
I agree with you bigly about this.
I have come at this from a libertarian angle and argued this in libertarian forums, but oddly don't seem to have gotten much traction there.
I think it is fairly clear that the US gvt reports to Big Money. That's what the US vs. Russia/China brouhaha is all about. https://science1arts2and3politics.substack.com/p/when-did-cold-war-ii-begin
The president is like a high school student body president, in that he has little real authority and mainly exists to distract attention away from the real mechanisms of power.
That's always seemed like such an American thing to me. I don't think I've ever seen somethinng like it in a high school inside the Netherlands myself, at most a class representative, maybe a student council. I wonder how much things like that are cultural, what's this like in other countries?
The US is a deeply, pervasively, but softly authoritarian country, much of which we inherited from New England's Puritan theocrats and their apprenticeship model of society. Much of the remainder, we inherited from aristocrats seeking to reenact Antiquity without King Dad cramping their style.
The Empire has never operated on the basis of morality, from the dropping of two A-bombs on civilians to the pardon of the butchers of Japanese Unit 731 in exchange for their human experiment data, to the syphilis experiments on Guatemalan peasants in 1947, the ends justify the means. Presidents? they are just puppets in the vast operation of the running of the Empire. Lately, we notice an increase in censorship which helps mask the illegal actions of the Deep State. As usual the public is oblivious.
I might add that the US is functionally an oligarchy and then even referring it to a "Country" is illusory. "Make the North American corporation great again"!
Don’t forget what Twain said: patriotism means supporting your country all the time, but its government only when it deserves it.
Left on, Caitlin. ( like right on, only in a better direction!). Will join your paid group when I can. Jeannette
Armageddon of the U.S., seems to be the only way that change will take place for the surviving people to start a new attempt of governing from a free democratic honest government, without corruption.
We have been placated by the lever pullers offering free stuff everytime a political crisis develops. We have become an inherently lazy populus with a laissez faire attitude. Your house is on fire- oh ok. I'll address that right after I finish reading the latest Facebook posts.
"We" refers only to the middle class and is actually reason enough to abolish the institution.
Of course we don't get to vote on the major global issues. The propaganda the empire creates does two things well, it keeps us ignorant of much of the global issues. The second thing it does is as you say, manufactures our consent. It is created in a way that we seemingly agree with what the empire does always. Strange, no matter what, we have never said no to any war.
The president is the empire scapegoat, he really can't do anything the empire doesn't want him to, everybody knows that. Yet we seemingly can get angry at him. Blame him, sure he isn't faultless, his jobis to be the face of the nation, the poster boy. Thing is that we are so divided on everything that we couldn't make any meaningful change to the empire if we wanted to. Those issues we are given are trivial to the larger picture. The government doesn't care about those.
We have had wars going on decades through both parties presidents. It doesn't matter what party or platform it is as you stated. The reason we can't tell which is that the data remains the same despite the power transition. You stated Republicans are pro this while Democrats pretend to be anti that. Yet no change occurs on either side, that's because we are really just flipping a coin where both the heads are the same. We don't participate in the real US government. We get to participate in the exhibition of it.
When Trump tried to order the armed forces out of Afghanistan they said, you and what army? They compromised and said they would withdraw half the troops, reports Col. Douglas MacGregor who was on the scene. But I doubt the army would have even done that.
When the troops really did withdraw I knew it was because there was a bigger operation somewhere else. Gotta keep the milk flowing from that cash cow.
I believe that the withdrawal you are describing was Syria, although the "Russian bounties on muh brave men and women of muh armed forces!" story was clearly contrived to make it impossible for Trump to withdraw from Afghanistan.
As if Pashtuns had to be paid to kill invaders.
Trump twice ordered the military to leave Syria and twice the military openly defied his orders, to cheers from the MSM and foreign policy establishment.
Douglas MacGregor was appointed by Trump to help get the troops out of Afghanistan. He personally wrote the order, but Trump couldn't get the armed forces to accept it. The dispute was less public than the Syria one. I'd like to give a reference to the video where he says this but he makes at least one a day so there are too many.
another great article...thank you
I completely agree. Unfortunately.
👍🏽
You have to go all the way, Catelin, and say that this is a recipe for revolution (and high time!).
empire's got that covered pretty tightly. a revolution in the minds of the oppressors, those fending for the status quo, maybe ...
Clinically accurate analysis in this article: the President is just the hood ornament, or even bumper sticker, of the Imperial Car. One development in the transition from Trump to Biden: It looks like the Carnival Barker in the Oval Office is getting weirder...
You'd think that more people would have learned by now that all politics and politicians are a scam and that the real power behind the throne does not have worry about pesky things like elections. But their blind faith in the process and in the possibility for change is unnerving and pathetic.
Empires throughout history have turned to war because that's where the money is. No human activity generates the level of profit that war does.
I'm not sure. An empire is an extortion racket. The ideal thing is to intimidate your subjects to obey without a fight. The wars are to conquer them in the first place and after that to "maintain credibility." Then you have the power of taxation, which is possibly the most profitable activity.
It depends. World War II was very unprofitable for France and the UK, even though they won. And a good thing to. War as a huge loss even when you win is unattractive. It was great for the USA because it knocked out their competitors. But this is not the usual result.
In the USA annual arms sales are maybe $350 billion while health care is $4.1 trillion. Fossil fuels are $210 billion.