Psychopaths plotted, seizing the throne; Their hoarded wealth, seeds of chaos sown. The weak were trampled, left to bleed, As gluttonous wolves embraced their greed.
The law once penned in sacrosanct ink, Now torn asunder where jackals slink. The golden rule? A hollow lie— The weak obey, while the strong defy.
The elite took all, the frail took none— Fair justice fled beneath the sun. While beggars starved on crumbs of spite, The elite proclaimed, “This world is right.”
In scholarly halls where once we relied, The gears of progress ground, then died. Science censored, truth deleted; Hope’s last gasp, drowned and defeated.
The vultures circled, skies embroiled, Talons shredding poor souls who toiled. They traded mercy, dealt in strife, Gorged themselves with stolen life.
No court of truth, no scales held fair— Just iron fists and poisoned air. The serfs, like hares, fled tooth and claw; The lords carved flesh and filled their maw.
Screams silenced in the stifled air, While tyrants feasted without a care. Law of the jungle, a shriek of might— Survival’s cost? The death of light.
“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” ~ Trump
Who would have guessed that a reality TV “star”, con-artist, and political hack would be the one person to shake America’s institutions of government to their core? Then again, Hitler was a down-and-out artist before he became a dictator. Lots of people warned that this time with D.J. Trump would come even before he finagled his way into the White House. From his days of swindling hundreds, if not thousands, of small business contractors and workers to laundering money and defrauding the U.S. government, his tenure as president has been no less riddled with corruption, back-stabbing, lying, and cheating. Since Trump cannot retain power through the traditional means of tinpot dictators via military coup, he is using an army of lawyers who will question every mail-in ballot and use every legal maneuver in an attempt to render the 2020 election results null and void. This summer, Trump began a campaign to sabotage mail-in voting after falsely claiming it was fraught with fraud and then hiring one of his unscrupulous cronies, GOP Megadonor Louis DeJoy, to cripple the U.S. postal service. However, the GOP plan to destroy majority rule really kicked into gear with their ‘gerrymandering on steroids’ strategy which was hatched more than a decade ago when right-wing strategists concluded that taking over state legislatures would enable them to redraw districts and control the outcome of elections.
Over the last four years, Trump has amassed a laundry list of skuldugery such as abusing his high office to delegitimize any reporting critical of his administration by labeling it “fake news”, exacerbating an atmosphere of doubt, mistrust, and suspicion of the government by perpetuating numerous conspiracy theories, stoking racial tensions with incendiary rhetoric while ignoring the mounting anger over police brutality, perverting the rule of law by stacking the courts with unqualified GOP-friendly judges, installing a henchman named William Barr to run the DOJ and help give the president autocratic powers, and politicizing science by censoring government researchers and dismantling science-based health and safety protections. All of these tactics have been used by dictators of foreign countries to eliminate opposition leaders and control the population. Muzzling of scientists is a global problem that is getting worse. Trump has single handedly made the US a pariah on the world stage as he cozies up to dictators while belittling and undercutting traditional Western allies. In fact, America’s reputation in the world is the lowest it’s been since such surveys began two decades ago. There’s no hiding that Trump would love nothing more than to turn America into a Russian-style dictatorship where he could rule for life, rob the public purse at will, and kill dissidents with impunity.
Had Trump properly handled the pandemic that continues to upend the economy and ravage people’s lives, 90% of U.S. coronavirus pandemic fatalities could have been prevented. Life would be drastically different from what we are experiencing today. By January 2021, pandemic fatalities in the U.S. are projected to more than double from their current number of over 200,000. This will be Trump’s macabre achievement for his criminally negligent handling of this pandemic. He was able to do much more than when he proclaimed he could stand on 5th Avenue, shoot someone, and get away with it. In fact, due to his lack of leadership, downplaying of the virus, obfuscation of CDC reporting, and failure to enact a coherent national plan, he will have killed more Americans than whom died in World War II. By comparison, that’s twenty-five to fifty times the number of Americans who die on average in any given year from the flu. Trump may blame China, the WHO, Democrats, or anyone else for unleashing this plague, but it was his deliberate and willful abdication of his duty as president to protect public health and safety that has created his coronavirus killing fields. Who hasn’t heard the Bob Woodward tapes from early February 2020 of Trump explicitly saying that the virus is much more deadly than any strenuous flu and extremely contagious? All the while he has downplayed the danger to the public, even going so far as to say it was a “hoax” by the Democrats? To this very day, he perpetuates these lies while corralling his cult followers into close quarters for his self-aggrandizing MAGA rallies. His followers are oblivious to the fact that they serve as nothing more than disposable props at these grotesque events. He mocks masks, the most effectiive tool we have against the virus. He likes to claim that his China travel ban saved many lives but, like so many things he says, the opposite is true. His ban had many holes and actually may have worsened the outbreak in the United States. In addition, Trump’s downplaying of the virus has allowed it to fester in the U.S. and likely mutate into a more contagious strain; whether it transforms into something more deadly is all a matter of a genetic roll of the dice. Experts are fearing a double whammy from both the flu and the COVID-19 coronavirus this winter.
With historic megafires raging along the entire west coast in the new normal of inferno seasons, Trump tells climate scientists directly to their face that “it will get colder, just wait and see” and “I don’t think science knows about climate.” In the meantime, he’ll be spending millions shoring up his golf course properties from the rising seas. Over eight feet of sea level rise is already locked in from Antarctic ice melt alone, even if Paris climate agreements are fulfilled. As Biden says, Trump is a “climate arsonist.” At this point, I cannot help but view anyone who supports this catastrophic president as anything other than a traitor to their own country.
At a time where compassion and honesty are most in need as our civilization runs headlong into the limits of a finite planet, the world appears to be going in the opposite direction of more magical thinking, selfish nationalism, and diminishing human rights. The destruction Trump has done is real and four more years of him will guarantee further damage for decades to come. For instance, many of the dozens of environmental regulations that Trump has rolled back will likely be permanently cemented into place by Trump-appointed judges. These rollbacks are already causing countless premature deaths in the U.S. The amount of carbon his legislative actions will have put into the atmosphere by 2035 is estimated to be the equivalent of Russia’s annual emissions. The EPA will become a shell of its former self, having been completely usurped by corporate interests to pollute without restraint. Other countries are already following America’s lead of completely disregarding the threat of anthropogenic climate disruption. Any semblance of democracy will be shredded as Trump’s swamp of greed, corruption, and white nationalism runs amok. Conspiracy theories will run rampant as daily life becomes ever more precarious in a climate of fear and science becomes completely subjugated by economy, polity, and religion. There is a prescient quote from Carl Sagan that warns of the dystopian world we are well on our way to creating:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” ~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
I shudder to think of the hellscape that awaits us with another term of Trumpian chaos. There are only two choices before us in our American corporatocracy, so let’s be pragmatic about our dire situation. I’ll take take Biden, the corporate friendly centrist who has a plan to contain the virus and a two trillion dollar climate change strategy, any day of the week over Trump, a corporate fascist masquerading as a populist who never had any national plan to effectively contain the virus and believes climate change is a hoax. Of course there are many other issues that make Biden the sane choice between the two. It’s comical how the Right-wing propaganda machine has painted Biden as some sort of bumbling socialist puppet, especially when you consider that Wall Street’s own analysts say that a Biden administration would be neutral to positive for them. Under Trump’s direction, the very wealthy were given big tax breaks that allowed them to pay less than the working class for the first time in history. And due to Trump’s gross mismanagement, our government’s budget deficit will soon exceed the size of the nation’s entire economy for the first time since World War II. A growing body count of dead Americans that rivals the biggest war fatalities in our nation’s history is happening as a result of Trump’s sociopathic response. Trump’s latest hairbrained scheme is to allow the American population to build herd immunity to the novel virus. Never mind that in the process we would incur fatalities in the millions and collapse the healthcare system which would raise the death toll even higher, or the fact that scientists doubt the population would even ever be able to reach such levels of immunity. Someone, please tell me how Trump has made America great again.
The following is a review of the documentary “The War You Don’t See” which I highly recommend seeing if you can find a copy. I originally wrote this for Media Roots, but never finished it. I have reworked it with edit suggestions by Abbey Martin. “The War You Don’t See” is not available in America. It was originally scheduled to debut at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico but was mysteriously cancelled at the last minute.
Review of John Pilger’s
“The War You Don’t See”
John Pilger’s powerful documentary, “The War You Don’t See,” explores what the media’s role has been during today’s rapacious wars, like those of Iraq and Afghanistan. What Pilger reveals is both frightening and sad: the so-called “Fourth Estate” of the media, once thought of as a bulwark against corruption in government and big business, is now no more than a cheerleader and mouthpiece for what has become the Corporate State.
Interviewing with western news reporters, Pilger questions the efficacy of today’s media in living up to its duty of critically analyzing the government narrative while providing unbiased information to the public. In response, he is met with exasperated replies like that of David Manion, editor in Chief of ITV news, who says, “I don’t think you are suggesting that we [the media] should completely dismiss the words of arguably the second most powerful man in the western world [Dick Cheney].”
Manion completely abdicates his responsibility of fact-finding when he states, “…we allowed the viewers to make up their [own] minds as to whether this[Cheney] was a man telling the truth or not.” With responses such as these, it becomes apparent that the Fourth Estate has been rendered a neutered servant to government/corporate power and agendas.
Major media outlets have simply become unthinking stenographers of the ‘official word’, not daring to ask substantive or probing questions about government/social policy. Television, print, and radio have been reduced to hollow conduits through which runs the government/corporate PR machinery, continuously pumping out lies and spin in order to generate legitimacy for its criminal acts. Bradley Manning exposed the inner workings of this deception with his access to U.S. state department cables from embassies and consulates around the world:
The non-PR-versions of world events and crises …like everything from the buildup to the Iraq War during Powell, to the actual content of “aid packages”: for instance, PR that the US is sending aid to Pakistan includes funding for water/food/clothing… that much is true, it includes that, but the other 85% of it is for F-16 fighters and munitions to aid in the Afghanistan effort, so the US can call in Pakistanis to do aerial bombing instead of Americans potentially killing civilians and creating a PR crisis.
Edward Bernays, who coined the term ‘public relations’ and pioneered modern propaganda as a form of psychological warfare, declared once that “the intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” The ability of the U.S. to wield ‘soft power’ by way of effective propaganda techniques is ever-evolving, and the ability of the Corporate State to frame the public debate and spread the Big Lie through its control of the nation’s digital media stream has consequently dumbed down the public discourse on important subjects.
In speaking about the advancement of nonstop digital news feeds, British reporter Rageh Omar explains that “twenty-four hour news is the easiest to manipulate, because it’s a giant echo-chamber.” Constant 24/7 repetition of the Big Lie all across the nation’s digital media stream ensures the successful brainwashing of the masses.
I remember when I was twenty years outside the United States, I moved back to New York City, and I was overwhelmed by the electronic hallucinations that bombarded me in my public and private space. And so, I retreated into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I could contemplate objects or paintings that didn’t move. You need to spend significant amounts of time with print material to grasp complex thoughts, and that requires silence. It requires an absence of noise. It requires an absence of moving images. And the less we do that, the more — the shallower or the more manipulated we become.
Investigative journalist Mark Curtis explains that the relationships western governments cultivate with oppressive foreign regimes are accompanied by a sophisticated PR operation touting foreign policy objectives of “promoting democracy, human rights, and economic development.” However, these fake altruistic claims hide an insidious agenda. Actual government planning files clearly state the intended policy is based on “controlling oil resources, creating an international economy that works in the interests of corporations, and maintaining their power status.” If one looks at the current influx of multinational oil firms into Iraq, the intentions of military intervention are made obvious.
When investigative journalists report the truth, such as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Charles J. Hanley who personally went to Iraq in 2003 and found no WMD after visiting every site named by Bush officials, they are simply blackballed and shut out of the mainstream media.
Of particular concern is the symbiotic relationship between the military industrial complex, driven by the profit-seeking objectives of corporations, and the major news conglomerates which, if not directly owned by military weapons manufacturers, receive advertising dollars from them. This intertwined relationship has been called the Military-Industrial-Media Complex. For instance, GE happens to be one of the largest defense contractors in the world and owns NBC. Another example is Lockheed Martin, which spends large sums of money advertising on CNN.
In his book War made Easy, Normon Solomon explained that “a military-industrial-media complex … now extends to much of corporate media. … Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links — financial and social— with the military industry and Washington’s foreign policy establishment.”
Pilger adeptly illustrates this perverse alliance with a string of TV clips in which news commentators are seen gushing and fawning over the extreme efficiency and performance of various industrial-killing weaponry. This groveling self-worship within the military-media complex is especially disturbing when recalling the images shown earlier in the film of children’s limp bodies being pulled out of rubble from Afghan villages obliterated by hi-tech armaments. With the ongoing censorship of such massacres and the sanitizing of western news reporting, Americans have become desensitized and normalized to war. The fact that over a million Iraqis have been snuffed out is simply not reported in the MSM (mainstream media), nor the fact that Iraq’s infrastructure remains crumbling and destroyed from the invasion.
Professor Melvin Goodman, former CIA analyst, explains that “pentagon officials have contracts with news organizations in terms of how to manipulate the news” as well as “pentagon officials involved in press releases to the media in which intelligence is used to manipulate public opinion (a violation of the charter of any intelligence organization).” Goodman claims that 80-90% of what you hear and read is ‘officially inspired’, meaning influenced by the ‘official’ narrative of the government. With 90% of the media in the hands of six corporations, can there be any doubt that the majority of news emanating from the self-serving interests of the corporatocracy’s military-media complex is all-pervasive. The dawning of the twentieth century has seen propaganda from the Corporate State taking on a truly global initiative. There also exists a revolving door between top military brass and defense contractors, making conflicts of interest inevitable and systemic. The degree to which utter moral decay and corruption has overtaken the American Empire is emphasized in an interview Pilger conducts with Julian Assange, whose character assassination by the U.S. government is currently playing out in the news:
Assange: Looking at the enormous quantity and diversity of these military and intelligence insider documents… what I see is a vast, sprawling estate — what we would traditionally call the military intelligence complex or military industrial complex. And that this sprawling industrial estate is growing, becoming more and more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled.
This is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interests by thousands and thousand of players all working together and against each other to produce an end result which is Iraq and Afghanistan and Columbia… and keeping that going…
We often deal with tax havens and people hiding assets and transferring money through off-shore tax havens. So I can see some really quite remarkable similarities. Guantanamo is used for laundering people to an off-shore haven, which doesn’t follow the rule of law. Similarly, Iraq and Afghanistan and Columbia are used to wash money out of the U.S. tax base and back in.
Pilger: Arms Companies
Assange: Arms Companies… yep.
Pilger: What you’re saying is money and money-making is at the center of modern war, and it’s almost self-perpetuating.
Assange: Yes, and it’s becoming worse.
The insanity behind America’s over-extended and bloated military war machine is highlighted when Pilger’s asks why the U.S. is in such a permanent state of war, when there is, in reality, no other country strong enough to stand up to it. The answer given by a government official to justify America’s never-ending militarism is “asymmetrical threats which transcend all geographic boundaries.” In other words, we wage war with an ever-shifting, nebulous enemy whom the Corporate State continually redefines. In reality, we create our own enemies to suit the interests of the elite who hold power. As the saying goes, state-sponsored war is simply terrorism with a bigger budget. The ‘War on Terror’ begets more of the same; it’s a self-perpetuating process. To quote Chalmer’s Johnson, “‘Blowback’ does not mean just revenge but rather retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has carried out abroad that it kept totally secret from the American public (even though such acts are seldom secret among the people on the receiving end).”
Carne Ross was the only official who expresses a higher form of moral consciousness in Pilger’s film when he states that he feels “actual shame running through [his] body” for what he did when working for the British government. He says, “…we should all be accountable to each other. That’s the only way to have a civilized society, with some kind of transparency and accountability with each other… with people holding others accountable for what they do, and that applies to journalists as much as it applies to anybody.”
In a world where resources are dwindling and the environment is showing clear signs of collapse, such a nihilistic war-mongering economy can only pull civilization down with it into chaos and barbarism. The remaining hope for mankind to survive the future and avoid the catastrophes of war and terrorism is for his ethical sense to evolve beyond what his scientific and technological capabilities have wrought. The war you don’t see is the true destructive and evil face of war whitewashed by a propaganda machine operating 24/7 to control and steer public sentiment in favor of underlying corporate interests. As Abraham Lincoln said, “He who molds the public sentiment… makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.” Pilger’s documentary is one of the most important to have come out in the last decade and is essential viewing for those who really want to better understand the machinations of the corporate-controlled political economy dominating our society.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
