Musing about mind control via covert totalitarianism, I sometimes marvel -- disgustingly -- how effectively violent gestapo-style cop-mentality has been inculcated throughout and across the collective and individual psyches of the police in the US. From big city forces like NYPD and LAPD through Staties as supposedly diverse as those in MA or TX, down to the cheesiest small-town Mayberry cops, the arm-twist first, assume-the-worst denigrating bullying attitude toward citizens (especially those with more melanin) seems universal. One would think the training manual was written by Hollywood in conjunction with Israel. Until we breed/foster a differently evolved cop mentality (if ever), totalitarian society is here to stay.
There is more information available about gas-lighting and other forms of mind manipulation than was available in previous decades. There is also more awareness of police brutality and bullying than there used to be. It never seems like enough information though. There is not even much pretense any more of the police being there to protect anyone. But maybe it is the wider availability of information about psychological manipulation combined with the visual evidence of brutality by police and military on social media that is making some of this oppressive behaviour more widely believed.
Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos ALREADY have for generations known the true face of the agency housed in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover, America’s all-time fascist.
Those Americans who think they are “white” are only now finding out.
But they should have long ago at least asked questions about why the nation was lauding an outright fascist and building monuments to him. Now it’s COINTELPRO for everyone who doesn’t conform to the genocide agenda.
Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and all the rest of the black sites across the globe have similarly benefitted from Israeli-US cooperation and training in enhanced interrogation and abusive prison regimes - just as they share intelligence gathering technology, and the development of drones and AI guided weaponry - the genocide in Gaza has given them golden opportunities to try out these systems.
Indeed, the nexus of CIA/Mossad/MI-6 operations in support of societally invasive, corrosive and destructive technologies is shocking, even just to the limited extent revealed by bold investigative journalists like Whitney Webb.
The UK government's role in the slow murder of Assange - as his declining health clearly shows - is absolutely shameful. Journalists are treated here the same as they are in Russia or America - tolerated up to a point, and then eliminated - though in our country it is not so obvious and violent, it's all dressed up in phoney judicial process
Thanks for this link -- it's a great example of one of the tentacles by which Israel lobby money sucks the blood of US society -- pay police forces to send their trainees to Israel, all expenses paid. There are far too many of these tentacles that really make it not insane to wonder who really runs the US governmental agency structure when push comes to shove
Thanks for that, Vinny. (Sono un cafone vecchio anch'io.) It's important to point out, as you do, that the "iron fist" is definitely there as an "alternative option" to the constant propaganda and gaslighting. (Caitlin's dichotomy didn't seem to include this fact.) Hell, the US "authorities" kill far more of their own citizens in a year than Mussolini's fascists ever did. And the dissidents very much in the public eye, like Julian Assange, they just kill slowly. Michael Hastings wasn't so lucky.
This is a very astute insight. Voting channels public energy into a controlled and harmless outlets. Coke or Pepsi? Team R corporate imperialist muppet or Team D corporate imperialist muppet?
Protesting is harder to control and may lead to outcomes that the rulers don't like.
Note how Evil Naughty Very Bad Totalitarian China *lifted* COVID restrictions in the face of widespread protests.
Good Virtuous Freedom Luving Canada cracked down, smearing protesters as Nazis and unlawfully freezing bank accounts.
This is NOT to say whether or not restrictions were or were not warranted. We can debate that later. The point is the Chinese government actually listened to the public. The Canadian government ignored its own laws to shut the public up, only to forget all about COVID once Ukraine rolled along.
"It’s hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one."
I have long maintained that Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. The technical term for this is a "beard".
Everyone in power in a democracy claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind. For that matter, Donald Trump’s influence over Team R.
In a classic authoritarian system, by contrast, everyone knows who is in charge and where the buck stops.
"I have long maintained that Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility."
I'll be more blunt.
First, democracy is basically Majority Supremacy with a right to vote.
Second it serves a way to equate the consent of elected officials with STATE-MANDATED ASSOCIATIONS to the consent of the governed with FREEDOM of ASSOCIATION.
How is "knowing who is in charge and where the buck stops in authoritarian systems" a benefit to anyone living in an authoritarian system? (i.e. what good is knowing who is in charge relevant to the lives of people in the system if they can do nothing to change the system?)
(I understand that at some level you are alluding to transparency and responsibility and holding those in power accountable.)
The Chinese government, on some level, fears its citizens. The fact that the Western governments, supposedly exercising "democracy" do not, is telling.
Moreover, it can also be argued that the Chinese government identifies with, and thus actually cares, about its citizens, even if its methods of governing are alien and odious to us.
I recall during my many years living in HK, that we would read about protests in China occurring on a regular basis. Back when Murdock owned the South China Morning Post, I expect the news was intended to show how unhappy everyone was in China. To me what it showed was that the Chinese people were more than ready to take to the streets or fields, to express their views. The same could not be said of the US, even though the entire industrial base, and the jobs, were being shipped overseas, many to China, until China became too "costly," then over to Bangladesh or Cambodia.
It seems the Chinese citizenry has one big advantage over Westerners, that is, of being clear-eyed about the root nature of government (in general): That it is a group that claims it has the only legitimate power to use force. When it gets bad enough, the choice to protest becomes clear, no matter the consequences.
Here, we (esp. Dems) conflate the government with 'We the People', and for a long time that illusion could be maintained. But today, when cognitive dissonance increasingly occurs in the modern era ("why are our jobs continually disappearing without remedy?" etc.), we go into denial and rationalization. If, nevertheless, we don't shut up, either in public or even by personal contact, we are censored, shunned from employment and other associations by secret campaigns, or lawfare-framed with ruinous fines or prison. But this is now slowly waking all of us up.
"It seems the Chinese citizenry has one big advantage over Westerners, that is, of being clear-eyed about the root nature of government (in general)"
NO.
If people were clear-eyed, propaganda would not work. A population as large as China's (or India's for example) can only be managed through propaganda (along with other strategies).
Then how does one explain the difference in their (apparent) willingness to rise up against abusive corporations and governments, vs Western counterparts? It appears to me the reason is that Western propaganda is significantly superior.
>>"Then how does one explain the difference in their (apparent) willingness to rise up against abusive corporations and governments"
It's not willingness that you perceive. It's desperation. The level of repression (depending on where you are in China) can be quite high. I'm not sure if you've followed news about the state of workers in Chinese factories, the long work hours in Chinese corporations, the socio-economic differences between the urban and rural areas, the high rate of youth unemployment in China, the unequal schooling and education system, etc.
(5) Understanding China's Regionally Administered Totalitarianism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-bHEeHhw04) (This video is a little biased against China IMHO, but still informative).
>>"It appears to me the reason is that Western propaganda is significantly superior."
You are completely right about that. The US are the world leaders in propaganda. Their propaganda apparatus and machinery are unparalleled.
It is much easier to control populations by propaganda/brainwashing/gaslighting than to control them by force/explicit coercion. Hence, you might observe that countries that are not as good at propaganda as the US might have to resolve to using more authoritarian, totalitarian and forceful methods to control their populations.
I've been to China. My niece is an expert on China. She tells us that the people for the most part approve of their government. As long as you aren't a Uigher, of course.
It is my observation that most Americans are more respectful of authority than are Chinese. They did after all have a revolution within living memory.
Should someone believe a claim based on the opinion of two people (neither of which live in China?). What about the opinions of the other 1.4 billion people? And the opinions of the 1.4 billion people will depend on who is doing the asking and under what circumstances.
>>"It is my observation that most Americans are more respectful of authority than are Chinese."
What observations made you conclude that Americans are more respectful of authority than the Chinese? What data did you look at? And what data did you fail to consider?
>>"The Chinese government, on some level, fears its citizens."
All Governments on some level fear its citizens. China is not unique or different (in this respect).
>>"Moreover, it can also be argued that the Chinese government identifies with, and thus actually cares, about its citizens"
That is black-and-white thinking. There is a spectrum (and not yes/no) when it comes to managing/caring about the population. And it is nuanced. Every Government cares about its citizens to some extent (even though it may not seem so). Also, every Govt. wants to stay in power (which seems to be more important to them than the caring part).
Where is this Chinese idolatory coming from? What criteria is being used to evaluate such subjective opinions? And what weightage is being assigned to the numerous variables and complexities that go into such analysis?
Meanwhile, it is stunningly clear that we now have government in the US that is completely -- and I do mean *completely* -- beholden to non-democratic interests, at home and abroad -- something not nearly so apparent, or even so predominantly false, when I was a young adult (c.1980)
So I am saying what appears to me true based on the differences between what I see of China and its citizens, vs what I see (primarily) in the US. The vast portion of the US population is (a) oblivious, and/or (b) avoiding conflict because it scared out of its wits, and/or (c) colludes with / accepts corruption, on some level.
Very, very few in the US go (d) the route of physical protest and risking arrests. Perhaps it is simply a media distortion to think the percentages willing to protest are higher in China?
You do realize that there is only ONE party in China right? There is no choice (not even a fake one). However flawed/fake/false the democracy is in the US (and it is indeed very flawed to the point of being non-existent), there is still more autonomy (and democracy) than countries like China, Russia, India (IMO).
China actively surveils its citizens (no, this is not all in my head) and clamps down on protests and prevents them from occuring. Their repression is many times more evolved than anything seen in Western countries.
>>"Perhaps it is simply a media distortion to think the percentages willing to protest are higher in China?"
Yes, you are right about that. The Chinese govt. tightly control their media (official and social media). Hence, it is difficult to gauge the "true level" of protests against the govt. Western govts. - due to their bias against China - will hype up even the smallest of Chinese protests to possibly make it more that it really is. Similarly, US media will try to cover as little as possible the protests happening around the country. I remember the protests during the Covid era. I remember (and am living through) the protests against the current genocide. The US media tends to cover these events as little as possible. Hence, there is a distorted perception of the true level of protests happening all over the US.
"However flawed/fake/false the democracy is in the US (and it is indeed very flawed to the point of being non-existent), there is still more autonomy (and democracy) than countries like China, Russia, India (IMO)."
"there is still more autonomy" in body maybe, but certainly not in mind. The fact is, the US and the West are very culturally sick. We (that is, the majority) have no good idea what is the problem, don't know the target, and are rudderless. Caitlin has written volumes about this.
So I should also point out that there is, in fact, only one *effective* party in the US as well, called by opponents the Uniparty, the Money Party, etc. The fact that the majority of the West do not understand this, as opposed to having identifiable target(s), is well-arguably comparable in importance to physical repression. And it is also fair to say that physical repression exists in the US, given the world's highest incarceration rate. If you're part of the small minority in which the propaganda hasn't taken root, then lawfare, and if necessary, yes, beating and killing, finishes people off.
I know this, because I am subject to repression myself, and I know clearly the difference from 50 years ago. Don't get the idea that (for the time being) that because I am writing here on Substack that things are fine, and I am not aware of the true state of the US.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views.
That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
The Gaza Genocide should provide several lessons.
Zionism is a psychopathic genocidal idiology whose existence is a disgrace to civilization.
The American People have no power.
Those with power in the US want our votes but not our voices.
Our government and the MIC will do as the lobbyists see fit.
Also, The Slur -- of "antisemitism" -- has loudly exposed itself for what it always has been - opportunistic and hypocritical phony outrage, used as a political whip. For heaven's sake! Now they would have us believe that protesting mass murder is anti-Jewish!
How do they get away with that one for one second?!
The Slur is being used to intimidate and silence people
about Genocide!
Where does Senator Bernie Sanders sit in all this and what is his role?
I would label him as a gatekeeper of damage control for the Status Quo.
He sets the boundaries of how much people can learn from the experiences of the last
several months.
If you listen to or read what he has to say you will notice that he wants a reset to before October 7th.
Below is a statement Bernie Sanders released on April 25th, 2024.
You will see that he does not, nor will he (as of May 12th), say the word Genocide.
By this we are to believe that Congress is not supporting Genocide.
We see that Bernie wants it both ways, he wants the votes of students and liberals and
he also wants to low ball the amount of casualties in Gaza.
Clearly obvious from his statement is that Bernie wants The Slur to maintain its power as a political whip.
Most of all, Mr Gatekeeper of damage control, wants support for Israel to reset to pre-October 7th levels.
He doesn't want anyone to see that Israel has proven itself to be psychopathic and genocidal. Bernie Sanders would have us believe that it is ALL Netanyahu and Netanyahu's **policies**. Once Netanyahu has gone we can all go back to pretending that Israel is a fine place deserving of our freshly printed debt, The Slur is still a powerful political whip and people can vote but not have voices.
<B>Bernie Sanders releases statement in support of Israel</B>
April 25, 2024
<BLOCKQUOTE>
No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000 – seventy percent of whom are women and children.
It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless – almost half the population.
It is not antisemitic to note that your government has obliterated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure – electricity, water, and sewage.
It is not antisemitic to realize that your government has annihilated Gaza’s health care system, knocking 26 hospitals out of service and killing more than 400 health care workers.
It is not antisemitic to condemn your government’s destruction of all of Gaza’s 12 universities and 56 of its schools, with hundreds more damaged, leaving 625,000 students with no education.
It is not antisemitic to agree with virtually every humanitarian organization in saying that your government, in violation of American law, has unreasonably blocked humanitarian aid coming into Gaza, creating the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of children face malnutrition and famine.
Mr. Netanyahu. Antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people.
But, please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war
policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you
are facing in the Israeli courts. It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions.
>>"The point is the Chinese government actually listened to the public."
Feral, you must be smoking some really high quality stuff. In what world/reality do you think that? I see people all over CJ's substack thinking USA bad & China/Russia good - that is a false dichotomy. Each of them are bad in their own ways. Each of them run under their own variations of Capitalism. Each of them have growing inequality. Each of them use propaganda to control their own populations. Each of them have corruption, abuse of power, authoritarianism, strong-man leaders, etc.
What people suffer from in their opinions about Russia/China/non-US opinions is - lack of robust data analysis and anecdotal evidence (+ survivorship bias of data).
Here's some real world data collection evidence to try out - try asking people living below the poverty line (or in the bottom 50%) in each of those countries about whether they "think" their Governments listen to them (the public).
Exactly. The people must use every tool in the box and cause the oligarchy as many headaches simultaneously to keep them off balance. Then the people will be able to topple the regime and assert their own power.
"If I were Jewish I would be enraged that the world’s most powerful governments and the world’s most influential media outlets keep telling everyone over and over again that opposing mass murder is anti-Jewish."
Yes. Who, exactly, is showing their antisemitism by telling us that being the perp of an outrageous crime is equivalent to being Jewish?! And every now another idiotic campaign also comes up to slam critics of globalism and capitalism with the same smear. This shit needs always to be boomeranged.
We live in a sociopathic system optimized to create and promote sociopaths. In this meme, it is no wonder that the politics we are immersed in, the leaders who succeed promote sociopathic actions and policies. Propaganda for the "liberal democracies" of The West is but one tool of this system.
Our challenge is to create, find, or adapt to another system where empathy dominates.
True. But you can't call complete lawlessness and anarchy a system. Which is what our billionaire rulers are working toward if a revolution does come - the Elites want to manipulate even the Revolutionary change if they can. They would like to hand over all control to the most wealthy, while the masses are left to fend entirely for themselves. We do need a better system, but that system cannot be replaced by an even more depraved lawless "Non-system" of no social value and complete chaos.
Anarchy is not chaos or complete lawlessness. It is governance from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, Peter Kropotkin, Paul Goodman, Marcos and many more talk about different ways of organizing our world in the style of anarchy. Oh, and Noam Chomsky.
Anarchy: 1. a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems.
Lawlessness is what hoodlums advocate for. I don't buy it for a second. And there have been numerous hoodlums in power. Chomsky told us we had to vote for Biden, advocating for the Lesser of Two Evils pile of shit - the damn fool.
Many years ago I was sitting at the table with my family and my 12 year old sister asked me what I was: was I a Catholic or a Protestant or??? I said I am none of those things. I am an anarchist. I was joking but my mother said "don't say that, they are murderers and criminals". I thought to myself, I don't think that is exactly true. I started reading about anarchism and the huge variety of ideas that are around it. Mostly I like the commitment to justice and freedom for everyone and the idea of getting rid of hierarchies. My mother was wrong about anarchism and so are you.
Of course all anarchists will not agree with each other, just like in every ideology, but generally, I see an anarchical approach as having a lot more possibilities than anything we presently use. I particularly like the idea of governance from the bottom up. I really see hierarchies as a huge problem.
from The Society of Problem Solvers, joshketry@substack.com: Decentralized, transparent systems that solve problems from the bottom-up instead of the top-down. We simply change the direction flow of problem solving with better systems, and lock the people doing the corrupting out of them. We migrate to these new high trust systems - where we can go to have meaningful conversations once again. Then, we plug our new systems into the corrupt ones and fix them.
Of course there is an authority. Those of us at the bottom are the authority and ideally, we would discuss how we would develop new systems and get rid of or fix (if they are fixable) the old ones.
It is interesting to note that the early Kibbutzim of the Israeli state were originally set up as Anarcho-Syndicalist Communes, and that left wing sentiment was supposed to be the guiding principle of the fledgling government. That noble enterprise was unfortunately entirely subsumed by terroristic, fascistic and racist ethno-state lunatics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Israel
They were encouraged to be created on lands to be claimed for Israel eventually. That is, it's a tool for ethnic cleansing and any "idea" for them would be welcome to establish the "facts on the ground".
chris leeds: Thanks for that link. I had not realized that the Kibbutzim were so similar to Doukhobor communes. The Doukhobours who came from Russia are also anarchic in their thinking. At least they used to be. That may have changed. When they first came to Canada, they did not send their children to school and they did not get driver's licenses.
one of the sadnesses of my life is that I used, as a child in the late 50s to read stories centred around the Kibbutzim, and admired their organisation, the equality between men and women, the sharing of child raising, and I was completely taken in by their account of "turning the empty desert into fertile land", and by their heroic resistance to Arabs irrationally intent on destroying them - all somewhat driven by guilt because my Mother's family were Germans. No mention was ever made of the Nakba, or that many of the settlers had terrorist origins. Now of course I realise it was all fiction, all propaganda - the land was not not empty desert, people already lived there, and it was the Palestinians who were the heroes resisting the occupation. All the fake democratic aspirations of the settlers were based on racist apartheid and fanatically nationalist ethno-fascism.
Maybe they had some good ideas at first but were taken over by Zionist thinking. When I first met some of the older Doukhobours, I was really impressed by some of their thinking. Then, many were jailed mostly because their actions were not understood properly by the dominant society. Children were taken from their families and put in camps. Doukhobours have changed a lot too.
Members of the Biden administration should be made to consider 18 U.S. Code § 1091 the law that brought the genocide convention into US law. Put this statute in their faces, up front and center at every protest at every meeting, press conference, briefing, and trips home and abroad.
They may feel they are immune now, but let's get them considering what is possible when they leave office, given they have set the precedent of charging former presidents. They should have visions of prison all the days of their lives.
The propagandists in the Mainstream Media need to be encouraged to think about their culpability as well.
I stopped voting after Obama’s 1st term. So many people worked their buttocks off to get him elected and he turned around and gave them the finger. He easily could have been an outstanding president if he had kept even half of his campaign promises.
Especially during the housing collapse when he bailed out the banks and let them steal people’s homes. And then he brutally broke up the people who protested against the theft.
Obama's first term was the only time I've ever voted. Felt compelled to, almost. But of course, that symbolic victory was illusory. Like the rest, he eventually reflected the true colors of the imperial presidency.
Yep it was just an illusion. Remember the scene from Grant park when people were laughing and crying thinking that he would actually do what he said he would? Now most of the comments I see about him are so full of anger. I believe that was why Hillary lost and Trump was elected. Then he too failed to do what he promised.
"... and he turned around and gave them the finger." - he didn't turn around. He had that finger out all the time, as any politician does, but people just refuse to see it. It's astounding how gullible people are to believe politicians' words.
You’re right. Everyone who fell for his talk should go back and listen to his speech and see that he never actually said what we heard. Some people tried to warn me, but I didn’t want to listen.
At least in the UK you have George Galloway and the Workers Party......George is the greatest orator in the English speaking world and he is on the right side of history, in my view.
I agree with Galloway on most things - and yes he is a great orator - but I think he was completely wrong on Brexit, for example (he was a leaver). He has some very 'conservative' views on gender and abortion, which upset many people. A bit like JK Rowling he is pilloried by the 'woke' for what are really just parental concerns about how gender and related topics are taught in schools - he consistently votes for things like allowing gay marriage, and allowing gay couples to adopt, but is very wary of 'gender fluidity', especially if promoted to children as a lifestyle choice, and he certainly opposes too early interventions with drugs or surgery. (Although I see myself as 'liberal' - I have to say, I share those concerns. Adults are free to do whatever they want to their own bodies, but children have to be shielded from making life altering decisions too young).
Personally I think tattoos should be banned but that would probably cripple the UK economy especially if head shaving was made compulsory at the same time.
Gender dysphoria is considered to be a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.....it affects relatively few people, probably in the UK, less than the number of Palestinians that have been killed or maimed by Zionists in Gaza over the years.
The question really should be: is Zionism a mental disorder, since most Zionists don't believe in god, but they do believe god gave them a "Promised Land" in Palestine?
Maybe a non Zionist jew, the kind I respect, will figure out a cure for both maladies and win a Nobel Prize for Peace.
I guess for gender and abortion every single case is different, and no one-size-fits-all approaches will work. I said to an Israeli friend the other day, talking about the Ultra Orthodox Although some protest against the compulsory draft and say that Zionism is no art of Judaism, others say they should keep fighting for Zionism, which she seemed to endorse. My answer was that surely by now the return to Zion has been accomplished, and could have been stabilised forever, and that I think it's the current Israeli actions in Gaza - and previous aggressions and land theft - that are destabilising and risking the Zionist project. For instance if they stupidly manage to provoke a full on war with Iran, the destruction of Israel as a meaningful entity will likely be assured
"the president has grown increasingly frustrated over the conduct of the war" - The Pulitzer prize winning newspaper telling us we need to be concerned about Joe Biden's "feelings" yet again. Although Joe himself has had the power all along to stop this ongoing atrocity and still does even now, stop the massacre of an entire unarmed civilian population including 14,000 young children, by a bunch of IDF sadist goons - we're all still suppose to be mainly concerned about this old man's ice cream cone feelings. A man known to be a blatant plagiarist and sellout to the highest bidder his entire life, corrupt as the day as long, a warmonger extraordinaire - a man who was forced down the throats of the American public by a corporate DNC that rigged the democratic primary process in the most blatantly corrupt fashion one could imagine - we're all supposed to be concerned about how he feels, and that we must be of proper decorum not to actively protest the mass killings this bastard is committing right before our eyes.
There must be an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Pope Francis has said what is needed, now he must do what is needed by going to Gaza and standing for peace, justice and freedom.
Let us also support UNRWA. If our governments won’t act in accordance with humanity, then we will. https://www.unrwausa.org/donate Let us do it to honor Aaron Bushnell, or in memory of Hind Rajab.
These are a few small things we can do. If we can do more, let us do more.
When will everyone Stop incorrectly referring to Gaza as a WAR. How can it be WAR when there is only ONE army, the IDF. Where is Gaza`s army? Those who try to screen the murder as war deliberatly try to justify this atrocity as just another war it is a depraved lie stop aiding them
And yet Gummy Jack Arden is still at large and so are s/he/its counterparts throughout the Collective Medical Tyranny AKA 'The West'. I think in particular of frontholes Bonnie Henry and, allegedly, Teresa (probably Terence) Tam of Canadahar.
If you haven't seen the BBC documentary "Hpernormalization" check it out. Caitlin, if you haven't seen it, check it out. It perfectly explains the manipulated and commodified reality we are trapped in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k&t=2s
Normalization of actions comes about when you faithfully support a goal or end that you will not give up. Instead you normalize those things your actually disapprove of.
Normalization of state actions occurs because most people faithfully support the state as necessary and something they will not give up.
I couldn't agree more with Caitlin's analysis of our current state of affairs. I have a question that has been forcing its way to the forefront of my thoughts recently:
I have always thought that I understood how someone could be motivated by monied interests to seek their own power, wealth, and self-interest. They have done this for years projecting themselves as protectors of human rights, and democracy for all.
What I am seeing, in the continuing current actions of the US, UK officials is that they have exposed their craven hypocrisy and banality, to such an extent that they no longer can make these claims, upon which a great deal of their power rests.
Which raises the question for me, of how can it be that money motivates people to gain power, and at the same time be a motivation for them to undermine their own power and self-interest? Something's missing in this picture, and I no longer believe this is a satisfactory or complete explanation of what is going on. Looking for serious input and feedback on this question.
I feel you are making a few assumptions in your question:
(1) You are assuming that the path to power (and money) does not contain contradictions. In reality, there are many contradictions happening at different levels at different times.
(2) You are assuming that people are rational and logical in their quest to achieve power (and money).
(3) You are assuming that the path to power (and money) is straightforward. But it could also be 2 steps forward, 1 step back or some other unexplainable dance moves that moves the needle towards achieving their ultimate end-goals.
(4) You are assuming that we (the public) are aware of all the behind-the-scenes logic of the power elite and their strategic planning. But in reality, we have very little information. We can only assume based on what we know, and I'm afraid what we don't know is magnitudes higher.
I don't know if what I'm saying is coming across or addressing your question appropriately. The logic of gaining and maintaining power/control/money/resources/etc. is not always rational or straightforward or necessarily observable. There are many contradictions of different magnitudes that take place within the overall arch of attaining end-goals. Some of these will resolve, others won't. For example: a person could take an action (based on emotions) that are positive in the short-term but negative in the long-term. Conversely, they could take a certain action that is detrimental in the short-term but which works out towards a positive outcome in the long-term. Without a full view into the exhaustive data set (of all short-term and long-term outcomes), it becomes difficult to make sense of these contradictions (that you allude to in your question).
I appreciate your points. The whole thing is difficult for me to even articulate. It's that we do seem to be working in the dark, as you point out, and I don't like that, which is the purpose of my question, to get us thinking about some of the whys of what we are seeing.
I do have assumptions, and one is that it is in Israel's benefit, long and short term, for the US to remain powerful. What I see are actions that undermine the power of the US, in a number of ways, especially what is called 'soft power.' That is going rapidly down the drain. To me that seems undesirable for any of their purposes, and I don't understand why they are doubling down on this. You suggest that they may be behaving irrationally. But so many?
I would have expected that, among the supporters of Israel, regardless of the reason for the support, there would be sufficient numbers to speak up and restrain Israel for Israel's own benefit, by pointing out that these nations are able to give Israel impunity only because they are powerful nations. To the extent this gets undermined, the impunity is also undermined. But the kinds of actions we see are the opposite.
"Which raises the question for me, of how can it be that money motivates people to gain power, and at the same time be a motivation for them to undermine their own power and self-interest?"
- because it no longer is undermining, at least as far as money. Money is secured for them and that's the self-interest part if you mean politicians losing their positions while fulfilling some paying parties' duties, - through positions on boards, universities, making speeches, etc.
I mean losing the position of power and influence their country previously enjoyed. I mean losing the election. If Trump truly represents the end of democracy, as they claim, and they supposedly have this great belief in democracy, then they are losing all of this, for what? Money doesn't fully explain, at least not to me, what is the motive here.
"I mean losing the position of power and influence their country previously enjoyed." - that's the "public service" part isn't it? But they don't care about it. All they care about is money.
I don't think we are looking at this in the same way, or maybe at different things entirely. My thinking is that these countries have gained positions of power in the world that are valuable. The leaders' current actions are undermining the very aspects of power that make them, the country and the person, valuable to those monied interests. Therefore, my question: why are they doing this? How, and what, are the leaders gaining from this loss of power that makes them do what they are doing? There's something I am very unclear about in this.
I think we're talking about the same thing, I'm just unable to get through.
"these countries have gained positions of power in the world that are valuable" - valuable to them, but not universally. Theirs is a colonial, parasitic behavior that earned them prosperity at the expense of the rest of the world. As that prosperity starts getting endangered, not just because of their problematic behavior, but also due to the rest of the world catching up in their prosperity levels, showing alternative ways of doing things, the "leaders" are forced to behave more erratically and belligerently.
So to your question "why are they doing this?" the answer could be - they are forced to.
I get what you are saying. But "forced to," opens up a whole can of unsightly worms,such as how, by whom, and what, and through what means? Saving face, fanaticism, blackmail? Threats to personal or family safety? Nuclear oblivion? Something else? Is there even anyway to get an answer to these?
Perhaps this is what I sense is missing from the picture/discourse or whatever it's called. Because for me, the obvious incentive to gain power seems would not work as an incentive to actively losing power.
well the leaders gain in the short term. so do the monied interests. what their long term plans are I don't know, they probably don't have anything realistic. Mars!!
I honestly believe in the pedophile theory. They are willing to burn it it eh ground, and kill every last Palestinian because Mossad has secrets on them that would destroy them. And nothing is worse than child rape
I think it's possible that not one person can know how they would react after having made a large amount of money. We could all say: I will never change//I will donate and help other disadvantaged people/I will be a good and empathetic person.
Problem is with making money one moves maybe to a better neighbourhood/better schools etc and you are meeting a new set of people who have opinions different than your own and slowly one begins to change.
Your questions and observations suggest to me an open mind — few posters ever ask questions. Money motivates some people to gain power. Power motivates some people to gain money. But most of the people with power, money and self interest were born into power, money, and self interest.
The monied interests and the power interests you refer to are the same people. They are not aspirational. We tend to perceive reality from our own experience.
Children grow in the circumstances into which they are born. Naturally their perspectives are limited. Metaphysical speculation aside, we do not choose the circumstances into which we are born. Life for a child is a time of absorption. He or she has no comparative capabilities. For a long time a child assumes the world is as he or she perceives it. …And for him or her, even when they see other people these other people are usually relatives and peers. His or her ability to deeply understand the labels we all use to identify distinctions are barely relevant for a long time. Awareness grows slowly. Advantages are take for granted. Disadvantages attendant to being poor — in certain circumstances are often recounted with joy. People say I never knew how poor we were. Advantages attendant to being born in families rich and powerful are often recounted with abject misery.
Middle class people seldom understand what being poor is like. There is lot of poor in being poor. Middle class people seldom understand what being rich is truly like. Middle class people are the most upwardly mobility motivated. There are so many layers of middle class upward mobility possibilities the difference between say a family with income of $250,000 in earned income and another family with $250,000 dollars in investment income are barely noticed by many people, even adults, let alone children. Consider this: a $250,000 income for the family whose jobs net that money may have very few assets. A family with $250,000 in invest income has assets. Those assets could be income from properties they rent to tenants. Those assets could be shares in a private business their family owns. Or those assets could be stock, i.e. shares in a corporation, say Walmart, or Boeing, or shares in ten different corporations.
There are many other assumptions that bear on this explanation but to keep it understandable and entirely likely, I’ll keep it simple. The market is more or less rational. If a person sees a much better investment, and so sells one asset and buys another, enough others see betterment, that at some point — sooner or later investment income averages out. They long run rate of investment returns i.e, income from assets is about 10% — the more risk the better the return.
Passive income of $250,000 therefore requires about $5,000,000 dollars of assets assuming a 50% tax rate. Believe me those are very different circumstances.
Now to get to your question. Suppose almost all assets are indebted by at least 50%. Corporations borrow enormous sums. Governments the same. Home owners the same. Farmers the same. Apartment owners the same. Cruise ships the same.
When banks loan money borrowers pledge their assets. Borrowers borrow because they are incentivized by the government to keep borrowing. How does that work? Money borrowed to buy assets is tax deductible. The rate of depreciation of assets encourages borrowers to build or renovate their properties. Buildings wear out!
Banks carry money on their books as liabilities. …Because savers expect the bank to pay them to use their money. Banks carry loans on their books as assets. The biggest banks and the richest people continuously lobby governments to behave favourably towards them.
Banks want the people to whom they lend money to be able to pay back the money they have lent at risk. Banks do not want to foreclose.
There exists enormous incentives within mature economies for banks to encourage
monopolies. Supposedly these giants do not go bankrupt. Whereas entrepreneurial activity is risky. But competition is disruptive. There are more bankruptcies when there is more competition. But competitive advantages accrue to innovative investments made by invention and innovation. Innovation gradually upsets the former equilibrium.
A great deal of the U.S. economy is mature and therefore depreciated. Corporations move offshore to gain better market conditions. Banks lend to corporations that when moving offshore still services the debts. But the profits are often kept offshore. Like with Apple.
Consider here the banks. They control much of the global economy. In essence the banks control much of the global economy because they want corporations to service their debts. Corporations can raise their prices. Bank lending to governments is almost risk free. Governments can raise taxes. But at the international level entire economies are in competition.
In other words the people with the power and the money are born with — power, wealth, and self interest. And they want to keep it that way!
But Jews seen unable to rest. At some point things seen and unseen have considerable momentum. Nothing ever rests. As Bob Dylan sang poetically 60 years ago — “…things not busy being born are busy dying.” Our modern economy is like a Ponzi scheme. Banks have to lend. Or else their depositors get restless and withdraw their deposits. Banks prefer to lend almost all the depositors funds. But gradually deposits accumulate. They paid out less and less interest to their depositors. Would be depositors seek to maintain the purchasing power of their money begin to cause inflation — asset prices rise but at some point there’s no advantage to anyone when the price of a house, or a share becomes unaffordable.
Sooner or later there tends to be far too much money in circulation. The money gets tied up in non performing assets. People stop spending. The poorest people then, have no jobs, no money, no cash flow, no purchasing power — no anything.
War has often been see and used as a solution. Assets are destroyed, lives too — munitions stocks are used, ships sunk, factories bombed, people are displaced, ideologies invented.
The people with money and power are off-times as likely to be ruined as the poor and middle class. They are no less afraid. Tragically knowledge and understanding are not always aligned. They concentrate in their own silos. Momentum carries mankind along the rushing slipstream of time. Men and women lose their minds. Their egos propel them along in certainty. The people with the most power and the most money come to think this is a consequence of their own capabilities. They constantly see affirmation so as to assuage their inner doubts. They lose their humanity. Many never had any.
The solutions to present problems lie in no doing many of the things which the greedy and foolish dismembered. For instance cancelling the restraints Glass-Steagall which was initiated to prevent risky activity, and prevent non-banking activities from contaminating banking activities — separating commercial and investment banking. Separating Wall Street from Main Street encouraged banks to be prudent with depositors funds.
Consider part of the problem was that banks could lend money to a company and then issue stocks in that same company without revealing to shareholders the bank’s underlying conflict of interest. If that company then failed, the bank suffered no losses while its investors were left holding the bag.
That should give you enough material and feed back to point you in the right direction.
Rules are meant to stabilize the banking industry, and stabilize society, and prevent the looting of the treasury and looting taxpayers.
Except the power to prevent looting rests with the people doing the looting. Rather like putting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in charge of the local bank. They would not have been too smart, would it?
What's missing is the support and the desire for State Power
Of course that conclusion involves taking a more negative view of The State than most people are willing to do.
The final choice is clear to me ( as a libertarian )
Support the Liberal Social Right to Freedom of Association or support / DEFAULT to State-Mandated associations which is what ALL states do even if using DEMOCRACY as an excuse
The first above. though, means people have a right to NOT associate with the State.
A position MOST Democrats and Republicans and many others are not willing to take.
When government is afraid of the people we have freedom; When people are afraid of the government we have tyranny-- Ben Franklin
Never before in the history of the world have governments so disgraced themselves as Western governments are now. It is just a parade of liar clowns trying to avoid responsibility for the mess of war and corruption they have brought about. they refuse to take responsibility for their wanton criminality.
We are in a highly integrated world where the consequences of gross incompetence may well lead to the greatest of mass extinctions. We should be waging peace and not war. The stupidity of Western despots is a lethal pandemic where a return to socialism( rather than sociopathy), common sense, and democracy are the only vaccines available.
With all due respect, I disagree with your above "Ben Franklin quote" as it does not reflect observed reality.
When govt. is afraid of people, we have more propaganda, more repression and oppression, more authoritarianism, and maybe even more totalitarianism - as the power elite and lords of empire will fight even harder to maintain the status quo. This should be self evident from studying events in world history.
I don't think government is afraid of the people now. It is desperately trying to arrogantly override public opinion. To this point people have been passive and only now are starting to speak out. The student protests are the first signal of much more to come and that is where politicians fear will become more manifest. It is going to be very interesting for the next months to see what level of anger issues forth from the people and will it be strong enough and sustained long enough to about bring real change. It is also an open question how brutal will the government get to enforce its despotism. The present situation has all the makings of a civil war.
As it is now the crisis only deepens and is moving away from resolution. The biggest thing government fears now is they have lost control of their agenda. There is much more to come.
>>"I don't think government is afraid of the people now"
There is a reason the power elite (or ruling elite or oligarchs, etc.) invest so much in propaganda, censorship, FBI/CIA/police brutality, suppression of people, gaslighting, etc. They know they are the minority. They are (and have always been) afraid of the majority rising up against them. They are afraid of their propaganda methods being exposed (what Caitlin Johnstone's articles are all about).
The protests are not a new thing. There have been anti-war protests in the US since before World War I (as I'm sure you are aware). The McCarthyism period, red scare, fear mongering about socialism, capitalism, moral panics, and authoritarianism and ruling by fear are all indications of a persistent fear that the power elite have always had (throughout history). Currently, we are simply in the next stage of the process of class warfare - of the 98% vs. the 2%. The more the fear, the crazier the narratives of the power elite become.
'We are indoctrinated from childhood by corrupt education systems which construct the mainstream empire-authorized worldview inside our skulls, and that worldview is continually bolstered, steered, and added onto throughout adulthood from every direction we’ve been trained to get our information from' Call it what it is- the patriarchy- rewarding dominance over non-whites and women and punishing compassion and co-operation.
Musing about mind control via covert totalitarianism, I sometimes marvel -- disgustingly -- how effectively violent gestapo-style cop-mentality has been inculcated throughout and across the collective and individual psyches of the police in the US. From big city forces like NYPD and LAPD through Staties as supposedly diverse as those in MA or TX, down to the cheesiest small-town Mayberry cops, the arm-twist first, assume-the-worst denigrating bullying attitude toward citizens (especially those with more melanin) seems universal. One would think the training manual was written by Hollywood in conjunction with Israel. Until we breed/foster a differently evolved cop mentality (if ever), totalitarian society is here to stay.
There is more information available about gas-lighting and other forms of mind manipulation than was available in previous decades. There is also more awareness of police brutality and bullying than there used to be. It never seems like enough information though. There is not even much pretense any more of the police being there to protect anyone. But maybe it is the wider availability of information about psychological manipulation combined with the visual evidence of brutality by police and military on social media that is making some of this oppressive behaviour more widely believed.
Learn from the best at repression:
https://m.jpost.com/Israel-News/Senior-US-law-enforcement-officials-visiting-to-study-Israeli-counterterrorism-ops-434709
If only they'd call this what it actually was, not "counterterrorism", but rather "lessons in terrorizing your own citizenry".
Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos ALREADY have for generations known the true face of the agency housed in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover, America’s all-time fascist.
Those Americans who think they are “white” are only now finding out.
But they should have long ago at least asked questions about why the nation was lauding an outright fascist and building monuments to him. Now it’s COINTELPRO for everyone who doesn’t conform to the genocide agenda.
"lauding an outright fascist"
? Whom? Andrew Jackson?
J. Edgar Hoover.
Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and all the rest of the black sites across the globe have similarly benefitted from Israeli-US cooperation and training in enhanced interrogation and abusive prison regimes - just as they share intelligence gathering technology, and the development of drones and AI guided weaponry - the genocide in Gaza has given them golden opportunities to try out these systems.
Indeed, the nexus of CIA/Mossad/MI-6 operations in support of societally invasive, corrosive and destructive technologies is shocking, even just to the limited extent revealed by bold investigative journalists like Whitney Webb.
You missed the worst one- the NSA.
Apologies for the oversight.
chris leeds, and the journalist/activist who exposed these war crimes sits in solitary confinement in Belmarsh jail UK, a political prisoner.
Free Assange! Free Palestine!
The UK government's role in the slow murder of Assange - as his declining health clearly shows - is absolutely shameful. Journalists are treated here the same as they are in Russia or America - tolerated up to a point, and then eliminated - though in our country it is not so obvious and violent, it's all dressed up in phoney judicial process
Caitlin also points out 'A federal judge in Canberra has sentenced whistleblower David McBride to five years and eight months for exposing Australian war crimes in Afghanistan'. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/13/whistleblower-mcbride-sentenced-to-5-yrs-8-mos/
When would think correctly.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/
Thanks for this link -- it's a great example of one of the tentacles by which Israel lobby money sucks the blood of US society -- pay police forces to send their trainees to Israel, all expenses paid. There are far too many of these tentacles that really make it not insane to wonder who really runs the US governmental agency structure when push comes to shove
Yes!
Thanks for that, Vinny. (Sono un cafone vecchio anch'io.) It's important to point out, as you do, that the "iron fist" is definitely there as an "alternative option" to the constant propaganda and gaslighting. (Caitlin's dichotomy didn't seem to include this fact.) Hell, the US "authorities" kill far more of their own citizens in a year than Mussolini's fascists ever did. And the dissidents very much in the public eye, like Julian Assange, they just kill slowly. Michael Hastings wasn't so lucky.
Ben spiegato.
Apropos of which, see this: https://youtu.be/4vjCdHWAmps?si=v6b4vOINSYG2azlg
Disturbing but unsurprising. Maybe I've lived too long.
So very true, such keen observations.....!
This is a very astute insight. Voting channels public energy into a controlled and harmless outlets. Coke or Pepsi? Team R corporate imperialist muppet or Team D corporate imperialist muppet?
Protesting is harder to control and may lead to outcomes that the rulers don't like.
Note how Evil Naughty Very Bad Totalitarian China *lifted* COVID restrictions in the face of widespread protests.
Good Virtuous Freedom Luving Canada cracked down, smearing protesters as Nazis and unlawfully freezing bank accounts.
This is NOT to say whether or not restrictions were or were not warranted. We can debate that later. The point is the Chinese government actually listened to the public. The Canadian government ignored its own laws to shut the public up, only to forget all about COVID once Ukraine rolled along.
"It’s hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one."
I have long maintained that Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. The technical term for this is a "beard".
Everyone in power in a democracy claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind. For that matter, Donald Trump’s influence over Team R.
In a classic authoritarian system, by contrast, everyone knows who is in charge and where the buck stops.
"I have long maintained that Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility."
I'll be more blunt.
First, democracy is basically Majority Supremacy with a right to vote.
Second it serves a way to equate the consent of elected officials with STATE-MANDATED ASSOCIATIONS to the consent of the governed with FREEDOM of ASSOCIATION.
I'd say it has devolved into Minority Supremacy. The 1% rule. Now they are going for the iron fist.
democracy is still defined the count of people who vote
now what they vote for
I say that a vote on two choices selected by the oligarchy is a faux democracy.
Are you comparing authoritarianism vs. democracy?
How is "knowing who is in charge and where the buck stops in authoritarian systems" a benefit to anyone living in an authoritarian system? (i.e. what good is knowing who is in charge relevant to the lives of people in the system if they can do nothing to change the system?)
(I understand that at some level you are alluding to transparency and responsibility and holding those in power accountable.)
The people could do something. They are however unable to organize. The system strives with all its might to keep it that way.
The Chinese government, on some level, fears its citizens. The fact that the Western governments, supposedly exercising "democracy" do not, is telling.
Moreover, it can also be argued that the Chinese government identifies with, and thus actually cares, about its citizens, even if its methods of governing are alien and odious to us.
I recall during my many years living in HK, that we would read about protests in China occurring on a regular basis. Back when Murdock owned the South China Morning Post, I expect the news was intended to show how unhappy everyone was in China. To me what it showed was that the Chinese people were more than ready to take to the streets or fields, to express their views. The same could not be said of the US, even though the entire industrial base, and the jobs, were being shipped overseas, many to China, until China became too "costly," then over to Bangladesh or Cambodia.
It seems the Chinese citizenry has one big advantage over Westerners, that is, of being clear-eyed about the root nature of government (in general): That it is a group that claims it has the only legitimate power to use force. When it gets bad enough, the choice to protest becomes clear, no matter the consequences.
Here, we (esp. Dems) conflate the government with 'We the People', and for a long time that illusion could be maintained. But today, when cognitive dissonance increasingly occurs in the modern era ("why are our jobs continually disappearing without remedy?" etc.), we go into denial and rationalization. If, nevertheless, we don't shut up, either in public or even by personal contact, we are censored, shunned from employment and other associations by secret campaigns, or lawfare-framed with ruinous fines or prison. But this is now slowly waking all of us up.
"It seems the Chinese citizenry has one big advantage over Westerners, that is, of being clear-eyed about the root nature of government (in general)"
NO.
If people were clear-eyed, propaganda would not work. A population as large as China's (or India's for example) can only be managed through propaganda (along with other strategies).
Then how does one explain the difference in their (apparent) willingness to rise up against abusive corporations and governments, vs Western counterparts? It appears to me the reason is that Western propaganda is significantly superior.
>>"Then how does one explain the difference in their (apparent) willingness to rise up against abusive corporations and governments"
It's not willingness that you perceive. It's desperation. The level of repression (depending on where you are in China) can be quite high. I'm not sure if you've followed news about the state of workers in Chinese factories, the long work hours in Chinese corporations, the socio-economic differences between the urban and rural areas, the high rate of youth unemployment in China, the unequal schooling and education system, etc.
Here are some links:
(1) China’s Entrenched Inequality Problem: A Big Data China Event (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGoEpfi919s)
(2) Curbing capitalism: How is economic policymaking in China changing? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHo4BWcyUhs)
(3) The AI-Surveillance Symbiosis in China: A Big Data China Event (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdQt0VGAjd0)
(4) China's Youth Unemployment At Record Highs: Meet The Jobless Graduates | Insight | Full Episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY1a00j5YAk)
(5) Understanding China's Regionally Administered Totalitarianism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-bHEeHhw04) (This video is a little biased against China IMHO, but still informative).
>>"It appears to me the reason is that Western propaganda is significantly superior."
You are completely right about that. The US are the world leaders in propaganda. Their propaganda apparatus and machinery are unparalleled.
It is much easier to control populations by propaganda/brainwashing/gaslighting than to control them by force/explicit coercion. Hence, you might observe that countries that are not as good at propaganda as the US might have to resolve to using more authoritarian, totalitarian and forceful methods to control their populations.
I've been to China. My niece is an expert on China. She tells us that the people for the most part approve of their government. As long as you aren't a Uigher, of course.
It is my observation that most Americans are more respectful of authority than are Chinese. They did after all have a revolution within living memory.
>>"I've been to China. My niece is an expert on China"
What you are doing is providing anecdotal evidence.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_anecdote)
Should someone believe a claim based on the opinion of two people (neither of which live in China?). What about the opinions of the other 1.4 billion people? And the opinions of the 1.4 billion people will depend on who is doing the asking and under what circumstances.
>>"It is my observation that most Americans are more respectful of authority than are Chinese."
What observations made you conclude that Americans are more respectful of authority than the Chinese? What data did you look at? And what data did you fail to consider?
>>"The Chinese government, on some level, fears its citizens."
All Governments on some level fear its citizens. China is not unique or different (in this respect).
>>"Moreover, it can also be argued that the Chinese government identifies with, and thus actually cares, about its citizens"
That is black-and-white thinking. There is a spectrum (and not yes/no) when it comes to managing/caring about the population. And it is nuanced. Every Government cares about its citizens to some extent (even though it may not seem so). Also, every Govt. wants to stay in power (which seems to be more important to them than the caring part).
Where is this Chinese idolatory coming from? What criteria is being used to evaluate such subjective opinions? And what weightage is being assigned to the numerous variables and complexities that go into such analysis?
I don't idolize China by any means.
Meanwhile, it is stunningly clear that we now have government in the US that is completely -- and I do mean *completely* -- beholden to non-democratic interests, at home and abroad -- something not nearly so apparent, or even so predominantly false, when I was a young adult (c.1980)
So I am saying what appears to me true based on the differences between what I see of China and its citizens, vs what I see (primarily) in the US. The vast portion of the US population is (a) oblivious, and/or (b) avoiding conflict because it scared out of its wits, and/or (c) colludes with / accepts corruption, on some level.
Very, very few in the US go (d) the route of physical protest and risking arrests. Perhaps it is simply a media distortion to think the percentages willing to protest are higher in China?
You do realize that there is only ONE party in China right? There is no choice (not even a fake one). However flawed/fake/false the democracy is in the US (and it is indeed very flawed to the point of being non-existent), there is still more autonomy (and democracy) than countries like China, Russia, India (IMO).
China actively surveils its citizens (no, this is not all in my head) and clamps down on protests and prevents them from occuring. Their repression is many times more evolved than anything seen in Western countries.
>>"Perhaps it is simply a media distortion to think the percentages willing to protest are higher in China?"
Yes, you are right about that. The Chinese govt. tightly control their media (official and social media). Hence, it is difficult to gauge the "true level" of protests against the govt. Western govts. - due to their bias against China - will hype up even the smallest of Chinese protests to possibly make it more that it really is. Similarly, US media will try to cover as little as possible the protests happening around the country. I remember the protests during the Covid era. I remember (and am living through) the protests against the current genocide. The US media tends to cover these events as little as possible. Hence, there is a distorted perception of the true level of protests happening all over the US.
"However flawed/fake/false the democracy is in the US (and it is indeed very flawed to the point of being non-existent), there is still more autonomy (and democracy) than countries like China, Russia, India (IMO)."
"there is still more autonomy" in body maybe, but certainly not in mind. The fact is, the US and the West are very culturally sick. We (that is, the majority) have no good idea what is the problem, don't know the target, and are rudderless. Caitlin has written volumes about this.
So I should also point out that there is, in fact, only one *effective* party in the US as well, called by opponents the Uniparty, the Money Party, etc. The fact that the majority of the West do not understand this, as opposed to having identifiable target(s), is well-arguably comparable in importance to physical repression. And it is also fair to say that physical repression exists in the US, given the world's highest incarceration rate. If you're part of the small minority in which the propaganda hasn't taken root, then lawfare, and if necessary, yes, beating and killing, finishes people off.
I know this, because I am subject to repression myself, and I know clearly the difference from 50 years ago. Don't get the idea that (for the time being) that because I am writing here on Substack that things are fine, and I am not aware of the true state of the US.
>>"The fact is, the US and the West are very culturally sick."
Completely agree with you on that.
Feral, if I were able to speak Chinese, I’d prefer to live in China.
Same goes for Russia.
The only Eurocentric nation I would live in is rebellious Ireland, who intends in the coming weeks to recognize a Palestinian state.
But since I’m stuck here for now, I am contributing what I can to Dr. Jill Stein’s campaign, and encourage others to do the same
jillstein2024.com
Is Bernie Sanders The Worst?
quote from Chomsky:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views.
That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
The Gaza Genocide should provide several lessons.
Zionism is a psychopathic genocidal idiology whose existence is a disgrace to civilization.
The American People have no power.
Those with power in the US want our votes but not our voices.
Our government and the MIC will do as the lobbyists see fit.
Also, The Slur -- of "antisemitism" -- has loudly exposed itself for what it always has been - opportunistic and hypocritical phony outrage, used as a political whip. For heaven's sake! Now they would have us believe that protesting mass murder is anti-Jewish!
How do they get away with that one for one second?!
The Slur is being used to intimidate and silence people
about Genocide!
Where does Senator Bernie Sanders sit in all this and what is his role?
I would label him as a gatekeeper of damage control for the Status Quo.
He sets the boundaries of how much people can learn from the experiences of the last
several months.
If you listen to or read what he has to say you will notice that he wants a reset to before October 7th.
Below is a statement Bernie Sanders released on April 25th, 2024.
You will see that he does not, nor will he (as of May 12th), say the word Genocide.
By this we are to believe that Congress is not supporting Genocide.
We see that Bernie wants it both ways, he wants the votes of students and liberals and
he also wants to low ball the amount of casualties in Gaza.
Clearly obvious from his statement is that Bernie wants The Slur to maintain its power as a political whip.
Most of all, Mr Gatekeeper of damage control, wants support for Israel to reset to pre-October 7th levels.
He doesn't want anyone to see that Israel has proven itself to be psychopathic and genocidal. Bernie Sanders would have us believe that it is ALL Netanyahu and Netanyahu's **policies**. Once Netanyahu has gone we can all go back to pretending that Israel is a fine place deserving of our freshly printed debt, The Slur is still a powerful political whip and people can vote but not have voices.
<B>Bernie Sanders releases statement in support of Israel</B>
April 25, 2024
<BLOCKQUOTE>
No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000 – seventy percent of whom are women and children.
It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless – almost half the population.
It is not antisemitic to note that your government has obliterated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure – electricity, water, and sewage.
It is not antisemitic to realize that your government has annihilated Gaza’s health care system, knocking 26 hospitals out of service and killing more than 400 health care workers.
It is not antisemitic to condemn your government’s destruction of all of Gaza’s 12 universities and 56 of its schools, with hundreds more damaged, leaving 625,000 students with no education.
It is not antisemitic to agree with virtually every humanitarian organization in saying that your government, in violation of American law, has unreasonably blocked humanitarian aid coming into Gaza, creating the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of children face malnutrition and famine.
Mr. Netanyahu. Antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people.
But, please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war
policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you
are facing in the Israeli courts. It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
>>"The point is the Chinese government actually listened to the public."
Feral, you must be smoking some really high quality stuff. In what world/reality do you think that? I see people all over CJ's substack thinking USA bad & China/Russia good - that is a false dichotomy. Each of them are bad in their own ways. Each of them run under their own variations of Capitalism. Each of them have growing inequality. Each of them use propaganda to control their own populations. Each of them have corruption, abuse of power, authoritarianism, strong-man leaders, etc.
What people suffer from in their opinions about Russia/China/non-US opinions is - lack of robust data analysis and anecdotal evidence (+ survivorship bias of data).
Here's some real world data collection evidence to try out - try asking people living below the poverty line (or in the bottom 50%) in each of those countries about whether they "think" their Governments listen to them (the public).
Protest and voting are linked through strategy. They are not mutually exclusive. Both and.
Exactly. The people must use every tool in the box and cause the oligarchy as many headaches simultaneously to keep them off balance. Then the people will be able to topple the regime and assert their own power.
"If I were Jewish I would be enraged that the world’s most powerful governments and the world’s most influential media outlets keep telling everyone over and over again that opposing mass murder is anti-Jewish."
Yes. Who, exactly, is showing their antisemitism by telling us that being the perp of an outrageous crime is equivalent to being Jewish?! And every now another idiotic campaign also comes up to slam critics of globalism and capitalism with the same smear. This shit needs always to be boomeranged.
We live in a sociopathic system optimized to create and promote sociopaths. In this meme, it is no wonder that the politics we are immersed in, the leaders who succeed promote sociopathic actions and policies. Propaganda for the "liberal democracies" of The West is but one tool of this system.
Our challenge is to create, find, or adapt to another system where empathy dominates.
True. But you can't call complete lawlessness and anarchy a system. Which is what our billionaire rulers are working toward if a revolution does come - the Elites want to manipulate even the Revolutionary change if they can. They would like to hand over all control to the most wealthy, while the masses are left to fend entirely for themselves. We do need a better system, but that system cannot be replaced by an even more depraved lawless "Non-system" of no social value and complete chaos.
Anarchy is not chaos or complete lawlessness. It is governance from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, Peter Kropotkin, Paul Goodman, Marcos and many more talk about different ways of organizing our world in the style of anarchy. Oh, and Noam Chomsky.
Anarchy: 1. a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems.
Lawlessness is what hoodlums advocate for. I don't buy it for a second. And there have been numerous hoodlums in power. Chomsky told us we had to vote for Biden, advocating for the Lesser of Two Evils pile of shit - the damn fool.
Many years ago I was sitting at the table with my family and my 12 year old sister asked me what I was: was I a Catholic or a Protestant or??? I said I am none of those things. I am an anarchist. I was joking but my mother said "don't say that, they are murderers and criminals". I thought to myself, I don't think that is exactly true. I started reading about anarchism and the huge variety of ideas that are around it. Mostly I like the commitment to justice and freedom for everyone and the idea of getting rid of hierarchies. My mother was wrong about anarchism and so are you.
Of course all anarchists will not agree with each other, just like in every ideology, but generally, I see an anarchical approach as having a lot more possibilities than anything we presently use. I particularly like the idea of governance from the bottom up. I really see hierarchies as a huge problem.
Think it was supposed to be the way it worked at outset
I think for many (most), it is still supposed to be that way. Where there is disagreement is in how to get there.
from The Society of Problem Solvers, joshketry@substack.com: Decentralized, transparent systems that solve problems from the bottom-up instead of the top-down. We simply change the direction flow of problem solving with better systems, and lock the people doing the corrupting out of them. We migrate to these new high trust systems - where we can go to have meaningful conversations once again. Then, we plug our new systems into the corrupt ones and fix them.
Then who's going to have the AUTHORITY to plug the new systems into the corrupt systems and fix them if there is no AUTHORITY?
Of course there is an authority. Those of us at the bottom are the authority and ideally, we would discuss how we would develop new systems and get rid of or fix (if they are fixable) the old ones.
Chomsky is certainly no fool!
He's overrated.
It is interesting to note that the early Kibbutzim of the Israeli state were originally set up as Anarcho-Syndicalist Communes, and that left wing sentiment was supposed to be the guiding principle of the fledgling government. That noble enterprise was unfortunately entirely subsumed by terroristic, fascistic and racist ethno-state lunatics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Israel
They were encouraged to be created on lands to be claimed for Israel eventually. That is, it's a tool for ethnic cleansing and any "idea" for them would be welcome to establish the "facts on the ground".
chris leeds: Thanks for that link. I had not realized that the Kibbutzim were so similar to Doukhobor communes. The Doukhobours who came from Russia are also anarchic in their thinking. At least they used to be. That may have changed. When they first came to Canada, they did not send their children to school and they did not get driver's licenses.
one of the sadnesses of my life is that I used, as a child in the late 50s to read stories centred around the Kibbutzim, and admired their organisation, the equality between men and women, the sharing of child raising, and I was completely taken in by their account of "turning the empty desert into fertile land", and by their heroic resistance to Arabs irrationally intent on destroying them - all somewhat driven by guilt because my Mother's family were Germans. No mention was ever made of the Nakba, or that many of the settlers had terrorist origins. Now of course I realise it was all fiction, all propaganda - the land was not not empty desert, people already lived there, and it was the Palestinians who were the heroes resisting the occupation. All the fake democratic aspirations of the settlers were based on racist apartheid and fanatically nationalist ethno-fascism.
Maybe they had some good ideas at first but were taken over by Zionist thinking. When I first met some of the older Doukhobours, I was really impressed by some of their thinking. Then, many were jailed mostly because their actions were not understood properly by the dominant society. Children were taken from their families and put in camps. Doukhobours have changed a lot too.
Hmmm.....
Excellent point, Jamenta!
Well said William Browett!
Members of the Biden administration should be made to consider 18 U.S. Code § 1091 the law that brought the genocide convention into US law. Put this statute in their faces, up front and center at every protest at every meeting, press conference, briefing, and trips home and abroad.
They may feel they are immune now, but let's get them considering what is possible when they leave office, given they have set the precedent of charging former presidents. They should have visions of prison all the days of their lives.
The propagandists in the Mainstream Media need to be encouraged to think about their culpability as well.
Let us find the way!
"Toy steering wheel of voting."
What an apt phrase to describe the sham democracy presented in Canada and the USA,
You get to vote for either Tweedle Dumb or Tweedle Dumber in both countries.
Don't worry, the corporate overlords and deep state will take you where THEY want to go.
Or you don't vote. For too many people that's the hardest choice. So they go the easier route and support the corrupt system. It's on them.
I stopped voting after Obama’s 1st term. So many people worked their buttocks off to get him elected and he turned around and gave them the finger. He easily could have been an outstanding president if he had kept even half of his campaign promises.
Especially during the housing collapse when he bailed out the banks and let them steal people’s homes. And then he brutally broke up the people who protested against the theft.
Obama's first term was the only time I've ever voted. Felt compelled to, almost. But of course, that symbolic victory was illusory. Like the rest, he eventually reflected the true colors of the imperial presidency.
"that symbolic victory was illusory"
Yep it was just an illusion. Remember the scene from Grant park when people were laughing and crying thinking that he would actually do what he said he would? Now most of the comments I see about him are so full of anger. I believe that was why Hillary lost and Trump was elected. Then he too failed to do what he promised.
Toy steering wheel indeed.
"... and he turned around and gave them the finger." - he didn't turn around. He had that finger out all the time, as any politician does, but people just refuse to see it. It's astounding how gullible people are to believe politicians' words.
You’re right. Everyone who fell for his talk should go back and listen to his speech and see that he never actually said what we heard. Some people tried to warn me, but I didn’t want to listen.
Sam, Franz Fanon - the Algerian philosopher in the times of the French colonisation of Algeria - would have called Obama a " black face; white mask".
I thought the Obama presidency was a key step in loss of faith in government.
Yep. I think that’s the statement of the year.
Bravo, Caitlin.
and the UK - we now have the labour party welcoming right wing defectors from the tory party - their policies are indistinguishable
At least in the UK you have George Galloway and the Workers Party......George is the greatest orator in the English speaking world and he is on the right side of history, in my view.
I agree with Galloway on most things - and yes he is a great orator - but I think he was completely wrong on Brexit, for example (he was a leaver). He has some very 'conservative' views on gender and abortion, which upset many people. A bit like JK Rowling he is pilloried by the 'woke' for what are really just parental concerns about how gender and related topics are taught in schools - he consistently votes for things like allowing gay marriage, and allowing gay couples to adopt, but is very wary of 'gender fluidity', especially if promoted to children as a lifestyle choice, and he certainly opposes too early interventions with drugs or surgery. (Although I see myself as 'liberal' - I have to say, I share those concerns. Adults are free to do whatever they want to their own bodies, but children have to be shielded from making life altering decisions too young).
Personally I think tattoos should be banned but that would probably cripple the UK economy especially if head shaving was made compulsory at the same time.
Gender dysphoria is considered to be a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.....it affects relatively few people, probably in the UK, less than the number of Palestinians that have been killed or maimed by Zionists in Gaza over the years.
The question really should be: is Zionism a mental disorder, since most Zionists don't believe in god, but they do believe god gave them a "Promised Land" in Palestine?
Maybe a non Zionist jew, the kind I respect, will figure out a cure for both maladies and win a Nobel Prize for Peace.
I guess for gender and abortion every single case is different, and no one-size-fits-all approaches will work. I said to an Israeli friend the other day, talking about the Ultra Orthodox Although some protest against the compulsory draft and say that Zionism is no art of Judaism, others say they should keep fighting for Zionism, which she seemed to endorse. My answer was that surely by now the return to Zion has been accomplished, and could have been stabilised forever, and that I think it's the current Israeli actions in Gaza - and previous aggressions and land theft - that are destabilising and risking the Zionist project. For instance if they stupidly manage to provoke a full on war with Iran, the destruction of Israel as a meaningful entity will likely be assured
"Toy steering wheel of voting."
I saw that in a political cartoon way back in 1965. But it was about Indonesia.
"the president has grown increasingly frustrated over the conduct of the war" - The Pulitzer prize winning newspaper telling us we need to be concerned about Joe Biden's "feelings" yet again. Although Joe himself has had the power all along to stop this ongoing atrocity and still does even now, stop the massacre of an entire unarmed civilian population including 14,000 young children, by a bunch of IDF sadist goons - we're all still suppose to be mainly concerned about this old man's ice cream cone feelings. A man known to be a blatant plagiarist and sellout to the highest bidder his entire life, corrupt as the day as long, a warmonger extraordinaire - a man who was forced down the throats of the American public by a corporate DNC that rigged the democratic primary process in the most blatantly corrupt fashion one could imagine - we're all supposed to be concerned about how he feels, and that we must be of proper decorum not to actively protest the mass killings this bastard is committing right before our eyes.
Yeah, but Biden is the MOST empathetic president ever.
🤢
Thank You Caitlin
There must be an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Pope Francis has said what is needed, now he must do what is needed by going to Gaza and standing for peace, justice and freedom.
Please sign the petition and share widely.
https://chng.it/CRQ7qw4Gzn
Code pink
https://www.codepink.org/cnngaza?utm_campaign=12_15_pali_update_alert_3&utm_medium=email&utm_source=codepink
Let us also support UNRWA. If our governments won’t act in accordance with humanity, then we will. https://www.unrwausa.org/donate Let us do it to honor Aaron Bushnell, or in memory of Hind Rajab.
These are a few small things we can do. If we can do more, let us do more.
I agree with some of what you said. But Pope Francis leads one of the biggest criminal enterprises on the planet.
When will everyone Stop incorrectly referring to Gaza as a WAR. How can it be WAR when there is only ONE army, the IDF. Where is Gaza`s army? Those who try to screen the murder as war deliberatly try to justify this atrocity as just another war it is a depraved lie stop aiding them
Another quote from Chomsky :
The unvaccinated are “a danger to the community".
"People who refuse to accept vaccines, I think the right response for them is not to force them to but rather to insist that they be isolated"
How would they get food, water, services?
"That's their problem"
Just a friendly reminder that EVERYONE is subject to the brainwashing that Chomsky was instrumental in pointing out...
And yet Gummy Jack Arden is still at large and so are s/he/its counterparts throughout the Collective Medical Tyranny AKA 'The West'. I think in particular of frontholes Bonnie Henry and, allegedly, Teresa (probably Terence) Tam of Canadahar.
If you haven't seen the BBC documentary "Hpernormalization" check it out. Caitlin, if you haven't seen it, check it out. It perfectly explains the manipulated and commodified reality we are trapped in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k&t=2s
Also: "WARNING FOR YOUNG PEOPLE: If You Are Thinking Of Joining The US Military, BEWARE!" ... https://mark192.substack.com/p/warning-for-young-people-if-you-are
Normalization of actions comes about when you faithfully support a goal or end that you will not give up. Instead you normalize those things your actually disapprove of.
Normalization of state actions occurs because most people faithfully support the state as necessary and something they will not give up.
100% correct.
Many thanks for the links !! 👍👍👍👍
I couldn't agree more with Caitlin's analysis of our current state of affairs. I have a question that has been forcing its way to the forefront of my thoughts recently:
I have always thought that I understood how someone could be motivated by monied interests to seek their own power, wealth, and self-interest. They have done this for years projecting themselves as protectors of human rights, and democracy for all.
What I am seeing, in the continuing current actions of the US, UK officials is that they have exposed their craven hypocrisy and banality, to such an extent that they no longer can make these claims, upon which a great deal of their power rests.
Which raises the question for me, of how can it be that money motivates people to gain power, and at the same time be a motivation for them to undermine their own power and self-interest? Something's missing in this picture, and I no longer believe this is a satisfactory or complete explanation of what is going on. Looking for serious input and feedback on this question.
Wonderful question- when you get the answer pls have it printed on my grave stone.
I feel you are making a few assumptions in your question:
(1) You are assuming that the path to power (and money) does not contain contradictions. In reality, there are many contradictions happening at different levels at different times.
(2) You are assuming that people are rational and logical in their quest to achieve power (and money).
(3) You are assuming that the path to power (and money) is straightforward. But it could also be 2 steps forward, 1 step back or some other unexplainable dance moves that moves the needle towards achieving their ultimate end-goals.
(4) You are assuming that we (the public) are aware of all the behind-the-scenes logic of the power elite and their strategic planning. But in reality, we have very little information. We can only assume based on what we know, and I'm afraid what we don't know is magnitudes higher.
I don't know if what I'm saying is coming across or addressing your question appropriately. The logic of gaining and maintaining power/control/money/resources/etc. is not always rational or straightforward or necessarily observable. There are many contradictions of different magnitudes that take place within the overall arch of attaining end-goals. Some of these will resolve, others won't. For example: a person could take an action (based on emotions) that are positive in the short-term but negative in the long-term. Conversely, they could take a certain action that is detrimental in the short-term but which works out towards a positive outcome in the long-term. Without a full view into the exhaustive data set (of all short-term and long-term outcomes), it becomes difficult to make sense of these contradictions (that you allude to in your question).
I appreciate your points. The whole thing is difficult for me to even articulate. It's that we do seem to be working in the dark, as you point out, and I don't like that, which is the purpose of my question, to get us thinking about some of the whys of what we are seeing.
I do have assumptions, and one is that it is in Israel's benefit, long and short term, for the US to remain powerful. What I see are actions that undermine the power of the US, in a number of ways, especially what is called 'soft power.' That is going rapidly down the drain. To me that seems undesirable for any of their purposes, and I don't understand why they are doubling down on this. You suggest that they may be behaving irrationally. But so many?
I would have expected that, among the supporters of Israel, regardless of the reason for the support, there would be sufficient numbers to speak up and restrain Israel for Israel's own benefit, by pointing out that these nations are able to give Israel impunity only because they are powerful nations. To the extent this gets undermined, the impunity is also undermined. But the kinds of actions we see are the opposite.
"Which raises the question for me, of how can it be that money motivates people to gain power, and at the same time be a motivation for them to undermine their own power and self-interest?"
- because it no longer is undermining, at least as far as money. Money is secured for them and that's the self-interest part if you mean politicians losing their positions while fulfilling some paying parties' duties, - through positions on boards, universities, making speeches, etc.
Politics is a career, not public service.
I mean losing the position of power and influence their country previously enjoyed. I mean losing the election. If Trump truly represents the end of democracy, as they claim, and they supposedly have this great belief in democracy, then they are losing all of this, for what? Money doesn't fully explain, at least not to me, what is the motive here.
"I mean losing the position of power and influence their country previously enjoyed." - that's the "public service" part isn't it? But they don't care about it. All they care about is money.
Their claims about "democracy" etc are lies.
I don't think we are looking at this in the same way, or maybe at different things entirely. My thinking is that these countries have gained positions of power in the world that are valuable. The leaders' current actions are undermining the very aspects of power that make them, the country and the person, valuable to those monied interests. Therefore, my question: why are they doing this? How, and what, are the leaders gaining from this loss of power that makes them do what they are doing? There's something I am very unclear about in this.
I think we're talking about the same thing, I'm just unable to get through.
"these countries have gained positions of power in the world that are valuable" - valuable to them, but not universally. Theirs is a colonial, parasitic behavior that earned them prosperity at the expense of the rest of the world. As that prosperity starts getting endangered, not just because of their problematic behavior, but also due to the rest of the world catching up in their prosperity levels, showing alternative ways of doing things, the "leaders" are forced to behave more erratically and belligerently.
So to your question "why are they doing this?" the answer could be - they are forced to.
I get what you are saying. But "forced to," opens up a whole can of unsightly worms,such as how, by whom, and what, and through what means? Saving face, fanaticism, blackmail? Threats to personal or family safety? Nuclear oblivion? Something else? Is there even anyway to get an answer to these?
Perhaps this is what I sense is missing from the picture/discourse or whatever it's called. Because for me, the obvious incentive to gain power seems would not work as an incentive to actively losing power.
well the leaders gain in the short term. so do the monied interests. what their long term plans are I don't know, they probably don't have anything realistic. Mars!!
I honestly believe in the pedophile theory. They are willing to burn it it eh ground, and kill every last Palestinian because Mossad has secrets on them that would destroy them. And nothing is worse than child rape
I think it's possible that not one person can know how they would react after having made a large amount of money. We could all say: I will never change//I will donate and help other disadvantaged people/I will be a good and empathetic person.
Problem is with making money one moves maybe to a better neighbourhood/better schools etc and you are meeting a new set of people who have opinions different than your own and slowly one begins to change.
Your questions and observations suggest to me an open mind — few posters ever ask questions. Money motivates some people to gain power. Power motivates some people to gain money. But most of the people with power, money and self interest were born into power, money, and self interest.
The monied interests and the power interests you refer to are the same people. They are not aspirational. We tend to perceive reality from our own experience.
Children grow in the circumstances into which they are born. Naturally their perspectives are limited. Metaphysical speculation aside, we do not choose the circumstances into which we are born. Life for a child is a time of absorption. He or she has no comparative capabilities. For a long time a child assumes the world is as he or she perceives it. …And for him or her, even when they see other people these other people are usually relatives and peers. His or her ability to deeply understand the labels we all use to identify distinctions are barely relevant for a long time. Awareness grows slowly. Advantages are take for granted. Disadvantages attendant to being poor — in certain circumstances are often recounted with joy. People say I never knew how poor we were. Advantages attendant to being born in families rich and powerful are often recounted with abject misery.
Middle class people seldom understand what being poor is like. There is lot of poor in being poor. Middle class people seldom understand what being rich is truly like. Middle class people are the most upwardly mobility motivated. There are so many layers of middle class upward mobility possibilities the difference between say a family with income of $250,000 in earned income and another family with $250,000 dollars in investment income are barely noticed by many people, even adults, let alone children. Consider this: a $250,000 income for the family whose jobs net that money may have very few assets. A family with $250,000 in invest income has assets. Those assets could be income from properties they rent to tenants. Those assets could be shares in a private business their family owns. Or those assets could be stock, i.e. shares in a corporation, say Walmart, or Boeing, or shares in ten different corporations.
There are many other assumptions that bear on this explanation but to keep it understandable and entirely likely, I’ll keep it simple. The market is more or less rational. If a person sees a much better investment, and so sells one asset and buys another, enough others see betterment, that at some point — sooner or later investment income averages out. They long run rate of investment returns i.e, income from assets is about 10% — the more risk the better the return.
Passive income of $250,000 therefore requires about $5,000,000 dollars of assets assuming a 50% tax rate. Believe me those are very different circumstances.
Now to get to your question. Suppose almost all assets are indebted by at least 50%. Corporations borrow enormous sums. Governments the same. Home owners the same. Farmers the same. Apartment owners the same. Cruise ships the same.
When banks loan money borrowers pledge their assets. Borrowers borrow because they are incentivized by the government to keep borrowing. How does that work? Money borrowed to buy assets is tax deductible. The rate of depreciation of assets encourages borrowers to build or renovate their properties. Buildings wear out!
Banks carry money on their books as liabilities. …Because savers expect the bank to pay them to use their money. Banks carry loans on their books as assets. The biggest banks and the richest people continuously lobby governments to behave favourably towards them.
Banks want the people to whom they lend money to be able to pay back the money they have lent at risk. Banks do not want to foreclose.
There exists enormous incentives within mature economies for banks to encourage
monopolies. Supposedly these giants do not go bankrupt. Whereas entrepreneurial activity is risky. But competition is disruptive. There are more bankruptcies when there is more competition. But competitive advantages accrue to innovative investments made by invention and innovation. Innovation gradually upsets the former equilibrium.
A great deal of the U.S. economy is mature and therefore depreciated. Corporations move offshore to gain better market conditions. Banks lend to corporations that when moving offshore still services the debts. But the profits are often kept offshore. Like with Apple.
Consider here the banks. They control much of the global economy. In essence the banks control much of the global economy because they want corporations to service their debts. Corporations can raise their prices. Bank lending to governments is almost risk free. Governments can raise taxes. But at the international level entire economies are in competition.
In other words the people with the power and the money are born with — power, wealth, and self interest. And they want to keep it that way!
But Jews seen unable to rest. At some point things seen and unseen have considerable momentum. Nothing ever rests. As Bob Dylan sang poetically 60 years ago — “…things not busy being born are busy dying.” Our modern economy is like a Ponzi scheme. Banks have to lend. Or else their depositors get restless and withdraw their deposits. Banks prefer to lend almost all the depositors funds. But gradually deposits accumulate. They paid out less and less interest to their depositors. Would be depositors seek to maintain the purchasing power of their money begin to cause inflation — asset prices rise but at some point there’s no advantage to anyone when the price of a house, or a share becomes unaffordable.
Sooner or later there tends to be far too much money in circulation. The money gets tied up in non performing assets. People stop spending. The poorest people then, have no jobs, no money, no cash flow, no purchasing power — no anything.
War has often been see and used as a solution. Assets are destroyed, lives too — munitions stocks are used, ships sunk, factories bombed, people are displaced, ideologies invented.
The people with money and power are off-times as likely to be ruined as the poor and middle class. They are no less afraid. Tragically knowledge and understanding are not always aligned. They concentrate in their own silos. Momentum carries mankind along the rushing slipstream of time. Men and women lose their minds. Their egos propel them along in certainty. The people with the most power and the most money come to think this is a consequence of their own capabilities. They constantly see affirmation so as to assuage their inner doubts. They lose their humanity. Many never had any.
The solutions to present problems lie in no doing many of the things which the greedy and foolish dismembered. For instance cancelling the restraints Glass-Steagall which was initiated to prevent risky activity, and prevent non-banking activities from contaminating banking activities — separating commercial and investment banking. Separating Wall Street from Main Street encouraged banks to be prudent with depositors funds.
Consider part of the problem was that banks could lend money to a company and then issue stocks in that same company without revealing to shareholders the bank’s underlying conflict of interest. If that company then failed, the bank suffered no losses while its investors were left holding the bag.
That should give you enough material and feed back to point you in the right direction.
Rules are meant to stabilize the banking industry, and stabilize society, and prevent the looting of the treasury and looting taxpayers.
Except the power to prevent looting rests with the people doing the looting. Rather like putting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in charge of the local bank. They would not have been too smart, would it?
A corporation is best understood as artificial intelligence. And that AI is in "control".
https://indi.ca/the-worst-case-scenario-for-ai-is-already-here/
I think I have your answer in an earlier comment.
What's missing is the support and the desire for State Power
Of course that conclusion involves taking a more negative view of The State than most people are willing to do.
The final choice is clear to me ( as a libertarian )
Support the Liberal Social Right to Freedom of Association or support / DEFAULT to State-Mandated associations which is what ALL states do even if using DEMOCRACY as an excuse
The first above. though, means people have a right to NOT associate with the State.
A position MOST Democrats and Republicans and many others are not willing to take.
When government is afraid of the people we have freedom; When people are afraid of the government we have tyranny-- Ben Franklin
Never before in the history of the world have governments so disgraced themselves as Western governments are now. It is just a parade of liar clowns trying to avoid responsibility for the mess of war and corruption they have brought about. they refuse to take responsibility for their wanton criminality.
We are in a highly integrated world where the consequences of gross incompetence may well lead to the greatest of mass extinctions. We should be waging peace and not war. The stupidity of Western despots is a lethal pandemic where a return to socialism( rather than sociopathy), common sense, and democracy are the only vaccines available.
With all due respect, I disagree with your above "Ben Franklin quote" as it does not reflect observed reality.
When govt. is afraid of people, we have more propaganda, more repression and oppression, more authoritarianism, and maybe even more totalitarianism - as the power elite and lords of empire will fight even harder to maintain the status quo. This should be self evident from studying events in world history.
I don't think government is afraid of the people now. It is desperately trying to arrogantly override public opinion. To this point people have been passive and only now are starting to speak out. The student protests are the first signal of much more to come and that is where politicians fear will become more manifest. It is going to be very interesting for the next months to see what level of anger issues forth from the people and will it be strong enough and sustained long enough to about bring real change. It is also an open question how brutal will the government get to enforce its despotism. The present situation has all the makings of a civil war.
As it is now the crisis only deepens and is moving away from resolution. The biggest thing government fears now is they have lost control of their agenda. There is much more to come.
>>"I don't think government is afraid of the people now"
There is a reason the power elite (or ruling elite or oligarchs, etc.) invest so much in propaganda, censorship, FBI/CIA/police brutality, suppression of people, gaslighting, etc. They know they are the minority. They are (and have always been) afraid of the majority rising up against them. They are afraid of their propaganda methods being exposed (what Caitlin Johnstone's articles are all about).
The protests are not a new thing. There have been anti-war protests in the US since before World War I (as I'm sure you are aware). The McCarthyism period, red scare, fear mongering about socialism, capitalism, moral panics, and authoritarianism and ruling by fear are all indications of a persistent fear that the power elite have always had (throughout history). Currently, we are simply in the next stage of the process of class warfare - of the 98% vs. the 2%. The more the fear, the crazier the narratives of the power elite become.
Wow!
In a sense the US has never really been free since Reagan. I am not enough of a Historian to know about before.
When you have a country where only 40-50 vote and know nothing about politics how can one know about freedom?
'We are indoctrinated from childhood by corrupt education systems which construct the mainstream empire-authorized worldview inside our skulls, and that worldview is continually bolstered, steered, and added onto throughout adulthood from every direction we’ve been trained to get our information from' Call it what it is- the patriarchy- rewarding dominance over non-whites and women and punishing compassion and co-operation.