Orwellian Parsing Fun

I was inspired when I read the following passage , a brilliant example of how to parse obfuscatory official language:

In a recent interview with the BBC on June 19, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the foreign policy icon and ultimate insider, exposed Washington’s deep involvement in the Iranian affair.

Dr. Kissinger said, “If it turns out that it is not possible for a government to emerge in Iran that can deal with itself as a nation rather than as a cause, then we have a different situation.” Translation: if our preferred candidate did not emerge a winner after using all our soft power… He continued, “Then we may conclude that we must work for regime change in Iran from the outside,” Translation: then the U.S. (or perhaps Israel) may have to resort to hard power, meaning military strikes.

He then added, “But if I understand the president correctly, he does not want to do this as a visible intervention in the current crisis.” Translation: Whatever President Barack Obama is doing in Iran, he wants to make sure that Washington’s hand is invisible.

I just now came across an article entitled U.S. begins major Afghan offensive.

(First, a parenthetical note. If anybody is surprised that Obama is ramping up the war in Afghanistan then they deliberately ignored Obama's repeated proclamations that this was his intention. Agent of change and hope... Perception Managers earned their pay on that one — but then again it's easy to package a product when people are desperate to buy it. Speaking of Perception Managers, they're working overtime on perhaps the greatest coordinated psyop offensive since WMD in Iraq, getting the public to buy the whole Iran election fraud thing. It's unfortunate (no — it's a fatal flaw) for our species that these Compliance & Perception Professionals succeed in their job so easily.)

If it wasn't so deeply troubling, the following caption, below a picture of a youngster in Murkan army drag, would have been amusing:

Marines surge into Afghanistan
Thousands of U.S. Marines and hundreds of Afghan troops moved into Taliban-infested villages of southern Afghanistan Thursday in the first major operation under President Barack Obama's strategy to stabilize the country. (July 1, 2009)

There's one thing in this caption that stands out like a sucking-chest wound. Can you spot it? Hint: it's the very same metaphor used by the Nazis when describing Jews. Yes, it's the word infested. And what do you do if vermin infest an area? You fumigate it, you eradicate it, you sterilize it. Obviously there's a need to clean out these villages of vermin — they're infested. So they're sending in professional exterminators to wipe them out. And, of course, since they're professionals, they'll make sure no innocents are harmed — after all, the troops are there for their sake, they're on an altruistic mission to stabilize the country. Sending thousands of troops into villages on a killing spree to wipe out locals who have been transmogrified into non-human vermin is not causing chaos, destruction, de-stabilization, no, what it is doing is stabilizing the country. I mean, sometimes you have to destroy a village to save it, right?

This is textbook Orwellian doublespeak psyop propaganda to de-humanize the enemy and make your team of killers look like the good guys, a clever and subtle use of language to mask and justify people killing other people.

(Speaking of Perception Management, did you know that after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban eliminated drug production? Can't have that -- eats into Wall Street's addiction to profits. When USA/NATO replaced the Taliban with their own puppets drug production flourished to even higher levels. So when you read about the good guys going in to clamp down on the drug trade I suggest you plug in your Orwellian doublespeak filters and turn the volume up, 'cause what's going on is not just about war profits or protecting the oil pipelines, it's also about protecting the drug pipelines.)

Addenda:

1. From Wikipedia on dehumanization:

   The empirically-supported propaganda model of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky shows how corporate media are able to carry out large-scale, successful dehumanization campaigns when that promotes the goals (profit-making) that the corporations are legally obliged to maximise. State media, in either democracies or dictatorships, are also capable of carrying out dehumanization campaigns, to the extent with which the population is unable to counteract the dehumanizing memes.

2. An insight from G. I. Gurdjieff:

   Nobody ever does anything deliberately in the interests of evil for the sake of evil. Everybody acts in the interests of good, as he understands it. But everybody understands it in a different way. Consequently men drown, slay, and kill one another in the interests of good.

Has It Begun?!

Flu fears prompt EU travel warning

India issues travel advisory for Canada

Media reports from Malaysia say that country’s Health Ministry is advising Malaysians against travelling to Canada, Mexico and selected U.S. states where there are swine flu cases.
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Russia, Hong Kong and Taiwan said they would quarantine visitors showing symptoms of the virus amid a surging global concern about a possible pandemic.

In Washington, President Barack Obama said today that the threat of spreading swine flu infections is a cause for concern but “not a cause for alarm” as the United States undertook close border monitoring to contain it.

World stock markets fell as investors worried that the deadly outbreak could go global and derail any global economic recovery [sic]. Airlines took the brunt of the selling.

The virus was suspected in up to 103 deaths in Mexico, the epicentre of the outbreak with more than 1,600 cases suspected, while 20 cases were confirmed in the United States and six in Canada.

In Luxembourg, EU Health Commissioner Andorra Vassiliou urged Europeans to postpone non-essential travel to the United States and Mexico “unless it is very urgent for them.”
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“These are early days. It’s quite clear that there is a potential for this virus to become a pandemic and threaten globally,” World Health Organization spokesman Peter Cordingley told AP Television News.
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Russia, Hong Kong and Taiwan said visitors returning from flu-affected areas with fevers would be quarantined.

China said anyone experiencing flu-like symptoms within two weeks of arrival had to report to authorities.

Some officials cautioned that the checks might not be enough.
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At Madrid’s Barajas International Airport, passengers arriving from Mexico today were asked to fill out forms saying where they had been in Mexico and whether they had felt any cold symptoms, and were told to leave a contact address and phone number.

Are we being buttered up? Just wondering...

Whatever else will be the result of it, one thing is obvious — they've latched onto the notion of some impending "pandemic" as an excuse to prepare for civil coordination on a major scale. Their overzealous dedication to gearing up for some fantastical apocalyptic virus is beyond fishy — it's the smoke from a gun that hasn't been fired yet.
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"grants the HHS secretary extraordinary powers to declare a health emergency simply based on a POTENTIAL threat. This means that a hypothetical threat analysis from intelligence agencies that failed to warn of Sept 11th could be used as a reason to suspend civil liberties and start mandatory smallpox vaccinations"
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No matter how cowed the media and how gullible the citizenry it was only a matter of time before the tide would turn against them; but that doesn't matter to them one iota: it just necessitates implementing new strategies from gameplans, which, like BioShield and the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, they have been developing in great detail for a long time.

Yep, just wondering...

The danger signs are spread all around us yet scarcely register in the standard economic models. Nature is the greatest obstacle of all to the future of the free-market system and cannot be treated as an adversary. The message must be protect or perish.

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The question for us is not whether but how to achieve the goal of drastic population reduction.

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The twenty-first century must choose between discipline and control or tumult and chaos. The only way to ensure the greatest welfare while still preserving capitalism is to make that number smaller.

History 101: Cause and Effect

The federal government’s ability to bail out the nation’s most corrupt capitalists appears inexhaustible, yet only crumbs have been made available for those who have produced all their profits. Wall Street insiders are still feeding at a bottomless trough funded by the millions of workers now facing mass layoffs, losing health insurance and confronting home values that are lower than their mortgages. But it is only a matter of time before the dam begins to break.
      —Sharon Smith, Bottom Feeders at the Trough: Bailing Out America's Most Corrupt Capitalists

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All of the above indicates that the much-feared financial meltdown is no longer a distant and remote possibility because in fact it is already taking place. However, this chaos might trigger some very serious and preoccupying consequences. In order to have a clear understanding of these implications, it is vital to take into account some reports that were not given the proper amount of attention they deserved when they were first published.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky observed that the US Army 3rd Infantry's 1st Brigade Combat Team returned from Iraq some months ago. That information is extremely disturbing because such military unit "may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control", according to official sources. Now, what scenario could possibly require the operational deployment of said units on American soil? Professor Chossudovsky puts forward an intriguing hypothesis that must be borne in mind. He argues that "Civil unrest resulting from from the financial meltdown is a distinct possibility, given the broad impacts of financial collapse on lifelong savings, pension funds, homeownership, etc".

Shortly afterwards, the Centre for Research on Globalization website posted an article written by Wayne Madsen. Mr. Madsen claims that a highly confidential official report has been circulating among senior members of the US Congress and their top advisors. The report has been allegedly nicknamed as the "C & R document". The author stipulates that those letters stand for none other than "conflict" and "revolution" because those scenarios are supposedly regarded by America's policymakers as plausible consequences triggered by a financial meltdown. According to Mr. Madsen, the content of the document reveals that severe financial chaos could spark a major war if Washington refuses to honor its foreign debt and/or massive riots in US cities if the American population does not accept a considerable tax increase.

For decades, overall political stability in the US was taken for granted. However, as it has been pointed out, even senior American statesmen are taking into consideration that financial volatility could fuel a wave of discontent which could easily reach troubling proportions. It seems that America itself is not immune from "regime-threatening instability" as the Pentagon and the American intelligence community terms it. It is likely that American government officials have not dismissed the worst-case scenario. Indeed it looks like they have been preparing accordingly.
     —José Miguel Alonso Trabanco, Civil Unrest in America?

Apparently it's Part of America's Cultural Identity

DENDERMONDE, Belgium – A man went on a rampage at a Belgian daycare centre today, stabbing two young children and a female worker to death and slashing and severely injuring 12 other people, 10 of them children.

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"(It's) something you hear about from America, not here," said bake shop owner Bie Hoornaert.

3 dead, 10 hurt in daycare knife attack

A Reminder of the The Sublime Heights Humanity Can Reach

Even though the world is being engineered towards the abyss to further enrich, empower and entrench the elite, every so often it's good to remind ourselves of the beauty and joy our species can attain. Humanity is not incorrigibly malign, and no matter how awful things are, we can still hold within our breast an awareness of decency and beauty.

I just had to share a glimpse of the heights we are capable of reaching.



Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
     —Wendell Berry

Vorocracy: Final: History's Most Lethal Parasites

Introduction

To commemorate the new epoch that officially began October 3, 2008 with the 700 billion dollar (700 billion!) theft gift of the public's hard-earned money to the handful of banksters who have precipitated the coming worldwide depression — one that will make the Weimar years look like a gravy train, and will inevitably lead to social collapse and world war — I thought I would revisit my theory of vorocracy. Rather than fill in the chapters I outlined more than two years ago — chapters dealing with anti-communism, the use of fascism's technocratic toolset, capitalism as theology, neoliberalism and deregulation, our current historical crux between two competing worldviews, etc. — I'll just jump straight to my notes for the final chapter and put together a quick, fairly unpolished summary of the nature of vorocrats and their rule.

How Big is 700 Billion?

$1 = 1 meter
dollars	magnitude	distance
$1	1.0 * 100	height of 4 year old boy
$100	1.0 * 102	height of Statue of Liberty
$88,000	8.8 * 104	height of Mt. Everest
$12,000,000	1.2 * 107	diameter of the earth
$1,400,000,000	1.4 * 109	diameter of the sun
$10,000,000,000	1.0 * 1010	one light minute (distance light travels in one minute)
$700,000,000,000	7.0 * 1011	the diameter of the asteroid belt
$1,000,000,000,000	1.0 * 1012	one light hour (distance light travels in one hour)

Definition of Vorocracy

The definition of vorocracy first introduced in chapter 3:

vorocracy [voro < devoro, latin: to devour < voro, latin: to eat greedily, swallow up, consume, gorge oneself; -cracy < suffix: type of government; rule by]

1. The political philosophy of insatiable appetite
2. Society structured around the need to pathologically consume until it self-destructs
3. A society at the service of those with such a drive
4. Government of the greedy, by the greedy, and for the greedy

A vorocracy exists for no reason other than for the ruling class to amass wealth by whatever means it can. A vorocracy develops belief systems to justify the means and ends of satisfying an insatiable greed. In a vorocracy, greed determines the ideology that justifies it's pathological goal of eternal and infinite acquisition. For a vorocrat there is no worldview other than "more".

Vorocracy is the governance of an open mouth that intends to consume until it self-destructs. Vorocracy is the political pathology of insatiable appetite

How Vorocracy is Distinct from Plutocracy and Kleptocracy

A distinction must be drawn between plutocracy, kleptocracy and vorocracy.

Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, and implies nothing more than that. It could be argued that most societies with any form of institutionalized government have a propensity towards plutocracy in addition to whatever other institutionalized structure it has, since power and wealth are generally coincident for obvious reasons (ie: wealth can purchase power; power can amass wealth: they tend to work hand in glove). But the connotation of plutocracy is neutral: it can be malign, or it can be benificent if the plutocrats use their wealth for the common good. A malign plutocracy is most likely a kleptocracy, or rule by a criminal class that seeks to increase their prestige and wealth at the expense of the governed.

A vorocracy, on the other hand, is not criminal in the sense of a kleptocracy, but is a political pathology. The distinction is homologously comparable to a murder committed by the sane versus the insane: a murder committed by the sane assumes that the criminal understands and shares the same moral universe of the society at large, and thus the criminal is cognizant that his act, when committed, goes against the accepted moral outlook of his society yet can be justified within his own code of ethics. A crime committed by the insane (however a society wishes to define the insane) assumes that the criminal was driven to the act by factors not in his control, regardless of his cognizance of any moral codes — there is no ethical justification for the act since such a consideration is irrelevant to its commission. Thus, for instance, a murder committed between rival gangmembers, or during the commission of a burglary, is qualitatively different from a murder committed by, say, a serial child killer: the former murder could have been prevented by an intercession of the actor's conscience; the latter murder is precluded from having any such intercession. The result, a murder, is the same, though for one it is a question of intent, for the other a question of pathology.

To apply this to the political theory under discussion, a kleptocrat is aware that his power is used for personal gain (Boss Tweed, or organized crime, comes readily to mind as examples) and operates within a society's moral universe by being aware where the conscious commission of his action might occur on the moral spectrum. A vorocrat is driven by a pathological need that cannot be controlled, nor is even necessarily understood for what it is: it is a drive that operates outside a society's moral universe. The contextual worldview in which each governance operates is different. The result may be the same — theft from the subjects and other victims into the coffers of the rulers — but the difference lies between the intent of the kleptocrat versus the pathology of the vorocrat. Kleptocrats may be greedy, but they still operate within the moral universe shared by society. Vorocrats do not. (Eg: rule by, say, a mafia don is a kleptocracy; rule by pathologically greedy CEOs and banksters is a vorocracy.) Thus all vorocracies function as kleptocracies, but kleptocracies are not necessarily vorocracies.

And, just as serial killers are a more serious threat to a society than other killers, so a vorocracy will be that much more dangerous and severe to a society than a kleptocracy: one cannot reason with a pathology, one cannot make appeals to a pathology's conscience. A pathology is an illness, not a stance, not an ideology. Vorocracy is a pathological illness of governance.

Capitalism's Prime Mover Unfurls a Big Red Flag and Hoists it Aloft

Adam Smith, that Prime Mover of Capitalism, knew what he was talking about. After all, if you're going to create a religion based on greed (for, ultimately, economics is nothing more than a religion), you probably have a keen and subtle awareness of the psychology of greed. Here, in the conclusion of Book One Chapter 11 of Adam Smith's sacred text The Wealth of Nations he reveals the extent to which he understood that an economic system based upon greed must seek ways to prevent the greedy (ie: business) from assuming the reins of political power [em. mine]:

The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order [ie, "those who live by profit"], therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two [ie, landowners, and "those who live by wages"]. Merchants and master manufacturers are, in this order, the two classes of people who commonly employ the largest capitals, and who by their wealth draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness of understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter. Their superiority over the country gentleman is not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

Thus the Prime Mover of Capitalism Himself said in his Bible that political power should never be exercised by businessmen because all they care about is their own gain, and will gladly "deceive" and "oppress" the public for it. Since he had such profound insight into the nature of such men, even to the point of understanding that the greatest profits are reaped when a country is going to ruin!, did he have a strategy to prevent such men from assuming the organs of government? No, none that I've found. Because there aren't any. Such men would inevitably find ways to assume the reins of political power. Adam Smith's economic religious theories basically gave such men the keys to Pandora's Box without providing any way to close it again. That's because greed is an unstoppable force, and there is nothing to stop an unstoppable force from eventually assuming the absolute power they need to "deceive" and "oppress" to further their gain.

Obviously Smith clearly understood what those devoted to wealth would do with political power. That's why he so clearly and strongly cautioned against putting "those who live by profit" — ie, modern-day neoliberal corporatists (aka businessmen) — in such positions. That's because Smith, like Ralph Nader, like Paul Hawkens with his philosophy of Natural Capitalism, all understand that the motor behind capitalism is the drive for profit, and they all understand that for capitalism to work for society rather than against it it must remain small (capitalism with a "c") and be held in check.

But capitalism cannot remain small. It must always expand. That's the inherent contradiction that must inevitably explode in greed's favor. You cannot foment an addiction and expect that it will never develop into a pathology. And we are seeing the result of that right now. Capitalism without any regulatory oversight — the neoliberal vision that has been American policy since Reagan — is a catastrophe waiting to happen: it is letting drug addicts into the pharmacy while the druggist goes out for lunch, expecting that the addicts won't help themselves to all those Category I & II drugs. And now the catastrophe is happening, but it's only just the beginning, a mere trickle before the tsunami that is quickly coming.

Vorocracy as the Transhistorical Engine of Deteriorating Rule

Friedrich Engels, co-author with Marx of The Communist Manifesto, in his anthropological study of the origins of the family, private property, and the state, discusses the ways in which greed ultimately leads to vorocratic dynasties.

Their neighbors' wealth excites the greed of peoples who already see in the acquisition of wealth one of the main aims of life. They are barbarians: they think it more easy and in fact more honorable to get riches by pillage than by work. War, formerly waged only in revenge for injuries or to extend territory that had grown too small, is now waged simply for plunder and becomes a regular industry... The wars of plunder increase the power of the supreme military leader and the subordinate commanders; the customary election of their successors from the same families is gradually transformed, especially after the introduction of father-right, into a right of hereditary succession, first tolerated, then claimed, finally usurped; the foundation of the hereditary monarchy and the hereditary nobility is laid. Thus the organs of the gentile constitution gradually tear themselves loose from their roots in the people, in gens, phratry, tribe, and the whole gentile constitution changes into its opposite: from an organization of tribes for the free ordering of their own affairs it becomes an organization for the plundering and oppression of their neighbors; and correspondingly its organs change from instruments of the will of the people into independent organs for the domination and oppression of the people. That, however, would never have been possible if the greed for riches had not split the members of the gens into rich and poor, if "the property differences within one and the same gens had not transformed its unity of interest into antagonism between its members" (Marx)...

The details of time, culture and political system of a given period may differ, but structurally this is a very sound analysis. Reading this, while keeping in mind the ascension of a few American "dynastic" families (Bush, Kennedy, Roosevelt,...), puts things in a structural perspective. (Note: rather than a supreme military leader, since we live in a putative democracy, we have an executive branch entrusted with the function of supreme military leader; rather than a hereditary passing of the executive office we have the charade of a democratic election to provide cover for the chosen ones. But should something go wrong with the script the Supreme Court will gladly intercede on behalf of the chosen successor.)

Engels asserts greed was the driving force of civilization, splitting society between an oppressor and an oppressed as the former gains wealth at the expense of the latter. It doesn't matter, then, what political incarnation is assumed — monarchism, feudalism, fascism, democracy — they can all serve as the ideological and political carrier waves for vorocrats who ultimately assume political power.

The Benighted States of Mammon

Democracy, combined with the theology of Capitalism, are the modern-day carrier waves of vorocracy. In earlier times emperors and potentates enjoined their henchmen to simply extort and steal from their subjects. Now, however, given that people actually take their rights of democracy seriously, the people must be hoodwinked with ever more transparent lies — ..., "Remember the Maine!"; the Gulf of Tonkin; the Military Humanism of Kosovo; Saddam's WMDs; the War on Terror.. — to guarantee the public's support in military efforts to amass wealth.

In fact now, with the advent of neoliberal globalization, vorocrats don't need to piggy-back on the politically powerful to amass their shekels, they don't need to be the stagehands working behind the scenes. It can be argued that there is no state now; that the state is run as a corporation, the executive branch now a boardroom executive fulfilling his role for his Board of Directors. They have come front and center onto the stage and assumed their place in the spotlight to reveal America as the Mammon-state it is, run as a multi-national corporation by a cabal of conflict-of-interest, insider-trading boardroom executives who openly embezzle from the public with complete impunity. It is the Benighted States of Mammon, history's first true out-of-the-closet vorocracy.

Once the Power Elite and their servants in political office are seen as vorocrats then things that seem ludicrous or insane to us in the "reality based community" start to make sense.

They are monomaniacally motivated by an insatiable greed for wealth and power, using tools of social control like stern and greedy employers to keep the workers cowed and obedient. They incite enmity and cause destruction as ways to create wealth for themselves.

They are proof that conflicts of interest can be cosmically profitable: for instance, in waging a war, they own the companies that serve as the means of both destruction and construction; they own the companies that provide security services; they own the companies that perform resource extraction; they own the investment firms that invest in all these various companies. What does it matter if they run the army into the ground? So what if they are caught in scandal after scandal, lie after lie? So what if they squander the reputation of their country? Their coffers get fatter, that's all that matters.

They commit insider trading on levels difficult to comprehend because the crime is so brazenly criminal. They use the cover of "national security" to preclude investigation. Currently they are rewarding their cronies responsible for the coming economic apocalypse with unimaginable sums of public monies, knowing that nothing will happen to them. They commit their monumental crimes right out in the open because no one dare believe the evidence before their own eyes. Thus their absolute contempt for the public is appropriate, since they know the public will idly watch without any hint of either comprehension or intercession.

A vorocratic government is nothing more than a funnel to transfer wealth from any source — their constituents, other countries, nature itself — to themselves. They command its intelligence agencies, security forces and military services to do their bidding. This is what they mean when they say they create their own reality, for indeed they are modern-day alchemists who have mastered the dark arts of politics to turn misery and despoiliation into money. War, genocide and natural catastrophes are enormously profitable.

BushCo has deliberately squandered America's military might; destroyed what little good reputation America had outside its own borders; made the world a far more dangerous place; killed countless tens and hundreds of thousands of people; ravaged natural and pristine lands; ransacked the economy; strengthened the police-state at home... All because doing so is cosmically profitable. Period.

But this is more than outright class warfare. These are the activities of people without conscience or humanity, driven by a pathological hunger for more and ever more, people for whom too much is never enough.

Vorocrats.

Conclusion: Humanity's Most Lethal Parasites

A vorocrat's entire worldview is dedicated to acquisition. Their entire perception channels everything through filters that interpret, evaluate, and analyze all it considers as means toward the end of acquiring ever more riches, ever more power. All of life, all of reality is like a grand boardgame to them, reducible to strategizing the moves of chits, the manipulation of numbers, determining lines-of-sight and watching dice rolls. They are playing Monopoly for real, pushing people out of the game when they can no longer pay, and stealing from the bank when no one's looking. Their minds are consumed with strategizing ways to win the bounty at all costs. And winning means getting more, and more, and more — sacrificing more blood, more tissue to amass more money and power.


A vorocrat's vision of a better world is nothing grander than watching their portfolios grow fatter, their wrist watches get thinner, and their homes grow more ostentatious. Vorocrats are only too happy to use True Believers and Useful Idiots to serve their own ends. They are history's ultimate parasites, attaching themselves to any host that can help them extract the symbolic lifeforce they hunger for. They are also history's most lethal parasites, since they have found the alchemical formula that converts flesh and blood into gold and lucre. Their drive is monomaniacal: they do not even care if they die with their host, so long as their funnel-like sucking mouth continues to extract the wealth they crave from the blood and tissue they'll consume to their dying breath. (This, ultimately, is what Virilio means when he discusses fascism as a suicidal State, because such a hunger can only end in great death and destruction.) They are pathologically insatiable: even were they able to obtain everything, as some aver is their aim (Michael Parenti: "There's only one thing this class has ever wanted in the whole of history and that's everything"), their thirst would still not be slaked. Greed knows no end. Greed can never be satisfied. Greed only gets hungrier the more it consumes.

Ultimately the vorocrats are playing an existential game wherein they think they can cheat death, their winnings attaining a kind of immortal transcendence because they are somehow infused with the numinous essence of their largesse. And when they die they will die with limpid consciences, incapable of reflecting with their "beautiful minds" on all the immeasurable misery their existence has brought to the world. And why should they? What matter that history will condemn them? They will die as winners, estimating the area on the gameboard they've conquered, and rounding the magical numbers of their monopoly money to the nearest power of ten to assess the value of their life on earth.

Does the enormous cost to humanity resulting from their miserable existence matter one fart to them?

The Web of Power Hidden Behind the Invisible Matrix of Consensus Reality

Synergy: The Web of Power

The processes of corporate power do not work in isolation. The economic and legal mechanisms that allow the privatization of the commonwealth, externalization of costs, predatory economic practices, political influence-buying, manipulation of regulation and deregulation, control of the media, propaganda and advertising in schools, and the use of police and military forces to protect the property of the wealthy — all of these work syngergistically to weave a complex web of power.

The Anatomy of Corporate Power

Activists seek to locate the “mechanisms” of power, but power is not a machine. Power, the ability to make decisions and control resources, is found in the dynamics of the relationship between people. Depending on how power flows and who wields it, political and economic decisions are made and resources flow between individuals, groups, and corporations. When society’s economic, political, and social structures become institutionalised, power tends to flow from people into institutions, but not back again. Power becomes centralised.

The flow of power to corporations is promoted by legal mechanisms such as corporate personhood, limits to liability, pollution permitting, and political campaign financing, and by institutional structures such as regulatory agencies, export credit agencies, and police forces and armies.

Together, these mechanisms and structures maintain networks of tightly-held power. Network analysis has shown that ninety percent of the 800 largest U.S. corporations are interlocked in a continuous network, with any one corporation within four steps of any other corporation in the network.

Analysis of think tanks and policy groups in the early 1990s showed that the Business Roundtable was interlocked most extensively, followed by the Business Council, the Conference Board, the Committee for Economic Development, Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Hoover Institution, Chamber of Commerce, and Heritage Foundation. Some of these institutions are being displaced by new ones. Interlocks are not the only source of power, and in any case, the precise measurement of power is impossible. But the enormous influence of these and other global alliances of corporate power is undeniable.

Corporations and corporate foundations fund think tanks which formulate policies which will be favorable to business. Corporate attorneys draft legislation which will make those policies the law of the land. Corporate political action committees pay for the election campaigns of the politicians who ensure that such legislation becomes law, and lobbyists make sure the politicians stay bought. Corporate executives are appointed to lead the regulatory agencies which enforce (or dismantle) the laws that aren’t favorable to business. National and multilateral trade and development agencies design and subsidize an international trading system dominated by the largest corporations. Governments and banks use public monies to subsidize and insure corporate investment.

The elite consensus rises above the competitive advantage of particular corporations, and is larger than any industry. What unites corporations and industry associations and the wealthy and powerful is a consensus to build and maintain power itself. Corporate power is dependent on legal, economic, and political mechanisms, structures, and processes which follow a few basic rules:

• Privatize profits. Get as many subsidies as possible from labor, the public, and the environment. Get below-cost raw materials from the public domain. Let communities and governments pay for infrastructure. Lobby for tax breaks and tax credits. Privatize public resources and governmental services. The less visible the subsidies are, the better, but also support them with a constant repetition of the virtues of private enterprise, the rights of private property, and the equation of profits with happiness.


• Externalize costs. Underpay your employees, even if it means hiring children overseas to work twelve hours a day. Don’t recycle your waste; don’t clean it up if it’s toxic; if you are caught, sue your insurance companies to make them pay. Minimize legal liability in general by claiming constitutional rights intended for natural persons.


• Control information. Acquire every outlet of the broadcast media, and merge their programs. Acquire independent publishers and bookstores, and standardize what they publish and sell. Write text books from a corporate point of view, and distribute them throughout the public school system. Pay the salaries of teachers and professors and social activists until they are no longer aware that they are censoring themselves for a living. Restrain free speech as much as possible. Forbid it on private property such as shopping malls. Forbid your employees to organize or to use the workplace as a venue for civic life. Make information about corporate operations and government decision making difficult to obtain. Worship expertise and confuse data with knowledge.


• Centralize political authority. Pay off injured employees and citizens to stay out of court, and make them agree to remain silent about the injury. If legal liability cannot be escaped, have it adjudicated in as high a court as possible. Do not appear in local or state courts if the case can be heard in federal court. Do not go to jury trial. If possible, preempt troublesome laws through the World Trade Organization, so that even national courts have less jurisdiction. Replace government and civic institutions with private corporations.


• Centralize economic authority. Acquire or destroy small businesses, cooperatives, and other alternatives. Make the surviving corporations as large as possible, not for economies of scale (which were optimized many decades ago), but for the sake of centralizing authority and eliminating competition. Have a handful of corporations dominate every industry, and have them control the allocation of resources and the means and the ends of production. Control prices. Remove profits from the community, and deposit them in offshore banks to escape taxes and potential liability.


• Remove all barriers to trade, regardless of whether they protect desirable industries, health and safety, human rights, or the environment. Expand management prerogative beyond the workplace, into the community, into the policymaking institutions, and across all jurisdictions. Make private property and the pursuit of profit the basis of all law and all social and economic policy. Create an economy where people have to pay currency for food, clothing, shelter, and culture. Commercialize the schools. Patent species. Make life pay.

Corporate power depends upon the successful maintenance of these principles. The cultural, legal, economic, and political mechanisms used to weave the web of power are complex, interdependent, and for most of us, largely hidden behind an invisible matrix of consensus reality. But the truth of the matter is that without subsidies, limited liability, and an inordinate influence over social and political agendas and information, corporations would soon become in reality what their apologists claim they are: merely groups of people. The sooner the better.

pages 44 & 5-7 of George Draffan's The Elite Consensus: When Corporations Wield the Constitution, the most succinct bird's eye view of the complex lattice of corporate power I've yet read. The second half of the book is an excellent resource that provides a clear-eyed summary of various powerful organizations serving elite interests (eg: Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, Heritage Foundation, the United Nations, Council on Foreign Relations, etc.). Highly recommended.

I appreciate Mr. Draffan's reminder that behind corporate power is "the dynamics of the relationship between people". It is a vitally important reminder. It is, ultimately, all about people. The institutions that we accept as a given reality are nothing more than a society's (unconsciously) agreed upon fabrications that serve the vested interests of those who know how to wield them for their own ends. Here is an excellent insight from Mr. Draffan: "When society’s economic, political, and social structures become institutionalised, power tends to flow from people into institutions, but not back again. Power becomes centralised."

A thought: We serve institutions that exist only as consensual realities. The very real lives we lead are based upon shared illusions. It's all too easy to forget that the institutions we reify are ultimately nothing more than phantasms we agree are real. It's our consensus reality that, literally, personifies these institutions and vests them as entities with seeming palpable facticity, entities (rather than people) that appear to affect our environment, entities that can be experienced as distinct and powerful personalities in our midst treating us as their pawns, entities that seem to control the course of events like gods, gods with names like General Electric and Chase Manhattan and Raytheon instead of Zeus and Hera and Athena. The Law (another reification, BTW) magically conjures corporations as persons with all the constitutional protections of actual, corporeal, flesh-and-blood mortals. But there's one crucial difference, one that transmutes these legally invoked fictitious entities from personhood to deity: once articles of incorporation are granted these fictitious persons are born as immortals, thus, by definition, making them gods. But not just any kind of gods, gods of greed summoned to increase the wealth of those who invoked them, insatiable gods that happen to seek to rule the world by economically enslaving us mortals. These gods demand sacrifices: of our time, our resources, our lives lived under their yoke. Our consensual reality has created economic deities that materially oppress us.

But gods only exist if people believe in them. Gods die when people stop believing in them. And, perhaps, somehow, therein lies the key to freedom...?

Pull the wool over your own eyes.
     —J. R. "Bob" Dobbs

I especially appreciate the quote Mr. Draffan sneaks in in the final blank pages of the book:

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
     —Wendell Berry

Compliance Professionals and Modern Strategies of Rule

Living in a society in which nearly every moment of human attention is exposed to the game plans of spin doctors, image managers, pitchmen, communications consultants, public information officers, and public relations specialists, the boundaries of my inquiry appeared seamless, and the shape that my analysis should take, illusive. Surveying the American cultural habitat, I observed that nearly every arena of public communication — the windows through which we come to know our world — was touched by the deliberate activities of “compliance professionals.”

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Bernays’s [Edward Bernays, the father of PR] take on public relations was remarkable in that it tended to ignore the particular processes or details of the periods that had given rise to it. Throughout the interview, he described public relations as a response to a transhistoric concern: the requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population.

For Bernays, public relations reflected the refinement of techniques developed to serve ancient purposes. He appeared to have thought little about his life or his field as bearing the imprint of a specific historical era. As I prepared to depart from him, I felt a bit disappointed in this regard.

Then, as we began discussing the means by which I would get from his house back to the airport, a curious conversation unfolded. Amid a general complaint about the cost of taxicabs, and after counseling me to save my money and hop a trolley, Bernays indicated that he had never learned how to drive an automobile. I expressed surprise. He explained that he had simply never had to learn to drive; among his family’s train of up to thirteen servants, there was always a chauffeur. Bernays then proceeded to tell me a story of one chauffeur in particular, a man he called “Dumb Jack.”

Each day, he related to me, Dumb Jack would awaken at five o’clock in the morning and prepare to drive Bernays and his wife (and partner in public relations), Doris Fleishman, to the office. The trusty chauffeur would then return to the family home to carry their two daughters to school. From there, he would return to the office to chauffeur Bernays and his wife to business meetings throughout the day, taking time out to retrieve the daughters from their school. At the end of the day, according to Bernays, a subdued Dumb Jack would step into the kitchen and, as the cook prepared the evening meal, would sit at the kitchen table, lay his head in his hands, and take a nap. He would go to bed a nine, only to begin his routine again the next morning at five. Comparing this situation favorably to the cost of one cab ride to the airport today, Bernays ended his story by saying that for all this work, Dumb Jack received a salary of twenty-five dollars per week and got half a Thursday off every two weeks.

“Not a bad deal,” Bernays confided, characterizing the benefits that his family had derived from Dumb Jack’s years of compliant service. Then, with a lilt of nostalgia in his voice, he concluded his story: “But that’s before people got a social conscience.”

At that moment, in that nostalgic reverie over a bygone era, my quest for historical explanation — or at least a piece of it — was satisfied. In an incidental reference to “social conscience,” Bernays had illuminated a historic shift in the social history of property, shedding inadvertent light on the conditions that gave birth to the practice of public relations. As the twentieth century progressed, people were no longer willing to accommodate themselves to outmoded standards of deference that history, for millennia, had demanded of them.

Bernays was the child of a bourgeois world that was, in many ways, still captivated by aristocratic styles of wealth, in which relations among the classes were marked, to a large extent, by deep-seated patterns of allegiance — of obedience and obligation — between masters and servants. Like Mr. Stevens (the Anthony Hopkins character) in Remains of the Day, Dumb Jack was also a child of these circumstances.

The “social conscience” to which Bernays had referred arrived at that moment when aristocratic paradigms of deference could no longer hold up in the face of modern, democratic, public ideals that were boiling up among the “lower strata” of society. At that juncture, strategies of social rule began to change, and the life and career of Bernays, I should add, serves as a testament to that change.

The explosive ideals of democracy challenged ancient customs that had long upheld social inequality. A public claiming the birthright of democratic citizenship and social justice increasingly called upon institutions and people of power to justify themselves and their privileges. In the crucible of these changes, aristocracy began to give way to technocracy as a strategy of rule. Bernays came to maturity in a society in which the exigencies of power were — by necessity — increasingly exercised from behind the pretext of the “common good.” Bernays, the child of aristocratic pretense who fashioned himself into a technician of mass persuasion, was the product of a “social conscience” that had grasped the fact that a once submissive Dumb Jack, in the contemporary world, would no longer be willing to place his tired head quietly in his folded hands at the end of the day, only to awaken and serve again the next morning. Born into privilege, developing into a technocrat, Bernays illustrates the onus that the twentieth century has placed on social and economic elites; they have had to justify themselves continually to a public whose hearts and minds now bear the ideals of democracy.

As I pursued my research following my encounter with Bernays and repeatedly ran into the fear of an empowered public that ignited the thinking of early practitioners of public relations, the story of Dumb Jack — the man who was no more — came to mind again and again, reminding me of the human flesh that encircles the bones of broad institutional developments.

Stuart Ewen. PR! - A Social History of Spin, pp 19-20; 11-13

Der Stürmer in Murka

I frequently get emails forwarded to me from my fascist patriotic Murkan in-laws (this one from my father-in-law, but it could just as well have been brother- or mother-in-law), who all seem to be on the hotlist for the latest thought-seed releases from the SID (Scared Ignorant Dumbfuck) Department of the Ministry of Propaganda. But I just had to share this one so that those who aren't aware of it can have some sense of what the other side of the so-called cultural divide really thinks — or at least is meant to think.

It would be too easy to comment on this, but I don't see the point — either you get it, or you really get it. I'll just suggest that you keep in mind that it's Muffy who's the intolerant hate-filled puppet, not mom and dad.

While all of us have been mired in this financial mess, we've forgotten it's back to school time — with many offspring leaving home for college.

Now, I don't have kids. But that shouldn't stop me from giving advice. If anything, being childless allows me the time to contemplate how to raise them.

And so, I've crafted this "Letter to the College Freshman, From Mom and Dad:"

Dear Muffy,

We wish you luck. We're so proud of you, and know you'll do great.

But if you come home claiming meat is murder, while sporting a nose ring and some Asian tattoo stamped on the crack of your ass — you can't come in. If you want to make a statement by mutilating the body God gave you — then go the whole nine: Cut off your face and join a carnival. At least that's a career move with strong profit potential.

If, while away, you've decided that America is at fault for everything, then you will sleep in the backyard and crap in a hole you dug yourself. After all, your professors admire Third World countries, so why not live like you're in one?

We do hope college "opens" your mind, but if you announce that terrorism is just the powerless speaking to the powerful, then we will beat the crap out of you. But we won't behead you. We'll leave that to the powerless.

If you also tell us that capitalism is corrupt and socialism is supreme, then hand over your cell phone and your credit cards. Practice what you preach and reject these trappings of an evil market system. We also want your bong. What can we say? We've earned it.

Also, if you must lecture your father on evil corporations, remember that he toiled at one for years so he could afford your tuition, while paying thousands into useless government programs that your teachers embrace. If, after that, you're still moaning, you will do it naked. Because we will take the clothes off your back and kick you out on your ass. See how life works when everything we worked so hard for disappears?

Finally, if you really think you're an individual — that is, a person who leads instead of follows — then you should easily resist the indoctrination of your delusional professors, misguided dormies and anyone with purple hair.

But if you come home and suddenly you're "edgy" and "angry" — claiming that the BS you picked up on campus is better than the common sense we taught you — then you'll need to find new parents.

Don't worry, we'll still love you. We just can't stand you.

"Nothing is more anarchic than power"

Nothing is more anarchic than power. Power can essentially do what it wants, and what it wants is completely arbitrary or dictated by its economic needs that elude common logic.
     —Pier Paolo Pasolini

We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we're masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.
     —The Duke (in Pasolini's masterpiece Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom)

We seem to be moving from one crisis to another, like the war and the terrorism crisis, to the food and energy crisis, and last is the financial crisis. What crisis is brewing next that will keep the population engulfed in fear and confusion? We have to ask ourselves, why was this financial crisis created? Who caused it? And who will benefit from it?
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The Bush administration has single-handedly increased our national debt by over five trillion dollars, more than all past administrations combined together. Bush has apparently achieved his objective by accruing more debt than any other president in the history of this nation.

Was it done on purpose? Creating pseudo-military and low intensity conflicts lead to tremendous borrowing and justified printing of money in the name of national security, which would hyperinflate the currency and eventually destroy it.

Was the extensive borrowing with the lavish and uncontrolled spending designed specifically to weaken the dollar and the US to the point of collapse, which will lead to the justification of change in currency?

Fear mongering and morbid forecasts are circulating everywhere predicting doom, knowing well that the stock market operate on sentiment, rumors, and manipulation not on objective measurable means.

In reality Armageddon has always been contrived by the elite and seems to affect only the middle class.
⋅ ⋅ ⋅
Meanwhile, the Luciferian network embodied in the NeoCons, the international bankers, and the global corporate CEOs/politicians will solidify further their power and their wealth, and will create more means to control the populace.

It's Really Really Coming

FEMA sources confirm coming martial law

WMR has learned from knowledgeable Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sources that the Bush administration is putting the final touches on a plan that would see martial law declared in the United States with various scenarios anticipated as triggers. The triggers include a continuing economic collapse with massive social unrest, bank closures resulting in violence against financial institutions, and another fraudulent presidential election that would result in rioting in major cities and campuses around the country.

Thousands of Troops Are Deployed on U.S. Streets Ready to Carry Out "Crowd Control"

Members of Congress were told they could face martial law if they didn't pass the bailout bill. This will not be the last time.

Background: the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing "unruly individuals," and the management of a national emergency. I am in Seattle and heard from the brother of one of the soldiers that they are engaged in exercises now. Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks.

Pre-election Militarization of the North American Homeland. US Combat Troops in Iraq repatriated to "help with civil unrest"

The Army Times reports that the 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is returning from Iraq to defend the Homeland, as "an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks." The BCT unit has been attached to US Army North, the Army's component of US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). (See Gina Cavallaro, Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1, Army Times, September 8, 2008).
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The BCT is an army combat unit designed to confront an enemy within a war theater.

With US forces overstretched in Iraq, why would the Pentagon decide to undertake this redeployment within the USA, barely one month before the presidential elections?

The new mission of the 1st Brigade on US soil is to participate in "defense" efforts as well as provide "support to civilian authorities".

What is significant in this redeployment of a US infantry unit is the presumption that North America could, in the case of a national emergency, constitute a "war theater" thereby justifying the deployment of combat units.

The new skills to be imparted consist in training 1st BCT in repressing civil unrest, a task normally assumed by civilian law enforcement.

What we are dealing with is a militarization of civilian police activities in derogation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

The prevailing FEMA emergency procedures envisage the enactment of martial law in the case of a terrorist attack.

Here's what I think is going to happen...


Update 10/10/08: Interesting slip there, John McCain. Wonder if he knows something the rest of the population doesn't... I especially like the McCain-Jugend rally at the end.

Update 10/10/08: Congressman Brad Sherman on the floor of the US House of Representatives

Crime Pays: History's Biggest White Collar Crime Rewarded with History's Biggest Payout

Congress passes bailout, Bush signs into law

(Excerpt from Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom)

• But this will not recapitalize the banks balance sheets or mop up the ocean of red ink which is flooding the financial system. No, Paulson intends to hand out lavish treats to his banker buddies, while interest rates soar, pension funds collapse, the housing market crashes, and the dollar does a last, looping swan-dive into a pool of molten lava. Thanks, Hank.


• This is a terrible bill, and it confers absolute authority on one of the central players in the scandal, Henry Paulson, who was the Chairman of Goldman Sachs at the time this MBS garbage was being peddled around the planet to credulous investors. Now Paulson will be in a position to buy up any "troubled asset" he that he believes could pose a threat to "financial market stability". It is clear that Paulson will use his unchecked powers to wipe the slate clean and remove any possibility that foreign investors will take legal action against the perpetrators; the giant Wall Street investment banks.


• These are the bankers who already have placed all the risk onto their clients and, by lobbying to rewrite the bankruptcy laws, onto debtors. As matters now stand, the $700 billion is to be used to finance this year’s annual bonuses, this year’s million-dollar salaries and sales commission, and to contribute yet more to the retirement funds for the golden parachutes that financial managers have siphoned off to provide a safety net for themselves. So we are back to the basic motto these days: “You only have to make a fortune once in a lifetime.” Now is the time to make these fortunes as big as they’re going to get. Because it’s all down hill from here.

A Foretoken?

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers

Corporate India is in shock after a mob of sacked workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who had dismissed them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi.

Lalit Kishore Choudhary, 47, the head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, an Italian-headquartered manufacturer of car parts, died of severe head wounds on Monday afternoon after being attacked by scores of laid-off employees, police said.

The incident, in Greater Noida, just outside the Indian capital, followed a long-running dispute between the factory's management and workers who had demanded better pay and permanent contracts.

A Foretoken? One can hope...

But I don't...

buzzadler

the truth is, the elites don't have to hide anything. they know full well the impotence of the average american. spoonfed on TV, Fast Food, Prescription Drugs, Toxic Tap Water, Government Schools, etc, the average American has absolutely no clue whats going on. The tools to fight this are at our fingertips, and almost nobody is doing anything about it.... Obama's popularity is no better testament to rampant ignorance of the general population.

The Contemporary Inquisitiion

I had begun an article in which I equate modern American policy — both domestic and foreign — with the Spanish Inquisition. I was drawing parallels between Scalia and Torquemada; the importance of fear as a tool of social control; the lawful cover used to justify the horrific, gratuitous, sadean torture of innocents; the spectacular and shameless display of hypocrisy as power's gauge of its own (illegitimate) authority; the necessary creation of the enemy as the Other to justify wholesale slaughter — which serves as nothing more than a strategic facade to mask a naked grab for resources; the modern economic re-definition of heresy, and of the heretic as one who doesn't believe in neo-liberal gangster capitalism (a topic for much further discussion, since economics is truly a modern religion); etc.

Michel Chossudovsky has done it for me, and with more clarity, encyclopedic knowledge and insight than I'm sure I would have brought to it.

Please read it — you will not find a better summation of our contemporary historical epoch.

[Here, for those who need it, is an exemplary refresher of American hypocrisy.]

Modern Transubstantiation

'The media has another essential function. It is the creator of images for consumption. It creates celebrities and personalities for people to look up to and vicariously live through. It creates role images for people to imitate in order to invent their “identity”. It creates images of events separated from and placed above life. It is through these images, ingested uncritically, that people are to view and interpret the world, formulating their opinions out of this virtual unreality…

In choosing to seek to get one’s ideas across through the media, one is choosing to feed these ideas to this masticating monster, to offer one’s self to this life-draining ghoul. For anarchists this makes no sense. It is impossible for the media to portray anarchism as a living praxis or anarchists as complex multi-dimensional individuals. It is therefore not possible to express anarchist ideas in a worthwhile way through this forum. The ideas will be chewed up and shat out as one opinion among many, one more turd about whose odor the public can argue. The living individuals get chewed up and shat out as images-of freaks, of intellectual brooders, of street rioters-but essentially as images not living, acting beings. The media is part of the power structure, and, as such, is our enemy. We can’t play their game and win.'

via Minneapolis IndyMedia

Those Who Are Jiggling the Toilet Handle

...an all out war feeds the profit driven agenda of global banking, including the institutional speculators in the energy market, the powerful Anglo-American oil giants and America's weapons producers, the big five defense contractors plus British Aerospace Systems Corporation, which play a major role in the formulation of US foreign policy and the Pentagon's military agenda, not to mention the gamut of mercenary companies and military contractors.

A small number of global corporations and financial institutions feed on war and destruction to the detriment of important sectors of economic activity, Broadly speaking, the bulk of the civilian economy is threatened.

What we are dealing with are conflicts and rivalries within the upper echelons of the global capitalist system, largely opposing those corporate players which have a direct interest in the war to the broader capitalist economy which ultimately depends on the continued development of civilian consumer and investment demand.

These vested interests in a profit driven war also feed on economic recession and financial dislocation. The process of economic collapse which results, for instance, from the speculative hikes in oil and food prices, triggers bankruptcies on a large scale, which ultimately enable a handful of global corporations and financial institutions to "pick up the pieces" and consolidate their global control over the real economy as well as over the international monetary system.

Financial manipulation is intimately related to military decision-making. Major banks and financial institutions have links to the military and intelligence apparatus. Advanced knowledge or inside information by these institutional speculators regarding specific "false flag" terrorist attacks, [here and here for stellar examples from 9/11] or military operations in the Middle East is the source of tremendous speculative gains.

Both the war agenda and the proposed economic sanctions regime trigger, quite deliberately, a global atmosphere of insecurity and economic chaos.

In turn, the institutional speculators in London, Chicago and New York not only feed on economic chaos and uncertainty, their manipulative actions in the energy and commodity markets contribute to spearheading large sectors of the civilian economy into bankruptcy.

The economic and financial dislocations resulting from the hikes in the prices of crude oil and food staples are the source of financial gains by a handful of global actors. Speculators are not concerned with the far-reaching consequences of a broader Middle East war, which could evolve into a World War Three scenario.

Iran: War or Privatization: All Out War or "Economic Conquest"? by Michel Chossudovsky

Impeachment: The Deafening Silence Part 2: Going Deeper

The Content of Silence: Managers and Their Networks

In the 1993 August/September edition, the prestigious Dutch magazine Exposure outlined disturbing details about how the Tavistock Institute for Behavioural Analysis, premier behavioural research center in the world, planned to control the boards of the three major and most prestigious television networks in the United States: NBC, CBS and ABC. All three television networks came as spin-offs from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). These organizations and institutions that theoretically are in "competition" with each other — this is part of the "independence" that ensures Americans enjoy unbiased news — are in fact closely interfaced and interlocked with countless companies and banks, making it an almost impossible task to untangle them.

According to then-U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, NBC's owner General Electric is "one of the largest corporations in the world — and one with a long history of anti-union activity. GE, a major contributor to the Republican Party, has substantial financial interests in weapons manufacturing, finance, nuclear power and many other industries. Former CEO Jack Welch was one of the leaders in shutting down American plants and moving them to low-wage countries like China and Mexico."

NBC is a subsidiary of RCA, a media conglomerate. On RCA's board sits Thornton Bradshaw, president of Atlantic Richfield Oil, and member of the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and the Council of Foreign Relations. Bradshaw is also chairman of NBC.

RCA's most legendary role, however, was the service it provided to British Intelligence during World War II. Of particular note: RCA's President David Sarnoff moved to London at the same time Sir William Stephenson (of Intrepid fame) moved into the RCA building in New York. During the war, Sarnoff was Eisenhower's top communications expert, overseeing the construction of a radio transmitter that was powerful enough to reach all of the allied forces in Europe. He campaigned for, and received, the honorary title of Brigadier General, and thereafter preferred to be known as "General Sarnoff." Today, the RCA directorate is made up of British-American establishment figures that belong to the other organizations such as the CFR, NATO, the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, Bilderbergers, Round Table, etc.

Among the NBC directors named in the Exposure article were John Brademas (CFR, TC, Bilderberg), a director of the Rockefeller Foundation; Peter G. Peterson (CFR), a former head of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (Rothschild), and a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce; Robert Cizik, chairman of RCA and of First City Bancorp, which was identified in Congressional testimony as a Rothschild bank; Thomas O. Paine, president of Northrup Co. (the big defense contractor) and director of the Institute of Strategic Studies in London; Donald Smiley, a director of two Morgan Companies, Metropolitan Life and U.S. Steel; and the above-mentioned Thornton Bradshaw, chairman of RCA, director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Atlantic Richfield, and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (both of the latter headed by a Bilderberger, Robert O. Anderson). Clearly the NBC board is considerably influenced by the Rockefeller-Rothschild-Morgan troika, leading exponents of the New World Order initiative.

ABC is owned by the Disney Corporation, "which produces toys and products in developing countries where they provide their workers with atrocious wages and working conditions." It has 153 TV stations. Chase Manhattan Bank control 6.7% of ABC's stock — enough to give it a controlling interest. Chase, through its trust department, controls 14% of CBS and 4.5% of RCA. Instead of three competing television networks called NBC, CBS, and ABC, what we really have is the Rockefeller Broadcasting Company, the Rockefeller Broadcasting System, and the Rockefeller Broadcasting Consortium.

On the ABC board of directors is Ray Adam, director of J.P. Morgan, Metropolitan Life (Morgan), and Morgan Guaranty Trust; Frank Cary, chairman of IBM, and director of J.P. Morgan and the Morgan Guaranty Trust; Donald C. Cook (CFR, Bilderberg), general partner of Lazard Freres banking house, whose executives frequently attend Bilderberg meetings; John T. Connor (CFR) of the Kuhn, Loeb (Rothschild) law firm, Gravath, Swaine and Moore, former Secretary of the Nazy, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, director of the Chase Manhattan Bank (Rockefeller / Rothschild), General Motors, and chairman of the J. Henry Schroder Bank; Thomas M. Macioce, director of Manufacturers Hanover Trust (Rothschild); George Jenkins, chairman of Metropolitan Life (Morgan) and Citibank (Rothschild connections); Martin J. Schwab, director of Manufacturers Hanover (Rothschild); Alan Greenspan (CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg), chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, director of J.P. Morgan, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Hoover Institute, Time magazine, and General Foods; Ulric Haynes, Jr., director of the Ford Foundation and Marine Midland Bank.

Isn't it strange how the same Rockefeller-Rothschild-Morgan characters on the board of the ABC network, which, we are told, is independent of NBC, appear to represent the competition? ABC was taken over by Cities Communication, whose most prominent director is Robert Roosa (CFR, Bilderberg), senior partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, which has close ties with the Bank of England. Roosa and David Rockefeller are credited with selecting Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Board.

CBS is owned by Viacom, which has over 200 TV and 255 radio affiliates nationwide. This huge media conglomerate owns, among other companies, MTV, Showtime, Nickelodeon, VH1, TNN, CMT, 39 broadcast television stations, 184 radio stations, Paramount Pictures and Blockbuster Inc. As an American intelligence officer, CBS founder William Paley was trained in mass brainwashing techniques during World War II at the Tavistock Institute in England.

The financial expansion of CBS was supervised for a long time by Brown Brothers Harriman and its senior partner, Prescott Bush (father and grandfather to Presidents), who was a CBS director. The CBS board included Chairman Paley, for whom Prescott Bush personally organized the money to buy the company; Harold Brown (CFR), executive director of the Trilateral Commission, and former Secretary of the Air Force and of Defense of the U.S.; Roswell Gilpatric (CFR, Bilderberg), from the Kuhn, Loeb (Rothschild) law firm, Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, and former director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Henry B. Schnacht, director of the Chase Manhattan Bank (Rockefeller/Rothschild), the Council of Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, and Committee for Economic Development; Michel C. Bergerac, chairman of Revlon, and diretor of Manufacturer's Hanover Bank (Rothschild); James D. Wolfensohn (CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg), former head of J. Henry Schroder Bank, who has close links with the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, and who in 1995 was successfully nominated to head the World Bank by Bill Clinton; Franklin A. Thomas (CFR), head of the Rockefeller-controlled Ford Foundation; Newton D. Minow (CFR), director of the Rand Corporation and, among many others, the Ditchley Foundation, which is closely linked with the Tavistock Institute of London and the Bilderberg Group. The former president of CBS was Dr. Frank Stanton (CFR), who is also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Institution. So, are the Rothschild and the Rockefeller families, who are leading groups in the tightly controlled field of communications, answering directly to the Bilderbergers?

FOX News Channel, part of the FOX network, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns a significant portion of the world's media. His network has close ties to the Republican Party and among his "fair and balanced" commentators is Newt Gingrich, former GOP Republican House speaker. Murdoch, needless to say, is a luminary in the secret Bilderberg Group. He has most recently added the Wall Street Journal to his empire.

All these network are closely interlocked with Bilderberg, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. How, then, can it possibly be claimed that the majority of Americans get their news from independent sources?

Daniel Estulin. The True Story of The Bilderberg Group

The Means of Silence: The Newsroom

Terkel: Most editors discourage reporting which the owner of their news organization might dislike. How does the individual reporter get the message?

Bagdikian: What the journalist is told, when there's something that doesn't fit in, is, "Nobody's interested in that." And that's, you know, it's an acceptable reason -- if it's true.

Dedman: It happens less often that the stories are actually written and then they're spiked. It's really more subtle than that. You have an idea, and then the editor says, "No, I don't think we'd be much interested in that." And that's all it takes.

Sydney Schanberg [former correspondent, city editor and columnist, New York Times]: It happens sort of by osmosis. There are no notes posted on the bulletin board, and senior editors usually do not tell desk editors, like the city editor, "We don't want you to cover this. We want you to cover that instead."

Rawls: "Gee, I don't know. How long do you think that would take?" "Gee, I don't know. Would you have to do any traveling? "Gee, I don't know. Do you what else have you got on your plate right now?" So all of those are negative expressions to the reporter, that's basically telling him, "There's not a lot of enthusiasm for this."

Cohen: Everybody plays the game. And if you're at NBC or CBS or ABC, I don't care where, you're going to play whatever game exists in that news organization. And if you know that they don't want certain kinds of stories at the top, then you're not going to do those stories.

Terkel: Frances Cerra, an award-winning investigative reporter, ignored the cues she was getting from her editors at the New York Times to play the game.

Frances Cerra: They wanted me, supposedly, to do the same kind of consumer reporting which I had specialized in at Newsday, which was investigative reporting.

John L. Hess [former editor, New York Times]: So when you take a young reporter who's hired full of beans, like Frances Cerra, and she wants to do a good, hard-hitting investigative reporting job, she found herself up against the editors. They were very unhappy with her.

Studs Terkel, Fear in the Newsroom

The Theory of Silence: Convenience

Every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what emphasis each shall have. There are no objective standards here. There are no conventions. Take two newspapers published in the same city on the same morning. The headline of one reads: "Britain pledges aid to Berlin against French aggression; France openly backs Poles." The headline of the second is "Mrs. Stillman's Other Love." Which you prefer is a matter of taste, but not entirely a matter of the editor's taste. It is a matter of his judgment as to what will absorb the half hour's attention a certain set of readers will give to his newspaper. Now the problem of securing attention is by no means equivalent to displaying the news in the perspective laid down by religious teaching or by some form of ethical culture. It is a problem of provoking feeling in the reader, of inducing him to feel a sense of personal identification with the stories he is reading. News which does not offer this opportunity to introduce oneself into the struggle which it depicts cannot appeal to a wide audience. The audience must participate in the news, much as it participates in the drama, by personal identification. Just as everyone holds his breath when the heroine is in danger, as he helps Babe Ruth swing his bat, so in subtler form the reader enters into the news. In order that he shall he must find a familiar foothold in the story, and this is supplied to him by the use of stereotypes. They tell him that if an association of plumbers is called a "combine" it is appropriate to develop his hostility; if it is called a "group of leading business men" the cue is for a favorable reaction.

It is in a combination of these elements that the power to create opinion resides. Editorials reinforce. Sometimes in a situation that on the news pages is too confusing to permit of identification, they give the reader a clue by means of which he engages himself. A clue he must have if, as most of us must, he is to seize the news in a hurry. A suggestion of some sort he demands, which tells him, so to speak, where he, a man conceiving himself to be such and such a person, shall integrate his feelings with the news he reads.

"It has been said" writes Walter Bagehot, "that if you can only get a middleclass Englishman to think whether there are 'snails in Sirius,' he will soon have an opinion on it. It will be difficult to make him think, but if he does think, he cannot rest in a negative, he will come to some decision. And on any ordinary topic, of course, it is so. A grocer has a full creed as to foreign policy, a young lady a complete theory of the sacraments, as to which neither has any doubt whatsoever."

Yet that some grocer will have many doubts about his groceries, and that young lady, marvelously certain about the sacraments, may have all kinds of doubts as to whether to marry the grocer, and if not whether it is proper to accept his attentions. The ability to rest in the negative implies either a lack of interest in the result, or a vivid sense of competing alternatives. In the case of foreign policy or the sacraments, the interest in the results is intense, while means for checking the opinion are poor. This is the plight of the reader of the general news. If he is to read it at all he must be interested, that is to say, he must enter into the situation and care about the outcome. But if he does that he cannot rest in a negative, and unless independent means of checking the lead given him by his newspaper exists, the very fact that he is interested may make it difficult to arrive at that balance of opinions which may most nearly approximate the truth. The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper find that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.

Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion

The Wish of Silence: Silence is Gold(en)

One common denominator of these and similar uses of silence is that they refer metaphorically to something which is either absent or ought to be absent.

Karlfried Knapp. Metaphorical and Interactional Uses of Silence

The Vehicle of Silence: The Medium is The Masses

The Political Sphere also only survives by a credibility hypothesis, namely that the masses are permeable to action and to discourse, that they hold an opinion, that they are present behind the surveys and statistics. It is at this price alone that the political class can still believe that it speaks and that it is politically heard, even though the political has long been the agent of nothing but spectacle on the screen of private life. Digested as a form of entertainment, half-sports, half-games (see the winning in American elections, or election evenings on radio or TV); it is like those old comedies of manners, at once both fascinating and ludicrous. For some time now, the electoral game has been akin to TV game shows in the consciousness of the people. The latter, who have always served as alibi and as supernumerary on the political stage, avenge themselves by treating as a theatrical performance the political scene and its actors. The people have become a public. The football match or film or cartoon serve as models for their perception of the political sphere. The people even enjoy day to day, like a home movie, the fluctuations of their own opinions in the daily opinion polls. Nothing in all this engages any responsibility. At no time are the masses politically or historically engaged in a conscious manner. They have only ever done so out of perversity, in complete irresponsibility. Nor is this a flight from politics, but rather the effect of an implacable antagonism between the class (caste?) which bears the social, the political, culture—master of time and history, and the formless, residual, senseless mass. The former continually seeks to perfect the reign of meaning, to invest, to saturate the field of the social, the other continually distorts every effect of meaning, neutralizes or diminishes them.

· · ·

Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence done to meaning and in the fascination that results? Is it the media which induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses which divert the media into spectacle? Mogadishu Stammheim: the media are made the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but, simultaneously, in the most total ambiguity, they propagate the brutal fascination of the terrorist act. They are themselves terrorists, to the extent to which they work through fascination. The media carry meaning and non-sense; they manipulate in every sense simultaneously. The process cannot be controlled, for the media convey the simulation internal to the system and the simulation destructive of the system according to a logic that is absolutely Moebian and circular—and this is exactly what it is like. There is no alternative to it, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution.

Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

The Paradigm of Silence: Official Truths

I have many friends among the mainstreamers, and I have sympathy for them. Their hands are tied. Their organizations are just too powerful. In decades past, musings about the Kennedy assassination never threatened the apple cart. The same cannot be said for such considerations by an agenda-setting corporation today.

Wondering about what really happened to TWA 800 on, say, ABC would have serious consequences. It would represent a powerful accusation that people could not ignore — as they have, say, The Press-Enterprise. The reporter could harbor little hope that he would win. He would know that the government would denounce him, with rage (as it has done to the skeptics, even prosecuting writer Jim Sanders and his wife). He would know that he might be professionally isolated, that other reporters might well describe him as a lunatic. And even if he stuck to his guns, he could have little hope that he would be shown to be right. And meantime, to the extent that anyone did take him seriously, he could well be seen as affecting global markets and come under huge pressure for doing so. The right-wing nuts who always said that one-world government would affect our sovereignty have a point: global media companies have to be as concerned with what sells in Singapore as well as in Seattle, which is hardly good news for the old free market of ideas.

That free market is alive and well, but it's marginalized. You have a wild and free debate of these issues in the fringe press, and on the internet, and no debate at all in the mainstream media.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. The powerful have always published official truths. In Cuba they turned the cameras aside when Fidel fainted during a speech. In the kingdom of Tonga, where I've been to write a book, they do not allow public criticism of the king and members of the royal family. The old Soviet Union did not exactly embrace debate about communism. The American variant seems to be that in the headquarters of global capital, corporate media outlets cannot entertain serious questions about the legitimacy of the powers-that-be, even when spokesmen are shown to lie.

Philip Weiss, When Black Becomes White, from Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press

The Context of Silence: The Quest of the Wizard Behind the Curtain

It is of the nobility of man's soul that he is insatiable. For he hath a Benefactor so prone to give, that He delighteth in us for asking. Do not your inclinations tell you that the World is yours? Do you not covet all? Do you not long to have it; to enjoy it; to overcome it? To what end do men gather riches, but to multiply more? Do they not like Pyrrhus, the King of Epire, add house to house and lands to lands; that they may get it all? It is storied of that prince, that having conceived a purpose to invade Italy, he sent for Cineas, a philosopher and the King's friend: to whom he communicated his design, and desired his counsel. Cineas asked him to what purpose he invaded Italy? He. said, to conquer it. And what will you do when you, have conquered it? Go into France, said the King, and conquer that. And,what will you do when you have conquered France? Conquer Germany. And what then? said the philosopher. Conquer Spain. I perceive, said Cineas, you mean to conquer all the World. What will you do when you have conquered all? Why then said the King we will return, and enjoy ourselves at quiet in our own land. So you may now, said the philosopher, without all this ado. Yet could he not divert him till he was ruined by the Romans. Thus men get one hundred pound a year that they may get another; .and having two covet eight, and there is no end of all their labour; because the desire of their Soul is insatiable. Like Alexander the Great they must have all: and when they have got it all, be quiet. And may they not do all this before they begin? Nay it would be well, if they could be quiet. But if after all, they shall be like the stars, that are seated on high, but have no rest, what gain they more, but labour for their trouble? It was wittily feigned that that young man sat down and cried for more worlds to conquer. So insatiable is man, that millions will not please him. They are no more than so many tennis-balls, in comparison of the Greatness and Highness of his Soul.

Thomas Traherne. Meditations: First Century

America: A Eulogy

bakunin June 12th, 2008 9:36 pm:

The utterly corrupt and cynical monied oligarchy that actually runs this country also of course controls the mass media. The last thing they want to do is to ignite a mass movement such as happened around civil rights and against the Vietnam war in the 60’s and 70’s. The oligarchy fears and loathes us–the toiling middle classes and poor of the United States. They learned the hard lessons of the 60’s and 70’s, and they now know how to keep the disempowered disempowered. They learned how to cut off a budding mass movement before it can get off the ground. So they feel secure and free to go about their theft of the rest of us. “Keep them in debt and scared.” That is their slogan. Bush and Cheney are their front men of the moment. Behind Bush and Cheney is the oligarchy–several thousand extremely evil, scheming, corrupt, and disgusting individuals drunk on power and money. The own multiple homes, belong to exclusive clubs, sit on corporate boards. They think and act like demigods, but they have clay feet, and the republic they are tearing down will bring them down as it crumbles.

America -- Rest In Pieces

Impeachment: The Decorum of Deafening Silence

The Event

News from Ireland

World News

US congressman moves to impeach Bush

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

By Gary Fennelly

Former Democratic presidential contender, Dennis Kucinich, has called for the impeachment of George W Bush claiming that the president set out to deceive the nation, and violated his oath of office with the Iraq war.

The Ohio representative yesterday introduced 35 articles of impeachment against Bush on the floor of the US House of Representatives.

The Evidence

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

The Defeaning Silence

Ghawar June 10th, 2008 6:07 pm

Great news...from Ireland.

News Hounds

So, what if they impeached the president and nobody reported it? As of 3AM EDT the goddam liberal media is largely silent on Dennis Kucinich's introduction of Articles of Impeachment on the floor of the House last night.

witness June 11th, 2008 6:37 am

This media blackban on reporting the matter is a new lowpoint.

The senate report has literally criminal dirt on Bush. The public are behind impeachment big time. McClellan is going to testify. Conyers is mobilising the house sargeant of arms on nose-thumbing subpeona evaders.

Kucinich just laid down a royal flush down on a table piled with chips.

BUT IT IS N-O-T NEWSWORTHY.

YOU REALLY COULD NOT MAKE THIS UP.

Why The Silence is Decorous

9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics

The continuity of past deep events is part of the problem facing those who wish to understand and correct what underlies them. For the mainstream U.S. media (as we now clearly see them) have become so implicated in past protective lies about Korea, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK assassination that they, as well as the government, have now a demonstrated interest in preventing the truth about any of these events from coming out.

This means that the current threat to constitutional rights does not derive from the deep state alone. As I have written elsewhere, the problem is a global dominance mindset that prevails not only inside the Washington Beltway but also in the mainstream media and even in the universities, one which has come to accept recent inroads on constitutional liberties, and stigmatizes, or at least responds with silence to, those who are alarmed by them. Just as acceptance of bureaucratic groupthink is a necessary condition for advancement within the state, so acceptance of this mindset's notions of decorum has increasingly become a condition for participation in mainstream public life.

Update <3 hours later

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to send articles of impeachment against President Bush to the Judiciary Committee for review.
⋅ ⋅ ⋅
The Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), already has before it articles of impeachment aimed at Vice President Dick Cheney. Since receiving that impeachment measure in November, the committee has done nothing.

Democratic leaders in the House seem determined to block the latest impeachment measure as well, and it remains all-but-impossible that the House would proceed with impeachment hearings before Bush leaves office.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is sticking by her earlier pledge to make sure impeaching Bush and Cheney is an option that remains strictly “off the table.”

Samson June 11th, 2008 3:12 pm

Note how the Dem leadership is the force that is actively blocking any impeachment now. There is certainly a case that is worthy of at least the first step of investigative hearings. Its the Dem leadership that has publically promised back in 06 that there would absolutely no impeachment (regardless of evidence). Thus its the Dem leadership that’s been actively protecting Bush and Cheney for the last year and a half and making sure they finish out their terms.

And where is mention of any of this in the MSM?

Oh, but of course — that would be indecorous, wouldn't it?

Update: Next Day

Gore Vidal chimes in:

As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment — he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials — we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.

Although this is the most important motion made in Congress in the 21st century, it was also the most significant plea for a restoration of the republic, which had been swept to one side by the mad antics of a president bent on great crime. And as I listened with awe to Kucinich, I realized that no newspaper in the U.S., no broadcast or cable network, would pay much notice to the fact that a highly respected member of Congress was asking for the president and vice president to be tried for crimes which were carefully listed by Kucinich in his articles requesting impeachment.

But then I have known for a long time that the media of the U.S. and too many of its elected officials give not a flying fuck for the welfare of this republic, and so I turned, as I often do, to the foreign press for a clear report of what has been going on in Congress.

And later, in the comments, this from davfin June 13th, 2008 2:16 am, who inquires incredulously:

I have always appreciated Vidal’s honesty and directness. This bit of writing genuinly shocied me though. From an Australian perspective, some Americans may be interested to know that I am genuinly shocied that the American media is THAT BAD!. Do you mean to tell me that there truly is little or NO coverage of these matters? How is America then a true democracy? Is this why Bush and co, not to mention the American Corporate culture are like they are; they can get away with it, corporate culture owning and controling so much of the media? Is America then a facist state?
Just think about it!

What's to think about? If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

Whatever Happened to the Commons, or Democracy Inaction