You better believe that the financial elite who run this country do have OWS and any other social movement under 24/7 surveillance. Anything that strives to change the status quo of neoliberal capitalism will be undermined and crushed, whether through covert actions or co-optive schemes. Social justice, the environment, and the very habitability of planet earth are not on the agenda of the 1%’ers.
Now we have official confirmation that this indeed was and is the case. Surprise, surprise:
Newly obtained documents confirm that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was monitoring peaceful protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement before the first OWS demonstrations even began…
…The list of documents, says Verheyden-Hilliard, “is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement.”
“These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” she writes. “These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.
What more proof do you need that we live under a corporatocracy? Since solving dire problems like climate change would require a complete dismantling of the current capitalist system, i.e. an economic system driven by the profit motive is incompatible with ecological sustainability, we can see why the financial and corporate elite would be hostile to a grass-roots movement which seeks social and environmental justice. Such issues don’t compute with the bottom line of corporations or our war-based economy. Interestingly, the only real attention that was given to OWS by those in power was on how their discontent could be co-opted by the status quo:
As I [Glenn Greenwald] noted several weeks ago, White House-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicitly clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign, and that’s what “Occupy Congress” is designed to achieve.
Of course the Tea Party was never really a threat to Corporate America because it’s what is termed an astroturf group, as was first reported a few years ago by Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham:
Do you think these free-market idealogues of capitalism are going to clean up the mess left in the wake of climate chaos? Hell no. The unwashed masses are on their own. As long as the elite have the money to insulate themselves from the ravages of our fossil fuel-dependent economy, they will have no real concern for the catastrophes that lie ahead. A case in point is the recent aftermath of the Hurricane Sandy Frankenstorm:
Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its $125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy. […]
Earlier this week, AFP, which is chaired by Koch and believed to be financed by several other plutocrats from the New York City region, released a letter warning members of Congress not to vote for the proposed federal aid package for victims of the storm that swept New Jersey, New York City and much of the surrounding area in October. An announcement on the group’s website says that the vote next week for the Sandy aid package will be a “key vote” — meaning senators who support sending money for reconstruction could face an avalanche of attack ads in their next election. Already, opposition to the bill is growing, although it passed one procedural hurdle last [Friday] night. […]
Koch’s top deputy in New Jersey, a surly gentleman named Steve Lonegan, who heads the local AFP state chapter, called the aid package a “disgrace.” “This is not a federal government responsibility,” Lonegan told reporters. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.
‘Change’ will always be an empty campaign slogan when you have a federal government which:
…wastes resources on a multi-trillion dollar Security and Surveillance apparatus to spy on its entire citizenry, in particular OWS protestors, minorities, and government critics/whistleblowers.
…pumps more than half of every tax dollar into the military industrial complex and its war-profiteering cronies who perpetuate our war economy.
…is not alarmed that 50 million Americans are dependent on food stamps while U.S. corporations hoard $22 trillion in secret offshore bank accounts.
…thinks that tax revenues can be maintained while its manufacturing base is off-shored to exploit cheap foreign labor pools.
…uses the growth in corporate profits as the only yardstick for societal well-being.
…marginalizes and prevents the participation of third party candidates within our two-party oligopoly.
…believes that the system described above should be bailed out for its criminal excesses from the billfold of a now beaten-down middle class.
New ‘smile guards’ will soon become mandatory in the work environment of the corporate state:
Wrapping your head around the seemingly unstoppable upward march of CO2 emissions is like trying to comprehend all those zeros in the expanding global debt bubble; both are so far beyond human scale that people cannot put them into a frame of reference or perspective. They have taken on a life of their own, a force of nature that defies all attempts to control and subdue them. Brian Merchant takes a stab at trying to frame the CO2 numbers behind industrial civilization’s conundrum of catastrophic climate change:
And 2012 is on track for another 2.6 percent increase. Why can’t we stop it? Perhaps the problem is structural and embedded in our economic system.
In a recent interview, dissident Julian Assange commented on the degree of intertwinement between government and corporations, i.e. fascism or more aptly called inverted totalitarianism in our times. Regulatory capture, the revolving corporate/government door, and K Street lobbying(legalized bribery) are examples of the monied interest$ of capitali$m having taken over government.
There’s not a barrier anymore between corporate surveillance, on the one hand, and government surveillance, on the other. You know, Facebook is based—has its servers based in the United States. Gmail, as General Petraeus found out, has its servers based in the United States. And the interplay between U.S. intelligence agencies and other Western intelligence agencies and any intelligence agencies that can hack this is fluid. So, we’re in a—if we look back to what’s a earlier example of the worst penetration by an intelligence apparatus of a society, which is perhaps East Germany, where up to 10 percent of people over their lifetime had been an informer at one stage or another, in Iceland we have 88 percent penetration of Iceland by Facebook. Eighty-eight percent of people are there on Facebook informing on their friends and their movements and the nature of their relationships—and for free. They’re not even being paid money. They’re not even being directly coerced to do it. They’re doing it for social credits to avoid the feeling of exclusion. But people should understand what is really going on. I don’t believe people are doing this or would do it if they truly understood what was going on, that they are doing hundreds of billions of hours of free work for the Central Intelligence Agency, for the FBI, and for all allied agencies and all countries that can ask for favors to get hold of that information.
William Binney, the former chief of research, the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence division, describes this situation thatwe are in now as “turnkey totalitarianism,” that the whole system of totalitarianism has been built—the car, the engine has been built—and it’s just a matter of turning the key. And actually, when we look to see some of the crackdowns on WikiLeaks and the grand jury process and targeted assassinations and so on, actually it’s arguable that key has already been partly turned. The assassinations that occur extrajudicially, the renditions that occur, they don’t occur in isolation. They occur as a result of the information that has been sucked in through this giant signals interception machinery.
Corporations are the ultimate expression of capitalism. Libertarians decry that what we have is not capitalism, but a corrupted form of it, aka crony capitalism. The opposite is true – unfettered, unregulated capitalism is the purest form of this profit-driven system where economic activity is structured around the accumulation of capital. This is what we get when economic power(money) inevitably usurps all branches of government. Corporate greenwashing, carbon credit schemes, privatization of the commons, and externalizing environmental costs are examples of capitalism’s incompatibility with sustainability and its inability to deal with the degradation of the planet. Corporate power rules the world and it’s what is destroying the planet:
Ecocide is permitted (as genocide was in Nazi Germany) by the government and, by dint of the global reach of modern-day transnational business, every government in the world. Corporate ecocide has now reached a point where we stand on the brink of collapse of our ecosystems, triggering the death of many millions in the face of human aggravated cataclysmic tragedies. Over the passage of time, tyranny revisits. Tyranny is the cruel, unacceptable, or arbitrary use of power that is oblivious to consequence. Whilst the use of coal stations may not be deemed an intentional cruelty, it is certainly an unacceptable use of corporate power. Our governments collude by encouraging excess emissions, contrary to their UNFCCC commitment to stabilize “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”60 years ago the tyranny was Nazism. Today it is pursuit of profit without moral compass or responsibility.
…There are several points to make in response to the belief that capitalism is compatible with a flourishing environment. Firstly, environmental activism can’t alter capitalism’s integral growth dynamic, it’s “grow or die” impulse, as the social ecologist Murray Bookchin put it. As a result the best environmentalism can do is ameliorate the worst effects. “Things getting worse at a slower rate”, is how the late environmental activist, Donella Meadows, described the situation.
Secondly, in the low or no growth world we are entering, environmental priorities are being sacrificed to meet the short-term need to revive growth. “We can’t be ambivalent about growth,” is how the UK government’s “planning” minister, Greg Clark, justified reducing regulations to make it much easier to approve building development in the countryside.
Thirdly, many polluting practices in western countries that have become culturally unacceptable have been exported to poorer countries, where people have less power to make their objections count.
Lastly, the experience of the 21st century has shown that when environmental activism directly confronts huge capitalist industries like oil, automobiles and mining, it does not win. The 1987 Montreal Protocol was the last successful international agreement to change capitalist behaviour. The protocol called for strict restrictions on chemicals that deplete the ozone layer (chlorofluorcarbons) and the results have been impressive. But, says Schweickart, the industries affected had substitutes to hand, and the protocol “should not lull us into thinking capitalism can accommodate all sensible environmental solutions.”…
…The consequence of the conflict between environmental sanity and profit has been that many capitalist countries – most notably the US – have been unable to change course to ameliorate climate change. Not only this, a political culture has developed that denies the existence of climate change even when its effects become harder and harder to ignore.
Of course the prospects of thinking outside-of-the-box on economic and foreign policy issues has always been heresy. As long as we think we can fix the ecological problem with the same tools that caused the problem, we can expect the Eco-Apocalypse, a tragedy of the commons on a global scale, to unfold as predicted:
Zizek:…………… the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.
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.
…pumps more than half of every tax dollar into the military industrial complex and its war-profiteering cronies who perpetuate our war economy.
