SC198-7

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/ghost-cities10-19.html

Could Pricey Urban Meccas become Crime-Ridden Ghost Towns?

If there is any trend that's viewed as permanent, it's the enduring attraction of coastal urban meccas: despite the insane rents and housing costs, that's where the jobs, the opportunities and the desirable urban culture are.

Nice, but like many other things the status quo considers permanent, this could reverse very quickly, and all those pricey urban meccas could become crime-ridden ghost towns. How could such a reversal occur?

1. Those in the top 10% who can leave reach an inflection point and decide to leave. The top 1% who live in enclaves filled with politicians, celebrities and the uber-wealthy see no reason to leave, as the police make sure no human feces land on their doorstep.

It's everyone who lives outside these protected enclaves, in neighborhoods exposed to exasperating (and increasingly dangerous) decay who will reach a point where the "urban lifestyle" is no longer worth the sacrifices and costs.

It might be needles and human feces on the sidewalk, it might be petty crime such as your mail being stolen for the umpteenth time, it might be soul-crushing commutes that finally do crush your soul, or in Berkeley, California, it might be getting a $300 ticket for not bringing your bicycle to a complete stop at every empty intersection on a city bikeway. (I've personally witnessed motorcycle officers nailing dozens of bicyclists with these $300 tickets.)

It might be something that shreds the flimsy facade of safety and security complacent urban dwellers have taken for granted, something that acts as the last grain of sand on the growing pile of reasons to get the heck out that triggers the decision.

Not everyone can move, but many in the top tier can, and will. Living in a decaying situation is not a necessity for these lucky few, it's an option.

2. Those who have to leave when they lose their job. A funny thing happens in all economies, even those with central banks: credit-cycle / business-cycle recessions are inevitable, regardless of how many times financial pundits say, "the Fed has our back" and "don't fight the Fed."

As I've noted here numerous times, a great many small businesses in these pricey urban meccas are one tiny step from closing: one more rent increase, one more bad month, one more regulatory burden, one more health issue and they're gone. They will move to greener pastures for the same reason as everyone else--they can't afford to live in urban meccas.

Once enough of the top 10% leave (by choice or because they can no longer afford it), the food/beverage service industry implodes. Wait staff and bartending have been a major source of jobs in these urban meccas, and when hundreds of struggling establishments fold due to a 10% decline in their sales, thousands of these employees will lose their jobs and the prospects of getting hired elsewhere decline with every new closure.

The vast majority of these service employees are renters, paying sky-high rents that unemployment can't cover. They will hang on for a few months and then cash in their chips and move to more affordable climes.

3. Once the stock market returns to historic norms, the gargantuan capital gains that supported local tax revenues and spending dry up. WeWork is the canary in the coal mine; from a $50 billion IPO to insolvency in six weeks.

Once tax revenues plummet (no more IPOs, hundreds of restaurants closing, etc.), cities and counties will have to trim their workforces to maintain their ballooning pension payments for retirees. This will leave fewer police and social workers available to deal with everyone with little motivation (or option) to leave: thieves, those getting public services and the homeless.

4. Housing prices and rents are sticky: sellers and landlords won't believe the good times have ended, and so they will keep home prices and rents at nosebleed valuations even as vacancies soar and the market is flooded with listings.

Neighborhoods that had fewer than 100 homes for sale will suddenly have 500 and then 1,000, as sellers realize the boom has ended and they want out--but only at top-of-the-bubble prices.

Ironically, this stubborn attachment to boom-era prices for homes and rents accelerates the exodus. As incomes decline, costs remain sky-high, so the only option left is to move away, the sooner the better.

By the time sellers grudgingly reduce prices, it's too late: the market has soured. The Kubler-Ross dynamic is in full display, as sellers go through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance: they grudgingly drop the price of the $1.2 million bungalow or flat to $1.15 million, then after much anger and anguish, to $1.1 million, but the market has imploded while they processed a reversal they didn't think possible: now sales have dried up, and prices are sub-$800,000 while they ponder dropping their asking price to $995,000.

Vacant apartments pile up, as the number of laid-off and downsized employees who can still afford high rents collapses. (Recall that tens of thousands of recent arrivals in urban meccas rely heavily on tips for their income, and as service and gig-economy business dries up, so do their tips.)

5. As the exodus gathers momentum, all the reasons people clung so rabidly to urban meccas decay: venues and cafes close, street life fades, job opportunities dry up, and yet prices for everything remain high: transport, rent, taxes, employees, etc.

Friends move away, favorite places close suddenly, streets that were safe now seem foreboding, and all the friction, crime, grime and dysfunction that was once tolerable becomes intolerable.

6. In response to deteriorating city and county finances, local government jacks up fees, tickets, permits and taxes, accelerating the exodus. How many $300 tickets, fees and penalties does it take to break the resolve to stick it out?

7. Those on the cusp cave in and abandon the mecca. Once those who had the option to leave have left, and those who can no longer afford to stay leave, the decay causes those on the cusp of bailing out to abandon ship.

Renters move out in the middle of the night, homeowners who have watched their equity vanish as prices went into freefall jingle-mail the keys to the house to the lender and small businesses that had clung on, hoping for a turn-around close their doors.

8. Each of these dynamics reinforce the others. Soaring taxes, decaying services, declining business, rising insecurity and stubbornly high costs all feed on each other.

And that's how pricey urban meccas turn into ghost towns inhabited by those who can't leave and those living on public services, i.e. those too poor to support the enormously costly infrastructure of public spending in the urban mecca.

The lifestyle you ordered is not just out of stock, the supplier closed down.

SC198-6

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/want-to-save-the-environment-de-fund-the-pentagon-c51f01b6f8ab

Want To Save The Environment? De-Fund The Pentagon.

Millions of people are uniting in demonstrations worldwide against our civilization’s ecocidal march toward extinction, which makes me so happy to see. It’s really encouraging to see so many young people burning with love for their planet and a hunger to reverse the damage that has been done to our ecosystem by the refusal of previous generations to turn away from our path of devastation. This must continue if we are to survive as a species.

The challenge now is the same perennial challenge which comes up every single time there is a massive and enthusiastic push from the public in a direction that is healthy: such movements always, without exception, become targeted for manipulation by establishment interests. I write all the time about how this has happened with the intrinsically healthy impulse of feminism; I just finished watching an MSNBC pundit proclaim that anyone who still supports Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren is a sexist. This corralling of healthy energy into the advancement of corrupt establishment interests happens with feminism, it happens with the healthy fight against racism and antisemitism, and of course it happens with environmentalism.

Of course it does. People get very emotional when you say this, even if you fully support environmentalism and don’t have any objections to the overall scientific consensus about what’s happening to our environment, but environmentalism is not destined to be the one and only popular movement which establishment interests don’t move mountains to co-opt.

We know that our oligarchic empire will do literally anything, up to and including murdering a million Iraqis, to secure control over energy resources. We know this with absolute certainty. Therefore we can also know with certainty that they are working to ensure that when new energy systems are put in place, they are put in place in a way which allows the oligarchs to retain their power, and ideally to expand it, without losing their thrones to rival plutocrats, to governments, or (worst case scenario) to the rank-and-file public gaining control over their own energy. This agenda is on the table. It is happening.

The ruling elites have many advantages over us, but one of the greatest is the fact that they know exactly what they want and exactly where they’re trying to push things, whereas we the general public, on average, do not. If we only had one positive anti-establishment direction to push in there’d be no stopping us, and as soon as we find one the oligarchs will be done. But in general and on average what we have is a few clear ideas about what we don’t want and a great many vague, frequently contradictory ideas about what we do want. This lack of clarity in direction always leaves us highly susceptible to the influence of any well-funded narrative manager who steps forward to say “Oh yeah I know exactly where we’re going! It’s this way, follow me!”

Luckily for us, there’s a very clear demand we can add into the mix in this new push for environmentalist reforms which runs directly counter to the interests of the empire that is trying to manipulate our healthy impulses: de-fund the Pentagon.

There is no single, unified entity that is a larger polluter than America’s dishonestly labeled “Department of Defense”. Its yearly carbon output alone dwarfs that of entire first-world nations like Sweden and Portugal; if the US military were its own country it would rank 47th among emitters of greenhouse gasses, meaning it’s a worse polluter than over 140 entire nations. That’s completely separate from the pollution already produced by the US itself. None of the sociopathic corporations whose environmental impact is being rightly criticized today come anywhere remotely close to that of the Pentagon. They are going under the radar.

And that’s just greenhouse gas emissions, which the Pentagon’s poisonous effects on our environment are in no way limited to. As journalist Whitney Webb highlighted in an excellent article for Mintpress News about the wildly neglected subject of the US military’s ecological toxicity: “Producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, the US Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among others.”

Webb documents how the US “has conducted more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined”, how US military interventionism in Iraq “has resulted in the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory, crippling the country’s agricultural industry and forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food,” and how “US military bases, both domestic and foreign, consistently rank among some of the most polluted places in the world.”

“While the US military’s past environmental record suggests that its current policies are not sustainable, this has by no means dissuaded the US military from openly planning future contamination of the environment through misguided waste disposal efforts,” Webb writes. “Last November, the US Navy announced its plan to release 20,000 tons of environmental ‘stressors,’ including heavy metals and explosives, into the coastal waters of the US Pacific Northwest over the course of this year.”

This is all a massive environmental burden to take on for a branch of the government which provides no other service to anyone beyond bullying the rest of the world into obedience, wouldn’t you agree? So get rid of it.

Surely with all this talk about the huge, sweeping changes that are required to avert climate catastrophe we’re not going to overlook the world’s single worst polluter just because a few think tankers and their plutocratic sponsors believe it’s important for the US-centralized power alliance to retain total global hegemony? If we’re making huge, sweeping changes, the completely needless globe-spanning US war machine would be the obvious place to start.

That’s something we can inject into the mainstream dialogue as this environmental movement grows, and the cool thing about it is that the establishment manipulators can’t reject it or they’ll expose themselves. It’s something we can demand that they can’t legitimately say no to. We can surf this clear, concrete, exciting and utterly indisputable idea on the surging momentum of these climate demonstrations, and the same healthy impulse to save our planet that these budding activists are now embodying will lift it right up and carry it to the top of mainstream awareness. No sane person will reject this, so if anyone pushes back against it to say “No, not that,” they’ll immediately spotlight the insane agendas they serve.

The US does not need any more military power than what other normal nations have: enough to defend its own easily defended shores from unprovoked attack. Anything beyond that, and certainly the hundreds of environmentally toxic military bases circling our planet, exists solely for the benefit of murderous dominating imperialists and sociopathic war profiteers. Demanding a reversal of US military expansionism as a part of the environmental movement is sane on its face and will benefit everyone, and it will also help highlight all unwholesome elements of empire loyalism.

SC198-5

https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-yemens-houthis-are-bringing-down-a-goliath/5690229

How Yemen’s Houthis Are Bringing Down a Goliath

“It is clear to us that Iran bears responsibility for this attack. There is no other plausible explanation. We support ongoing investigations to establish further details.”

The statement above was not written by Franz Kafka. In fact, it was written by a Kafka derivative: Brussels-based European bureaucracy. The Merkel-Macron-Johnson trio, representing Germany, France and the UK, seems to know what no “ongoing investigation” has unearthed: that Tehran was definitively responsible for the twin aerial strikes on Saudi oil installations.

“There is no other plausible explanation” translates as the occultation of Yemen. Yemen only features as the pounding ground of a vicious Saudi war, de facto supported by Washington and London and conducted with US and UK weapons, which has generated a horrendous humanitarian crisis.

So Iran is the culprit, no evidence provided, end of story, even if the “investigation continues.”

Hassan Ali Al-Emad, Yemeni scholar and the son of a prominent tribal leader with ascendance over ten clans, begs to differ. “From a military perspective, nobody ever took our forces in Yemen seriously. Perhaps they started understanding it when our missiles hit Aramco.”
A satellite image from the US government shows damage to oil and gas infrastructure from weekend drone attacks at Abqaig on September 15.

Al-Emad said:

“Yemeni people have been encircled by an embargo. Why are Yemeni airports still closed? Children are dying without treatment. In this current war, the first door [to be closed against enemies] was Damascus. The second door is Yemen.”

Al-Emad considers that Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayed Nasrallah and the Houthis are involved in the same struggle.

Al-Emad was born in Sana’a in a Zaydi family influenced by Wahhabi practices. Yet when he was 20, in 1997, he converted to Ahlulbayat after comparative studies between Sunni, Zaydi and the Imamiyyah – the branch of Shi’ite Islam that believes in 12 imams. He abandoned Zaydi in what could be considered a Voltairean act: because the sect cannot withstand critical analysis.
Sen. Graham Wants to Bomb Iran in Response to Houthi Attack on Saudi Oil

I talked and broke bread – and hummus – with Al-Emad, in Beirut, during the New Horizon conference among scholars from Lebanon, Iran, Italy, Canada, Russia and Germany. Although he says he cannot get into detail about military secrets, he confirmed: “Past Yemeni governments had missiles, but after 9/11 Yemen was banned from buying weapons from Russia. But we still had 400 missiles in warehouses in South Yemen. We used 200 Scuds – the rest is still there [laughs].”

Al-Emad breaks down Houthi weaponry into three categories: the old missile stock; cannibalized missiles using different spare parts (“transformation made in Yemen”); and those with new technology that use reverse engineering. He stressed: “We accept help from everybody,” which suggests that not only Tehran and Hezbollah are pitching in.
Smoke billows from the Aramco oil facility in Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern province after the Sept 14 attacks. Photo: AFP

Al-Emad’s key demand is actually humanitarian: “We request that Sana’a airport be reopened for help to the Yemeni people.” And he has a message for global public opinion that the EU-3 are obviously not aware of: “Saudi is collapsing and America is embracing it in its fall.”
The real danger

On the energy front, Persian Gulf energy traders that I have relied upon as trustworthy sources for two decades confirm that, contrary to Saudi Oil Minister Abdulazziz bin Salman’s spin, the damage from the Houthi attack on Abqaiq could last not only “months” but even years.

As a Dubai-based trader put it:

“When an Iraqi pipeline was damaged in the mid-2000s the pumps were destroyed. It takes two years to replace a pump as the backlogs are long. The Saudis, to secure their pipelines, acquired spare pumps for this reason. But they did not dream that Abqaiq could be damaged. If you build a refinery it can take three to five years if not more. It could be done in a month if all the components and parts were available at once, as then it would be merely a task of assembling the components and parts.”

On top of this, the Saudis are now only offering heavier crudes to their customers in Asia. “Then,” adds a trader,

“We heard that the Saudis were buying 20,000,000 barrels of heavier crudes from Iraq. Now, the Saudis were supposed to have as much as 160 million barrels a day of stored crude. So what does this mean? Either there was no stored crude or that crude had to go through Abqaiq in order to be sold.”

Al-Emad explicitly told me that Houthi attacks are not over, and further drone swarms are inevitable.

Now compare it with analysis by one trader:

“If in the next wave of drone attacks 18 million barrels a day of Saudi crude are knocked out, it would represent a catastrophe of epic proportions. The US does not want the Houthi to believe that they have such power through such fourth generational warfare as drones that cannot be defended against. But they do. Here is where a tiny country can bring down not only a Goliath such as the US, but also the whole world.”

Asked about the consequences of a possible US attack against Iran – picking up on Robert Gates’ famous 2010 remark that “Saudis want to fight Iran to the last American” – the consensus among traders is that it would be another disaster.

“It would not be possible to bring Iranian crude on line for the world to replace the rest of what was destroyed,” said one.

He noted that Senator Lindsey Graham had “said he wanted to destroy the Iranian refineries but not the oil wells. This is a very important point. The horror of horrors would be an oil war where everyone is destroying each others’ wells until there was nothing left.”

While the “horror of horrors” hangs by a thread, the blind leading the blind stick to the script: Blame Iran and ignore Yemen.

SC198-4

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-latest-numbers-tell-us-that-the-global-economic-slowdown-is-accelerating-dramatically

The Latest Numbers Tell Us That The Global Economic Slowdown Is Accelerating Dramatically

Economists are already predicting “the world’s lowest growth in a decade”, but it is beginning to look like what we will be facing will be much worse than that. In recent days, numbers have been coming in from all over the planet that are absolutely abysmal. The “global economic slowdown” is rapidly transitioning into a new global economic crisis, and central banks seem powerless to stop what is happening. They have already pushed interest rates to the floor (actually below the floor in many cases), and over the past decade they have absolutely flooded the global economy with new money. But despite all of this unprecedented intervention, economic conditions are deteriorating at a pace that is breathtaking.

Let’s start by taking a look at what is happening in India. According to CNN, vehicle sales in India fell a whopping 31 percent in July…

Just two years ago, India’s huge car market was booming and global players were rushing to invest. Now it’s been slammed into reverse.

Sales of passenger vehicles plunged 31% in July, according to figures released by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) on Tuesday. It’s the ninth straight month of declines and the sharpest one-month drop in more than 18 years, SIAM Director General Vishnu Mathur told CNN Business.

Those are numbers you would expect to see if we were in the middle of a full-blown economic depression, and it is being projected that this downturn “could result in a million people being laid off”…

The slump has prompted companies to slash over 330,000 jobs through the closing of car dealerships and cutbacks at component manufacturers, Mathur said, citing data from industry associations that govern those two sectors.

The Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India warned in a statement last month that its “crisis-like situation” could result in a million people being laid off.

A million jobs is very serious.

And we are talking about just one industry in one country.

How many jobs will ultimately be lost all over the world in the months ahead?

Over in China, the auto industry is also deeply struggling…

China’s Geely (GELYF) revealed this week that its net profit probably plunged by 40% in the first half of the year as the world’s second largest economy slowed. In June alone, its car sales fell 29%.

That isn’t supposed to happen in China.

For decades, China has been one of the primary engines of global economic growth, but now things have changed dramatically.

Perhaps you can blame the trade war for what is happening in China, but the auto industry is also in big trouble in Europe. In fact, some of the biggest automakers in the world are closing European factories and ruthlessly slashing jobs…

Ford is cutting 12,000 jobs and closing six plants in Europe, including an engine factory in the United Kingdom. Jaguar Land Rover, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors (TTM), is slashing 4,500 jobs. Honda is also closing a plant in the United Kingdom.

If those companies expected the European economy to bounce back in the foreseeable future, they would not be making such moves.

But just like you and I, they can see what is happening to Europe’s economy, and on Monday we just received some more deeply troubling news. The following comes from Zero Hedge…

Weakness in euro-area manufacturing hit a climax this morning as German private sector activity plunged to a seven-year low. The Germany Manufacturing PMI slumped in September, dropping to 41.4, down from 44.7 in August, printing below the lowest sellside estimate (consensus of 44.4); worse, the German manufacturing recession is now spreading to the services sector, where the formerly resilient services PMI also slumped from 54.8 to 52.5, also missing the lowest analyst estimate, and collectively, resulting in the first composite PMI print below 50, or 49.1 to be precise, since April 2013. The rate of decline was one of the sharpest in seven years.

It appears that the German economy has already entered recession territory, and these new numbers are not causing anyone to be optimistic.

In fact, “abysmal” is hardly strong enough to describe these absolutely horrible figures…

Flash Germany PMI Composite Output Index (1) at 49.1 (Aug: 51.7). 83-month low.
Flash Germany Services PMI Activity Index(2) at 52.5 (Aug: 54.8). 9-month low.
Flash Germany Manufacturing PMI(3) at 41.4 (Aug: 43.5). 123-month low.
Flash Germany Manufacturing Output Index(4) at 42.7 (Aug: 45.8). 86-month low.

Of course the U.S. economy has been slowing down for quite some time now, and if you doubt this, I encourage you to read this list of 28 alarming facts about our economy that I posted earlier this month.

We haven’t seen economic conditions like this in the United States since the depths of the Great Recession, and many believe that what is coming will be far worse than the last time around.

And we may be deep into the coming crisis far sooner than many were expecting. In fact, David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff is adamant that there is “a recession coming in the next 12 months”…

David Rosenberg, the Gluskin Sheff chief economist and strategist, is warning that a recession is coming. Rosenberg says economic growth in the United States will turn negative sooner than most investors anticipate and the Federal Reserve is powerless.

Even if the central bank lowers interest rates to zero, a recession will still grip the U.S. within 12 months, Rosenberg predicts. “There’s a recession coming in the next 12 months,” he stated with fact last Thursday on CNBC’s “Futures Now. The Fed just lowered its benchmark interest rate last Wednesday by a quarter-point and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell signaled rates would only be cut again if there’s new evidence the economy is softening.

If things really start to deteriorate in the months ahead, we could be in the midst of a horrible economic downturn by the time the U.S. presidential election rolls around.

Let us hope that is not the case, but right now things certainly do not look good for the U.S. economy or for the global economy as a whole.

....

Net energy available to the world economies has declined drastically in recent decades. Economic contraction in all its forms is irreversible. The huge worldwide debt binge, especially in the last decade was/is an attempt to forestall the inevitable.

SC198-3

https://www.globalresearch.ca/hong-kong-is-scared-of-the-rioters/5690145

Hong Kong is Scared – of the Rioters

It was once a British police station, as well as the Victoria Prison Compound. Hong Kong inhabitants used to tremble just from hearing its name mentioned. This is where people were detained, interrogated, humiliated, tortured and disappeared.

Now, after Hong Kong ‘returned to China’, it was converted into the Tai Kwun Center – one of the biggest and the most vibrant art institutions in Asia.

This transformation was symbolic, the same as the conversion of the former British-era slums into public parks has been symbolic.

But now, as the pro-Western and anti-Chinese treasonous hooligans are dividing and ruining this former U.K. colony, the old-colonialist flags of “British Hong Kong” are being waved alongside the flags of the United States, while Chinese flags are being humiliated, and thrown into the bay.

Rioters seem to remember nothing about those ‘good old times’ (according to them), when signs shamelessly declared: “No Dogs and Chinese”. As they seem to close both eyes and ignore the neo-colonialism and massacres, that both North America and Europe are constantly committing in all corners of the world.

Now, the citizens of Hong Kong are scared. Not of the “government”, not of the police, or Beijing: they are frightened of the so-called protesters, of ninja-like looking young people with covered faces and metal bars in their hands.

Mr. Edmond, who works for the Tai Kwun Center, speaks bitterly about the events in his city:

“What is truly scary now, is that families here in HK are deeply divided. Father does not talk to his son. Silence reigns inside the families. Colleagues do not touch the subject of riots. The situation is thoroughly ruining our city, our society, our families.”

“If someone publicly disagrees with the protesters, they get beaten. They managed to silence people.”

“People come here, to this wonderful art center, and if they are from Beijing, they are now hiding their identity. It is because they are scared.”

Mr. Edmond keeps repeating that “disagreements should be like disputes inside the family”. He means, disagreements between the Hong Kong inhabitants, and Beijing. According to him, the outsiders should not be involved.

This is what the majority of the people feels in Hong Kong now. This is what they felt in 2014, when I wrote about another prolonged and destructive event which was sponsored by the West – the so-called “Umbrella” uprising.

They feel this, but most of them would not dare to express it. The rioters are young, in good physical shape, and armed with sticks and bars. They have no identity, as their faces are covered by scarves. They are drunk on fanatical self-righteousness; stoned on a primitive sense of purpose. Their behavior is not rational – it is religious.

I have been talking to them. In 2014, and now. Most of them know nothing about the foreign policy of the West. They have no clue about the brutality of the British Empire. They do not want to hear about the humiliation and pain of the Chinese people, when their country was invaded, broken into pieces and occupied.

They are selfish; grandstanders, and extremely arrogant.

They wave flags; foreign flags. They spit on their own banners. They do what they are told to do: by the hostile, foreign powers. And they do, what they are paid to do. It is as depressing, as it is embarrassing, to watch.

“President Trump, please liberate us!” “Please Save us, President Trump!” That is what they shout. That is what their posters say.

It is very hard to talk to them. I tried. Most of them do not want to uncover their faces, and to speak. They seem to feel secure only when in packs, in multitudes. When challenged, they reveal that they know very little, even about China; or even about Hong Kong itself.

But they are ready to preach; to lecture.

When faced with logical arguments, which they cannot refute, they become brutal.
Western Media Portrays Hong Kong Hooligans as Heroes. But Are They?

Just a few days ago, they attacked a local teacher who was singing the national anthem of China. They beat him up. A child witnessing the event was horrified. He cried. The teacher kept singing.

They are beating those who try to make them stop destroying the city. They are beating those who are shaming them.

Whenever I manage to have longer exchanges with them, it somehow feels the same as when I am confronting religious fanatics in the Middle East. Perhaps, it should not even be surprising, as both are products of the Western propagandists and their allies.

People refusing to accept their leaflets at the airport –get beaten. If visitors to shopping centers challenge the rioters – a public beating takes place.

This covering of faces with black scarves would be illegal in many parts of the West, were the black scarves to be worn by, let’s say, Muslim women, or local rioters. But the Western media, outrageously selective in its coverage, is glorifying it here, simply because it is against the interests of the People’s Republic of China.

Chinese people, with thousands of years of culture, mostly tolerant, are not used to all this. These events of the last three months are something extremely foreign to them. Therefore, many are scared. Very scared. Desperate.

Ninjas of this nature are usually jumping and hitting in all directions, but from the screens of television sets, not right in the middle of the streets.

***

As I am filming in Hong Kong, as I am reporting for television stations, the picture is becoming clearer and clearer.

There are U.S. flags being carried, the U.S. anthem is sung, then immediately, hundreds of Western media crews start filming.

But when public property is being damaged, subway stations vandalized, pedestrians and motorists attacked, Western cameras are nowhere in sight.

If rioters were to trash Heathrow Airport in London, the army would be called, immediately. Here, the rioters are cheered on by foreigners.

It is obvious that Western mass media outlets and the rioters are working hand-in-hand. They have the same goals.

***

Fear is mixed with shame. No one in Hong Kong is speaking openly, on the record. Even on such seemingly ‘innocent’ topics like the collapse of tourism.

Those who are destroying the city, are obviously not willing to take responsibility for the hardship they are causing to its citizens.

Those who are with Beijing, those who believe in “one China”, which is the silent majority of the citizens, feel shame, because there are so many traitors living among them, in one overcrowded urban area.

Therefore, silence!

Everyone here in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, understands how dangerous the situation really is. Leaders of the riots, like Joshua Wong, are groomed by Washington, London and Berlin. They are morally and financially supported, not unlike people like Guaido in Venezuela. Mr. Wong is known to associate himself with organizations such as the “White Helmets”, which is working on behalf of the West for “regime change” in Syria.

To damage, to break China into pieces, is now the main goal of Western foreign policy. Beijing is being attacked on all fronts: Uyghurs, the Belt and Road Initiative, Taiwan, Tibet, South China Sea, trade. The more successful China gets; the more attacks it has to face.

Hong Kong used to be a city where “streets were paved with gold”, according to the legend. Mainland Chinese used to see it as a semi-paradise. All this has changed, reversed now. Neighboring cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, count with much better infrastructure, a greater cultural life, and lesser levels of poverty.

In one of the international hotels of Hong Kong, I was told by a manager:

“Mainland Chinese people do not see Hong Kong as something attractive, anymore. They do not travel here often, anymore. They are not treated well here. They go to Thailand or to Europe instead.”

The citizens of Hong Kong feel frustrated and angry. Their “uniqueness” is evaporating. They are being left behind. Poverty rates are high. English language proficiency is declining, and businesses are moving to Singapore. Hong Kong is the most expensive city on earth, and it is unaffordable for most of its citizens.

Extreme capitalism here has brought nothing spectacular to the people. It is increasingly obvious that the Communist (or call it “socialism with the Chinese characteristics”) system has become much more successful than the old British-style neo-liberalism; in terms of social policies, infrastructure, the arts and general quality of life.

The spoiled, egotistical young people of Hong Kong are outraged. What? They are suddenly not on top of the world? The Commies across the line are better at almost everything they touch?

Instead of working harder, they turn against China; against the Mainland.

They want to convince the entire Hong Kong and even the Mainland, that the ‘Hong Kong way’ is the only correct way. And of course, there is plenty of funding available to support their insane claims. The funding comes from the fellow-collapsing societies – those in the West.

***

HK2

Most of the citizens of Hong Kong are scared that the rioters may succeed.

They have already forced the withdrawal of the Extradition Bill, which could help Hong Kong to fight the endemic corruption and invulnerability of its business elites.

They have already managed to scare the Hong Kong government into compromises.

The rioters are acting like huge, violent gangs, and they are enjoying full propaganda support from the West.

But whether they like it or not, Hong Kong is China. Ask a grocery vendor at North Point, ask coolies, old ladies on a park bench, or an elementary school teacher, and you will understand. These people do not care whether Hong Kong is exceptional or not. They do not need to show-off. They just want to live, to survive, to look forward to a better future.

And a better future is definitely with Beijing, not with Washington or London.

They already had London. They had enough of it.

“More Beijing, not less”, you would hear if people were not scared to talk. In 2014, when things were not as extreme as now, they used to tell me.

Now, it is not easy to fight the hundreds of thousands of face-covering and metal-bar-waving zealots and fanatics. Their religion is simply “The West”. It is abstract. As are their demands. As are their violent outbursts of inferiority complexes.

Both, the local majority, and Beijing, have to think hard as to what strategy to apply, in order to protect, and to defend Hong Kong and China against those brutal, frustrated, morally corrupt hooligans and treasonous cadres.

SC198-2

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept19/financial-storm9-19.html

Financial Storm Clouds Gather

The financial storm clouds are gathering, and no, I'm not talking about impeachment or the Fed and repo troubles--I'm talking about much more serious structural issues, issues that cannot possibly be fixed within the existing financial system.

Yes, I'm talking about the cost structure of our society: earned income has stagnated while costs have soared, and households have filled the widening gap with debt they cannot afford to service once the long-delayed recession grabs the economy by the throat.

Everywhere we look, we find households, enterprises and local governments barely able to keep their heads above water--in the longest expansion in recent history. This is as good as it gets, and we're only able to pay our bills by borrowing more, draining rainy-day funds or playing accounting tricks.

So what happens when earned income and tax revenues sag? Households, enterprises and local governments will be unable to pay their bills, and borrowing more will become difficult as the financial markets awaken to the re-emergence of risk: as shocking as it may be in the era of Central Bank Omnipotence, borrowers can still default and lenders can be destroyed by the resulting losses.

The era of Central Bank Omnipotence has been characterized by two things:

1. A disconnect between risk and return. Since "central banks have our backs," risk has been vanquished, and since central banks socialize losses by bailing out corporations and banks who gambled and lost, then the financial Oligarchs have been free to ignore risk since the Federal Reserve has implicitly guaranteed returns will always be secured by Fed backstops, market interventions, etc.

2. Costs have been ignored because "we're all getting richer" via asset bubbles. Your healthcare insurance just doubled in a couple of years? Forget it, Pal, that's chump change compared to the big-time gains in the value of your house and 401K stock holdings. This is the wealth effect: even as rising costs consume earned income, we ignore this financial erosion and borrow and spend more because we feel richer when we look at our home and stock valuations.

In other words, the wealth effect has been deployed to paper over the enormous structural gap between income and expenses. The wealth effect doesn't just affect households: rising real estate valuations have boosted local government tax revenues, and small businesses have been buoyed by the spending of the top 20% who own 93% of the stocks owned by households and who have seen their homes soar in value. (Note that the top 5% own 71% of the stocks; the top 10% own 84%.)

But asset bubbles always pop, and once they do, the wealth effect reverses and people feel poorer as the value of their homes and portfolios decline. They borrow and spend less, and all the capital gains that boosted local tax revenues dry up, too.

Here's reality: wages haven't kept up with expenses. This chart displays healthcare costs, but rent, higher education, childcare, etc. have similar asymmetries.

Not to pick on these households, but they are representative of the enormous asymmetry between stagnant income and rising costs, and of the "solution": debt, and lots of it.

I was surprised to find such an honest account in the mainstream (i.e. cheerleader of "good news") Wall Street Journal:

Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class
Wages stalled but costs haven’t, so people increasingly rent or finance what their parents might have owned outright Median household income in the U.S. was $61,372 at the end of 2017, according to the Census Bureau. When inflation is taken into account, that is just above the 1999 level. How households earning $61,000 can acquire cars costing half their gross income is a story of the financialization of the economy.

More accurately: financialization is the result of the cost structure pulling away from our ability to pay our expenses with earned income. The only way to enable costs to continue soaring far above our ability to pay them is to financialize the economy, making debt the core mechanism to pay the bills, and asset bubbles the core mechanism to create phantom collateral to support the skyrocketing debt.

Here's the problem with reducing the cost structure to levels we can actually afford: all the fat in our system is screaming that it's bone. The slightest reductions trigger titanic lobbying by whatever group of insiders or vested interests will bear the brunt of the cuts.

This leaves politicians with one easy way out: borrow enough money to satisfy the demands of every constituency, every clique of insiders and every vested interest. Rather than re-aligning costs with our ability to pay, we're going to use debt to keep all the constituencies happy.

The price of this "solution"--the undermining of the financial system--will eventually be paid in full to the detriment of everyone, including all the layers of productivity-killing fat that proclaimed themselves essential bone.

....

In recent days the Fed ( a collection of 12 central banks that are private, not government agencies ) has been injecting/pumping billions upon billions of " money/funds " into the financial system which is and has been a huge fraud, a casino of corruption. Just today the amount was 190 Billion. The Fed has been claiming it represents some type of technical glitch, and that it " may " go on for another month. The Fed is lying like they always do to disguise what is/are the real reasons/objectives of this made out of thin air money ( appearing in accounts like magic ) being put into the system. You can bet this maneuver is meant to loot and pillage on a huge scale, and to attempt to prop up the house of cards financial system which is teetering on the edge of collapse. Since 2008 the Fed in their Orwellian Double speak language called this legalized counterfeiting operation " quantitative easing ". This most recent injection is not even being discussed in the US media. All the world's economies having been borrowing from the future by taking on skyrocketing amounts of debt. This because the root of the problem is that the available vital energy resources, coal, gas and oil that makes modern economies possible, made the massive growth that occurred in the last 150 years possible, is now waning/declining. Debt was a way to keep the big party going, just a little bit longer. These massive frauds will cause collapse of the system, it is unavoidable, and it is occurring now at an ever increasing rate. The growing climate chaos is adding to the mayhem as what was built gets steadily torn apart by various types of extreme weather events. Add to this a very long list of other converging stresses on the overall system that will be working in synergy with the above mentioned giant problems, which will accelerate decline. Living as we have, soon to be 8 billion people, it was never sustainable and the reality of this will be washing across the world like a tidal wave of drastic and dire changes.

SC198-1

https://www.globalresearch.ca/globalism-transfer-us-economy-china/5686832

What Globalism Did Was to Transfer the US Economy to China

The main problem with the US economy is that globalism has been deconstructing it. The offshoring of US jobs has reduced US manufacturing and industrial capability and associated innovation, research, development, supply chains, consumer purchasing power, and tax base of state and local governments. Corporations have increased short-term profits at the expense of these long-term costs. In effect, the US economy is being moved out of the First World into the Third World.

Tariffs are not a solution. The Trump administration says that the tariffs are paid by China, but unless Apple, Nike, Levi, and all of the offshoring companies got an exemption from the tariffs, the tariffs fall on the offshored production of US firms that are sold to US consumers. The tariffs will either reduce the profits of the US firms or be paid by US purchasers of the products in higher prices. The tariffs will hurt China only by reducing Chinese employment in the production of US goods for US markets.

The financial media is full of dire predictions of the consequences of a US/China “trade war.” There is no trade war. A trade war is when countries try to protect their industries by placing tariff barriers on the import of cheaper products from foreign countries. But half or more of the imports from China are imports from US companies. Trump’s tariffs, or a large part of them, fall on US corporations or US consumers.

One has to wonder that there is not a single economist anywhere in the Trump administration, the Federal Reserve, or anywhere else in Washington capable of comprehending the situation and conveying an understanding to President Trump.

One consequence of Washington’s universal economic ignorance is that the financial media has concocted the story that “Trump’s tariffs” are not only driving Americans into recession but also the entire world. Somehow tariffs on Apple computers and iPhones, Nike footwear, and Levi jeans are sending the world into recession or worse. This is an extraordinary economic conclusion, but the capacity for thought has pretty much disappeared in the United States.

In the financial media the question is: Will the Trump tariffs cause a US/world recession that costs Trump his reelection? This is a very stupid question. The US has been in a recession for two or more decades as its manufacturing/industrial/engineering capability has been transferred abroad. The US recession has been very good for the Asian part of the world. Indeed, China owes its faster than expected rise as a world power to the transfer of American jobs, capital, technology, and business know-how to China simply in order that US shareholders could receive capital gains and US executives could receive bonus pay for producing them by lowering labor costs.

Apparently, neoliberal economists, an oxymoron, cannot comprehend that if US corporations produce the goods and services that they market to Americans offshore, it is the offshore locations that benefit from the economic activity.

Offshore production started in earnest with the Soviet collapse as India and China opened their economies to the West. Globalism means that US corporations can make more money by abandoning their American work force. But what is true for the individual company is not true for the aggregate. Why? The answer is that when many corporations move their production for US markets offshore, Americans, unemployed or employed in lower paying jobs, lose the power to purchase the offshored goods.

I have reported for years that US jobs are no longer middle class jobs. The jobs have been declining for years in terms of value-added and pay. With this decline, aggregate demand declines. We have proof of this in the fact that for years US corporations have been using their profits not for investment in new plant and equipment, but to buy back their own shares. Any economist worthy of the name should instantly recognize that when corporations repurchase their shares rather than invest, they see no demand for increased output. Therefore, they loot their corporations for bonuses, decapitalizing the companies in the process. There is perfect knowledge that this is what is going on, and it is totally inconsistent with a growing economy.

As is the labor force participation rate. Normally, economic growth results in a rising labor force participation rate as people enter the work force to take advantage of the jobs. But throughout the alleged economic boom, the participation rate has been falling, because there are no jobs to be had.

In the 21st century the US has been decapitalized and living standards have declined. For a while the process was kept going by the expansion of debt, but consumer income has not kept pace and consumer debt expansion has reached its limits.

The Fed/Treasury “plunge protection team” can keep the stock market up by purchasing S&P futures. The Fed can pump out more money to drive up financial asset prices. But the money doesn’t drive up production, because the jobs and the economic activity that jobs represent have been sent abroad. What globalism did was to transfer the US economy to China.

Real statistical analysis, as contrasted with the official propaganda, shows that the happy picture of a booming economy is an illusion created by statistical deception. Inflation is undermeasured, so when nominal GDP is deflated, the result is to count higher prices as an increase in real output, that is, inflation becomes real economic growth. Unemployment is not counted. If you have not searched for a job in the past 4 weeks, you are officially not a part of the work force and your unemployment is not counted. The way the government counts unemployment is so extradinary that I am surpised the US does not have a zero rate of unemployment.

How does a country recover when it has given its economy away to a foreign country that it now demonizes as an enemy? What better example is there of a ruling class that is totally incompetent than one that gives its economy bound and gagged to an enemy so that its corporate friends can pocket short-term riches?

We can’t blame this on Trump. He inherited the problem, and he has no advisers who can help him understand the problem and find a solution. No such advisers exist among neoliberal economists. I can only think of four economists who could help Trump, and one of them is a Russian.

The conclusion is that the United States is locked on a path that leads directly to the Third World of 60 years ago....

SC197-15

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/saving-the-planet-means-overthrowing-the-ruling-elites/

Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites

Friday’s climate strike by students across the globe will have no more impact than the mass mobilizations by women following the election of Donald Trump or the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the Iraq War. This does not mean these protests should not have taken place. They should have. But such demonstrations need to be grounded in the bitter reality that in the corridors of power we do not count. If we lived in a democracy, which we do not, our aspirations, rights and demands, especially the demand that we confront the climate emergency, would have an impact. We would be able to vote representatives into power in government to carry out change. We would be able to demand environmental justice from the courts. We would be able to divert resources to the elimination of carbon emissions.

Voting, lobbying, petitioning and protesting to induce the ruling elites to respond rationally to the climate catastrophe have proved no more effective than scrofula victims’ appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal touch. The familiar tactics employed over the past few decades by environmentalists have been spectacular failures. In 1900 the burning of fossil fuel—mostly coal—produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. That number had risen threefold by 1950. Today the level is 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the last decade the increase in CO2 was 100 to 200 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age. On May 11 the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded 415.26 parts per million of CO2 in the air. It’s believed to be the highest concentration since humans evolved. We will embrace a new paradigm for resistance or die.

The ruling elites and the corporations they serve are the principal obstacles to change. They cannot be reformed. And this means revolution, which is what Extinction Rebellion seeks in calling for an “international rebellion” on Oct. 7, when it will attempt to shut down city centers around the globe in acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. Power has to be transferred into our hands. And since the elites won’t give up power willingly, we will have to take it through nonviolent action.

Protests can be the beginning of political consciousness. But they can also be empty political theater. They can be used to celebrate our moral probity—advertisements, especially in the age of social media, for ourselves. They can be a boutique activism in which protesters allow themselves to be funneled through police barricades and arrests are politely choreographed, resulting in a few hours in jail and the credentialing of the demonstrators as radicals. They can be used to distance ourselves from a repugnant political figure such as Donald Trump, while leaving us silent and complicit when the same policies are carried out by a supposed progressive such as Barack Obama. This is a game the state has learned to play to its advantage. As long as we do not disrupt the machine, as long as we protest according to their rules, the elites will let us march through the streets of Washington in pussy hats or walk out of school for a day.

When power is threatened, as it was in the sustained protests during the Occupy encampments and at Standing Rock, the ruling elites react very differently. They employ the full weight of the surveillance state to demonize the protesters, arrest and detain the leadership and infiltrate agents provocateurs to carry out violent assaults to justify the use of the police and security forces to shut the protests down.

Preemptive efforts by the security forces to harass and thwart Extinction Rebellion’s planned October occupation of city centers, an action designed to negatively affect commerce and bring parts of major cities to a standstill, have already begun. Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, was arrested Sept. 14 and charged with attempting to cause a disruption at Heathrow Airport by using a drone. Hallam has called Heathrow—which climate activists say emits 18 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, more than the total emissions of 118 countries—“a crime against humanity.” He and other activists have vowed to halt the airport’s plans to build a third runway. Hallam’s case will be heard at the Isleworth Crown Court on Oct. 14, meaning he will not be released until after the Oct. 7 protests. In addition, other Extinction Rebellion organizers, including Andrew Medhurst, have been arrested in England, and police have seized their phones and computers.

It does not matter who is the public face of the corporate state. This is not about political personalities. It was Obama, after all, who oversaw a coordinated national effort to eradicate the Occupy encampments and place the water protectors at Standing Rock under siege. Obama’s environmental policies, despite his lip service to curbing global warming and his support of the nonbinding Paris climate accord—which the climate scientist James Hansen called a fraud—were appalling. U.S. oil production rose every year he was in office, an increase of 88%. It was the largest domestic increase in oil production in American history. Obama opened offshore drilling to American oil companies as if he were Sarah Palin. “American energy production, you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president,” Obama told an audience at Rice University last year. “And you know that … suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer … that was me, people.”

Democrats, like Republicans, serve corporate power. They will not end government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not impose carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit overconsumption. The technologies they invest in—fracking, hybrid cars, genetically modified food—are designed to maintain or expand consumption levels, not reduce them. They will not redirect the trillions of dollars and scientific and technical expertise from the military and corporations toward saving us from environmental catastrophe. The rhetoric and gimmicks they use to placate the public, from carbon credits to wind turbines and solar panels, are, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury.

The creation of ever more complex bureaucratic and technocratic systems in an age of diminishing resources is a characteristic of dying civilizations. Civilizations in their final phase frantically search for new methods of exploitation rather than adapt to a changing environment. They repress and exploit the lower classes with greater and greater ruthlessness to maintain the insatiable appetites among the elites for power, luxury and hedonism. The worse things get, the more the elites retreat into their private enclaves. The more out of touch the elites become, the more catastrophe is assured. This self-defeating process degrades the ecosystem until catastrophic systems collapse.

The ruling elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs, are not equipped to confront the existential problems caused by climate catastrophe. They are trained to maintain, no matter the cost, the systems of global capitalism. They are systems managers. They lack the intellectual capacity and imagination to search for solutions outside the narrow parameters of global capitalism.

Those living in the global south are already suffering and dying from the effects of global warming, for which the wealthy industrialized nations of the global north bear most of the responsibility. The richest 0.54%, or 42 million people across the world, are responsible for more emissions than the poorest half of the global population, or 3.8 billion people. These elites are sacrificing the poorest on the planet first as they work up the social and economic hierarchy to extinguish us all.

We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, our naive belief that with grit and determination we can solve all problems. We have to face the bleakness before us. We live in a world already heavily damaged by global warming, which will inevitably get worse. Refusal to participate in the further destruction of the planet means a rupture with traditional politics. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every nonviolent way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including becoming vegans, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation. And it means waves of sustained civil disobedience until the machine is broken.

The biosphere, including the Amazon rainforest, the oceans and the polar ice caps, is visibly deteriorating. Heat waves are crippling Europe, Australia and the American Southwest. Floods devastate the Midwest. Last week, southeast Texas suffered heavy flooding and deaths when it was hit by the seventh-wettest tropical cyclone in U.S. history, with some areas receiving more than 40 inches of rainfall within three days. Monster hurricanes ravage the Caribbean and the shores of the United States. Wildfires consume the forests of the West Coast. But despite the tangible signs of a climate emergency, the elites continue to assure us we can live as we have always lived.

The mathematical models for the future of the planet have three devastating trajectories: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive. This third scenario, which most scientists admit is unlikely, is dependent on a halt to the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet to destroy the animal agriculture industry—almost as large a contributor to greenhouse gases as the fossil fuel industry—and greening the deserts and restoring rainforests. We know what we have to do if our children are to have a future. The only question left is how do we empower leaders who will save us.

Climate scientists warn that we will soon reach a tipping point when the biosphere becomes so degraded no effort to save the ecosystem will halt runaway climate change. We may already be there. The tipping point, many believe, is a further increase in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius. At that point “feedback loops” will see environmental catastrophes exacerbate each other.

We must embrace a new radicalism. We must carry out sustained civil disobedience to disrupt the machinery of exploitation, even as we prepare for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes ahead. We must alter our lifestyles and consumption to cut our personal carbon footprints. And we must organize to replace existing structures of power with ones capable of coping with the crisis before us.

SC197-14

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/us-defends-your-freedom-by-using-troops-as-saudi-oil-security-guards-e5db36fa1dde

US Defends Your Freedom By Using Troops As Saudi Oil Security Guards

If you’ve been lying awake at night terrified that the Pentagon might not send additional troops and armaments to defend oil corporations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, I’ve got some great news for you.

In response to an attack on Saudi Aramco oil infrastructure for which Houthi rebels in Yemen have taken credit, the US government has responded in the only possible rational way: by blaming Iran and deploying troops to act as security guards for Middle Eastern oil companies.

“In response to the kingdom’s request, the president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces, which will be defensive in nature and primarily focused on air and missile defense,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper informed the press yesterday. “We will also work to accelerate the delivery of military equipment to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to enhance their ability to defend themselves.”

So you can breathe easy, my friend. Freedom and democracy are safe once more.

A lot of delusional, unpatriotic democracy haters like to argue that the US military doesn’t actually defend the freedom of the American people, and that it isn’t really used to defend freedom at all, and that it isn’t even really used to defend any rules-based international order as sometimes claimed, and that even to use the word “defend” to describe anything the US military does is inaccurate since it is consistently on the attacking and aggressing side of any given conflict, and that actually the US military functions as nothing other than a blunt object wielded by the rich and powerful for the advancement of plutocratic interests and the geostrategic dominance of opaque and unaccountable government agencies, and that it can in fact be accurately said that the only difference between the US military and any other band of armed thugs is funding…

I forget where I was going with this.

Ah, yes. Defending your freedoms. If sending a platoon of Paul Blarts to act as mall security for foreign oil corporations isn’t enough to get you saluting every American flag flying over every McDonald’s you see, then you should know that the US military’s freedom fighting doesn’t end at mere corporate asset protection.

They’re also defending your freedom by killing Afghan farmers in their sleep.

Why did the armed forces of the United States kill dozens of civilian farmers in Afghanistan while they rested in the field after a hard day’s work? That’s a good question. But an even better question is, what were those Afghan farmers doing lying on top of your freedom?

Obviously the compassionate US military would never dream of killing non-combatants under any circumstances whatsoever, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few civilians. Those dead farmers were collateral damage, caught in the crossfire of a a life-or-death struggle for freedom and democracy in a nation that surely has something to do with defending those things somehow. It is certainly a loss that civilians perish in this way on a regular basis in Afghanistan, but that’s a small price to pay for everything we’ve gained as a result of that eighteen-year occupation, such as [research what’s been gained and put here in second draft].

Yes, whether they’re defending Saudi Aramco profit margins, bombing field laborers, encircling the planet with hundreds of military bases, stockpiling nuclear weapons, funneling weapons to extremist militias, toppling governments, destabilizing large regions, inflicting siege warfare upon civilians via starvation sanctions, or just generally dominating the entire world using the carrot of military alliance and the stick of military retribution, you can rest assured that the US military is giving your freedoms the best protection that petrodollars and war profiteering can buy.

SC197-13

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52060.htm

Inside the Submissive Void: Propaganda, Censorship, Power and Control

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government, 1768.

Brief: The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies in the West. Yet the history of how western governments and their ever vigilant overlords in the media, financial and business spheres have controlled the political narrative of the time via these means is a long, storied and ruinous one, going back well before 1914. Along with serving the contemporaneous political objectives of its perpetrators as contrived, such activities often continue to inform our understanding, and cement our interpretation, of history. If as the saying goes, “history repeats itself”, we need look no further as to the main reason why. In this wide ranging ‘safari’ into the disinformation, myth-making, fake news wilderness—The Big Shill—Greg Maybury concludes that “It’s the narrative, stupid!”

Controlling the Proles

The following yarn may be apocryphal, but either way the ‘moral of the fable’ should serve our narrative well. The story goes like this: sometime during the height of the Cold War a group of American journalists were hosting a visit to the U.S. of some of their Soviet counterparts. After allowing their visitors to soak up the media zeitgeist stateside, most of the Americans expected their guests to express unbridled envy at the professional liberties they enjoyed in the Land of the Free Press.

One of the Russian scribes was indeed compelled to express his unabashed ‘admiration’ to his hosts…in particular, for the “far superior quality” of American“propaganda“. Now it’s fair to say his hosts were taken aback by what was at best a backhanded compliment. After some collegial ‘piss-taking’ about the stereotypes associated with Western “press freedom” versus those of the controlled media in the Soviet system, one of the Americans called on their Russian colleague to explain what he meant. In fractured English, he replied with the following:

‘It’s very simple. In Soviet Union, we don’t believe our propaganda. In America, you actually believe yours!’

As amusing as this anecdote is, the reality of the Russian journo’s jibe doesn’t simply remain true now; that ‘belief’ has become even more delusional, farcical, and above all, dangerous. One suspects that Russian journos today would think much the same. Andin few cases has the “delusional”, “farcical”, and “dangerous” nature of this belief been more evident than with the West’s continued provocations of Russia, with “Skripalgate” in Old Blighty (see here, and here), and “Russia-Gate” stateside (see here, and here) being prime, though far from the only, exemplars we might point to.

Of course just recently we were all subjected to the ludicrous dog n’ pony show that was the much touted London “media freedom” conference, organised under the auspices of the so-called Media Freedom Coalition (MFC), a UK/Canadian ‘initiative’. As the name suggested, this was the establishment’s lip-service effort to be seen to be supporting or ‘defending’ media freedom, and initiating strategies and frameworks for the ‘protection’ of journalists. For my part I can’t recall another recent event that so perfectly embraced the Orwellian playbook, absent any hint of irony or embarrassment from the parties involved.

To illustrate, after noting that ‘the world is becoming a more hostile place’for journalists, the MFC website then righteously intones: …‘[they face dangers beyond warzones and extremism, including increasing intolerance to independent reporting, populism, rampant corruption, crime, and the breakdown of law and order….’. The cynic might be tempted to add: ‘And that’s just in our Western democracies!’

And who can forget the fatuous “integrity initiative” that preceded it, whose lofty ambitions aimed to ‘defend democracy against disinformation’? This is elite code for limiting free speech, already happening at a rate of knots, with the powers that be ‘setting up new perimeters’ online and offline. The prevailing efforts by a range of people to make it a crime to criticise Israel or boycott the country is arguably the most insidious, egregious example. As well, the attempts by the MSM to designate genuine, independent analysis by alternative media as “fake news” is another one.

Such is the sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used today—afforded increasingly by ‘computational propaganda’ via automated scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and algorithms and the like, along with the barely veiled censorship and information gatekeeping practised by Google and Facebook and other tech behemoths—it’s become one of the most troubling aspects of the technological/social media revolution. (See also here, and here.)

Notably, the MFC conference came and went after organisers saw fit to exclude legitimate Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik, an ideological ‘fashion statement’ thoroughly at odds with the purported premise upon which it was instigated. Moreover, there was little mention of the ‘elephant in the room’ Julian Assange—the person who embodies foremost the disconnect between the practice and the preaching of Western media freedom, to say little of underscoring the irony, self-serving opportunism, and double standards that frequently attend any mainstream debate about what it actually means.

Put bluntly, “media freedom” in the West is increasingly ‘more honoured in the breach than in the observance’, with the London confab all about keeping up appearances to the contrary, an event we might say was conceived of by soulless, demented, establishment shills, ‘…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. The surreal spectacle though must have induced cognitive dissonance amongst pundits, and many head-shaking moments for Assange supporters and genuine truth-seekers alike.

As for Wikileaks and Assange himself, it’s worth noting the attitude of the national security state toward him. After accusing Assange of being a “narcissist”, “fraud”, and “a coward”, and labelling WikiLeaks a“hostile intelligence service”, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared he [Assange] was ‘eager to do the bidding of Russia and other American adversaries.’ Either way, his comments can be taken as more or less representative of Beltway opinion. Along with noting that official Washington’s hatred of Assange ‘borders on rabid’, Ted Carpenter offered the following:

‘[Assange] symbolizes a crucial fight over freedom of the press and the ability of journalists to expose government misconduct without fear of prosecution. Unfortunately, a disturbing number of “establishment” journalists in the United States seem willing—indeed, eager—to throw him to the government wolves.’

Lapdogs for the Government

Here was of course another surreal spectacle, this time courtesy of one of the Deep State’s most dangerous, reviled, and divisive figures, a notable protagonist in the Russia-Gate conspiracy, and America’s most senior diplomat no less. Not only is it difficult to accept that the former CIA Director actually believes what he is saying, well might we ask, “Who can believe Mike Pompeo?”

And here’s someone whose manifest cynicism, hypocrisy, and chutzpah would embarrass the much derided scribes and Pharisees of Biblical days. We have Pompeo on record recently in a rare moment of honesty admitting—whilst laughing his ample ass off it should be noted—that under his watch as CIA Director, ‘…We lied, we cheated, we stole…it was like, we had entire training courses.’ It may have been one of the few times in his wretched existence that Pompeo didn’t speak with a forked tongue.

At all events, his candour aside, we can assume safely that this reactionary, monomaniacal, Christian Zionist ‘end-timer’ passed all the Company’s “training courses” with flying colours. According to Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times, all this did not stop Pompeo however from citing Wikileaks when it served his own interests. Back in 2016 at the height of the election campaign, he had ‘no compunction…about pointing people toward emails stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks.’

And this is of course the CIA we’re talking about, whose past and present relationship with the media might be summed up in two words: Operation Mockingbird (OpMock). Anyone vaguely familiar with the well-documented Grand Deception that was OpMock, arguably the CIA’s most enduring, insidious, and successful psy-ops gambit, will know what we’re talking about. (See here, here, here, and here.) At its most basic, this operation was all about propaganda and censorship.

After opining that the MSM is ‘totally infiltrated’ by the CIA and various other agencies, for his part former NSA whistleblower William Binney recently added, ‘When it comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other statements about what’s going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically the lapdogs for the government.’ Even the redoubtable William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director back in the day was reported to have said something along the following lines: ‘We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.’

In order to provide a broader and deeper perspective, we should now consider the views of a few others on the subjects at hand, along with some history. In a 2013 piece musing on the modern meaning of the practice, my compatriot John Pilger recalled a time when he met Leni Riefenstahl back in 70s and asked her about her films that ‘glorified the Nazis’. Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will ‘cast Adolf Hitler’s spell’. She told Pilger the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above”, but on the “submissive void” of the German public.

All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone’s totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might’ve at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here, and here.) “Triumph” apparently still resonates today. To the surprise of few one imagines, such was the impact of the film—as casually revealed in the excellent 2018 Alexis Bloom documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes—it elicited no small amount of admiration from arguably the single most influential propagandist of the modern era.

In a recent piece unambiguously titled “Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems”, my other compatriot Caitlin Johnstone also had a few things to say about propaganda, echoing Orwell when she observed it was all about “controlling the narrative”. In this of course she is correct, though I’d suggest the greater “root” problem is our easy propensity to ignore this reality, pretend it doesn’t or won’t affect us, or reject it as conspiratorial nonsense. Yet as she cogently observes,

‘I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don’t have the time or energy to write…about every single narrative control tool that the US-centralized empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn fast, because they’re just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.’

The Discreet Use of Censorship and Uniformed Men

‘It is hardly surprising that those who hold power should seek to control the words and language people use’ said Canadian author John Ralston Saul in his 1993 book Voltaire’s Bastards–the Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Fittingly,in a discussion encompassing amongst other things history, language, power, and dissent, he opined, ‘Determining how individuals communicate is’…anobjective which represents for the power elites ‘the best chance’[they] have to control what people think. In essence, this translates as: The more control ‘we’ have over what the proles think, the more ‘we’ can reduce the inherent risk for elites in democracy.

‘Clumsy men’, Saul went on to say,‘try to do this through power and fear. Heavy-handed men running heavy-handed systems attempt the same thing through police-enforced censorship.

The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on creating intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.’ In other words, along with assuming it is their right to take it in the first place, ‘those who take power will always try to change the established language’, presumably to better facilitate their hold on it and/or legitimise their claim to it.

For Oliver Boyd-Barrett, ‘democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas.’ Yet for the author of the recently published RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media, ‘No such infrastructure exists.’ The mainstream media he says, is ‘owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates’ that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates:

‘The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.’

Of course the word “inability” suggests the MSM view themselves as having some responsibility for maintaining such an egalitarian news and information environment. They don’t of course, and in truth, probably never really have! A better word would be “unwilling”, or even “refusal”. The MSM all but epitomise the “plutocratic self-regard” that is characteristic of “oligopoly capitalism”. Indeed, the MSM collectively functions as advertising, public relations/lobbying entities for Big Corp, in addition to acting as its Praetorian bodyguard, protecting their secrets, crimes, and lies from exposure. Like all other companies they are beholden to their shareholders (profits before truth), most of whom it can safely be assumed are no strangers to “self-regard”, and could care less about “histories, perspectives and vocabularies” that run counter to their own interests.

It was Aussie social scientist Alex Carey who pioneered the study of nationalism, corporatism, and more so for our purposes herein, the management (read: manipulation) of public opinion, though all three have important links. For Carey, the following conclusion was inescapable: ‘It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.’ This former farmer from Western Australia became one of the world’s acknowledged experts on propaganda.

Prior to embarking on his academic career, Carey was a successful sheep grazier. By most accounts, he was a first-class judge of the animal from which he made his early living, and one wonders if this expertise gave him a unique insight into his main area of research! In any event, Carey eventually sold the family farm and travelled to the U.K. to study psychology, apparently a long-time ambition.

From the late fifties until his death in 1988, he was a senior lecturer in psychology and industrial relations at the Sydney-based University of New South Wales, and his research was lauded by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, both of whom have had a thing or three to say over the years about The Big Shill. In fact such was his admiration, Pilger described him as “a second Orwell” in his prophesies, which in anyone’s lingo is a big call.

Carey unfortunately died in 1988, interestingly the year that his more famous contemporaries Edward Herman and Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media was published, the authors notably dedicating their book to him. Though much of his work remained unpublished at the time of his death, a book of Carey’s essays—Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty—was published posthumously in 1997. It remains a seminal work. In fact, for anyone with an interest in how public opinion is moulded and our perceptions are managed and manipulated, in whose interests they are done so and to what end, it is as essential reading as any of the work of other more famous names. This tome came complete with a foreword by Chomsky, so enamoured was the latter of Carey’s work.

For Carey’s part, the three “most significant developments” in the political economy of the twentieth century were:

a) the growth of democracy;
b) the growth of corporate power; and
c) the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against

Carey’s main focus was on the following:

a) advertising and publicity devoted to the creation of artificial wants;
b) the public relations and propaganda industry whose principal goal is the diversion to meaningless pursuits and control of the public mind; and
c) the degree to which academia and the professions are under assault from private power determined to narrow the spectrum of thinkable (sic) thought.

For Carey, it is an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is ‘distinctive of totalitarian regimes’. Yet as he stresses:the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not).’ “Conventional wisdom” becomes conventional ignorance, and “common sense”, not so much.

For Sharon Beder, the purpose of this propaganda barrage has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and ‘forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now largely confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.’

In the increasingly dysfunctional political economy we inhabit then, whether it’s widgets or wars or anything in between, few people realise the degree to which our opinions, perceptions, emotions, and views are shaped and manipulated by propaganda (and its similarly ‘evil twin’ censorship,) its most adept practitioners, and those elite, institutional, political, and corporate entities that seek out their expertise.

Making the World Safe for Plutocracy

It is now just over a hundred years since the practice of propaganda took a giant leap forward, then in the service of persuading palpably reluctant Americans that the war raging in Europe at the time was their war as well. This was at a time when Americans had just voted their then president Woodrow Wilson back into office for a second term, a victory largely achieved on the back of the promise he’d “keep us out of the War.” Americans were very much in what was one of their most isolationist phases, and so Wilson’s promise resonated with them.

But over time they were convinced of the need to become involved by a distinctly different appeal to their political sensibilities. This “appeal” also dampened the isolationist mood, one which it has to be said was not embraced by most of the political, banking, and business elites of the time, most of whom stood to lose big-time if the Germans won, and/or who were already profiting or benefitting from the business of war.

For a president who “kept us out of the war”, this wasn’t going to be an easy ‘pitch’. In order to sell the war the president established the Committee on Public Information (aka the Creel Committee) for the purposes of publicising the rationale for the war and from there, garnering support for it from the general public. Enter Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who’s generally considered to be the father of modern public relations.

In his film Rule from the Shadows: The Psychology of Power, Aaron Hawkins says Bernays was influenced by people such as Gustave le Bon, Walter Lippman, and Wilfred Trotter, as much, if not more so, than his famous uncle. Either way, Bernays ‘combined their perspectives and synthesised them into an applied science’, which hethen ‘branded’ “public relations”.

For its part the Creel committee struggled with its brief from the off; but Bernays worked with them to persuade Americans their involvement in the war was justified—indeed necessary—and to that end he devised the brilliantly inane slogan, “making the world safe for democracy”. Thus was born arguably the first great propaganda catch-phrases of the modern era, and certainly one of the most portentous.The following sums up Bernays’s unabashed mindset:

‘The conscious, intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.’

The rest is history (sort of), with Americans becoming more willing to not just support the war effort but encouraged to view the Germans and their allies as evil brutes threatening democracy and freedom and the ‘American way of life’, however that might’ve been viewed then. From a geopolitical and historical perspective, itwas an asinine premise of course, but nonetheless an extraordinary example of how a few well chosen words tapped into the collective psyche of a country that was decidedly opposed to any U.S involvement in the war and turned that mindset completely on its head. ‘[S]aving the world for democracy’ (or some variation) has since become America’s positioning statement, ‘patriotic’ rallying cry, and the “Get out of Jail Free” card for its war and white collar criminal clique.

At all events though it was by any measure, a stroke of genius on Bernays’s part; by appealing to the basic fears and desires of people he could engineer consent on a mass scale. It goes without saying it changed the course of history in more ways than one.

That the U.S. is to this day still using a not dissimilar meme to justify its “foreign entanglements” is testament to both its utility and durability. The reality as we now know was markedly different of course. They have almost always been about power, empire, control, hegemony, resources, wealth, opportunity, profit, dispossession, keeping existing capitalist structures intact and well-defended, and crushing dissent and opposition.

It is instructive to note that the template for ‘manufacturing consent’ for war had already been forged by the British. For twenty years prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914, the then stewards of the British Empire had been diligently preparing the ground for what they viewed as a preordained clash with their rivals for empire the Germans. To begin with, contrary to the opinion of the general populace over one hundred years later and the bog standard narratives of thousands of history textbooks written since that time, it was not the much touted German aggression and militarism, nor their undoubted imperial ambitions, which precipitated its outbreak.

And neither did the Europeans ‘sleepwalk’ into this conflagration. The stewards of the British Empire were not about to let the Teutonic upstarts chow down on their imperial lunch as it were, and set about unilaterally and preemptively crushing Germany and with it any ambitions it had for creating its own imperial domain in competition with the Empire upon which Ol’ Sol never set.

The “Great War” is worth noting here for other reasons. As documented so by Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty in their two books covering the period from 1890-1920, we learn much about propaganda, which attest to its extraordinary power, in particular its power to distort reality en masse in enduring and subversive ways. In reality, the only thing “great” about World War One was firstly the degree to which the masses fighting for Britain were conned into believing this war was necessary, and secondly, the way the official narrative of the war was sustained for posterity via propaganda and censorship. “Great” maybe, but not in a good way!

In their seminal tomes—World War One Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War and its follow-up Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-And-A-Half Years—Macgregor and Docherty provide a masterclass for us all of the power of propaganda in the service of firstly inciting, then deliberately sustaining a major war. The horrendous carnage and destruction that resulted from the war was of course unprecedented, the global effects of which linger on now well over one hundred years later.

Such was the enduring power of the propaganda that today most people would have great difficulty in accepting the following; this is a short summary of historical realities revealed by Macgregor and Docherty that are at complete odds with the official narrative, the political discourse, and the school textbooks:

a) It was Great Britain (supported by France and Russia) and not Germany who was the principal aggressor in the events and actions that let to the outbreak of war;
b) The British had for twenty years prior to 1914 viewed Germany as its most dangerous economic and imperial rival, and fully anticipated that a war was inevitable;
c) In the U.K. and the U.S., various factions worked feverishly to ensure the war went on for as long as possible, and scuttled peacemaking efforts from the off;
d) key truths about this most consequential of geopolitical conflicts have been concealed for well over one hundred years, with no sign the official record will change;
e) very powerful forces (incl. a future US president) amongst U.S. political, media, and economic elites conspired to eventually convince an otherwise unwilling populace in America that U.S. entry onto the war was necessary;
f) those same forces and many similar groups in the U.K. and Europe engaged in everything from war profiteering, destruction/forging of war records, false-flag ops, treason, conspiracy to wage aggressive war, the dissemination of propaganda, and direct efforts to prolong the war by any means necessary, many of which will shock.

But peace was not on the stewards’ agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so costly and embarrassing some key players in the British government were willing to talk about peace and discuss what that might mean. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be ditched. The unelected European leaders had one common bond. They would fight Germany until she was crushed.

Prolonging the Agony details how this secret cabal organised the change of government without a single vote being cast. David Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister in France. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the decision-makers in British politics. Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America.

Propaganda Always Wins

But just as the pioneering adherents back in the day might never have dreamt how sophisticated and all encompassing the practice of propaganda would become, nor would the citizenry at large have anticipated the extent to which the industry has facilitated an entrenched, rapacious plutocracy at the expense of our economic opportunity, our financial security, our physical environment, and increasingly, our basic democratic rights and freedoms.

We now live in the Age of the Big Shill—cocooned in a submissive void no less—an era where nothing can be taken on face value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where ‘open-book’ history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable, upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual—albeit dubious—freedoms.

More broadly, it’s the “Roger Ailes” of this world—acting on behalf of the power elites who after all are their paymasters—who create the intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures, whilst ensuring…these systems require only ‘the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.’ They are the shapers and moulders of the discourse that passes for the accepted lingua franca of the increasingly globalised, interconnected political economy of the planet. Throughout this process they ‘will always try to change the established language.’

And we can no longer rely on our elected representatives to honestly represent us and our interests. Whether this decision making is taking place inside or outside the legislative process, these processes are well and truly in the grip of the banks and financial institutions and transnational organisations. In whose interests are they going to be more concerned with? We saw this all just after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) when the very people who brought the system to the brink, made billions off the dodge for their banks and millions for themselves, bankrupted hundreds of thousands of American families, were called upon by the U.S. government to fix up the mess, and to all intents given a blank cheque to so do. That the U.S. is at even greater risk now of economic implosion is something few serious pundits would dispute, and a testament to the effectiveness of the snow-job perpetrated upon Americans regarding the causes, the impact, and the implications of the 2008 meltdown going forward.

In most cases, one accepts almost by definition such disconnects (read: hidden agendas) are the rule rather than the exception, hence the multi-billion foundation—and global reach and impact—of the propaganda business. This in itself is a key indicator as to why organisations place so much importance on this aspect of managing their affairs. At the very least, once corporations saw how the psychology of persuasion could be leveraged to manipulate consumers and politicians saw the same with the citizenry and even its own workers, the growth of the industry was assured.

As Riefenstahl noted during her chinwag with Pilger after he asked if those embracing the “submissive void” included the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? “Everyone,” she said.

By way of underscoring her point, she added enigmatically: ‘Propaganda always wins…if you allow it’.