Faint flickers of hope in the midst of despair
The chaos and disorder in the world created by capitalism are increasing exponentially. That constitutes a very serious problem for the elites who till now have been able to stave off the inevitable loss of power by alternating so-called democratic regimes with more openly authoritarian ones in the mainstay of their homebase, the US, and by the deployment of a huge mythmaking apparatus. The signs are multiplying, however, that the propaganda bubble may soon burst.
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By Gui Rochat | Patrice Greanville [print_link]
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PHOTO: Bill Clinton “explaining” his administration’s policies toward Wall Street, a continuation of Bush-Reagan policies behind the mask of fabricated populism. Off-camera, throwing the requisite soft-ball questions is media eunuch, CBS News “Political Correspondent” Bob Schieffer, who also helms Face the Nation.
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Thus, since the only real interests served in our passably “democratic” societies are those of the upper strata (actually oligarchic republics), it has little sense to engage in the usual political squabbling that these societies offer in place of true representation. Little human oversight is necessary to keep the political structure intact because it functions largely on autopilot. This is the result of careful planning from the beginning of the Republic. Since then, every government put into office has had as its preeminent mission the protection of privilege against the unwashed masses, the real barbarians at the gates. This elitism is imbued in the system itself and silently accepted by most power players as a necessary evil.
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Groping for solutions
Instead of allowing the wealthy folks in the Senate to keep their luxurious perches to blather away every day about various subjects of only demagogic importance, an exercise that only confuses the public and diverts attention from their true job, which is to legislate pseudo democratic laws that primarily benefit their masters—the national and international plutocracies—a situation replicated with few exceptions in the House of Representatives (sic), the citizens must now undertake a complete overhaul of the government in order to start a regime of genuine representation of citizens’ rights in America. This is not just long overdue. It is grotesquely overdue.
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That this is not a utopian vision is evidenced in the growing and deserved dissatisfaction with government. While we disagree with the Republican Tea Party on multiple grounds and its essentially reactionary and utterly hypocritical agenda (the “Tea party” is just a rebranding of Republican shock-troops), it’s hard to argue that the turmoil they generate is only a product of thinly veiled racism, or yet another spasm of libertarianism. The discontent with government is profound, and while much of it has been planted in the brains of these folks by the GOP/Right’s noise machine and its shameless distortions, not to mention the toxic brew of deceitful myths enveloping the consciousness of practically all Americans, no lie can travel far without finding some fount of replenishment in what average folks term common experience. The fact is that the American government in the last quarter century—on just about any index we care to look—has become the least democratically responsive of all developed nations. Americans by and large get little in return for their tax money, and nothing for their blood. PHOTO: Empire servants: Former US Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld speaks with his chief speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, prior to giving reporters an operational update on Operation “IRAQI FREEDOM.”
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like the assembly of high-ticket prostitutes they are, apparently responds only to those who can afford them. Thus properly “elected” according to the traditional rules of the game, such representatives soon proceed to put their legitimating imprimatur on the siphoning off of the national wealth into the hands of those who, protected by a wall of favorable laws and police, by now coldly control the whole nation.
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The road out of the false New Canaan
he media are only too happy to charge for every political advertisement they can get, but it’s obvious that this obscenely corrupt system remains in place only because it suits the moneyed interests it automatically favors, the media make no fuss about it, and no one has yet mounted a substantial attack. The solution is equally obvious: To stop the malfeasance implicit in this practice, advertising for candidates up for election must be free or fully paid for by the federal government. Considering the nefarious consequences for American society of allowing private financing of “the people’s champions”, public financing could easily become one of the greatest bargains in our history.
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While public financing alone cannot guarantee a marked improvement in American legislation, as candidates remain embedded in a society drenched in pro-business propaganda, most people carry atrocious deformations in their reality-acquiring apparatus, and a long history of conservative, individualist values, the reform might still create a liberating opening for people of modest means and progressive backgrounds.
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After more than two and a half centuries of intermittent popular revolts in the West it is clear that two factors promise results for changing society in the medium run: one aims at systematically neutralizing the props that protect the upper levels from the democratic agenda, things like the commercial media and a political class totally invested in the status quo, and second, the mobilization of the normally more progressive (and numerous) urban masses. Indoctrination is a friable entity because the more it stretches to cover the rationale of common life, the thinner its message becomes. Within the present societal disorder we experience in America and now throughout Europe, this presents seeds for rebellion—both spontaneous and organized—even among a public thoroughly lacking in the tools for accurate political analysis. The signs are becoming propitious because the official propaganda is getting quite stale and the people smell it.
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The Obama gambit is a two-edge sword
With Obama in the White House the proverbial naive idealism of the United States population has been getting a fierce kick in the face, as the present presidency has been a definite catalyst for massive disappointment, some of it no doubt the product of Republican chicanery, always in abundant supply, but primarily the result of Democratic corruption, spinelessness and irrefutable complicity in the same plutocratic project in which the GOP has long distinguished itself. For many who until recently fiercely believed in the ability of the system to purge itself from criminals via the ballot box, the Obama victory and its aftermath have been a brutal eye-opener.
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It is therefore entirely a question of time and of the uncontrollable chaos we see growing in all spheres, showing a sort of ebb and flow in the tides of popular revulsion. Hitherto, the corporate establishment forces have managed to reassert their power in every instance, but each round of conflict, whether clear to the public or not, has left more cracks in the edifice of legitimation.
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What Chomsky mentions as common consent is getting scarcer and scarcer in the land, and the more the upper classes profit by the near destitution of many in the working classes (which is a real phenomenon already, though of course rarely shown by the media), the less acquiescence the propaganda for capitalism receives. After all, the elites are perfectly aware of the thin veil of deception that the capitalist system requires to operate, and how easily it can be torn by determined action, a vital fact, which, naturally, is carefully hidden from the subjected masses.
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The Animal Farm is Us
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1823.shtml )
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