During the last thirty-plus years powerful supra-national business and financial interests have embarked in the systematic dismantling of our democratic institutions, of the proper functioning of government, of an adequate regulatory framework capable of protecting the public against predatory practices by large corporations and business cartels. They have used their money and power to corrupt our political institutions (helping bring about a system of legalized bribery), and the mainstream media, which they use as a mind-numbing propaganda machine.
Image: R_Evolution by Guillem Marí
As a direct result of this situation, income inequality has reached unprecedented levels, while the social and economic well-being of much of the citizenry continues to deteriorate at an accelerated pace.
The anti-democratic power grab by these supranational corporate cartels has been focused and disciplined--and accomplished mainly through deception, and bribery (or our debased political class).
Throughout all this time average folks kept believing the myths conveniently propagated by the corporate state; we believed in the myth that achieving the so-called American Dream required us to be selfish and self-absorbed, indifferent to to the suffering of others who presumably were not up to par when it came to "competing in the free marketplace"; we believed in the myth about how our military was fighting for "freedom and democracy," and to keep us safe; we believed in the myth of a free press; we believed in the myth that unfettered capitalism was the same as democracy. And most of all, we believed in the myth that those who have been entrusted with the most sacred duty in a democracy, public service, were truly doing the best they could on behalf of the people they were supposedly representing.
Those myths are now crumbling, as more and more people come to the realization that they were based on self-serving lies. Greed and selfishness do not help bring about the American Dream; they instead contribute to a societal nightmare. The brave man and women of our armed forces have not been protecting freedom and democracy, but have instead been (mis)used to protect the interests of corporations and the ruling elite. The press (corporate media) has not being used to keep us informed, and to educate us about important issues; it has instead been used as a powerful propaganda machine specifically designed to manipulate us into accepting the false narratives that benefit those in power. Unfettered capitalism is not the same as democracy; it instead destroys it, as it destroys lives and our natural environment.
As these myths crumble under the weight of the oppression and exploitation caused by the depravities of the neoliberal (and supra-national) corporate state, millions of people are rising up to oppose it, and to demand and impose (social and economic) justice, freedom, and democracy. The fast-spreading social justice movement is now in the process of helping propagate these truths; a very necessary step, as argued by the late
Bill Moyer in "
Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements"
To achieve the goal of winning over and involving the citizenry, social movements need to reframe by exposing and proving to the public that the powerholder's actual policies and programs violate the social myths. The best way to inspire the public to be actively involved in creating social change is to show continuously, over time, the gap between the powerholder's actual policies and programs and the culture's values and beliefs. Highlighting this gap is the most critical consciousness raising work and lies at the center of social movement strategy.
[The emphasis is mine]
But as more and more people come to understand the true nature of the system and join the social justice movement against corporate-lead oppression, we must continue reaching out in order to gain the necessary strength to end the injustices.
Social movements involve a long-term struggle between the movement and the powerholders for the hearts, minds, and support of the majority of the population. Before social movements begin, most people are either unaware that a problem exists or don't believe that they can do anything about it. They believe the powerholder's societal myths and support the high-sounding official policies and practices, all of which seem to be consistent with the culture's deeply held held values and beliefs...
~snip~
The strategy of social movements, therefore, is to alert, educate, and win over an ever increasing majority of the public. First the public needs to be convinced that a critical social problem exists. Then it must be convinced that policies need to be changed. And then a majority of people must be mobilized into a force that eventually brings about an acceptable solution.
[The emphasis is mine]
I argue that one of the last important challenges we face before we reach the revolutionary tipping point is to make sure that a large-enough segment of the population comes to understand the mechanisms by which the corporate state manipulates and controls the citizenry, namely, divide-and-conquer strategies, as I argued in "
An Open Letter to The Occupy Wall Street Movement: You Were Right All Along."
There is a vast total-information-awareness surveillance network made up of global corporations and subservient (captured) governments engaging in the systematic infiltration and suppression of social justice activist groups. Their main method of control is the implementation of divide-and-conquer strategies. When it comes to activists, their approach is to apply these strategies to what they have defined as four distinct groups: Radicals, who see the system as corrupt are marginalized and discredited with character assassination techniques. Realists, who can be convinced that real change is not possible. Idealists, who can be convinced (through propaganda) that they have the facts wrong. And Opportunists, who are in it for themselves and therefore can be easily co-opted.
For decades now, one of the main objectives of the national security/surveillance state has been to prevent the rise of effective social justice movements... Here's what Amy Goodman reports in a recent truthdig article about the activists who broke into FBI offices on March 8th, 1971 exposing the illegal and unconstitutional activities know by the program name, COINTELPRO:
They broke into the office, stole all the files inside and took them to a farmhouse an hour outside of Philadelphia. They pored over the liberated documents, shocked at what they read. One memo detailed an FBI conference on the New Left, predicting that more FBI interrogations of activists would “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox..."
[The emphasis is mine]
And here's how John Raines, one of the activists who broke into the FBI offices in order to garner evidence of crimes committed by the surveillance/security state
spoke about the importance of dissent, in a democracy, and how it applies to the situation we face today:
We decided that it was time to, once again, come forward with the question of government surveillance, government intimidation, and the right of citizens to vocally dissent. I think that the gasoline of democracy is the right to dissent, because wherever there’s power, wherever there’s privilege, power and privilege are going to try to remove, insofar as they can, from public discourse anything they want to do. That leaves the citizens’ right to dissent as the last line of defense for freedom. Now, that’s what we were faced with back in 1970s. I think that’s what we’re faced with once again today. It should not surprise us. I mean, it should not surprise us that those in power in Washington want to make the decisions that really count off stage, out of sight from the rest of us. But democracy depends upon the rights of citizens to have the information they need in order for them, the citizens—who are the sovereigns—for them to decide what the government should be doing and should not be doing. They must have that information so that they can make up their minds.
[The emphasis is mine]
Like Mr. Raines said, we continue to face the same problem today, as
we've learned from the patriotic efforts and sacrifices of political prisoners like Jeremy Hammond, and Chelsea Manning, as well as dissidents, activists, and journalists like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Glenn Greenwald.
I argue that after reviewing the latest revelations about the security/surveillance state, including Stratfor leaked documents ("Global Ingelligence Files"), reports like "Dissent or Terror," and "Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations," a reasonable person could conclude that what we are facing is a situation where powerful business cartels, after having essentially bought off the entire political establishment, have now proceeded to instruct their puppets in government to direct the power of the state, the total-information-awareness capabilities, to be used as tools of oppression, manipulation, and subjugation, against the citizenry.
And this is tyranny in the form of what has come to be known as "Inverted Totalitarianism."
Inverted totalitarianism is a term coined by political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in 2003 to describe the emerging form of government of the United States. Wolin believes that the United States is increasingly turning into an illiberal democracy, and he uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to illustrate the similarities and differences between the United States governmental system and totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, inverted totalitarianism is described as a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics trumps politics. In inverted totalitarianism, every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse and the citizenry are lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in their government by excess consumerism and sensationalism.
[The emphasis is mine]
Another conclusion I've reached from my ongoing research about the entrenchment of the neoliberal corporate state and the resulting proto-fascism is that the treasonous operatives behind the corrupt system (including the
tens of thousands of paid spies, informers, cognitive infiltrators, and trolls in its employ), that they have three distinct objectives:
Firstly, they are spending an extraordinary amount of resources in cognitive infiltration and disinformation tactics specifically designed to prevent a large-enough segment of the population from coming to a full and accurate understanding about the true nature of the system.
Secondly, these treasonous thugs, acting on behalf of corporations, are focused on preventing people from joining together in mass protests on an ongoing/sustained basis against specific government and corporate targets, which could grow to eventually represent a real challenge to the proto-fascist corporate hegemony.
Thirdly, to employ shock doctrine tactics against the citizenry, including induced economic insecurity and poverty (through "austerity measures"), in order to prevent people from having the type of necessary leisure time they would need to carefully reflect and think about the true nature of the system.
On that last point, here's what The San Francisco Chronicle reported: "Aid helps the poor more than advice, study says."
But if interesting new research is correct, the conditions and the decisions are indistinguishable. In other words, poor people really do tend to make worse financial decisions than rich people, but it's not for lack of good McAdvice. It's because they're poor.
The research, some of which was published in the journal Science in the fall, was led by Harvard economist (and MacArthur grant winner) Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton cognitive scientist Eldar Shafir. The two detail the work in their book, "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much," published in September.
~snip~
Mullainathan and Shafir's team found that for the poorer test subjects, being faced with the more costly hypothetical had a marked effect on their performance on the cognitive tests. The mental strain of having to work through the potentially ruinous financial calculation, even hypothetically, exhausted them, and they did significantly worse on the intelligence and impulse-control tests than equivalently poor subjects who had been given the cheaper hypothetical. How much worse? As poorly as if they had been severely sleep-deprived. (For the wealthier test subjects, neither scenario was unaffordable, so there was no effect.)
In other words, the financial stresses of poverty can weaken people's decision-making ability...
[The emphasis is mine]
The reason I highlight this study is because I think this is at the heart of the periodic "shock doctrine" events the ruling class uses periodically to manipulate the population, and it is at the heart of the extremely coordinated push by the supra-national neoliberal ruling elite to impose so-called austerity measures in several countries.
And that's the reason I argue that now is the time for a middle class non-violent revolt: "The Urgency of a Middle Class Revolt
And I believe that's the reason Chris Hedges argues that "it is not the poor who make revolutions."
It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,” Anatole France commented acidly.
[The emphasis is mine]
And so, if it is true that the "chains are being readied for the rest of us," as Chris Hedges
argues, the question that arises is, are we going to let it happen, or are we going to rise up in opposition to corporatist-induced tyranny and oppression?
I (and others) argue that it is time to rise up and put an end to this untenable situation. And I (and others) argue that all we have to do to get going is to take the first step, together as we seek to unite in solidarity against the depravities of the corporate state.
And we can do it through non-violent action, as university professor and researcher Erica Chenoweth explains in the following TED video...
She finds (through her research) that when an average 3.5 percent of any given population engages in non-violent (civil) resistance on a sustained basis, "no single campaign failed." She also finds that "every single campaign that surpassed that 3.5 percent was a non-violent one." She goes on to say that "In fact, the non-violent campaigns were on average four times larger than the average violent campaign, and they were often much more inclusive and representative in terms of gender, age, race, political party, class, and the urban role distinction. Civil resistance allows people of all different levels of physical ability to participate. This could include the elderly, people with disabilities, women, children, and anyone else who wants to. If you think about it, everyone is born with a natural physical ability to resist non-violently..."
I remember ten-plus years ago when many were sounding the alarm about the rise of a proto-fascist corporate state, and those warnings were summarily dismissed by most. People would say, "Well, I don't think anybody is going to rise up until things get bad enough."
Would you not agree that we are at that point? Or how bad will it have to get before is "bad enough?" As the social fabric unravels victim to the rapacious greed of those in power, we are seeing more and more tragedies, including towns being incinerated by industrial explosions, a growing incidence of police brutality and actual murders with total impunity, the pillaging of trillions of dollars by the Wall Street criminal racketeering cartel with total impunity, 300,000 people without potable water due to chemical spills as the result of neglect and poor oversight by totally captured government agencies, a two-tiered legal system that is especially brutal against African-American men and other minorities, an ubiquitous total information awareness surveillance state engaged in the building of very detail dossiers of innocent people on behalf of corporatist overlords, on and on and on...
I (and others) argue that the time to act is now! And people are doing just that. I encourage you to join the movement, to conduct your own research so you can come up with your own conclusions about the true nature of the system. But whatever you do, I argue that is it extremely important that you engage now and not wait until things get even worse.
I've argued before that in this age of massive government and corporate surveillance those who join the movement should embrace non-hierarchical approaches to civil resistance, given the fact that we must assume that almost all organized groups have been infiltrated and may be subject to manipulation.
I have some very specific ideas I'd like to share for consideration based on these three principles: Highly adaptive non-hierarchical organizational structure; Non-violent; Sustained.
I will describe/share those ideas in a follow-up essay titled, "100 Weeks of Non-violent Resistance Against The Corporate State," which I will publish later today.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal...
- Frederick Douglass
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Sockpuppets & Trolls Watch: Their aim is to disrupt, to annoy, to introduce "noise" in order to prevent meaningful discussions of issues. Their tactics include casting aspersions (attack on the reputation or integrity), and ad hominems, where instead of addressing issues, they attack the character of people. They also engage in mockery, and logical fallacies. A good source of information about the tactics used by sockpuppets, trolls and hacks is "The 15 Rules of Web Disruption." Once you familiarize yourself with those tactics, it is pretty easy to spot the potential troll. Once spotted, the best thing is to ignore them. [Image credit: Jacob Bøtter from Copenhagen, Denmark]