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.
Stinky keeps shaming sheeple (he calls them all kinds of scientific names, though) for non-action, submission, etc. He has at least one ally here in the forum called @Jeano who's rather explicit in her derision towards such kind.
At least she points to her solution - go vote. A stupid one - as its outcome has been shown over and over again as pointless, but nevertheless. She's that stubborn.
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'm talking about organized mass voting actually. It's organized in such a manner that it's irrelevant. The masses are led to vote the way govt wants. That's the problem.
OTOH, if one refuses to participate in the circus the elections have become - in all its aspects - that's making a statement, undeniably and unequivocally.
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,
Patrick Powers: If voting participation went to 10%, the State would force people to vote like they do in Australia. The State needs the fig leaf of legitimacy from the people they rule.
Patrick Powers: I may be helpless when it comes to the State, but I can ignore it, ridicule it (the State hates that), and live my life my way. The Irish are still around because they always found a way around the State.
>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
Well, if @Jeano is down to earth then you're up in the sky. The former (voting) is sort of right there, easily fooled by being within reach, and is taught in schools to boot, most of the latter is for folks to arrive at first, and then wistfully ponder while going over their monthly budgets.
By "abolish morality" do you mean hypocrisy? If not, then I'm curious in the details.
"master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals" - as Clinton did for Teddy Roosevelt. According to Kinzer Teddy at the time was begging for a medal of honor but was refused by the military. Never mind, come Billy and Teddy is all set.
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
The thing is that no matter how often and by whom these ideas are pronounced - and it's been happening through the centuries - the practical effect is next to none. Those who take it to heart or arrived at it by themselves are a hopeless minority.
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.
PP: It's a rabbit hole that my friend who lives in Los Feliz and drove by the house where Zappa lived, told me about. He knew people in that era. There's mansion in the hills run by the CIA. The whole hippie movement was a CIA PsyOp. Do you think it was a fluke that all of those musicians of that era were in Laurel Canyon? And they all had their music hit the airwaves?
It's a deep rabbit hole but it makes sense. One more way to divide the family. Hippies.
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 and the state ... were never separate at all ..." - the question is whose corporations and which state. The idea that corporations existing in a particular state are one and the same as it relates to the said state is bogus. If we presume corporations ultimately report to the USA then we can clearly identify the World's Supreme Fascist.
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.
Isn't it interesting how those seeking to discredit DJT continue to lump him in w the past, particularly previous nefarious, administrations? No one seems to notice that he is the ONLY President ever, to be publicly, vocally and vociferously vilified by previous office holders and witch hunted down, ILLEGALLY, after leaving office by a weaponized, illegally seated administration. That speaks volumes to me.
I strongly dislike Trump, but I do think Letsrock has a point. He is being prosecuted because he failed to follow the formula for maintaining the illusion of a democracy; he came too close to wrecking the illusion and exposing the real workings of the U.S. political system of control.
You don't get the extreme attacks from the minions of the Empire that he did (and still does), and still does, unless you're over some important targets. The reaction to him was like some extreme immune response to a pathogen invading a body.
Contrary to Caitlin, I do think that Trump was different than the other presidents, both Democrat and Republican.
He did not merely accept the "intel reports" the Empire wrote for him and follow the "advice" the Empire gave to him. (Recall the frequent public criticisms that he disparaged the "intel community" and ignored his advisors.) He also didn't need the payoffs of the post-presidential career as an "elder statesman", like Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama now enjoy.
So the Empire had to control him in a different way, which was to distract him by playing on his propensity for showmanship and enjoying public fights.
It's interesting that this is similar to the play that defenders of the left's anti-establishment tradition (like Caitlin, Jimmy Dore, etc.) say the Empire uses on the public at large. Distract them with fights--like racial issues, gender issues, abortion, etc.--that don't imperil the Empire's core activities of profit through world domination. And Trump sees himself as a populist man of the people, so maybe he falls for similar tricks as the general public, just more personally targeted in his case.
Recall also that the Joint Chiefs of Staff took their orders from the think tanks and slow-walked or half-assed Trump's orders. There isn't much you can do with a professional services strike unless you're willing to actually deport the whole of Thinktankistan (including the entire faculty and administration of elite universities) to black sites and give them their just deserts with pliers and blowtorches.
So what were Trump’s good intentions? He got along with every yes man he appointed, but the second they publicly disagreed or criticized him, they became targets. His “draining the swamp” rhetoric was a cynical sales pitch. RFKJR said that Trump appointed him to deal with the pharmaceutical industry when Covid hit, and then Pfizer gave him a huge donation, and RFKJR was fired in favor of Pfizer’s very own Scott Gottlieb. So much for “draining the swamp.”
Trump has a long history of bilking. Virtually everything he does is to serve his own interests, and his primary interest is himself. I don’t know if you were raised in the United States, but the notion that “many in politics” are there to do good isn’t a view shared by anybody I know.
I give Trump the benefit of the doubt, only for public discussion. I never voted for him, and hold him in low regard. Like many in politics, I think he meant to do good. It is very interesting that his government paychecks were given to various charities.
Trying to argue that some admins are “particularly nefarious” is kind of a lost-in-the-trees argument.
I find it interesting that most of the passionate warnings about the deep state and the evil machinations of globalism are coming from the Republican right, billionaires, admitted insiders who, by the way are different. Trump forged this path, but now the billionaires vying for the WH, are seemingly coming out of the woodwork.
The Democrat right, billionaires, also insiders, are looking at all of the billionaires as the root of the dysfunctional system, but by the way, they are different.
Trump is a caricature that represents to the Dems the whole Republican “looney right,” and this has played well because Trump has been too easy to mock. If Vivek or DeSantis get in power, the language will be normalized and the narcissist ego will be nowhere in sight, and the Dems will no longer be able to kick that dog.
I think that’s when the pretense of democracy will morph into outright fascism. We are already there but for the optics.
Perhaps one of the most insidious accusations for the vote any blue crowd who insist we all should have voted for Biden anyway because Trump was the epitome of evil - the argument I hear nowadays is "because" I allowed Trump to win (i.e. by not voting for Biden) abortion now became illegal in many parts of the country.
It's hard to deal with this kind of accusation - that I personally have become responsible for the loss of abortion rights in the country. It feels similar to the accusation that if I didn't fully go along with the "me too" movement (not because of women's rights which I have supported my entire life) but because I felt the tag was being used hypocritically and cynically as a political tool by the neo-liberals - who looked the other way when it came to their own democratic tribe of womanizers - I was a terrible human being.
The whole push is a huge guilt trip, that if one doesn't vote for this entirely corrupt party - then YOU are to blame for everything that then happens in consequence. That you yourself are a contemptible human being because you didn't stop the eradication of Roe vs. Wade - which you should have predictably saw coming. That the democratic party - according to these self-righteous neo-liberals - never played an enabling role. It's the same kind of neurotic thinking when it comes to Ukraine - that Putin just one day, on a dime, because he is evil (like Trump) just decided to invade Ukraine - that NATO and the west played no role in the enablement of the bloody war.
It's hard to deal with this kind of ignorant black and white mentality - and I often have to remind myself that no, the gas lighting is just that: gas lighting - that there is far more context (being deliberately left out) that does not make me the responsible party for the state of the nation, and level of political corruption in both parties. And much like an abuser attempts to make his victim responsible for his abuse - I must walk away from the abuse, and refuse to accept the abuser's fabricated yarn and shallow justification for his/her abuse.
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...
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.
Stinky keeps shaming sheeple (he calls them all kinds of scientific names, though) for non-action, submission, etc. He has at least one ally here in the forum called @Jeano who's rather explicit in her derision towards such kind.
At least she points to her solution - go vote. A stupid one - as its outcome has been shown over and over again as pointless, but nevertheless. She's that stubborn.
What Stinky is getting at remains a mystery.
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'm talking about organized mass voting actually. It's organized in such a manner that it's irrelevant. The masses are led to vote the way govt wants. That's the problem.
OTOH, if one refuses to participate in the circus the elections have become - in all its aspects - that's making a statement, undeniably and unequivocally.
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.
Patrick Powers: If voting participation went to 10%, the State would force people to vote like they do in Australia. The State needs the fig leaf of legitimacy from the people they rule.
Patrick Powers: I may be helpless when it comes to the State, but I can ignore it, ridicule it (the State hates that), and live my life my way. The Irish are still around because they always found a way around the State.
>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
Well, if @Jeano is down to earth then you're up in the sky. The former (voting) is sort of right there, easily fooled by being within reach, and is taught in schools to boot, most of the latter is for folks to arrive at first, and then wistfully ponder while going over their monthly budgets.
By "abolish morality" do you mean hypocrisy? If not, then I'm curious in the details.
Stinky: I think you should change your name to "Ping Pong" as you bounce from subject to subject like a Ping Pong ball taken over by Mal AI. LOL.
I'll stick with "Renaissance man," thank you.
Stinky: I think politics is show business for very old people.
The P-word [peace] is no longer mentioned. Indeed it is more or less banned.
"master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals" - as Clinton did for Teddy Roosevelt. According to Kinzer Teddy at the time was begging for a medal of honor but was refused by the military. Never mind, come Billy and Teddy is all set.
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
The thing is that no matter how often and by whom these ideas are pronounced - and it's been happening through the centuries - the practical effect is next to none. Those who take it to heart or arrived at it by themselves are a hopeless minority.
In the words of Ralph Nader, "I'm not results oriented."
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.
PP: Many think Frank Zappa and the Laurel Canyon musicians were CIA plants.
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.
PP: It's a rabbit hole that my friend who lives in Los Feliz and drove by the house where Zappa lived, told me about. He knew people in that era. There's mansion in the hills run by the CIA. The whole hippie movement was a CIA PsyOp. Do you think it was a fluke that all of those musicians of that era were in Laurel Canyon? And they all had their music hit the airwaves?
It's a deep rabbit hole but it makes sense. One more way to divide the family. Hippies.
Gotta love Frank! I miss him!
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 and the state ... were never separate at all ..." - the question is whose corporations and which state. The idea that corporations existing in a particular state are one and the same as it relates to the said state is bogus. If we presume corporations ultimately report to the USA then we can clearly identify the World's Supreme Fascist.
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.
Stinky; I agree with your comment. Corporations are legal fictions. Queen Elizabeth I came up with the concept (I think).
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.
Isn't it interesting how those seeking to discredit DJT continue to lump him in w the past, particularly previous nefarious, administrations? No one seems to notice that he is the ONLY President ever, to be publicly, vocally and vociferously vilified by previous office holders and witch hunted down, ILLEGALLY, after leaving office by a weaponized, illegally seated administration. That speaks volumes to me.
I strongly dislike Trump, but I do think Letsrock has a point. He is being prosecuted because he failed to follow the formula for maintaining the illusion of a democracy; he came too close to wrecking the illusion and exposing the real workings of the U.S. political system of control.
You don't get the extreme attacks from the minions of the Empire that he did (and still does), and still does, unless you're over some important targets. The reaction to him was like some extreme immune response to a pathogen invading a body.
(Edit: Added the parenthetical.)
Contrary to Caitlin, I do think that Trump was different than the other presidents, both Democrat and Republican.
He did not merely accept the "intel reports" the Empire wrote for him and follow the "advice" the Empire gave to him. (Recall the frequent public criticisms that he disparaged the "intel community" and ignored his advisors.) He also didn't need the payoffs of the post-presidential career as an "elder statesman", like Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama now enjoy.
So the Empire had to control him in a different way, which was to distract him by playing on his propensity for showmanship and enjoying public fights.
It's interesting that this is similar to the play that defenders of the left's anti-establishment tradition (like Caitlin, Jimmy Dore, etc.) say the Empire uses on the public at large. Distract them with fights--like racial issues, gender issues, abortion, etc.--that don't imperil the Empire's core activities of profit through world domination. And Trump sees himself as a populist man of the people, so maybe he falls for similar tricks as the general public, just more personally targeted in his case.
Recall also that the Joint Chiefs of Staff took their orders from the think tanks and slow-walked or half-assed Trump's orders. There isn't much you can do with a professional services strike unless you're willing to actually deport the whole of Thinktankistan (including the entire faculty and administration of elite universities) to black sites and give them their just deserts with pliers and blowtorches.
I can’t believe the dummy is still pushing the shots even today
You’re right that DJT was certainly an outsider with good intentions, but it did not take long for the deep state to bring him to heel.
So what were Trump’s good intentions? He got along with every yes man he appointed, but the second they publicly disagreed or criticized him, they became targets. His “draining the swamp” rhetoric was a cynical sales pitch. RFKJR said that Trump appointed him to deal with the pharmaceutical industry when Covid hit, and then Pfizer gave him a huge donation, and RFKJR was fired in favor of Pfizer’s very own Scott Gottlieb. So much for “draining the swamp.”
Trump has a long history of bilking. Virtually everything he does is to serve his own interests, and his primary interest is himself. I don’t know if you were raised in the United States, but the notion that “many in politics” are there to do good isn’t a view shared by anybody I know.
I give Trump the benefit of the doubt, only for public discussion. I never voted for him, and hold him in low regard. Like many in politics, I think he meant to do good. It is very interesting that his government paychecks were given to various charities.
In a reply on this thread to Letsrock, I suggested one way in which this was done.
Trying to argue that some admins are “particularly nefarious” is kind of a lost-in-the-trees argument.
I find it interesting that most of the passionate warnings about the deep state and the evil machinations of globalism are coming from the Republican right, billionaires, admitted insiders who, by the way are different. Trump forged this path, but now the billionaires vying for the WH, are seemingly coming out of the woodwork.
The Democrat right, billionaires, also insiders, are looking at all of the billionaires as the root of the dysfunctional system, but by the way, they are different.
Trump is a caricature that represents to the Dems the whole Republican “looney right,” and this has played well because Trump has been too easy to mock. If Vivek or DeSantis get in power, the language will be normalized and the narcissist ego will be nowhere in sight, and the Dems will no longer be able to kick that dog.
I think that’s when the pretense of democracy will morph into outright fascism. We are already there but for the optics.
Perhaps one of the most insidious accusations for the vote any blue crowd who insist we all should have voted for Biden anyway because Trump was the epitome of evil - the argument I hear nowadays is "because" I allowed Trump to win (i.e. by not voting for Biden) abortion now became illegal in many parts of the country.
It's hard to deal with this kind of accusation - that I personally have become responsible for the loss of abortion rights in the country. It feels similar to the accusation that if I didn't fully go along with the "me too" movement (not because of women's rights which I have supported my entire life) but because I felt the tag was being used hypocritically and cynically as a political tool by the neo-liberals - who looked the other way when it came to their own democratic tribe of womanizers - I was a terrible human being.
The whole push is a huge guilt trip, that if one doesn't vote for this entirely corrupt party - then YOU are to blame for everything that then happens in consequence. That you yourself are a contemptible human being because you didn't stop the eradication of Roe vs. Wade - which you should have predictably saw coming. That the democratic party - according to these self-righteous neo-liberals - never played an enabling role. It's the same kind of neurotic thinking when it comes to Ukraine - that Putin just one day, on a dime, because he is evil (like Trump) just decided to invade Ukraine - that NATO and the west played no role in the enablement of the bloody war.
It's hard to deal with this kind of ignorant black and white mentality - and I often have to remind myself that no, the gas lighting is just that: gas lighting - that there is far more context (being deliberately left out) that does not make me the responsible party for the state of the nation, and level of political corruption in both parties. And much like an abuser attempts to make his victim responsible for his abuse - I must walk away from the abuse, and refuse to accept the abuser's fabricated yarn and shallow justification for his/her abuse.
Jamenta: To anyone who talks to me about the abortion issue I give the same reply, "Why is government involved in our personal health care decisions?"
They never respond to my question in a meaningful way.
Letsrock: "It's an old Gestapo trick. Pretend to kill one of your own. " North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock.
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
Right on, Caitlin. ( like leftist ProgreSSive on, only in a better direction!)
https://open.substack.com/pub/genearly/p/this-endless-blah-blah-blah-is-done?
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...