Ebullient Dissent

Angie Riedel

I do often wonder, are we ever going to get real in this country?
Will we ever face the one thing we can't stand looking at, ourselves, and get honest with ourselves and each other?
We could do that, but it would take getting real, which would mean no game playing, being serious, and being out front about who we are. That would help a lot.
I'm not holding my breath. I am, however, reserving my right to leave room for miracles.
Why is it that so many people are utterly and profoundly against getting real? A whole lot of perfectly nice people truly hate and fear getting real about something or other in life.
To get real would be to change everything. To change everything would mean those in control would no longer be in control; and those getting rich off our sacrifice and sweat would have to give up their monopoly on power and wealth distribution. That simply can't happen. I think it's been well established that enough of these super rich criminals will kill to preserve their unprecedented hoarding. It's all they've got I suppose. When you're crippled inside you have to push hard to feel anything. If all you can feel is satisfaction when you get more for yourself even though you don't need it, that's what you do. I'm afraid facing the truth in this country is not allowed. It is something deftly and expertly avoided, with only the rarest exceptions, and even those are routinely and rapidly buried.

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by Howard F. Stein / November 6th, 2009 (2)

“Downsizing” by HF Stein

      What is happening
      Has not happened,
      And if it has,
      We do not want to know.

      People I worked with yesterday,
      Today are suddenly whisked away;
      No one asks where they go –
      Or even really wants to know.

      There is no blood to show
      For all their disappearance;
      They just are
      Not around any more.

      The signs all
      Read the same –
      On the highways, in the stores,
      On the elevators, …

(Full article …)

by Michel Chossudovsky

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Global Research, October 11, 2009

When concepts and realities are turned upside down,

When fiction becomes truth and truth becomes fiction.

When a global military agenda is heralded as a humanitarian endeavour, 

When the killing of civilians is upheld as "collateral damage", 

When those who resist the US-NATO led invasion of their homeland are categorized as "insurgents" or "terrorists".  

When pre-emptive nuclear war is upheld as self defense.

When advanced torture and "interrogation" techniques are routinely used to "protect peacekeeping operations",

When tactical nuclear weapons are heralded by the Pentagon as "harmless to the surrounding civilian population"

When three quarters of US personal federal income tax revenues are allocated to financing what is euphemistically referred to as "national defense" 

When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,

When the Lie becomes the Truth. 

Obama's "War Without Borders"
We are the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US in partnership with NATO and Israel has launched a global military adventure which, in a very real sense, threatens the future of humanity.

At this critical juncture in our history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee's decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama constitutes an unmitigated tool of propaganda and distortion, which unreservedly supports the Pentagon's "Long War":  "A War without Borders" in the true sense of the word, characterised by the Worldwide deployment of US military might. 

Apart from the diplomatic rhetoric, there has been no meaningful reversal of US foreign policy in relation to the George W. Bush presidency, which might have remotely justified the granting of the Nobel Prize to Obama. In fact quite the opposite. The Obama military agenda has sought to extend the war into new frontiers. With a new team of military and foreign policy advisers, the Obama war agenda has been far more effective in fostering military escalation than that formulated by the NeoCons.

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by Kim Petersen / October 9th, 2009

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has seen fit to award a peace prize to a man less than a year into elected presidential office in the United States. So what are Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize credentials?

Obama is a man who has yet to shut down a global gulag, who has yet to end the warring in Iraq, who has yet to oversee the return of the elected president of Haiti (deposed by US, Canadian, and French forces), who stands unflinching on the coup d’etat in Honduras, who runs cover for Israeli massacres of Palestinians and Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions (i.e., supporting war crimes), who seeks to proliferate military bases in Columbia, who has ramped up the killing in Afghanistan, and who has overseen the spillover of war into Pakistan.

Is this the criteria that is deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjørn Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

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by Paul Levy

We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself.

We have the most criminal regime in all of our history wreaking unspeakable horror on the entire planet, while simultaneously waging war on the consciousness of its own citizens - US. If we aren’t aware of this, we are unwittingly playing into, supporting and complicit in the evil that is being perpetrated in our name.

A government’s war on the consciousness of its own citizens is by no means unique to the Bush administration. Abusing power over others so as to limit their freedom is an archetypal process that has been endlessly re-enacted by governments throughout history in various forms. With the Bush administration, however, the pathological aspect of this process has become so exaggerated and amped up to such a degree that it is just about impossible not to notice its staggering malignancy. With the Bush administration, the underlying evil that has played out in our government over many years is becoming overwhelmingly obvious for all to see. With the Bush administration, the underlying evil that informs systems of government that are based on “power over” instead of “liberty for” is coming out from hiding in the shadows. Instead of being acted out underground, our government is acting out this evil above ground, in plain sight for all who are courageous enough to look.

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by Chris Hedges

.

Global Research, September 22, 2009

Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do—stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.

“The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong,” said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. “This is what this meeting is about.”

The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power.
The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.

The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world’s wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city’s police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.

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Listening means passivity. Listening means forgetting yourself completely - only then can you listen. When you listen attentively to somebody, you forget yourself. If you cannot forget yourself, you never listen. If you are too self-conscious about yourself, you simply pretend that you are listening - you don't listen. You may nod your head; you may sometimes say yes and no, but you are not listening. When you listen, you become just a passage, a passivity, a receptivity, a womb: you become feminine. And to arrive one has to become feminine. You cannot reach God as aggressive invaders, conquerors. You can reach God only...or it will be better to say God can reach you only when you are receptive, a feminine receptivity. When you become yin, a receptivity, the door is open - and you wait. Listening is the art for becoming passive.

OSHO

Intelligence is a natural phenomenon -- just as breathing is, just as seeing is. Intelligence is the inner seeing; it is intuitive. It has nothing to do with intellect. Never confuse intellect with intelligence, they are polar opposites. Intellect is of the head; it is taught by others, it is imposed on you. You have to cultivate it. It is borrowed, it is something foreign, it is not inborn. But intelligence is inborn. It is your very being, your very nature.

OSHO

Jean Goulard

09/13/09

"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." - J. Edgar Hoover

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - Theodore Roosevelt

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The real rulers of Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." - Felix Frankfurter - Supreme Court Justice

"But, you know, there's another group that really runs the show. It's very shadowy, just as you've described... Those of us in the Congress of the United States are window dressing." - Congressman Virgil Goode

"There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself." - Senator Daniel Inouye

"Fifty men have run America, and that's a high figure." - Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK

"For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and secret conspiracy that relies primarily on covet means for expanding its sphere of influence, on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversions instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine, that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no secret is revealed. It conducts the cold war, in short, with a wartime discipline no democracy would ever hope to wish to match." - John F. Kennedy

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." - Thomas Jefferson

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” - David Rockefeller

"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses." - Albert Einstein

"There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know." - Harry S. Truman

"The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper." - Thomas Jefferson

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson

“I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” - John D. Rockefeller

"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think." - Adolf Hitler

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." - Noam Chomsky

"There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties." - George Wallace - Governor of Alabama and 1968 Republican Presidential candidate

"Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves." - Herbert Marcuse

"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates." - Gore Vidal

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." - Julius Caesar

"Belief means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Global Research, August 19, 2009

Transnational Totalitarianism

Global trends in political economy suggest that “democracy” as we know it, is a fading concept, where even Western industrialized nations are retreating from the system. Arguably, through party politics and financial-corporate interests, democracy is something of a façade as it is. However, we are entering into an era in which even the institutions and image of democracy are in retreat, and the slide into totalitarianism seems inevitable.

The National Intelligence Council report, Global Trends 2025, stated that many governments will be “expanding domestic security forces, surveillance capabilities, and the employment of special operations-type forces.” Counterterrorism measures will increasingly “involve urban operations as a result of greater urbanization,” and governments “may increasingly erect barricades and fences around their territories to inhibit access. Gated communities will continue to spring up within many societies as elites seek to insulate themselves from domestic threats.”[1] Essentially, expect a continued move towards and internationalization of domestic police state measures to control populations.

The nature of totalitarianism is such that it is, “by nature (or rather by definition), a global project that cannot be fully accomplished in just one community or one country. Being fuelled by the need to suppress any alternative orders and ideas, it has no natural limits and is bound to aim at totally dominating everything and everyone.” David Lyon explained in Theorizing Surveillance, that, “The ultimate feature of the totalitarian domination is the absence of exit, which can be achieved temporarily by closing borders, but permanently only by a truly global reach that would render the very notion of exit meaningless. This in itself justifies questions about the totalitarian potential of globalization.” The author raises the important question, “Is abolition of borders intrinsically (morally) good, because they symbolize barriers that needlessly separate and exclude people, or are they potential lines of resistance, refuge and difference that may save us from the totalitarian abyss?” Further, “if globalization undermines the tested, state-based models of democracy, the world may be vulnerable to a global totalitarian etatization.”[2]

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Wednesday 02 September 2009

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Right-wing commentator Glenn Beck. (Photo: The New York Times)

    Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment - a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?

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Expressing an alternative view of reality was necessarily a secret pursuit until recent times. Only 227 years ago, in the apparently cultured and enlightened lands of Europe - Anna Göldi was executed for witchcraft in the village of Glarus, Switzerland. She was beheaded by the blade of a state-sanctioned executioner. This brutal killing represented the final chapter in a centuries long tale of deranged witch-hunts that beleaguered Europe for centuries.

In 1682, in Devon, England - Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards were tried for witchcraft and hanged at Exeter jail. The same year, Guenevere Damascus, her lover and their spiritual teacher, were accused of speaking in unknown languages, practicing knowledge beyond their natural abilities and acting in peculiar manners. They were burned at the stake. In 1684, Alice Molland was sent to the gallows at Exeter jail, becoming the last witch to be executed in England. In 1692, Salem, Massachusetts, 150 people were arrested and imprisoned on charges of witchcraft. 19 were hanged, one was crushed to death under heavy stones. At least 5 more perished in their prison cells.
Opposing official religious doctrine, on any spiritual matter or common natural law, and often simply just upsetting the wrong people, would see you branded a witch. A few allegations of supernatural powers, and in particular communication with spirits and animals, was usually sufficient to secure a guilty verdict. In every case I’ve looked through, the evidence against the accused was truly pitiful and in some instances quite non-existent, most data being either pure hearsay or entirely circumstantial.
So why the extraordinary and lethal hysteria? Where did it all begin?

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by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

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Global Research, August 11, 2009

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." Dwight David Eisenhower, "Military-Industrial Complex Speech," 1961, [1]

"My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington." Former SAIC manager, quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007[2]

"We make American military doctrine" Ed Soyster, MPRI[3]

The Myth of the Grand Chessboard: Geopolitics and Imperial Folie de Grandeur

In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.

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by Michel Chossudovsky

.

Global Research, July 26, 2009

The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic. Mike Wallace, CBS, 60 Minutes, November 4, 1979)

"The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children....

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By questioneveryprecept

The Fog Of Psychogenic Fugue

There are some that believe the earth underwent a catastrophic event 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. There is not much written evidence to support this claim–although there are a few lines and writings in ancient text that allude to a devastating event that altered the scale of human life on the earth. The Mahabharata and the Book Of Enoch mention some harrowing tales. Some revisionist historians, scientists and archaeologists have deduced that some earth-shattering event took place, some type of deluge or atomic detonation. Whatever it was left an indelible imprint on the human consciousness, a memory card of trauma inserted into our very DNA. Since then, humanity has been committed to a chaotic asylum of perpetual war, death and disease. Gaia’s psyche twisted into some madhouse realm of 20th century horror films narrated by Edgar Allan Poe and the score composed by Marilyn Manson.

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Good theatre is compelling beyond the artificial stage props, ostentatious costumes and dramatic flare. Moving dialogue and a gripping plot can lead the mind to blend the fiction into the neural canvas and recreate an entire new reality. Audience members most entranced can even be led to feel as if they and the production are one and the same.

The tears cried become their tears, abuse suffered by the protagonists is felt vicariously, and audience members draw inferences between certain characters and their own lives. When the emotional pandora is uncapped, it does not matter whether the production was real or not. What matters is that the performance held such a semblance of reality that it somehow ties into our personal experience.

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Image: Bible… by ~Perth-Fallen-Angel

By Camille Marino

6/18/09

There is an inherent danger in all religion which is the surrender of critical thought. It’s called “faith” — a concept bereft of logic or reason; perhaps an opiate for a painful reality; an idea so flawed that questioning it results in death in many corners of the world. Any and all religions that vest omniscience in a single individual — human or god — are dangerous and antithetical to common sense.

People do inexplicable things in the name of religion. Some hack away at the genitals of their newborn children in the name of faith. Some surrender their lives for a mythological deity and the promise of 72 virgins, as well as permission to get laid, in an afterlife. Some of the more bland adherents to sacred doctrine symbolically consume the body and blood of a christ. The licenses for genocide, slavery, racism and the wholesale slaughter of non-human individuals are all there in the bible. And inextricably woven into the fabric of every major religion are a patriarchal hierarchy and misogyny as virtue. It stands to reason that when frustrated patriarchs write the rules, women become the instruments of evil.

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by Chris Hedges

Global Research, June 16, 2009

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

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By questioneveryprecept

Dissolving The Straw (Wo)Man

There was an aphorism in the novel Atlas Shrugged that struck me as profound: “When a man declares “Who am I to know?” he is saying “Who am I to live?”

What sort of authority do I have to inquire, question, investigate? Who am I to challenge the prevailing opinions of our day? Who am I to doubt the sincerity of my would-be-rulers? How did I even get to the point of referring to servants of the “public good” as rulers? How did I lessen myself to such an extent that I find that the authority without is more comforting than the authority within? Who am I to be a moving, living, breathing, sentience being with the full capacity of thought and imagination? Who am I to rely on my ingenuity, strength, courage to go about creating that kind of world I imagine? Who I am to make mistakes and to fall into the well if the results are not favorable to the authority apparatus? Who am I to go outside of the decrees of the Uniformity League Of The World to find a code not recognized by the current operating system?

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By questioneveryprecept

Evaporating Culture

There is no requisite skill set for the community outside of the walls of culture. We can poke our head over the wall of separation from faux life and real experience and we’re already equipped with the language to understand the infinite spectrum. It’s not because there is some prefabricated jargon but rather that the language is revitalized when we come out of it, “it” being the sensory deprivation realm, and come into a territory where we rediscover our forgotten faculties.

We can get down to formulating our own content and finding a new originality in parts of us that felt bland and banal before. We’re like that old man finding a youthful swagger. It feels as if we’ve known this thing all along, that it had always been apart of ourselves but we locked it away in some appliance box and let it collect dust in the attic. We couldn’t do that with engineering and astrophysics. We couldn’t have a “lightbulb” experience and immediately hit the road to sound off about structural building collapse or nanoparticles. But we can with the felt presence of direct experience find the individual religion.

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Neil Kramer

In the territories of the visionary, the intellectual tools of the scholar are of little use. They cannot penetrate the membrane of the fractal stargate. Constructs of mind and self must be put to one side. Consciousness must be allowed to surrender itself back into merging with the sublime formlessness where all things exist at once. This is where the visionary seer (an impulse in all humans) becomes one with knowing.

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by Adrian Salbuchi

Global Research, May 8, 2009

A good doctor is one who will tell his patient what ails him, no matter how bad the news...  A good doctor begins by making a correct diagnosis of his patient's condition.  A bad doctor, however, either cannot make a proper diagnosis (because he lacks expertise) or, worst still, he hides the truth afrom his patient...  

When a dread disease patient is told what he is suffering from, before actually accepting the envitable he first goes through the stages of disbelief and denial.  There's disbelief when we hear the patient say "this is not right: the doctor's made a mistake!".   But when the dignosis of his illness is confirmed, then in dispair he goes info full denial saying "Impossible!  This can't be happening to me!!".  

A good doctor helps his patient weather this painful process, guiding him towards acceptance of his predicament.  Only then can the healing begin.     Something similar happens - albeit more abstractly -, when the People are hit by social turmoil as a consequence of severe crises arising from what Carl G. Jung called "epidemics of the mind and soul".

Below, we address some key issues that we feel reflect the fact that a cycle is coming to an increasingly abrupt end in the whole world, even though the global media may be looking the other way (i.e., hiding the truth and generating smoke screens), most politicians hardly understand what is going on (on account of their ignorance), the bulk of the population in all countries see and feel this but cannot rationalize what's happening (disbelief), and some intelectuals may actually understand what's going on and where we're being dragged, but find it too hard to accept (i.e., denial).

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David Barsamian
Information Clearing House
Mon, 04 May 2009 02:33 UTC

Excerpted from Class Warfare (1995)
David Barsamian: One of the heroes of the current right-wing revival... is Adam Smith. You've done some pretty impressive research on Smith that has excavated... a lot of information that's not coming out. You've often quoted him describing the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves and nothing for other people."
Noam Chomsky: I didn't do any research at all on Smith. I just read him. There's no research. Just read it. He's pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.
He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. That's the argument for them, because he thought that equality of condition (not just opportunity) is what you should be aiming at. It goes on and on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would call North-South policies. He was talking about England and India. He bitterly condemned the British experiments they were carrying out which were devastating India.
He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way states work. He pointed out that its totally senseless to talk about a nation and what we would nowadays call "national interests." He simply observed in passing, because it's so obvious, that in England, which is what he's discussing -- and it was the most democratic society of the day -- the principal architects of policy are the "merchants and manufacturers," and they make certain that their own interests are, in his words, "most peculiarly attended to," no matter what the effect on others, including the people of England who, he argued, suffered from their policies. He didn't have the data to prove it at the time, but he was probably right.

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by Richard C. Cook

Global Research, May 9, 2009

What impresses me in the current financial crisis is the near-total failure of so-called progressives to appreciate the magnitude of what is going on or the level of intelligence behind it. How many will say, for instance, that the crash was deliberately engineered by the creation, then destruction, of the investment bubbles of the last decade?

When the financial system creates bubbles it drives up the cost of assets far beyond their true value in producing or storing wealth. When the bubbles burst the value of the assets plummets. Those with ready cash then buy them up on the cheap. When the dust settles more wealth has been concentrated in fewer hands. The rich get richer, and ordinary people are left in a deeper condition of indebtedness, poverty, and pressure to perform to the liking of the financial masters.

Progressives think the system needs to be “reformed.” Maybe the banking system needs to be re-regulated or even nationalized. Maybe it should be possible for families facing loss of their homes to get a lower monthly payment from a bankruptcy court. Maybe the government instead of the private sector should administer student loans.

What we fail to acknowledge is that the system itself is totalitarian. This means that it is designed to exert total control over the lives of individuals. We are accustomed to use this label when thinking of anachronisms of history like communism or fascism. We do not understand that globalist finance capitalism and the government which protects, enables, or even regulates it are also totalitarian.

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