sort of the armchair bizarre world of rah-rah, rallying for your chosen criminal
Yep, Williamson, West, Kennedy, Pence, DeSantis, and the Biden Crime Family! Shit, worthless useless/useful idiots:
Emanuel Pastreich summarizes 11 Chapters on taking down the billionaires.
He’s a real deal, born the same month JFK was assassinated by CIA:
Emanuel Pastreich: I see the struggle against the billionaire class as the equivalent of war.
That is why I invoke the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu whose writings I know since my field is Asian studies. I studied classical Chinese, so books like “The Art of War” are very familiar to me. “The Art of War” stresses understanding who your enemy is, what their nature is, what their desires are, and what they’re striving for. At the same time, it demands that you understand yourself, know your own weaknesses, your own misperceptions, your own indulgences.
The implication is that if you can grasp both, who your enemy is, who the person you’re struggling with is, and who you are, then you are on the road to success. But if you don’t get the second part, if you don’t understand who you are, or if you don’t understand who you’re dealing with, then the situation is quite dangerous.
The billionaires have spent, billions of dollars over a long period of time, on research from back in the 1960s on how to make people stupid, over time, using TV, movies, pornography and games. They conducted a lot of research on mass manipulation, as I mentioned regarding the work of DARPA on this subject. Basically, the effort has been quite successful.
It is true that many people look up to the billionaires. Elon Musk or Bill Gates are glorified because they promote themselves, spreading myths about their start as entrepreneurs creating their business in their basement, or in their garage. Supposedly, thanks to their genius and the American way they became billionaires. And so could you if you were only a bit smarter.
This narrative is a clear fraud. These billionaires rise to wealth was fixed. It wasn’t about technology; it was about access finance.
There was some brilliance in people like Mark Zuckerberg. The way in which he played various investors against each other to keep Facebook under his control was smart. But that was not his brilliance in technology or his vision for humanity-just his greed and cunning. Anyone could have built the Facebook if they had access to 50 billion dollars in loans that they did not have to pay back anytime soon. The key was the use of global finance and the leveraging of the use of supercomputers to manipulate people.
These days, money is calculated by supercomputers. Most of those supercomputers handling digital currency are not accessible to third parties. The parasite class can get billions, or trillions, of dollars by just cooking it up, using derivatives and other financial mythical beasts that live in super computers.
Supercomputers are also used to track us, anticipate our actions and manipulate, “nudge” us into making decisions that are not in our interests.
This part of the conspiracy is left out of most alternative media.
Using super computers, multinational corporations get access to extremely detailed descriptions of all of us that allow them to track us as individuals, as groups, or as communities all over the whole world: hundreds of millions of people in real time.
They use this information to anticipate what we will do. And they float all sorts of false news, concepts, ideas, and initiatives—the test runs you get in the Washington Post that is owned by Jeff Bezos—in order to test us, manipulate us, shock us, and to lull us into a state of passivity and mental disorientation that allows, assures, that no effective resistance will be organized. This mass manipulation via profiles of just about everyone and customized information fed to individuals and populations undermines the whole sense of governance.
The bottom line for us is not uncovering the latest fraud. It must be forming meaningful, organized, long-term, planned resistance that will take them down step by step by step.
Again, we need Parenti!
Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World by Michael Parenti (2007)
[Image by Judite B]
There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?
Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.
The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses—much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.
The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.
By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.
In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.
The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.
U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.
The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.
A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries.
Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.
The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.
But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.
They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.
So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings—which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.
Here then we have explained a “mystery.” It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don’t adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.
There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.
In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?
No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?
The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.
In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.
The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!
Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world—and want to own it all—are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.
Michael Parenti’s most recent books are The Culture Struggle (2006), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), God and His Demons (2010), Democracy for the Few (9th ed. 2011), and The Face of Imperialism (2011). For further information about his work, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.
Pastreich gets it, and there is no way in hell he’ll get a dime’s of poublicity from the Occupied Media, from the Muscle Men and Women Controlling the Narrative. This is a grand conspiracy, a grand beck door program, an amazing project that has infected all aspects of the “system” — education, media, publishing, entertainment, retail, consumerism, all of it, infecting the mind:
Emanuel Pastreich: “We face a systematic effort, based upon research conducted back in the fifties, manipulate people by inducing narcissistic, self-centered behavior.
If you notice that youth are more self-centered today than was the case before, that is because they have been brainwashed by the corporate culture around them—it is not a natural change.
That is how we’re controlled. Milton Mayer’s book “They Thought they were Free” describes how under the Third Reich in Germany citizens were convinced that they were entirely free through advanced psychological manipulation in media and entertainment, in music and art. The advances in technology make the assault even more dangerous today. We are not free at all. We are deeply manipulated people.”
Of course, vital reading gone gone gone. There is no education, really.
“IF VOTING MADE ANY DIFFERENCE, THEY WOULDN’T LET US DO IT.”
Charles Umney, in his Class Matters (2018), calls it “an old anarchist slogan, frequently found as lamp-post graffiti in university cities.” Umney’s claim is corroborated by several sources. Journalists Harry Goldman, Matt Ridley, and Patrick Traub all reported seeing the slogan tagged on bridges, buildings, and other graffiti sites in Boston, Indianapolis, New York, and Washington D.C. from 1988 and 1992.
The slogan seems likely to have originated in 1960s activism. Two stories in the Reno Gazette-Journal, separated by a decade, report that it was a “typical motto” of the broadcaster and gonzo journalist, Travus T. Hipp. The revised edition of And I Quote (2003) attributes it to Bob Avakian. And in a 2008 interview with The Nation, Father Daniel Berrigan gives the sources as his brother, Father Phillip Berrigan.
And, so, this country now is empty of soul, empty of brain, empty of spirit, empty of mutual aid, and is based on transactional bullshit.
Here, five hours = Digital Empire and the War on Humanity and Natural Life
All these bright people seeing through the gauze of gullible Capitalists, stricken with Consumer and Retail and Stockhold Syndrome Chlamydia.
If you think THIS doesn’t involve you, this Digital Fascism, well well:
Celo’s Alliance for Prosperity, includes over a hundred different organizations ranging from payment providers, lenders, international aid, data mining, venture capital and other large associations, including Blockchain Alliance for Social Impact, Mercy Corp, OxFam Mexico, HopeforHaiti, a16z, Coinbase Ventures, and Deutsche Telekom.
Digital microwork, often AI-focused, falls under the trend of “Global Business Process Outsourcing” (BPO), a practice that entails corporations splitting up and outsouring work needed to train AI/ML as microtasks that people complete on smartphones. A service provider turns the tasks into microtasks and provides the platform people use to do the work. Right now, the majority of the work involves data annotation, which basically means categorizing data for use in AI/ML algorithms.
Digital microtasks follow the same exact pattern as remote work robotics, where someone across the world remotely controls robots to complete basic tasks. The ability to draw from people pushed into poverty keeps costs down. (Silicon Icarus)
Here, Australian (sic) Caitlin Johnstone:
Here are 15 such questions:
1. Why does nothing change no matter who we vote for?
2. Why does US foreign policy always continue along the same trajectory regardless of the president’s party or platform?
3. What keeps our voting population split right down the middle into two political factions of equal size, with neither side ever gaining enough of a majority to democratically change society in any meaningful way?
4. Why does the stalemate described in #3 always seem to benefit the rich, the powerful, and the war-horny?
5. Why is it that the most consequential US government policies like plutocratic influence, privatization, globalization, ecocidal capitalism and nuclear brinkmanship are never on the ballot? Why do these things keep happening, against our interests, without our ever voting for them or electing anyone who campaigned on the pledge to enact them?
6. If our federal government’s behavior never changes no matter who we elect, could it be that there are other bodies involved in government policy-setting whom we did not elect, and who remain in positions of influence regardless of the comings and goings of our official elected government?
7. If the above is the case, then who is it? Who’s really calling the shots in this country?
8. Could it be that everything we’ve been told about our country, our government, our political processes and our world is untrue?
9. If so, what are the implications of the fact that our schools and our media have been feeding us lies since we were small?
10. What forces would be responsible for keeping all these lies flowing throughout our society? What might keep an ostensibly free press spinning more or less the same lies throughout the western world day after day, year after year, generation after generation?
11. Is it possible that our entire electoral system is a sham designed to give the public the illusion of control so that they’ll let oligarchs and empire managers run the country undisturbed?
12. If the electoral system is a sham, then how do we enact the changes we so desperately need?
13. Is it possible that there are other ways to effect change in the United States which don’t involve casting a pretend vote in a fake election?
14. Could it be that those other means of forcing change are precisely what the charade of casting pretend votes in fake elections is meant to divert us from?
15. Should we perhaps spend less energy bickering about who should get sworn into the White House a year and a half from now, and more energy examining other possible avenues toward advancing meaningful change?
Yet, oh yet, this is it for this Continuing Criminal Enterprise. Mugshots of just a handful of the millions of criminals!
From the redneck New York Post, not my commie newspaper, but here:
To express disappointment in the results of the Hunter Biden probe is to admit you ever believed it was an actual and honest investigation.
Shame on you, sucker.
Santa Claus is more real than the integrity of the FBI and Justice Department under Joe Biden. Friend and family discounts have never been so obvious — and odious.
For the other side of the coin, see the FBI’s tracking of parents who dared to criticize progressive school boards, and agents who were willing to carry out an armed visit to the home of an anti-abortion protester. Traditional Catholics also were singled out for undercover surveillance.
So, that Bumbling Biden, the liar, the plagiarist, the accused rapist, the criminal of UkrainLandia, he just can shut his Ugly American Trap:
“Biden’s big mouth is a loose cannon,” said Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, adding that the remarks may not undo what Blinken had achieved on his China visit.
Other analysts also played down the likely damage to the U.S.-China relationship.
“I bet Washington wants to let this quietly go away,” said Yun Sun, head of the China program at the Stimson Center.
“And the Chinese will not want to blow this out of proportion, ruining the prospect of a process leading to Xi’s bilateral summit with Biden in November.”
Biden has often defined the current state of global politics as a battle between democracy and autocracy, and said democratically-led countries should establish economic ties to balance autocratic-led countries, aiming at Russia and China.
Here, a hero in the world:
Attending a fundraiser in California, Biden said Xi was very embarrassed when a suspected Chinese spy balloon was blown off course over U.S. airspace early this year, and suggested Xi’s embarrassment was compounded by his grip on power. Blinken had said on Monday the chapter should be closed.
“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment in it was he didn’t know it was there,” Biden said.
“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened. That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course,” Biden said.
Biden, the rapist?
This is the face of America, really:
Dmitry Peskov told reporters there was a contradiction between Biden’s comment and the efforts of his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to lower tensions with Beijing at a meeting with Xi earlier this week.
“These are very contradictory manifestations of U.S. foreign policy, which speak of a large element of unpredictability,” Peskov told reporters.
He said Biden’s comment was an “incomprehensible” follow-up to what he described as “various conciliatory statements” during Blinken’s visit.
“However, that’s their business,” Peskov said. “We have our own bad relations with the United States of America and our very good relations with the People’s Republic of China.”
Ahh, just watch this Zoom Webinar soon, as it just ended, 11:42 PST, 6/21. It will be up. On YouCIAtube.
United National Antiwar Coalition
Paul Haeder, Author 