https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/08/03/they-work-to-manufacture-consent-because-they-need-it-so-dont-give-it-to-them/
They Work To Manufacture Consent Because They Need It. So Don’t Give It To Them.
Plutocrat-owned news media outlets lie constantly. When I say this I don’t mean that everything they say is false; many of the events reported by mass media are for the most part factual. Whenever it’s convenient for the loose alliance of western plutocrats, the political establishment those plutocrats own and operate, and the secretive government agencies with which they are allied, the plutocratic media tell the truth to the extent that it advances plutocratic agendas. But only telling the truth when it suits one’s agendas is the same as lying constantly.
A good liar doesn’t simply say the opposite of what’s true all the time; nobody does that. A good liar tells the truth enough of the time to gain a reputation as an honest and trustworthy source of information, and then, when the truth poses an obstacle to their agendas, they put the slightest spin possible on it to nullify that obstacle. They tell half-truths, they omit key pieces of information, and, with really important maneuvers like manufacturing consent for a strategic military destabilization in the Middle East or new cold war escalations against a nuclear superpower, they shift accountability for factual reporting from themselves onto secretive military and intelligence agencies. In this way they keep full control of the narrative and still ensure that the public supports agendas which do not serve the public interest.
This is evidenced by the fact that the public has continued collaborating with a system which kills the ecosystem we depend on for survival and allows people to die of poverty while spending trillions of dollars in needless wars overseas and an ever-expanding Orwellian surveillance network. Everyone besides the most powerful and their lackeys is aware on some level that the current system is not working for them, and yet the overwhelming majority of people keep playing into it by supporting mainstream parties that are fully owned and operated by wealthy oligarchs, and then shrugging and sighing when things keep getting worse.
This is because their consent has been successfully manufactured. Due to the fact that the governed will always vastly outnumber their government, any government necessarily depends upon the consent of the governed. The entire American populace could theoretically wake up tomorrow morning and decide they want to literally eat everyone on Capitol Hill, and there’s not actually anything anyone could do to stop them. The only thing holding existing power structures in place is the fact that the public consents to it, and, in a system which does not serve the interests of the public, the only thing holding that consent in place is the ability of those in power to manufacture it.
So if there’s ever any doubt that international network of ruling elites would pour billions of dollars into controlling public narratives, remember that their power (and potentially their very lives) fully depends on their ability to manufacture the consent of the governed. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If they lose control of the narrative, they lose everything.
For this reason it is absolutely essential that consent remains seamless and unbroken throughout every step of the march toward greater and greater oligarchic dominance. If they are unable to manufacture consent for a new war or a new escalation in domestic surveillance or what have you, then they don’t get to have it. This is why no full-scale intervention has happened in Syria or Iran for example, despite relentless mass media propaganda campaigns against the governments of those nations. They work so hard to manufacture consent because they absolutely require that consent, and they can’t move forward with their agendas until they get it.
This is not to suggest that an Iraq-style invasion of Syria or Iran would likely cause a revolutionary war or anything like that; that would be naive. If the US and its allies launched such an invasion the people in those allied nations would be outraged, but they would not be outraged enough to kill and die over it. What would happen, though, is a total collapse in their ability to manufacture consent. And that would be just as fatal to their rule as a full-scale violent revolution.
The invasion of Iraq had broad public support, but after it was discovered to have been a catastrophic, immensely costly intervention based on nothing but lies, it is now looked upon unfavorably. If they tried to force another Iraq-style invasion through, the public would not accept the narratives they were fed about it, and they would see the MSM lie factory for what it is. This collapse of the public’s trust in anything the talking heads on TV say would make everyone impossible to propagandize, and thus impossible to rule over. The people would begin telling their own stories about what’s going on, in a way which better reflects reality and better serves themselves instead of the alliance of sociopathic billionaires. If this happened, the old power structures could be shrugged off like a heavy coat on a warm day without anyone firing a shot, simply by the public deciding to rewrite the rules in a way which benefits the public.
This is absolutely essential to be aware of, because it means that we can collectively prevent any agenda from being advanced as long as enough of us refuse to consent to it. And all that needs to happen for that consent to be withdrawn is the exposure of the lies that the mass media is spinning to advance a given agenda.
We’ve already seen this happen with Syria. There was a stretch in April of this year where the mass media machine was cranking out attack editorials on alternative media voices who’d cast doubt upon the establishment Syria narrative, because there was so much opposition to what we were being told to believe about the Assad government that the alliance of plutocrats and intelligence/defense agencies were unable to manufacture support for a large-scale invasion. All they got out of their massive MSM propaganda blitz in April was a meaningless bombing which accomplished essentially nothing, and now the Syrian government is recapturing its territory from the violent jihadists who had seized it with western backing. Had the “think of the children!” propaganda campaign succeeded in the wake of the highly suspicious Douma incident, we would likely have seen a very dangerous and costly western regime change intervention in Syria by now.
We can do this with literally anything. The people don’t need to consent to another idiotic war. The people don’t need to consent to a two-headed one-party system which pretends that domestic espionage is acceptable or that wanting the US to stop facilitating the slaughter of Yemeni civilians is some crazy, radical fringe position. The people don’t need to consent to the persecution of Julian Assange. The people don’t need to consent to the rule of the oligarchs at all. By collectively withdrawing our consent for those things in our own self-interest, we can make them unsustainable.
And of course, our rulers are acutely aware of this possibility. This is the reason for the current moral panic about “Russian bots”, “Kremlin propaganda” and “fake news”. It’s the reason for the smear campaign against WikiLeaks and the attempts to imprison Julian Assange. It’s the reason for the tightening corporate censorship we’re seeing with Google, Facebook and Twitter. Our rulers are aware that any of their agendas can be thwarted simply by their failing to manufacture consent for them, so any voices which disrupt that consent-manufacturing machine are in the crosshairs for attack and silencing.
But they can’t be too ham fisted about their censorship attempts, because the public would never consent to full-scale totalitarian censorship out in the open. The illusion of freedom and democracy would be shattered, trust in the propaganda machine would die, and the oligarchs would completely lose control of the narrative. The nice guy mask needs to remain firmly in place for any consent manufacturing to take effect; as soon as they remove it they lose the mechanism of manipulation and control that their entire system of rule is built upon. This buys us some time. Not a lot of time, but some.
So the time to strike is now, while the iron is hot. Disrupt the consent-manufacturing machine at every opportunity, because it’s the only thing holding the bars of our cage in place. The new media environment is still ripe for a grassroots campaign to expose the lies of our rulers and shine light on the puppeteers of the kabuki theater using facts, information and intelligent arguments.
So let them have it with both barrels. Blog, tweet, make videos, make memes, engage in debates; any day you can weaken the trust that even one person has in any part of the deception machine is a gain in this battle. Fight their lies with truth and their evil with good will. When you are opposing a depraved power establishment which relies on deceit to sustain its rule, you have truth and light on your side. So fight with absolute certainty in yourself, and give them everything you’ve got. This might be humanity’s last chance.
Friday, August 3, 2018
SC169-12
https://srsroccoreport.com/the-u-s-government-to-fork-out-a-half-trillion-to-service-its-debt-in-2018/
The U.S. Government To Fork Out A Half Trillion To Service Its Debt In 2018
The U.S. Government is going to surpass another significant milestone this year. According to the recently released data from the TreasuryDirect.gov, the government will fork out a stunning half trillion dollars just to service its debt in 2018. Unfortunately, as U.S. interest rates rise, along with ever-expanding public debt, the cost to service the debt will continue to increase.
In just the first nine months of the year, the U.S. interest expense has increased by an additional $40 billion. Last year, the U.S. Government paid only $375 billion to service its debt from October to June, but this year it has jumped to $415 billion:
Now, if we consider that the U.S. Treasury paid $83 billion in interest expense for the three remaining months last year, and add it to the current total, it would equal $498 billion. However, the U.S. interest expense is up over 10% already. So, if we assume that the interest expense for July-Sept will also be up 10%, then the estimated total debt service for fiscal 2018 will reach $506-$510 billion.
A half a trillion dollars to service one’s public debt is truly a staggering figure. Since 2012, the U.S. interest expense has increased from $360 billion to an estimated $500+ billion this year:
Interestingly, the U.S. debt service in 2000 of $361 billion was higher than the $360 billion in 2012. The U.S. government paid more interest payments in 2000 because of a much higher interest rate of 6.6%, even though the public debt was only $5.6 trillion. In the chart below, we can see how the falling interest rate and higher debt kept the U.S. debt service from exploding:
If the United States had to pay a 6.6% interest rate on its $21.2 trillion in debt, it would amount to a mind-blowing $1.4 trillion a year. This is precisely why Central banks will not allow their interest rates to rise unless the market forces rates higher. If that happens, well then, the U.S.A. Titanic sinks to the bottom.
As I mentioned above, a half trillion dollars worth of interest expense is a tremendous amount of money. By comparing what the United States pays a year to service its debt versus the annual GDP of various countries, we have the following chart below:
According to the data from Statistictimes.com, U.S. interest expense this year of $500 billion falls right behind Belgium and Sweden’s projected GDP of $562 billion and $600 billion respectively. Furthermore, U.S. debt service will surpass the annual GDP of Thailand, Austria, Norway, Iran, Iceland, South Africa, and Denmark.
Moreover, the U.S. interest expense is higher than the GDP of 167 countries shown in the list at the website linked above. There are only 25 countries whose GDP is higher than the annual U.S. debt service.
Whenever I discuss the rapidly increasing U.S. interest expense with individuals in public, their usual reply is, “Are we really paying that amount?” I gather they don’t realize that those who hold the $21.2 trillion in U.S. debt are being paid that interest expense every month. Whether it is a foreign government who owns U.S. Treasuries or a domestic Pension fund, everyone wants their interest payment… and they COUNT on it dearly.
For example, I estimate that China is receiving around $27 billion a year in interest expense from the U.S. government while Japan gets $24 billion for holding over $1 trillion each in U.S. debt. I base that on an average 2.3% interest rate.
So, the BIG PROBLEM for the U.S. Government is what happens when the markets crack? When U.S. stock and real estate values crash, so will the government’s tax receipts. The only way to keep the U.S. government from going bankrupt during this time is to print money and lower interest rates.
Unfortunately, this time around, the country will not have the domestic energy supply to pull itself out of the next recession-depression as it did from 2008 to 2018. U.S. shale oil production will likely peak within the next 1-3 years. However, if the oil price drops like a rock along with the stock market, then the collapse of U.S. shale oil production could be even much bigger and sooner than the market anticipates.
All I can say is that the next few years are going to be one heck of a surprise for most Americans.
The U.S. Government To Fork Out A Half Trillion To Service Its Debt In 2018
The U.S. Government is going to surpass another significant milestone this year. According to the recently released data from the TreasuryDirect.gov, the government will fork out a stunning half trillion dollars just to service its debt in 2018. Unfortunately, as U.S. interest rates rise, along with ever-expanding public debt, the cost to service the debt will continue to increase.
In just the first nine months of the year, the U.S. interest expense has increased by an additional $40 billion. Last year, the U.S. Government paid only $375 billion to service its debt from October to June, but this year it has jumped to $415 billion:
Now, if we consider that the U.S. Treasury paid $83 billion in interest expense for the three remaining months last year, and add it to the current total, it would equal $498 billion. However, the U.S. interest expense is up over 10% already. So, if we assume that the interest expense for July-Sept will also be up 10%, then the estimated total debt service for fiscal 2018 will reach $506-$510 billion.
A half a trillion dollars to service one’s public debt is truly a staggering figure. Since 2012, the U.S. interest expense has increased from $360 billion to an estimated $500+ billion this year:
Interestingly, the U.S. debt service in 2000 of $361 billion was higher than the $360 billion in 2012. The U.S. government paid more interest payments in 2000 because of a much higher interest rate of 6.6%, even though the public debt was only $5.6 trillion. In the chart below, we can see how the falling interest rate and higher debt kept the U.S. debt service from exploding:
If the United States had to pay a 6.6% interest rate on its $21.2 trillion in debt, it would amount to a mind-blowing $1.4 trillion a year. This is precisely why Central banks will not allow their interest rates to rise unless the market forces rates higher. If that happens, well then, the U.S.A. Titanic sinks to the bottom.
As I mentioned above, a half trillion dollars worth of interest expense is a tremendous amount of money. By comparing what the United States pays a year to service its debt versus the annual GDP of various countries, we have the following chart below:
According to the data from Statistictimes.com, U.S. interest expense this year of $500 billion falls right behind Belgium and Sweden’s projected GDP of $562 billion and $600 billion respectively. Furthermore, U.S. debt service will surpass the annual GDP of Thailand, Austria, Norway, Iran, Iceland, South Africa, and Denmark.
Moreover, the U.S. interest expense is higher than the GDP of 167 countries shown in the list at the website linked above. There are only 25 countries whose GDP is higher than the annual U.S. debt service.
Whenever I discuss the rapidly increasing U.S. interest expense with individuals in public, their usual reply is, “Are we really paying that amount?” I gather they don’t realize that those who hold the $21.2 trillion in U.S. debt are being paid that interest expense every month. Whether it is a foreign government who owns U.S. Treasuries or a domestic Pension fund, everyone wants their interest payment… and they COUNT on it dearly.
For example, I estimate that China is receiving around $27 billion a year in interest expense from the U.S. government while Japan gets $24 billion for holding over $1 trillion each in U.S. debt. I base that on an average 2.3% interest rate.
So, the BIG PROBLEM for the U.S. Government is what happens when the markets crack? When U.S. stock and real estate values crash, so will the government’s tax receipts. The only way to keep the U.S. government from going bankrupt during this time is to print money and lower interest rates.
Unfortunately, this time around, the country will not have the domestic energy supply to pull itself out of the next recession-depression as it did from 2008 to 2018. U.S. shale oil production will likely peak within the next 1-3 years. However, if the oil price drops like a rock along with the stock market, then the collapse of U.S. shale oil production could be even much bigger and sooner than the market anticipates.
All I can say is that the next few years are going to be one heck of a surprise for most Americans.
SC169-11
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114254/time-some-climate-honesty
Time For Some Climate Honesty
Half-truths are doing no good
Let’s assume that you had doubts about global warming. Some people do and, truthfully, we utterly lack the ability to accurately model how much warming will happen, where and by when. Emphasis on accurately. The reason is not for lack of trying or continual learning and model refinement, but centers on the complexity of the task.
Even seemingly simple systems that are actually complex are impossible to predictively model. An example is a pile of sand growing grain by grain that will finally slump at some unpredictable time and in an unpredictable way. You would think that such a simple system could be accurately modeled, but that’s not the case. Exactly when the pile will finally slump is unpredictable. Exactly how large the resulting slump will be is also unpredictable. The “when” and the “how much” are unknowable (using current modeling techniques).
All that can be calculated for certain is that a higher pile with steeper sides/areas (a.k.a. “fingers of instability”) is more likely to slump sooner and more catastrophically.
Now consider the tasks laid out before the global climate modelers where feedback loops abound, unknown variables still lurk, and the final result is the summation of multiple interacting complex systems. It’s not a pile of sand granules, it’s a gigantic interconnected system composed of heat flows, cloud formation, wind and oceanic patters and currents, variable solar and cosmic radiation, volcanoes and dust and jet trails and a thousand other inputs all interreacting with and influencing each other…in unpredictable ways.
It’s chaos theory (i.e. the butterfly effect) which means it’s way beyond anything we can currently model with any accuracy or confidence. However, the inability to model the exact nature and timing of the “slumps” and magnitudes (to draw from our sand pile analogy) does not detract from the observation that the “fingers of instability” are growing.
Because greenhouse gasses trap heat by preventing it from radiating out to space more heat is being retained within the system. We know that for sure and the science is very settled. CO2 is a prime greenhouse gas, although not the strongest, and it is accumulating at a very rapid pace:
What happens next? We don’t know. If the system were linear we could simply measure the concentration of greenhouse gasses, factor in solar input (which varies over time), and then tell you how many degrees of warming and by when.
But the system is anything but linear.
What we don’t know is if the climate models have erred by overstating or understating the rate of global warming that will result. It could proceed faster than we think or slower, maybe a lot faster or a lot slower. Honestly, it could be either way. The range of uncertainty is huge.
The warming will also certainly not be evenly spread. Some places will warm up a lot and some will actually cool down, such as has been postulated for the UK and other parts of northern Europe if/when the Atlantic gulf stream conveyor belt slows down and slides to the briny depths, no longer delivering vast amounts of southern Atlantic heat to the north.
Actually, that’s already happened:
Atlantic ‘conveyor belt’ has slowed by 15% since mid-20th century
Apr 11, 2018
The Atlantic Ocean current that brings warm water up to Europe from the tropics has weakened by 15% since the middle of the last century, new research suggests.
Two studies, published in the journal Nature, use different approaches to show that the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” (AMOC) is in a weaker state now than it has been for decades – and possibly even centuries.
The two studies differ on when and how they think the weakening was triggered. While one suggests it began in the mid-20th century as a response to human-caused climate change, the second proposes that it began a hundred years earlier following a natural shift in regional climate.
Despite the debate on when the weakening started, the studies agree that there has been a “continued decline in AMOC over the 20th century that may be attributed to recent global warming and melting of the Greenland ice sheet”, one author tells Carbon Brief.
The Atlantic Ocean plays host to a perpetual conveyor belt that transports heat from the equator up to the North Atlantic. The warm water that the AMOC carries northwards releases heat into the atmosphere, which means it plays a crucial role in keeping Western Europe warm. Without it, for example, winters in the UK would be around 5C colder.
If that conveyor belt breaks down, the UK suddenly discovers that its winters have a lot more in common with Hudson Bay (its actual latitude) than Virginia Beach.
Some models have predictions that the jet stream will become unreliable, and wobble out of its normal patterns bringing unseasonable cold (as New England and much of Europe experienced this “spring” which almost didn’t seem to happen as we stayed in winter mode and then lurched suddenly into summer) and allowing extreme heatwaves to settle in.
Actually, that’s already happened and here in August of 2018 much of the northern hemisphere is locked in a vicious heat wave. Records are being broken daily, and often by a lot.
Europe's all-time heat record could fall this weekend
Aug 2, 2018
A building heat wave in Portugal and Spain threatens to topple national and all-time high temperature records in a continuation of a series of remarkable heat waves that have roasted the Northern Hemisphere this summer.
The big picture: The heat wave will be most intense in Portugal, Spain and parts of France, although the U.K. will also see above average temperatures for this time of year. In Spain and Portugal, the fire danger will climb to dangerous levels as temperatures soar, humidity levels plunge, and downslope winds increase.
A massive high-pressure ridge, with a clockwise circulation of air around it, will pump hot, dry air filled with dust from the Sahara Desert into the Iberian Peninsula through the weekend. Already on Thursday, the high temperature in Alvega, Portugal reached 44.6°C, or about 112°F, according to the U.K. Met Office.
By the numbers: The heat is expected to crank up in coming days, with computer models projecting astonishing high temperatures of at least 118°F to 122°F, or 50°C, in southwest Spain and Portugal during the next few days.
What’s happened here is that the usual steering jet stream pattern has gone missing which has allowed a persistent high pressure system to squat over Europe and funnel heat up from Africa for days on end.
The associated crop failures are astounding. Heat misery and deaths are climbing especially in places that are so unused to heat that they lack any appreciable numbers of airconditioned buildings in which to escape the heat.
‘Furnace Friday:’ Ill-Equipped for Heat, Britain Has a Meltdown
Jul 27, 2018
The monthlong heat wave has broken records, spawned wildfires in Wales and England, spurred delays in the transportation system and given birth to names like “Furnace Friday,” as Britons tried to find ways to describe this puzzling pain.
“Shops are out of fans, ice, sun cream, ice cream, and there’s a water shortage that has left our beautiful, lush parks all parched and yellow,” said Lucy Thornton, 36, an interior designer, as she walked into a west London cafe on Friday in search of cold water.
“We’re not equipped for this,” she added, “so it feels kind of apocalyptic.”
Unlike other European countries that are accustomed to coping with hot weather, Britain had what others saw as a meltdown because it generally lacks the infrastructure and resources to deal with the effects of long spells of high temperatures.
As far north as the arctic circle, above it actually, temperatures of over 32C (90F) have driven people and reindeer alike into the water.
Records are being broken all over the place, smashed in some cases:
Death Valley Smashes Heat Record, 2nd Year in a Row
Aug 1, 2018
For the second year in a row, July in California's Death Valley National Park snagged the award for the "hottest month ever." Congratulations to this national treasure that is truly an unstoppable inferno.
Death Valley's Furnace Creek weather station recorded an average temperature of 108.1 degrees F (42.2 degrees C), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's temperature database, xmACIS2.
To add to the misery, a whopping 21 days in July saw maximum temperatures of 120 degrees F (48.9 degrees C) or higher in Death Valley. While unusual, that stretch of days is, surprisingly, not a record for this area; 29 days in July 1917 reached temperatures of 120 degrees F (48.9 degrees C) or higher.
Temperature records are being smashed which is an amazing feat because so many records were just broken last year.
2017 shatters global climate records including highest sea levels, hottest year without El Niño
2017 shattered various climate records, including the highest global temperature for a non-El Niño year, lowest Arctic sea ice extent, highest sea levels as well as greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, according to the American Meteorological Society's 2017 State of the Climate report released on Aug. 1, 2018.
To add to this the Arctic sea ice extent is withering away under all of the intense arctic heat and may even break the all-time low set in 2012. I predicted this, rather casually and unscientifically, when I was freezing my butt off this winter. Each arctic cold snap was the loss of a gigantic blob of cold air from the arctic. That was like a resource it lost that came south and so I surmised that there would be less cold and more heat up there this summer. Ergo less ice.
Maybe that’s a too-simplistic view of things, but the ice loss is very real at the moment and some are concerned that a “blue ocean” event is far closer than we think for the arctic. While the decrepit mainstream media nearly always wraps that idea up in the prospect of easier shipping or more oil and mineral exploration, what should really be at the center of our attention is the prospect of what will happen to weather patterns in the mid-latitudes due to the fact that blue oceans absorb and retain heat in far greater amounts than white ice.
While we don’t really know yet, the effects of all that new heat up north could be both quick and extreme, which you might say we’re already seeing in our abnormally harsh winters and brutal summers.
The question always emerges, what can we do?
Climate Change Movement Needs Some Honesty
I have some experience being the deliverer of tough news. The Crash Course takes an unflinching look at the intersection of the economy, energy and environment and concludes that our entire way of life, the very systems of money and economy that deliver our daily comfort is unsustainable.
Harsh message, right?
Then why was it so successfully propagated? Why did the Crash Course reach millions of people, and influence so many thousands of them to reshape their view of the world and take entirely new actions as a result?
Because I told the truth, as best I understood it, and did not pull any punches.
As the evidence mounts and the world is “on fire” here in the summer of 2018, I continue to be baffled and annoyed by the climate change spokespeople who hurt their own aims by failing to be honest and complete in their answers about what needs to be done.
I was listening to an NPR piece talking about the scorching summer and the climate advocate they had on was asked quite directly “so what can we do?” The answers he gave were evasive and incomplete. “We should return to the Paris Climate accord.” “People should examine their own carbon footprint and try to reduce it.”
Utter rubbish!
Here’s the unvarnished truth.
Cutting carbon by 50% right now would result in massive starvation and the collapse of our economy and financial system as we know it. Massive joblessness, deprivation, and suffering would result. We are utterly addicted to fossil fuels and the constant barrage of “solar this” and “wind that” along with a daily dose of Elon Musk has blinkered most people to the true reality; ending fossil fuel use will be painful.
Full stop.
Very few are ready or able to hear that message, and the masses certainly aren’t, which is why the mainstream media goes out of its way to avoid bringing in voices that say such things.
Surplus energy is the lifeblood of any economy. Fossil fuels delivered the greatest and most concentrated burst of surplus energy ever enjoyed by any one species. Removing that surplus energy would shove the entire machinery of our industrial economy into reverse. Living standards would slip. Easy comforts would vanish. What we’d experience as hard times would return, although every single generation prior to 1900 would simply call that ‘life.’
There’s no political will for enforced simplicity or deprivation. Every possible element of the status quo machinery is arrayed towards the advancement of business as usual.
That’s just how it is…but you can feel the fear creeping in, the concern mounting as the world burns and the ice melts.
Nobody has a clue what to do about it because the answer is just to painful to consider.
So it’s time for some honesty.
Here’s what’s on the table:
This is Armageddon Summer in the northern hemisphere: out-of-control wildfires all around the Arctic Circle (not to mention California and Greece), weeks-long heatwaves with unprecedented high temperatures, torrential downpours and Biblical floods. And yes, it's climate change.
It's quite appropriate to be frightened, because the summers will be much worse 10 years from now, and much worse again 10 years after that. Prompt and drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions now might stop the summers of the 2040s from being even worse, but they wouldn't do much to lessen the mounting misery of the next 20 years.
Those emissions are mostly in the atmosphere already.
[For humans] food is the key issue: as warming turns whole regions into desert, mass starvation is imaginable, although actual extinction seems improbable. It's also still possible that we will react fast enough to stop well short of mass death.
The situation is quite grim. Bad news, of course, but when you find yourself in a high-stakes game you should know what the stakes are.
If the oceans warm even further and then fail to turn over because circulation has collapsed, as seems increasingly likely, then the deep oceans will be deprived of oxygen, which means anaerobic bacteria will begin to produce hydrogen sulfide. That, in turn, will wipe out all the life in the ocean and most or all of it on the surface of the planet as has happened 3 or 4 other times throughout geologic history.
That’s what’s at stake, and the climate change activists and mainstream media cannot bring themselves to say the truth; cutting carbon means cutting jobs, reducing the easy abundance of our modern lives. It means making huge changes that practically nobody is ready or willing to make. It means applying self-imposed limits and admitting that our entire economic model is not just unsustainable, but self-destructive.
Which is why telling the truth matters. It’s why you don’t attempt an intervention on a drunk by telling them pleasant half-truths like “sometimes, Dave, when you drink you are little bit unreasonable, but not all the time, and I think we should hold some more meetings about that in the future.”
You say what needs to be said straight up, and brutally true. “Dave, your drinking makes you a complete asshole who nobody wants to be around and if you keep it up you’re going to die early and miserable and alone.”
Here’s my message to the world: If we don’t stop the destruction of the planets ecosystems, we’re totally screwed.
So it’s time for some honesty. No, we’re not going to save anything at all by driving sexy electric cars. Instead we need to reconfigure our lives so we are not driving so much or at all.
We need to stop washing topsoil into the sea and begin farming in ways that build soils and store carbon.
We need to wean ourselves off of eating fossil fuels.
A lot of bullshit jobs are going to go away, themselves merely an artifact of surplus energy and the false belief that a 40-hour work week is some sort of honorable necessity.
Retirement? That too was an artifact of surplus energy and it’s already crumbling as an idea for the vast majority of US citizens who lack any retirement savings and depend on pensions and Social Security that simply won’t be there.
But mostly we have to give up on this crazy idea of infinite growth on a finite planet. That’s a relic of our system of money, and the sooner we do away with debt-backed fiat money the better. It was a passable idea in 1913, it’s a disastrous idea here in 2018.
None of these changes are going to be easy, but fibbing to ourselves and white-washing the “solutions” and understating the risks harms the cause.
A proper intervention requires unflinching truth....
Time For Some Climate Honesty
Half-truths are doing no good
Let’s assume that you had doubts about global warming. Some people do and, truthfully, we utterly lack the ability to accurately model how much warming will happen, where and by when. Emphasis on accurately. The reason is not for lack of trying or continual learning and model refinement, but centers on the complexity of the task.
Even seemingly simple systems that are actually complex are impossible to predictively model. An example is a pile of sand growing grain by grain that will finally slump at some unpredictable time and in an unpredictable way. You would think that such a simple system could be accurately modeled, but that’s not the case. Exactly when the pile will finally slump is unpredictable. Exactly how large the resulting slump will be is also unpredictable. The “when” and the “how much” are unknowable (using current modeling techniques).
All that can be calculated for certain is that a higher pile with steeper sides/areas (a.k.a. “fingers of instability”) is more likely to slump sooner and more catastrophically.
Now consider the tasks laid out before the global climate modelers where feedback loops abound, unknown variables still lurk, and the final result is the summation of multiple interacting complex systems. It’s not a pile of sand granules, it’s a gigantic interconnected system composed of heat flows, cloud formation, wind and oceanic patters and currents, variable solar and cosmic radiation, volcanoes and dust and jet trails and a thousand other inputs all interreacting with and influencing each other…in unpredictable ways.
It’s chaos theory (i.e. the butterfly effect) which means it’s way beyond anything we can currently model with any accuracy or confidence. However, the inability to model the exact nature and timing of the “slumps” and magnitudes (to draw from our sand pile analogy) does not detract from the observation that the “fingers of instability” are growing.
Because greenhouse gasses trap heat by preventing it from radiating out to space more heat is being retained within the system. We know that for sure and the science is very settled. CO2 is a prime greenhouse gas, although not the strongest, and it is accumulating at a very rapid pace:
What happens next? We don’t know. If the system were linear we could simply measure the concentration of greenhouse gasses, factor in solar input (which varies over time), and then tell you how many degrees of warming and by when.
But the system is anything but linear.
What we don’t know is if the climate models have erred by overstating or understating the rate of global warming that will result. It could proceed faster than we think or slower, maybe a lot faster or a lot slower. Honestly, it could be either way. The range of uncertainty is huge.
The warming will also certainly not be evenly spread. Some places will warm up a lot and some will actually cool down, such as has been postulated for the UK and other parts of northern Europe if/when the Atlantic gulf stream conveyor belt slows down and slides to the briny depths, no longer delivering vast amounts of southern Atlantic heat to the north.
Actually, that’s already happened:
Atlantic ‘conveyor belt’ has slowed by 15% since mid-20th century
Apr 11, 2018
The Atlantic Ocean current that brings warm water up to Europe from the tropics has weakened by 15% since the middle of the last century, new research suggests.
Two studies, published in the journal Nature, use different approaches to show that the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” (AMOC) is in a weaker state now than it has been for decades – and possibly even centuries.
The two studies differ on when and how they think the weakening was triggered. While one suggests it began in the mid-20th century as a response to human-caused climate change, the second proposes that it began a hundred years earlier following a natural shift in regional climate.
Despite the debate on when the weakening started, the studies agree that there has been a “continued decline in AMOC over the 20th century that may be attributed to recent global warming and melting of the Greenland ice sheet”, one author tells Carbon Brief.
The Atlantic Ocean plays host to a perpetual conveyor belt that transports heat from the equator up to the North Atlantic. The warm water that the AMOC carries northwards releases heat into the atmosphere, which means it plays a crucial role in keeping Western Europe warm. Without it, for example, winters in the UK would be around 5C colder.
If that conveyor belt breaks down, the UK suddenly discovers that its winters have a lot more in common with Hudson Bay (its actual latitude) than Virginia Beach.
Some models have predictions that the jet stream will become unreliable, and wobble out of its normal patterns bringing unseasonable cold (as New England and much of Europe experienced this “spring” which almost didn’t seem to happen as we stayed in winter mode and then lurched suddenly into summer) and allowing extreme heatwaves to settle in.
Actually, that’s already happened and here in August of 2018 much of the northern hemisphere is locked in a vicious heat wave. Records are being broken daily, and often by a lot.
Europe's all-time heat record could fall this weekend
Aug 2, 2018
A building heat wave in Portugal and Spain threatens to topple national and all-time high temperature records in a continuation of a series of remarkable heat waves that have roasted the Northern Hemisphere this summer.
The big picture: The heat wave will be most intense in Portugal, Spain and parts of France, although the U.K. will also see above average temperatures for this time of year. In Spain and Portugal, the fire danger will climb to dangerous levels as temperatures soar, humidity levels plunge, and downslope winds increase.
A massive high-pressure ridge, with a clockwise circulation of air around it, will pump hot, dry air filled with dust from the Sahara Desert into the Iberian Peninsula through the weekend. Already on Thursday, the high temperature in Alvega, Portugal reached 44.6°C, or about 112°F, according to the U.K. Met Office.
By the numbers: The heat is expected to crank up in coming days, with computer models projecting astonishing high temperatures of at least 118°F to 122°F, or 50°C, in southwest Spain and Portugal during the next few days.
What’s happened here is that the usual steering jet stream pattern has gone missing which has allowed a persistent high pressure system to squat over Europe and funnel heat up from Africa for days on end.
The associated crop failures are astounding. Heat misery and deaths are climbing especially in places that are so unused to heat that they lack any appreciable numbers of airconditioned buildings in which to escape the heat.
‘Furnace Friday:’ Ill-Equipped for Heat, Britain Has a Meltdown
Jul 27, 2018
The monthlong heat wave has broken records, spawned wildfires in Wales and England, spurred delays in the transportation system and given birth to names like “Furnace Friday,” as Britons tried to find ways to describe this puzzling pain.
“Shops are out of fans, ice, sun cream, ice cream, and there’s a water shortage that has left our beautiful, lush parks all parched and yellow,” said Lucy Thornton, 36, an interior designer, as she walked into a west London cafe on Friday in search of cold water.
“We’re not equipped for this,” she added, “so it feels kind of apocalyptic.”
Unlike other European countries that are accustomed to coping with hot weather, Britain had what others saw as a meltdown because it generally lacks the infrastructure and resources to deal with the effects of long spells of high temperatures.
As far north as the arctic circle, above it actually, temperatures of over 32C (90F) have driven people and reindeer alike into the water.
Records are being broken all over the place, smashed in some cases:
Death Valley Smashes Heat Record, 2nd Year in a Row
Aug 1, 2018
For the second year in a row, July in California's Death Valley National Park snagged the award for the "hottest month ever." Congratulations to this national treasure that is truly an unstoppable inferno.
Death Valley's Furnace Creek weather station recorded an average temperature of 108.1 degrees F (42.2 degrees C), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's temperature database, xmACIS2.
To add to the misery, a whopping 21 days in July saw maximum temperatures of 120 degrees F (48.9 degrees C) or higher in Death Valley. While unusual, that stretch of days is, surprisingly, not a record for this area; 29 days in July 1917 reached temperatures of 120 degrees F (48.9 degrees C) or higher.
Temperature records are being smashed which is an amazing feat because so many records were just broken last year.
2017 shatters global climate records including highest sea levels, hottest year without El Niño
2017 shattered various climate records, including the highest global temperature for a non-El Niño year, lowest Arctic sea ice extent, highest sea levels as well as greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, according to the American Meteorological Society's 2017 State of the Climate report released on Aug. 1, 2018.
To add to this the Arctic sea ice extent is withering away under all of the intense arctic heat and may even break the all-time low set in 2012. I predicted this, rather casually and unscientifically, when I was freezing my butt off this winter. Each arctic cold snap was the loss of a gigantic blob of cold air from the arctic. That was like a resource it lost that came south and so I surmised that there would be less cold and more heat up there this summer. Ergo less ice.
Maybe that’s a too-simplistic view of things, but the ice loss is very real at the moment and some are concerned that a “blue ocean” event is far closer than we think for the arctic. While the decrepit mainstream media nearly always wraps that idea up in the prospect of easier shipping or more oil and mineral exploration, what should really be at the center of our attention is the prospect of what will happen to weather patterns in the mid-latitudes due to the fact that blue oceans absorb and retain heat in far greater amounts than white ice.
While we don’t really know yet, the effects of all that new heat up north could be both quick and extreme, which you might say we’re already seeing in our abnormally harsh winters and brutal summers.
The question always emerges, what can we do?
Climate Change Movement Needs Some Honesty
I have some experience being the deliverer of tough news. The Crash Course takes an unflinching look at the intersection of the economy, energy and environment and concludes that our entire way of life, the very systems of money and economy that deliver our daily comfort is unsustainable.
Harsh message, right?
Then why was it so successfully propagated? Why did the Crash Course reach millions of people, and influence so many thousands of them to reshape their view of the world and take entirely new actions as a result?
Because I told the truth, as best I understood it, and did not pull any punches.
As the evidence mounts and the world is “on fire” here in the summer of 2018, I continue to be baffled and annoyed by the climate change spokespeople who hurt their own aims by failing to be honest and complete in their answers about what needs to be done.
I was listening to an NPR piece talking about the scorching summer and the climate advocate they had on was asked quite directly “so what can we do?” The answers he gave were evasive and incomplete. “We should return to the Paris Climate accord.” “People should examine their own carbon footprint and try to reduce it.”
Utter rubbish!
Here’s the unvarnished truth.
Cutting carbon by 50% right now would result in massive starvation and the collapse of our economy and financial system as we know it. Massive joblessness, deprivation, and suffering would result. We are utterly addicted to fossil fuels and the constant barrage of “solar this” and “wind that” along with a daily dose of Elon Musk has blinkered most people to the true reality; ending fossil fuel use will be painful.
Full stop.
Very few are ready or able to hear that message, and the masses certainly aren’t, which is why the mainstream media goes out of its way to avoid bringing in voices that say such things.
Surplus energy is the lifeblood of any economy. Fossil fuels delivered the greatest and most concentrated burst of surplus energy ever enjoyed by any one species. Removing that surplus energy would shove the entire machinery of our industrial economy into reverse. Living standards would slip. Easy comforts would vanish. What we’d experience as hard times would return, although every single generation prior to 1900 would simply call that ‘life.’
There’s no political will for enforced simplicity or deprivation. Every possible element of the status quo machinery is arrayed towards the advancement of business as usual.
That’s just how it is…but you can feel the fear creeping in, the concern mounting as the world burns and the ice melts.
Nobody has a clue what to do about it because the answer is just to painful to consider.
So it’s time for some honesty.
Here’s what’s on the table:
This is Armageddon Summer in the northern hemisphere: out-of-control wildfires all around the Arctic Circle (not to mention California and Greece), weeks-long heatwaves with unprecedented high temperatures, torrential downpours and Biblical floods. And yes, it's climate change.
It's quite appropriate to be frightened, because the summers will be much worse 10 years from now, and much worse again 10 years after that. Prompt and drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions now might stop the summers of the 2040s from being even worse, but they wouldn't do much to lessen the mounting misery of the next 20 years.
Those emissions are mostly in the atmosphere already.
[For humans] food is the key issue: as warming turns whole regions into desert, mass starvation is imaginable, although actual extinction seems improbable. It's also still possible that we will react fast enough to stop well short of mass death.
The situation is quite grim. Bad news, of course, but when you find yourself in a high-stakes game you should know what the stakes are.
If the oceans warm even further and then fail to turn over because circulation has collapsed, as seems increasingly likely, then the deep oceans will be deprived of oxygen, which means anaerobic bacteria will begin to produce hydrogen sulfide. That, in turn, will wipe out all the life in the ocean and most or all of it on the surface of the planet as has happened 3 or 4 other times throughout geologic history.
That’s what’s at stake, and the climate change activists and mainstream media cannot bring themselves to say the truth; cutting carbon means cutting jobs, reducing the easy abundance of our modern lives. It means making huge changes that practically nobody is ready or willing to make. It means applying self-imposed limits and admitting that our entire economic model is not just unsustainable, but self-destructive.
Which is why telling the truth matters. It’s why you don’t attempt an intervention on a drunk by telling them pleasant half-truths like “sometimes, Dave, when you drink you are little bit unreasonable, but not all the time, and I think we should hold some more meetings about that in the future.”
You say what needs to be said straight up, and brutally true. “Dave, your drinking makes you a complete asshole who nobody wants to be around and if you keep it up you’re going to die early and miserable and alone.”
Here’s my message to the world: If we don’t stop the destruction of the planets ecosystems, we’re totally screwed.
So it’s time for some honesty. No, we’re not going to save anything at all by driving sexy electric cars. Instead we need to reconfigure our lives so we are not driving so much or at all.
We need to stop washing topsoil into the sea and begin farming in ways that build soils and store carbon.
We need to wean ourselves off of eating fossil fuels.
A lot of bullshit jobs are going to go away, themselves merely an artifact of surplus energy and the false belief that a 40-hour work week is some sort of honorable necessity.
Retirement? That too was an artifact of surplus energy and it’s already crumbling as an idea for the vast majority of US citizens who lack any retirement savings and depend on pensions and Social Security that simply won’t be there.
But mostly we have to give up on this crazy idea of infinite growth on a finite planet. That’s a relic of our system of money, and the sooner we do away with debt-backed fiat money the better. It was a passable idea in 1913, it’s a disastrous idea here in 2018.
None of these changes are going to be easy, but fibbing to ourselves and white-washing the “solutions” and understating the risks harms the cause.
A proper intervention requires unflinching truth....
SC169-10
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/light-it-up-3/
Light It Up?
The Guardians of the Galaxy at National Public Radio were beside themselves Wednesday night reporting that “the lights are blinking red for a 2018 election attack by Russia.” Well, isn’t that an interesting set-up? In effect, NPR is preparing its listeners in advance to reject and dispute the coming midterm election if they’re not happy with the results. Thus continues America’s institutional self-sabotage, with the help of a news media that’s become the errand boy of the Deep State.
What do I mean by the Deep State? The vested permanent bureaucracy of Washington DC, and especially its vastly overgrown and redundant “Intel Community,” which has achieved critical mass to take on a life of its own within the larger government, makes up its own rules of conduct, not necessarily within the rule of law, and devotes too much of its budget and influence defending its own prerogatives rather than the interests of the nation.
Personally, I doubt that President Putin of Russia is dumb enough to allow, let alone direct, his intel services to lift a finger “meddling” in the coming US midterm election, with this American intel behemoth vacuuming every digital electron on earth into the NSA’s bottomless maw of intercepted secrets. Mr. Putin must have also observed by now that the US Intel Community is capable of generating mass public hallucinations, to the beat of war-drums, and determined not to give it anything to work with. That’s my theory about what Russia is up to. If you have a better one, let’s hear it?
Another curious incident played out on CNN earlier this week when Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations (the Deep State faculty lounge) faced off against Russia historian/scholar Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton on Anderson Cooper’s prime-time show. “Russia is attacking us right now according to Trump’s own Director of National Security (Daniel Coates)!” Mr. Boot shrilly declared.
“I’ve been studying Russia for forty-five years,” Mr. Cohen replied, “I’ve lived in Russia and I’ve lived here. If Russia was attacking us, we would know it.”
“You’ve consistently been an apologist for Russia in those last 45 years,” Mr. Boot riposted.
“I don’t do defamation of people; I do serious analysis of serious national security policy,” Mr. Cohen rejoined. “When people like you call people like me ‘apologists for Russia’ because we don’t agree with your analysis, you are criminalizing diplomacy and detante and you are the threat to national security.”
Referee Anderson Cooper stepped in: “So, finally Stephen, you’re saying Russia was not attacking the United States?”
“Yes, I don’t think they attacked the United States,” Cohen said.
“You’re apologizing for Russia as we speak,” Mr. Boot inserted.
“This is low-level stuff that went on,” Mr. Cohen said. “It is not 9/11. It is not Pearl Harbor. It is not Russian paratroopers descending on Washington. This kind of hyperbole, ‘an attack on America,’ suggests that we need to attack Russia….I think Mr. Boot would have been happy if Trump had waterboarded Putin at the summit and made him confess….”
Notice how astonished Mr. Cooper was to hear the view that Russia did not attack the US. It’s inconceivable in the universe-as-known-to-CNN, so potent is the hallucination there that even the water-cooler is bubbling with angst. Oh, and by the way, do any of you readers actually know how the duties of the Director of National Security (Mr. Coates) differ from the Director of the CIA (Gina Haspel) or the Director of the NSA (Paul M. Nakasone)?
In case you are mystified as to why a considerable portion of the public is disgusted with the news media, it is as simple as this: they appear to be an instrument of that permanent government bureaucracy, doing its bidding, defending its criminal mischief, and covering up its dishonesty. Proof of that is the media’s conspicuous inattention to the now well-documented political depravity in another arm of the Intel Community, the FBI — a much more compelling story of villainy than 13 Russian Facebook trolls and the alleged (still unproven) hacking of the DNC.
Donald Trump, aka the Golden Golem of Greatness, may be an unappetizing and embarrassing president. But is the Deep State ready to start a world war just to shove him offstage? Or burn down the constitution? While CNN stands by with Jeri-cans of gasoline?
Light It Up?
The Guardians of the Galaxy at National Public Radio were beside themselves Wednesday night reporting that “the lights are blinking red for a 2018 election attack by Russia.” Well, isn’t that an interesting set-up? In effect, NPR is preparing its listeners in advance to reject and dispute the coming midterm election if they’re not happy with the results. Thus continues America’s institutional self-sabotage, with the help of a news media that’s become the errand boy of the Deep State.
What do I mean by the Deep State? The vested permanent bureaucracy of Washington DC, and especially its vastly overgrown and redundant “Intel Community,” which has achieved critical mass to take on a life of its own within the larger government, makes up its own rules of conduct, not necessarily within the rule of law, and devotes too much of its budget and influence defending its own prerogatives rather than the interests of the nation.
Personally, I doubt that President Putin of Russia is dumb enough to allow, let alone direct, his intel services to lift a finger “meddling” in the coming US midterm election, with this American intel behemoth vacuuming every digital electron on earth into the NSA’s bottomless maw of intercepted secrets. Mr. Putin must have also observed by now that the US Intel Community is capable of generating mass public hallucinations, to the beat of war-drums, and determined not to give it anything to work with. That’s my theory about what Russia is up to. If you have a better one, let’s hear it?
Another curious incident played out on CNN earlier this week when Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations (the Deep State faculty lounge) faced off against Russia historian/scholar Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton on Anderson Cooper’s prime-time show. “Russia is attacking us right now according to Trump’s own Director of National Security (Daniel Coates)!” Mr. Boot shrilly declared.
“I’ve been studying Russia for forty-five years,” Mr. Cohen replied, “I’ve lived in Russia and I’ve lived here. If Russia was attacking us, we would know it.”
“You’ve consistently been an apologist for Russia in those last 45 years,” Mr. Boot riposted.
“I don’t do defamation of people; I do serious analysis of serious national security policy,” Mr. Cohen rejoined. “When people like you call people like me ‘apologists for Russia’ because we don’t agree with your analysis, you are criminalizing diplomacy and detante and you are the threat to national security.”
Referee Anderson Cooper stepped in: “So, finally Stephen, you’re saying Russia was not attacking the United States?”
“Yes, I don’t think they attacked the United States,” Cohen said.
“You’re apologizing for Russia as we speak,” Mr. Boot inserted.
“This is low-level stuff that went on,” Mr. Cohen said. “It is not 9/11. It is not Pearl Harbor. It is not Russian paratroopers descending on Washington. This kind of hyperbole, ‘an attack on America,’ suggests that we need to attack Russia….I think Mr. Boot would have been happy if Trump had waterboarded Putin at the summit and made him confess….”
Notice how astonished Mr. Cooper was to hear the view that Russia did not attack the US. It’s inconceivable in the universe-as-known-to-CNN, so potent is the hallucination there that even the water-cooler is bubbling with angst. Oh, and by the way, do any of you readers actually know how the duties of the Director of National Security (Mr. Coates) differ from the Director of the CIA (Gina Haspel) or the Director of the NSA (Paul M. Nakasone)?
In case you are mystified as to why a considerable portion of the public is disgusted with the news media, it is as simple as this: they appear to be an instrument of that permanent government bureaucracy, doing its bidding, defending its criminal mischief, and covering up its dishonesty. Proof of that is the media’s conspicuous inattention to the now well-documented political depravity in another arm of the Intel Community, the FBI — a much more compelling story of villainy than 13 Russian Facebook trolls and the alleged (still unproven) hacking of the DNC.
Donald Trump, aka the Golden Golem of Greatness, may be an unappetizing and embarrassing president. But is the Deep State ready to start a world war just to shove him offstage? Or burn down the constitution? While CNN stands by with Jeri-cans of gasoline?
Monday, July 30, 2018
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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-permanent-lie-our-deadliest-threat/
The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat
The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.
Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.
The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of “fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is “going to get killed” by a tax bill that actually will save him and his heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit—only there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual evidence, that “this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses.”
Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that “public lands will once again be for public use.” When environmentalists denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism “a false narrative.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the internet, says, “[T]hose who’ve said the internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong. … We have a free internet going forward.” And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as “evidence-based” and “science-based” are banned.
The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”
When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.
The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.
“Thus all our dignity consist in thought,” wrote Pascal. “It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”
We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.
The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat
The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.
Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.
The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of “fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is “going to get killed” by a tax bill that actually will save him and his heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit—only there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual evidence, that “this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses.”
Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that “public lands will once again be for public use.” When environmentalists denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism “a false narrative.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the internet, says, “[T]hose who’ve said the internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong. … We have a free internet going forward.” And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as “evidence-based” and “science-based” are banned.
The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”
When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.
The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.
“Thus all our dignity consist in thought,” wrote Pascal. “It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”
We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.
Sunday, July 29, 2018
SC169-8
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Here's What We've Lost in the Past Decade
The past decade of "recovery" and "growth" has actually been a decade of catastrophic losses for our society and nation. Here's a short list of what we've lost:
1. Functioning markets. Free markets discover price and assess risk. What passes for markets now are little more than signaling devices to convince us the economy is doing spectacularly well. It is doing spectacularly well, but only for the top .1% of 1% and the class of managerial/technocrat flunkies and apologists who serve the interests of the top .1%.
2. Genuine Virtue. Parading around a slogan or online accusation, "liking" others in whatever echo-chamber tribe the virtue-signaler is seeking validation in, and other cost-free gestures--now signals virtue. Genuine virtue--sacrificing the support of one's tribe for principles that require skin in the game--has disappeared from the public sphere and the culture.
3. Civility. As Scientific American reported in its February issue (The Tribalism of Truth), the incentive structure of largely digital "tribes" rewards the most virulent, the most outrageous, the least reasonable and the most vindictive of the tribe with "likes" while offering little to no encouragement of restraint, caution, learning rather than shouting, etc.
The cost of gaining tribal encouragement is essentially zero, while the risk of ostracism from the tribe is high. In a society with so few positive social structures, the self-referentially toxic digital tribe may be the primary social structure for atomized "consumers" in a dysfunctional system dominated by a rigged "market" and a central state that no longer needs the consent of the governed.
Common ground, civility, the willingness to listen and learn--all lost.
4. Trust. Few find reason to trust corporations, the corporate media, the tech monopolies or the government. This distrust is reasonable, given these institutions have squandered the public trust to protect the swag being skimmed by insiders and elites.
Rather than earn our trust with true transparency and accurate reporting of data, these institutions spew a false form of transparency that's doubly opaque, as it's rigged to mask the skims of the insiders. Transparency: lost. Accountability: lost.
Do you really trust Facebook, Google, and the agencies that are supposed to provide oversight of these monopolies? If you said, "yes," you're joking, right?
5. Social mobility for the masses. You've undoubtedly read reports about the stagnation of wages for the bottom 90% and the soaring wealth and income of the top 5%, which is concentrated in the top .1%. The old adage--go to college, you'll be guaranteed a secure, well-paying job-- no longer works, as we've over-produced elites (college graduates) for decades.
Starting your own business was once a ladder of social mobility, but the layers of bureaucratic costs and compliance are now so heavy that few have the resources or appetite for risk to start a business.
The only business model that's worth trying now is to start a digital company that can be sold for a couple of million dollars to a tech monopoly (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.) within a matter of months, two years max. By that time, some corporate behemoth will have purchased a competitor and eaten your lunch.
6. Federal law enforcement and national security agencies that were above partisan politics. Now these agencies and their leadership are nothing but political agendas hiding behind a long-extinct reputation for apolitical professionalism. The political impact now guides what's made public, and how that "information" is gamed, spun or fabricated to drive a political agenda.
7. A democratizing Internet. A handful of corporate cartels and quasi-monopolies now control what we see in web searches, news feeds, our "friends" postings, and what's available on user-generated content networks such as YouTube. Under the banner of "fake news" and "hate speech," mass surveillance and censorship are now the status quo.
8. National purpose. Arguably lost long ago, but the loss has become painfully apparent in the past decade. Does anyone still think the Empire is spreading freedom and liberty? Everyone can see that what we're spreading is destruction and disorder.
The society and culture have degraded to an abject worship of greed and private gain. The "national purpose" is to maximize one's personal gain by whatever means are available, including fraud, racketeering, embezzlement, lying, cover-ups, punishing whistleblowers, gaming the system to maximize overtime, etc.
The rationalization is always the same: everyone else is doing it.
Here's a shorthand way to summarize America's "purpose" now: a medication that costs $8 per vial in Europe costs $38,892 in the U.S.
9. Perspectives on entitlement. Everyone's entitled to everything now--to sex, a secure income, the "right" to abuse/accuse online without restraint or blowback, the "right" to demand everyone treat you in whatever way you reckon is your "right," and so on in an infinite expansion of entitlements that require no sacrifice, virtue or even civility of the entitled.
10. Humility. How often do you find someone who publicly expresses caution about their own righteousness, or presents a healthy hesitation about the rightness of their positions, i.e. that they might be wrong? How many are publicly skeptical of their own views and not just of everyone else's views? How many admit to having a poor understanding of complex issues?
The confidence and hubris of those directing the rest of us to race off the cliff while they watch from a safe distance is off the charts.
Here's What We've Lost in the Past Decade
The past decade of "recovery" and "growth" has actually been a decade of catastrophic losses for our society and nation. Here's a short list of what we've lost:
1. Functioning markets. Free markets discover price and assess risk. What passes for markets now are little more than signaling devices to convince us the economy is doing spectacularly well. It is doing spectacularly well, but only for the top .1% of 1% and the class of managerial/technocrat flunkies and apologists who serve the interests of the top .1%.
2. Genuine Virtue. Parading around a slogan or online accusation, "liking" others in whatever echo-chamber tribe the virtue-signaler is seeking validation in, and other cost-free gestures--now signals virtue. Genuine virtue--sacrificing the support of one's tribe for principles that require skin in the game--has disappeared from the public sphere and the culture.
3. Civility. As Scientific American reported in its February issue (The Tribalism of Truth), the incentive structure of largely digital "tribes" rewards the most virulent, the most outrageous, the least reasonable and the most vindictive of the tribe with "likes" while offering little to no encouragement of restraint, caution, learning rather than shouting, etc.
The cost of gaining tribal encouragement is essentially zero, while the risk of ostracism from the tribe is high. In a society with so few positive social structures, the self-referentially toxic digital tribe may be the primary social structure for atomized "consumers" in a dysfunctional system dominated by a rigged "market" and a central state that no longer needs the consent of the governed.
Common ground, civility, the willingness to listen and learn--all lost.
4. Trust. Few find reason to trust corporations, the corporate media, the tech monopolies or the government. This distrust is reasonable, given these institutions have squandered the public trust to protect the swag being skimmed by insiders and elites.
Rather than earn our trust with true transparency and accurate reporting of data, these institutions spew a false form of transparency that's doubly opaque, as it's rigged to mask the skims of the insiders. Transparency: lost. Accountability: lost.
Do you really trust Facebook, Google, and the agencies that are supposed to provide oversight of these monopolies? If you said, "yes," you're joking, right?
5. Social mobility for the masses. You've undoubtedly read reports about the stagnation of wages for the bottom 90% and the soaring wealth and income of the top 5%, which is concentrated in the top .1%. The old adage--go to college, you'll be guaranteed a secure, well-paying job-- no longer works, as we've over-produced elites (college graduates) for decades.
Starting your own business was once a ladder of social mobility, but the layers of bureaucratic costs and compliance are now so heavy that few have the resources or appetite for risk to start a business.
The only business model that's worth trying now is to start a digital company that can be sold for a couple of million dollars to a tech monopoly (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.) within a matter of months, two years max. By that time, some corporate behemoth will have purchased a competitor and eaten your lunch.
6. Federal law enforcement and national security agencies that were above partisan politics. Now these agencies and their leadership are nothing but political agendas hiding behind a long-extinct reputation for apolitical professionalism. The political impact now guides what's made public, and how that "information" is gamed, spun or fabricated to drive a political agenda.
7. A democratizing Internet. A handful of corporate cartels and quasi-monopolies now control what we see in web searches, news feeds, our "friends" postings, and what's available on user-generated content networks such as YouTube. Under the banner of "fake news" and "hate speech," mass surveillance and censorship are now the status quo.
8. National purpose. Arguably lost long ago, but the loss has become painfully apparent in the past decade. Does anyone still think the Empire is spreading freedom and liberty? Everyone can see that what we're spreading is destruction and disorder.
The society and culture have degraded to an abject worship of greed and private gain. The "national purpose" is to maximize one's personal gain by whatever means are available, including fraud, racketeering, embezzlement, lying, cover-ups, punishing whistleblowers, gaming the system to maximize overtime, etc.
The rationalization is always the same: everyone else is doing it.
Here's a shorthand way to summarize America's "purpose" now: a medication that costs $8 per vial in Europe costs $38,892 in the U.S.
9. Perspectives on entitlement. Everyone's entitled to everything now--to sex, a secure income, the "right" to abuse/accuse online without restraint or blowback, the "right" to demand everyone treat you in whatever way you reckon is your "right," and so on in an infinite expansion of entitlements that require no sacrifice, virtue or even civility of the entitled.
10. Humility. How often do you find someone who publicly expresses caution about their own righteousness, or presents a healthy hesitation about the rightness of their positions, i.e. that they might be wrong? How many are publicly skeptical of their own views and not just of everyone else's views? How many admit to having a poor understanding of complex issues?
The confidence and hubris of those directing the rest of us to race off the cliff while they watch from a safe distance is off the charts.
Saturday, July 28, 2018
SC169-7
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/07/28/in-refusing-to-defend-assange-mainstream-media-exposes-its-true-nature/
In Refusing To Defend Assange, Mainstream Media Exposes Its True Nature
Last Tuesday a top lawyer for the New York Times named David McCraw warned a room full of judges that the prosecution of Julian Assange for WikiLeaks publications would set a very dangerous precedent which would end up hurting mainstream news media outlets like NYT, the Washington Post, and other outlets which publish secret government documents.
“I think the prosecution of him would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers,” McCraw said. “From that incident, from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and I think the law would have a very hard time drawing a distinction between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”
Do you know where I read about this? Not in the New York Times.
“Curiously, as of this writing, McCraw’s words have found no mention in the Times itself,” activist Ray McGovern wrote for the alternative media outlet Consortium News. “In recent years, the newspaper has shown a marked proclivity to avoid printing anything that might risk its front row seat at the government trough.”
So let’s unpack that a bit. It is now public knowledge that the Ecuadorian government is actively seeking to turn Assange over to be arrested by the British government. This was initially reported by RT, then independently confirmed by The Intercept, and is today full mainstream public knowledge being reported by mainstream outlets like CNN. It is also public knowledge that Assange’s asylum was granted by the Ecuadorian government due to a feared attempt to extradite him to the United States and prosecute him for WikiLeaks publications. Everyone from President Donald Trump to Attorney General Jeff Sessions to now-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to ranking House Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff to Democratic members of the US Senate have made public statements clearly indicating that there is a US government interest in getting Assange out of the shelter of political asylum and into prison.
The New York Times is aware of this, and as evidenced by McCraw’s comments it is also aware of the dangerous precedent that such a prosecution would set for all news media publications. The New York Times editorial staff are aware that the US government prosecuting a publisher for publishing important documents that had been hidden from the public would make it impossible for the Times to publish the same kind of material without fear of the same legal repercussions. It is aware that the maneuvers being taken against Assange present a very real existential threat to the possibility of real journalism and holding power to account.
You might think, therefore, that we’d be seeing a flood of analyses and op-eds from the New York Times aggressively condemning any movement toward the prosecution of Julian Assange. You might expect all media outlets in America to be constantly sounding the alarm about this, especially since the threat is coming from the Trump administration, which outlets like the New York Times are always eager to circulate dire warnings about. You might expect every talking head on CNN and NBC to be ominously citing Assange as the clearest and most egregious case yet of Trump’s infamous “war on the free press”. Leaving aside the issues of morality, compassion and human rights that come with Assange’s case, you might think that if for no other reason than sheer unenlightened self interest they’d be loudly and aggressively defending him.
And yet, they don’t. And the fact that they don’t shows us what they really are.
Theoretically, journalism is meant to help create an informed populace and hold power to account. That’s why it’s the only profession explicitly named in the United States Constitution, and why freedom of the press has enjoyed such constitutional protections throughout US history. The press today is failing to protect Julian Assange because it has no intention of creating an informed populace or holding power to account.
This is not to suggest the existence of some grand, secret conspiracy among US journalists. It’s just a simple fact that plutocrats own most of the US news media and hire the people who run it, which has naturally created an environment where the best way to advance one’s career is to remain perpetually inoffensive to the establishment upon which plutocrats have built their respective empires. This is why you see ambitious reporters on Twitter falling all over themselves to be the first with a pithy line that advances establishment agendas whenever breaking news presents an opportunity to do so; they are aware that their social media presence is being assessed by potential employers and allies for establishment loyalism. This also why so many of those aspiring journalists attack Assange and WikiLeaks whenever possible.
“Everyone hoping to gain admission to the cultural elite must now strenuously cultivate their social media so as to avoid controversy,” journalist Michael Tracey observed recently. “Eventually they will internalize controversy-avoidance as a virtue, not a societal imposition. Result: a more boring, conformist elite culture.”
A great way for an aspiring journalist to avoid controversy is to never, ever defend Assange or WikiLeaks on social media or in any media outlet, and certainly under no circumstances allow yourself to look like the sort of journo who might someday publish the sorts of materials that WikiLeaks publishes. An excellent way to prove yourself is to become yet another author of yet another one of the many, many smear pieces that have been written about Assange and WikiLeaks.
Mainstream media outlets and those who thrive within them have no intention of rocking the boat and losing their hard-earned privilege and access. Conservative mass media will continue to defend the US president, and liberal media will continue to defend the CIA and the FBI. Both will help advance war, ecocide, military expansionism, surveillance and police militarization, and none will leak anything that is damaging to the power structures that they have learned to serve. They will remain innocuous, uncontroversial defenders of the rich and powerful at all times.
Meanwhile, alternative media outlets are defending Assange ferociously. Just today I’ve seen articles from Consortium News, World Socialist Website, Disobedient Media, Antiwar and Common Dreams decrying the persecution of the most important government transparency advocate living today. Alternative media outlets and independent writers aren’t bound by establishment servitude, so the value of WikiLeaks is clear as day. One’s eyes are only blinded to the pernicious behaviors of power when power is signing one’s paycheck.
Mass media outlets in America and around the world have fully discredited themselves with their failure to defend a publisher who actually holds power to account and brings facts into the light of truth to create an informed populace. Every day that goes by where they don’t unequivocally condemn any attempt to prosecute Assange is another day in the pile of evidence that corporate media outlets serve power and not truth. Their silence is a tacit admission that they are nothing other than stenographers and propagandists for the most powerful forces on earth.
In Refusing To Defend Assange, Mainstream Media Exposes Its True Nature
Last Tuesday a top lawyer for the New York Times named David McCraw warned a room full of judges that the prosecution of Julian Assange for WikiLeaks publications would set a very dangerous precedent which would end up hurting mainstream news media outlets like NYT, the Washington Post, and other outlets which publish secret government documents.
“I think the prosecution of him would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers,” McCraw said. “From that incident, from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and I think the law would have a very hard time drawing a distinction between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”
Do you know where I read about this? Not in the New York Times.
“Curiously, as of this writing, McCraw’s words have found no mention in the Times itself,” activist Ray McGovern wrote for the alternative media outlet Consortium News. “In recent years, the newspaper has shown a marked proclivity to avoid printing anything that might risk its front row seat at the government trough.”
So let’s unpack that a bit. It is now public knowledge that the Ecuadorian government is actively seeking to turn Assange over to be arrested by the British government. This was initially reported by RT, then independently confirmed by The Intercept, and is today full mainstream public knowledge being reported by mainstream outlets like CNN. It is also public knowledge that Assange’s asylum was granted by the Ecuadorian government due to a feared attempt to extradite him to the United States and prosecute him for WikiLeaks publications. Everyone from President Donald Trump to Attorney General Jeff Sessions to now-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to ranking House Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff to Democratic members of the US Senate have made public statements clearly indicating that there is a US government interest in getting Assange out of the shelter of political asylum and into prison.
The New York Times is aware of this, and as evidenced by McCraw’s comments it is also aware of the dangerous precedent that such a prosecution would set for all news media publications. The New York Times editorial staff are aware that the US government prosecuting a publisher for publishing important documents that had been hidden from the public would make it impossible for the Times to publish the same kind of material without fear of the same legal repercussions. It is aware that the maneuvers being taken against Assange present a very real existential threat to the possibility of real journalism and holding power to account.
You might think, therefore, that we’d be seeing a flood of analyses and op-eds from the New York Times aggressively condemning any movement toward the prosecution of Julian Assange. You might expect all media outlets in America to be constantly sounding the alarm about this, especially since the threat is coming from the Trump administration, which outlets like the New York Times are always eager to circulate dire warnings about. You might expect every talking head on CNN and NBC to be ominously citing Assange as the clearest and most egregious case yet of Trump’s infamous “war on the free press”. Leaving aside the issues of morality, compassion and human rights that come with Assange’s case, you might think that if for no other reason than sheer unenlightened self interest they’d be loudly and aggressively defending him.
And yet, they don’t. And the fact that they don’t shows us what they really are.
Theoretically, journalism is meant to help create an informed populace and hold power to account. That’s why it’s the only profession explicitly named in the United States Constitution, and why freedom of the press has enjoyed such constitutional protections throughout US history. The press today is failing to protect Julian Assange because it has no intention of creating an informed populace or holding power to account.
This is not to suggest the existence of some grand, secret conspiracy among US journalists. It’s just a simple fact that plutocrats own most of the US news media and hire the people who run it, which has naturally created an environment where the best way to advance one’s career is to remain perpetually inoffensive to the establishment upon which plutocrats have built their respective empires. This is why you see ambitious reporters on Twitter falling all over themselves to be the first with a pithy line that advances establishment agendas whenever breaking news presents an opportunity to do so; they are aware that their social media presence is being assessed by potential employers and allies for establishment loyalism. This also why so many of those aspiring journalists attack Assange and WikiLeaks whenever possible.
“Everyone hoping to gain admission to the cultural elite must now strenuously cultivate their social media so as to avoid controversy,” journalist Michael Tracey observed recently. “Eventually they will internalize controversy-avoidance as a virtue, not a societal imposition. Result: a more boring, conformist elite culture.”
A great way for an aspiring journalist to avoid controversy is to never, ever defend Assange or WikiLeaks on social media or in any media outlet, and certainly under no circumstances allow yourself to look like the sort of journo who might someday publish the sorts of materials that WikiLeaks publishes. An excellent way to prove yourself is to become yet another author of yet another one of the many, many smear pieces that have been written about Assange and WikiLeaks.
Mainstream media outlets and those who thrive within them have no intention of rocking the boat and losing their hard-earned privilege and access. Conservative mass media will continue to defend the US president, and liberal media will continue to defend the CIA and the FBI. Both will help advance war, ecocide, military expansionism, surveillance and police militarization, and none will leak anything that is damaging to the power structures that they have learned to serve. They will remain innocuous, uncontroversial defenders of the rich and powerful at all times.
Meanwhile, alternative media outlets are defending Assange ferociously. Just today I’ve seen articles from Consortium News, World Socialist Website, Disobedient Media, Antiwar and Common Dreams decrying the persecution of the most important government transparency advocate living today. Alternative media outlets and independent writers aren’t bound by establishment servitude, so the value of WikiLeaks is clear as day. One’s eyes are only blinded to the pernicious behaviors of power when power is signing one’s paycheck.
Mass media outlets in America and around the world have fully discredited themselves with their failure to defend a publisher who actually holds power to account and brings facts into the light of truth to create an informed populace. Every day that goes by where they don’t unequivocally condemn any attempt to prosecute Assange is another day in the pile of evidence that corporate media outlets serve power and not truth. Their silence is a tacit admission that they are nothing other than stenographers and propagandists for the most powerful forces on earth.
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