He came draped in gilded lies, A jester’s grin, a tyrant’s eyes, “I’ll build great walls to sterilize—” Just close your ears to the orphans’ cries.
He vowed to “save” the land from wasteful government hands, But then pillaged coffers, slashed vital social plans. The threads of a safety net frayed beneath his knife, While the impoverished starved and elders lost their life.
A nation’s tapestry, once tightly spun, Unraveled slow, then came undone— Not by blade, but from the hate he bred, “Sow suspicion,” the puppetmaster said.
He stoked fear with cunning guise, A flood of smoke to blind our eyes, Whispering, “Your neighbor’s not your kin— Fear the shade of their foreign skin.”
He cursed the poor, the brown, the displaced, their distressed cries, Voices drowned by his rhetoric of contempt and despise. But the throne he carved from deceit, mistrust, and falsehood Splintered to pieces where the people, arm in arm, stood.
False pillars built on weak and shifting sand Collapse hard in time’s unforgiving, clenched hand. In the dark, where democracies often fail, A flame refused to bend, to break, to grow pale.
For hearts still beat where justice plants its seeds— No autocratic clown outlives the reckoning of his deeds.
The . . . metamessage of our time is that the commodity form is natural and inescapable. Our lives can only be well lived (or lived at all) through the purchase of particular commodities. Thus our major existential interest consists of maneuvering for eligibility to buy such commodities in the market. Further, we have been taught that it is right and just—ordained by history, human nature, and God—that the means of life in all its forms be available only as commodities. . . . Americans live in an overcommodified world, with needs that are generated in the interests of the market and that can be met only through the market.
~ Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves:Walt Disney World and America
From the Amazonian tribe driven off its land by fossil fuel companies to the wage-enslaved city dweller dependent on mass-produced food and other commodities, no place on Earth has escaped the planet-wide reach of capitalist industrial civilization’s profit-extracting mechanisms. The oligarch’s of industry and banking shape public thought through an all-pervasive mass media monopoly, control legislation and regulation by pulling political purse-strings and commanding an army of lobbyists, sew death and mayhem with the global arms trade, sacrifice the next generation in resource wars, decimate ecosystems for short-term gain, manipulate and devalue currencies, create economic bubbles, and sell this entire vile process back to the masses as “progress” and “development” with measurements of inflated stock prices and skewed GDP figures. The untold human and environmental costs are now bursting at the seams with societal disintegration, epidemic mental illness, wide-scale resource depletion, industrial pollution and contamination, and the on-going collapse of the Earth’s biosphere.
If you’re wondering why there can never seem to be any significant action taken on climate change, don’t look for honest answers from those whose livelihood is tied to capitalism. If the true costs of the global industrial economy were calculated in terms of environmental damage, the ill-health effects on workers and the public, as well as the fraying of the Earth’s web of life, industries would find the costs too great to bear. The honest truth is that this ecocidal economic system would have to be dismantled for there to be any hope of humanity preserving a living planet and averting extinction.
“…big-time corporate capitalism is an omnicidal momentum. I mean, it just has one thing in mind, and it will destroy or weaken or co-opt anything in its way that is civic, that is democratic….corporations have been very clever A) in distracting people, especially young generation, with entertainment, with professional sports, turning them into spectators. Now you’ve got, you know, 24/7 entertainment. There’s no end to it. And they’ve also been very good in making people internalize a sense of powerlessness.” ~ Ralph Nader
Perhaps the three biggest crises facing civilization are unrestrained financialization of commerce and society, climate change, and peak oil (or peak net energy). Let’s take a quick look at how America is handling each of these crises:
Employing paid shills for the financial industry is now simply standard operating procedure in the U.$.A.:
…Consumer advocates and independent analysts do their best to weigh in as well, but they are outgunned. Meanwhile, consulting firms dedicated to playing matchmaker between corporations and hired experts have flourished in the new regulatory environment. Director Charles Ferguson, whose film Inside Job highlighted the role of sponsored professors in supporting the deregulatory policies that led to the financial meltdown in 2008, says the business of economic consulting firms that work to “source” academics for expert testimony and regulatory filings “has been going on for quite a while, and it’s now quite a large industry.”…
Of course anthropogenic climate change, the existential threat of modern times, would seem to be a catastrophe deserving of mankind’s attention, would it not? Well, as you can see, the capitalist only views it as a public relations war:
An extensive study into the financial networks that support groups denying the science behind climate change and opposing political action has found a vast, secretive web of think tanks and industry associations, bankrolled by conservative billionaires.
“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” study author Robert Brulle, who published his results in the journal Climatic Change, told the Guardian. “It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”
His work, which is focused on the United States, shows how a network of 91 think tanks and industry groups are primarily responsible for conservative opposition to climate policy. Almost 80 percent of these groups are registered as charitable organisations for tax purposes, and collectively received more than seven billion dollars between 2003 and 2010.
How about peak oil? Again, the energy industry has its PR machine in full swing touting America’s imminent energy independence along with many other myths, but commenter James of this blog cuts to the chase:
Now, which ponzi is most despicable, a religious or financial one? Both are based upon deceit and both serve primarily the enrichment of the scheme officialdom. One promises a payoff in eternal life while the other promises financial success. One examines your credit score while the other applies tick marks in you behavioral ledger of good and evil. Both systems of fleecing are based upon human fear and herd mentality. Society shuns the heretic of either ponzi and damnation awaits those that do not participate fully. Ponzis collapse when increasing numbers of fools, resources and energy can no longer be sucked into their cancerous growth schemes. The religious structures will be more enduring as they can always find plenty of poor dolts to give their last penny to gain a chance at the big after-life payoff. The financial schemers, faced now with meeting the absolutely unbelievable limits of growth will have to leave all those little nest eggs of promises, unhatched. The key is to convince the ponzi participants that the U.S. is the new Saudi Arabia, that fracking oil and natural gas is the future and we can get enough oil from shale to last a million years. “Just relax folks, you’re all gonna get your money back”. Not. What a miraculous world we live in.
As you can see, America is handling all three crises like a sleazy car salesman unloading a lot full of lemons.
And if anyone was spooked by the Snowden revelations of government spying, the implications of corporate espionage on social-change organizations that threaten to impede unfettered access to profits is truly terrifying.
Although I’m not a particularly religious person, all evidence does point to a civilization which has completely succumbed to the worship of Mammon:
…The fruits of such idolatry are clear: the injustice and unemployment and waste of human talents; the corruption of our political leadership and their collusion with immoral financial practices; the depredation and degradation of our natural environments and the exhaustion of our natural resources; the inevitable wars and other crises that arise from the systematic fostering of base human appetites and the refusal to compromise our ways of life, and pursue a more equitable sharing of the gifts bequeathed to us…
I would not blame anyone for wanting to seek comfort in a bottle or some other form of self-medication, but perhaps doing something more dramatic to escape this nightmarish reality of a thoroughly corrupted, money-worshipping society is in the cards. When your back is against the wall and you’ve lost faith in everything, then revolution is the antidote for the “pseudo-realities” that plague us.
“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” ~ Philip K. Dick
The specter of death, near-term extinction, haunts us as we silently endure the evil and decay all around us, going along just to get along in the belly of the American empire. One day pent-up anger and hunger will burst forth, pushing us into the streets. Blood and emotions will flow freely. Inept and crooked governments will fall. We’ll have nothing left to lose.
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 
