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Redistributing Wealth
Upwards, ever upward.
These are the richest times in human history.
David Stockman says 7/8 of all wealth ever created has been created since 1981. Most all of it has fallen into the pockets of the rich.
So, what happened to the Middle Class? And the poor, where did they go?
Anyone care? They should.
58 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Here's why we need separation of Wall Street from Washington DC:
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was reported to be fond of Diego Rivera's mural telling the story of the CIA-led 1954 coup d'etat in Guatemala, using it for a Christmas card one year.
Is the Clinton Foundation the Dulles Brother’s Sullivan and Cromwell?
by JOHN STANTON
CounterPunch, APRIL 15, 2016
According to CounterPunch editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair:
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton instigated and legitimized the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009 not all that unlike the 1954 Guatemala Coup engineered primarily by CIA Director Allen Dulles, supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and with the glowing approval of President Dwight Eisenhower.
In a March 2016 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Greg Grandin, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, discussed the fallout from the 2009 Honduran Coup. “I mean, hundreds of peasant activists and indigenous activists have been killed. Scores of gay rights activists have been killed. I mean, it’s just—it’s just a nightmare in Honduras. I mean, there’s ways in which the coup regime basically threw up Honduras to transnational pillage. And Berta Cáceres , in that interview, says what was installed after the coup was something like a permanent counterinsurgency on behalf of transnational capital. And that was—that wouldn’t have been possible if it were not for Hillary Clinton’s normalization of that election, or legitimacy.”
In an April interview with Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on Democracy Now, Frank indicated that President Obama had basically turned over Central and South America to Hillary Clinton. Frank then said this: “I think it’s really about the U.S. pushback against the democratically elected governments of the left and the center-left that came to power in Latin America in the ’90s and in the 2000s—Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, El Salvador, all these countries. And Zelaya was the weakest link in that chain. He, himself, did not come out of a big social movement base at the time of his election, certainly since the coup. And I think they were—the U.S. was looking for a way to push back against that. There’s a very important military base, U.S. military base, Soto Cano Air Force Base, in Honduras. And Honduras has always been the most captive nation of the United States in Latin America. So, I think they were testing what they could get away with. And they got away with it. It was the first domino pushing back against democracy in Latin America and reasserting U.S. power, in service to a transnational corporate agenda.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/15/is-the-clinton-foundation-the-dulles-brothers-sullivan-and-cromwell/
by JOHN STANTON
CounterPunch, APRIL 15, 2016
According to CounterPunch editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair:
“The desire for secrecy is one of Mrs. Clinton’s enduring and damaging traits…Befitting a Midwestern Methodist with a bullying father, repression has always been one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent characteristics. Hers has been the instinct to conceal, to deny, to refuse to admit any mistake. Mickey Kantor, the Los Angeles lawyer who worked on the 1992 (presidential) campaign, said that Hillary adamantly refused to admit to any mistakes. Since Vietnam, there’s never been a war that Mrs. Clinton didn’t like. She argued passionately in the White House for the NATO bombing of Belgrade. Five days after September 11, 2001, she was calling for a broad war on terror…“I’ll stand behind (George W.) Bush for a long time to come”, Senator Clinton promised, and she was as good as her word, voting for the Patriot Act and the wide-ranging authorization to use military force against Afghanistan…Of course she supported without reservation the attack on Afghanistan and, as the propaganda buildup toward the onslaught on Iraq got underway, she didn’t even bother to walk down the hall to read the national intelligence estimate on Iraq before the war.”
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton instigated and legitimized the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009 not all that unlike the 1954 Guatemala Coup engineered primarily by CIA Director Allen Dulles, supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and with the glowing approval of President Dwight Eisenhower.
In a March 2016 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Greg Grandin, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, discussed the fallout from the 2009 Honduran Coup. “I mean, hundreds of peasant activists and indigenous activists have been killed. Scores of gay rights activists have been killed. I mean, it’s just—it’s just a nightmare in Honduras. I mean, there’s ways in which the coup regime basically threw up Honduras to transnational pillage. And Berta Cáceres , in that interview, says what was installed after the coup was something like a permanent counterinsurgency on behalf of transnational capital. And that was—that wouldn’t have been possible if it were not for Hillary Clinton’s normalization of that election, or legitimacy.”
In an April interview with Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on Democracy Now, Frank indicated that President Obama had basically turned over Central and South America to Hillary Clinton. Frank then said this: “I think it’s really about the U.S. pushback against the democratically elected governments of the left and the center-left that came to power in Latin America in the ’90s and in the 2000s—Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, El Salvador, all these countries. And Zelaya was the weakest link in that chain. He, himself, did not come out of a big social movement base at the time of his election, certainly since the coup. And I think they were—the U.S. was looking for a way to push back against that. There’s a very important military base, U.S. military base, Soto Cano Air Force Base, in Honduras. And Honduras has always been the most captive nation of the United States in Latin America. So, I think they were testing what they could get away with. And they got away with it. It was the first domino pushing back against democracy in Latin America and reasserting U.S. power, in service to a transnational corporate agenda.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/15/is-the-clinton-foundation-the-dulles-brothers-sullivan-and-cromwell/
Weird how money is much more important than people for some people.
I believe that's what Diego Rivera tried to get across in his 1934 mural, "Man at the Crossroad," created for Rockefeller Center and later re-created in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. The Rockefellers were so angered at the finished work, they ordered it destroyed for including portaits of Lenin and other commie martyrs.
The very idea that labor is what creates wealth is Top Secret Eyes Only put-that-in-the-lockbox in Switzerland. Where is it mentioned in school? When is it discussed on television or the news print? And who, other than our fellow DUers, SharonAnn, ever heard of the Powell Memorandum?
Firstly: Every word you said is pure gold, enid602. Thank you for summing it up so succinctly. Here's the history on how We the People got put under the thrall of the Money Trumps Peace Cabal.
Somewhere in Detroit, 1980 GOP Convention:
After the election, the relationship really, ah, evolved:
George Bush Takes Charge
The Uses of "Counter-Terrorism"
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
CONTINUED...
More details from the good professor:
EXCERPT...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
[font color="green"]The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
This all matters because there's a steady bloody red line from 1981 to the present day few write about. More would, were the nation's news media honest and lived up to their constitutional mandate.
After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm found a job at Swiss bank UBS as vice chairman. He later brought in former President Bill Clinton to the Wealth Management team. What a coincidence, they are the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagal. Since the New Deal it was the financial regulation that protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino. Oh well, what are a few hundred million in speaking fees compared to a $16 trillion bailout among friends?
It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:
President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool
SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html
Some of why DUers and ALL voters should care about Phil Gramm.
How many hours of week of NFL football vs how often the ties between the world's wealthiest people and our politicians should be of great concern to all who care about Democracy.
Violent revolutions do succeed...but dear gods, the cost. 
Drink!
Drink!
Bob-Bye 
That's 75
Drink!
Drink!
Drink!
A little history for those wondering why the Banksters almost walked away blaming "the poor for buying big houses they couldn't afford" at the top of their lungs without anyone noticing those with red hands.
Bernie Sanders Calls Federal Reserve "Socialism for the Rich" After $16 Trillion Secret Bail-Outs, Including Foreign Banks.
By Ralph Lopez, War Is a Crime | News Analysis
Truth-Out, Monday, 30 July 2012 14:27
After 89 Democrats in the House voted in a victory for bipartisanship for HR 459 to audit the Federal Reserve, some jaw-dropping numbers are emerging as a result of a partial audit conducted this year. It is no surprise that the news is dropping with a dull thud in the media. That's why you should get your news from the Internet and sites like this.
Senator Bernie Sanders at his official website reports:
The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. "As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."
Despite the wording of the Sanders press release the audit was not "top-to-bottom," with many areas excluded. HR 459 would remedy this.
The consortium of private banks collectively known as the Federal Reserve found itself in the crosshairs of Occupy Wall Street last fall. Created in 1913, the Fed holds a monopoly on the creation of the currency, which it lends to the US Treasury at interest, or to other banks.
Blogger Pierre Joris of the Department of English at SUNY Albany gleaned from the report:
"The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious — the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs."
CONTINUED w/links, sources...
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/10609-bernie-sanders-calls-federal-reserve-socialism-for-the-rich-after-16-trillion-secret-bail-outs-including-foreign-banks
One of those foreign financial institutions the US taxpayer bailed out, by the way, is Swiss bank UBS.
PS: If the Congress and Bush and Obama administrations had followed Bernie Sanders' lead, the Banksters would be in jail, not spending bonus money on yachts, cars and dope.
A fun loving guy, posing with some fans in the men's room, FWIU.
William K. Black explains why, even with Democrats, it's ALWAYS "Leave no billionaire behind":
No Mr. President, Larry Summers Did Not Resolve the Financial Crisis for a Pittance. He Just Papered Over the Problem.
by William K. Black
Oct. 28, 2010
I passed up the obvious title: "Heckuva Job Larry!" That was the moment of President Obama's appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that set all Americans cringing. Yes, he really said that Summers "did a heckuva job." The candidate that was gifted the opportunity to run against the legacy of one of the worst presidents in U.S. history has, as president, used Bush as his role model to continue many disastrous policies. It was strangely fitting that he would channel Bush's infamous praise ("Heckuva job Brownie"
for the FEMA chief who failed New Orleans so badly in the hurricane.
President Obama understandably wishes to focus attention on the economic disaster he inherited from President Bush. But Jon Stewart's question to him, which led to the president's gaffe, correctly asked about the message that Summers' appointment sent about the administration's commitment to fundamental change.
Summers had financial red ink on his hands at the time he was appointed. He was Rubin's chief minion in the successful effort to defeat effective financial regulation and supervision. (Yes, the effort was bipartisan and the Republican leadership shares in the guilt.) [font color="green"]Summers was not simply wrong, but also arrogant and brutal, in blocking effective regulation at the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Summers was made rich by Wall Street in one of those sordid consulting arrangements designed to buy influence and reward past and future favors.[/font color]
President Obama's appointment of Summers as his chief economic advisor made the administration's overall response to the crisis predictable. (Robert Kuttner gives a detailed explanation of the policies that Rubin's protégés championed in his new book, A Presidency in Peril.) The response would follow the disastrous Japanese model that has harmed their economy and damaged their integrity. The dominant characteristics can be summarized quickly: [font color="green"](1) the government would act for the benefit of the largest financial firms and their CEOs, even when they directed massive frauds, by (2) engineering a cover up of the banks' losses and the CEO's misconduct; (3) the administration would use the fictional reports generated to conduct the cover up to declare victory (due to their brilliance); and (4) the same strategy would impair the recovery.[/font color] (For more on the cover up, see here and here.)
CONTINUED w/links...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/no-mr-president-larry-sum_b_775307.html
by William K. Black
Oct. 28, 2010
I passed up the obvious title: "Heckuva Job Larry!" That was the moment of President Obama's appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that set all Americans cringing. Yes, he really said that Summers "did a heckuva job." The candidate that was gifted the opportunity to run against the legacy of one of the worst presidents in U.S. history has, as president, used Bush as his role model to continue many disastrous policies. It was strangely fitting that he would channel Bush's infamous praise ("Heckuva job Brownie"
for the FEMA chief who failed New Orleans so badly in the hurricane.
President Obama understandably wishes to focus attention on the economic disaster he inherited from President Bush. But Jon Stewart's question to him, which led to the president's gaffe, correctly asked about the message that Summers' appointment sent about the administration's commitment to fundamental change.
Summers had financial red ink on his hands at the time he was appointed. He was Rubin's chief minion in the successful effort to defeat effective financial regulation and supervision. (Yes, the effort was bipartisan and the Republican leadership shares in the guilt.) [font color="green"]Summers was not simply wrong, but also arrogant and brutal, in blocking effective regulation at the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Summers was made rich by Wall Street in one of those sordid consulting arrangements designed to buy influence and reward past and future favors.[/font color]
President Obama's appointment of Summers as his chief economic advisor made the administration's overall response to the crisis predictable. (Robert Kuttner gives a detailed explanation of the policies that Rubin's protégés championed in his new book, A Presidency in Peril.) The response would follow the disastrous Japanese model that has harmed their economy and damaged their integrity. The dominant characteristics can be summarized quickly: [font color="green"](1) the government would act for the benefit of the largest financial firms and their CEOs, even when they directed massive frauds, by (2) engineering a cover up of the banks' losses and the CEO's misconduct; (3) the administration would use the fictional reports generated to conduct the cover up to declare victory (due to their brilliance); and (4) the same strategy would impair the recovery.[/font color] (For more on the cover up, see here and here.)
CONTINUED w/links...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/no-mr-president-larry-sum_b_775307.html
William K. Black is a forensic economist who, as a government investigator, helped send many white collar criminals to prison during the S&L crisis for FRAUD. Iceland called him to help ice their banksters, yet, for some reason, the last two U.S. administrations have ignored his expertise and services.
I like it when you keep going. 
Going along with the Wall Street-on-the-Potomac same old, same old isn't getting it done for me, either. These are the wealthiest times in human history. We should live in a country that reflects that.
Instead, the Jet Set sets records for good times and greed.
Wealth of richest 400 Americans surges to $2.29 trillion
By Andre Damon
World Socialist Web Site, 6 October 2014
The wealthiest 400 people in the United States had their combined net worth grow thirteen percent to $2.29 trillion this year, amidst a surging stock market and record corporate profits. The figures come from the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, compiled every year since 1982 by the American business magazine of the same name.
As Forbes noted last week, the net worth of these 400 individuals is “about the same as the gross domestic product of Brazil, a country of 200 million people.” The average net worth of the Forbes 400 hit $5.7 billion, up by $700 million over the past year.
The new figures of wealth in America were generally buried in the media. Neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal published an article. Nor has it been a topic in political campaigns, one month before the midterm elections. Neither big-business party has an interest in calling attention to the extraordinary levels of social inequality in the US, with endless claims that there is no money for basic social services.
Last week marked the sixth anniversary of the signing of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which established the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as the bank bailout. Since then, the wealth of the richest sections of society has soared while the annual income of the typical household has fallen by five percent.
SNIP...
[font color="green"]* Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the richest man in the US for 21 years in a row, had his wealth increase $9 billion in one year, to $81 billion. Gates’ wealth has increased by a staggering $31 billion in the past five years. To put this figure in perspective, since 2009 Gates’ wealth has increased by nearly 30 times the annual budget of the city of Detroit, currently in bankruptcy.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/06/forb-o06.html
So, while on paper these are the greatest boom times in history, most of the boom in terms of hard cash has landed in the pockets of Haves and the Have-Mores.
Personally, I believe Ms. Clinton is superior to any Republican. She may even be the smartest person in Washington. The thing is: I favor open-government, transparency in office and policy, non-spying on citizens and allies, civil rights respecting, peace and prosperity for all, better days are ahead, we can all get it done if we all work together team, a Democratic team that runs on Democratic principles a nation of laws, not an Empire to enrich the few.
Today, the rich and powerful hide what they do behind code words.
Case in point: One Neil Mallon Pierce Bush, son of then-president George Herbert Walker Bush and caught with his hand in a billion-dollar S&L cookie jar called Silverado Savings & Loan. Here's what Poppy did for his Number 3 Son:
How the Elite Talk in Code
EXCERPT...
A perfect example of code talk comes from a true master insider, George H.W. Bush, when his son, Neil, was caught red handed in the middle of the S&L crisis as a director of Sliverado Bank.
Did Bush lay out his cards and call in his operatives and say pull some strings, get my son out of this investigation (Remember Bush was president at the time.) No. Bush is too smooth. In his published collection of letters, All The Best, George Bush, he shows us how the heat is delicately taken off Neil. On page 449, there is this letter to Thomas Ludlow Ashley.
Ashley is a Yale University grad, and member of the secret society Skull and Bones along with Bush. Here's the letter:
The Honorable Thomas Ludlow Ashley
Association of Bank Holding Companies
Washington, D.C. 20005
Dear Lud,
Thank you for your good memo December 8th.
I would appreciate any help you can give Neil. He tells me he never had any insider dealings. He got off the Board early--long before I was elected President. The Denver paper apparently ran a very nice editorial about him on that. He is an outside director, and thus I guess has liability, but I can't believe his name would appear in the paper if it was Jones not Bush. In any event, I know that the guy is totally honest. I saw him in Denver and I think he is worried about the publicity and the "shame". I tell him not to worry about that but any advice you can give as this matter unfolds would be greatly appreciated by me. If it turns out there has been some marginal call, or he has done something wrong, needless to say there will be no intervention from his dad. But, I'm quite confident this is not true...
Warm regards,
George
Notice how smooth. No talk about getting Ashley anything for taking care of the matter. The nice touch about if Neil "has done something wrong", but the clear finish, he didn't.
CONTINUED...
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2009/07/how-elite-talk-in-code.html
Chief Seattle understood what really matters:
Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them.
SOURCE: http://www.halcyon.com/arborhts/chiefsea.html
SOURCE: http://www.halcyon.com/arborhts/chiefsea.html
Thank you for reminding us, felix_numinous.
The New Deal created the Middle Class. Thus, the GOP and its friends in blue hate Keynesian economics.
JFK and LBJ knew the New Deal worked. That's why thry wanted the civilian space program to succeed: in addition to advancing technology, it created a new economy with great jobs and an unlimited future.
Nixon and the Big Money GOP hated the civilian space program.
How often, since Reagan, have we heard -- even DEMOCRATS -- said "government doesn't create jobs." It sure as shooting does. And, as FDR made sure the contracts were with union representation, government employment boosts "competition" for labor, thus acting to raise wages for workers across the entire economy.
Today, in the wealthiest times in human history, we get austerity and zero-vision expressed from those who can see a better way forward.
Chile 1973 was a blueprint for their vision of the United States of America.
It's where the Jet Set go to get their blood replaced, stem cells injected, and money stashed.
Now that head transplants are around the corner....
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
[font size="1"]Crazy Horses Riding Through the Lower East Side to a WikiLeaks Soundtrack, 2013 graffiti or mural by Banksy[/font size]
PS: You are most welcome, rhett o rick! The fact some people want to stop discussion on DU of matters of peace, politics and prosperity is most concerning. Censorship isn't Democratic. It is fascistic.
Wikileaks vs. the Empire: the Revolutionary Act of Telling the Truth
by JOHN PILGER
CounterPunch, Oct. 2, 2015
EXCERPT...
These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.
SNIP...
Edward Bernays, who invented the term, “public relations” as a euphemism for “propaganda”, predicted this more than 80 years ago. He called it, “the invisible government”.
He wrote, “Those who manipulate this unseen element of (modern democracy) constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of …”
The aim of this invisible government is the conquest of us: of our political consciousness, our sense of the world, our ability to think independently, to separate truth from lies.
This is a form of fascism, a word we are rightly cautious about using, preferring to leave it in the flickering past. But an insidious modern fascism is now an accelerating danger. As in the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the regularity of a metronome. Muslims are bad. Saudi bigots are good. ISIS bigots are bad. Russia is always bad. China is getting wikileaksfilesbad. Bombing Syria is good. Corrupt banks are good. Corrupt debt is good. Poverty is good. War is normal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/wikileaks-vs-the-empire-the-revolutionary-act-of-telling-the-truth/
by JOHN PILGER
CounterPunch, Oct. 2, 2015
EXCERPT...
These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.
SNIP...
Edward Bernays, who invented the term, “public relations” as a euphemism for “propaganda”, predicted this more than 80 years ago. He called it, “the invisible government”.
He wrote, “Those who manipulate this unseen element of (modern democracy) constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of …”
The aim of this invisible government is the conquest of us: of our political consciousness, our sense of the world, our ability to think independently, to separate truth from lies.
This is a form of fascism, a word we are rightly cautious about using, preferring to leave it in the flickering past. But an insidious modern fascism is now an accelerating danger. As in the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the regularity of a metronome. Muslims are bad. Saudi bigots are good. ISIS bigots are bad. Russia is always bad. China is getting wikileaksfilesbad. Bombing Syria is good. Corrupt banks are good. Corrupt debt is good. Poverty is good. War is normal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/wikileaks-vs-the-empire-the-revolutionary-act-of-telling-the-truth/
PS: You are most welcome, rhett o rick! The fact some people want to stop discussion on DU of matters of peace, politics and prosperity is most concerning. Censorship isn't Democratic. It is fascistic.
