Oui wrote a short post today titled AltRight and Return of Hate and Witch-hunt. It mostly consisted of links to articles about the loathsome Roy Cohn, master fixer to the powers-that-be no matter what their legal status…which was usually guilty both legally and morally.
One phrase in a quoted link caught my attention.
The sleaze of Roy Cohn was no secret. Why ignore it? Why excuse it? The only important questions forced on us by these books have nothing to do with Roy Cohn, but everything to do with judges and lawyers and publishers and writers and TV stars and politicians and developers-the wealthy and the powerful people who for many years ate Roy Cohn’s shit with a grin.
That got me to thinking.
Why indeed?
My answer is below.
Read on.
Why?
The answer is very simple.
The real “American Dream” is…and has always been…a whitewash job on an American Nightmare. It is the flip side of our shining coins, the apparently high-minded Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Start with the phrase “all men are created equal”…written by a group of wealthy and powerful, middle-aged white men who had absolutely no intent whatsoever of letting the unwashed masses into their little club, let alone people of other races…and work your way down into the sewer that is now Washington DC for your answer.
This is all…finally…coming to a head, and we have Donald Trump to thank for it. A minor member of the trillion dollar hustle club, he ratted them all out in terms that even the stupidest among us could understand. Is he some kind of hero? No, more of an anti-hero, someone so flawed personally and mentally that he couldn’t keep his trap shut about what was going on because his lust for ultimate power wouldn’t let him do so.
The universe works in strange and miraculous ways.
Ain’t it the truth!
For almost 250 years this whitewash has held in the minds of most Americans…the ones who were granted the “privilege” of believing it by the color of their skins. Never mind the conclusive evidence that almost everyone of middle or lower class roots who ascended into the ruling class has done so by the use of vicious, morally if not legally criminal tactics. A cursory look at the actions and beliefs of the robber barons of the late 19th century and the political and industrial giants of the 20th century is all you need to know on that account. Cheat and win was their basic tactic, and it worked extraordinarily well. However, the educational and media systems did such a good job of brainwashing the population that…until now, quite possibly…there has never, ever arisen a majority of people in this country who truly understood that hustle, let alone were willing to take the potentially mortal chance of actually doing something about it.
And so we rolled along, blessed by a massive, almost totally unsettled country with natural resources beyond the dreams of our founding hustlers…errrr, ahhhh…fathers. We had so many resources that we could afford wave after wave of low-wage immigrants and bless them with living conditions that were better than those that they had fled. We could even let the following generations of immigrants take over the low wage burdens, bumping many of the previous immigrants and their children up into a complacent middle class.
The decade or so following WWII was the peak of this action. The U.S. was the most powerful, wealthiest country ever known, able to dictate terms to every other nation in the world relatively unchallenged. But then it all began to fall apart. The lower classes got restive. “When do we get a chance to move up!!!???” they clamored. Only there was no more headroom to allow them to move up. Stasis had set in. We were full up. “No more rooms. Sorry. Go fuck yourselves. We’ll give you condoms so you don’t overbreed.”
Plus the other areas of the world…once they recovered from the shock of that massive war…began to say the same thing. “When will it be our turn in the catbird seat?” Successful wars of liberation were followed by “Yankee Go Home!!!” movements of all kinds. Our dominance was enforced in the post-war years by many smaller overt and covert wars waged to maintain the economic imperialist position that allowed the U.S. and its satrap-like allies to continue to rule the world economically.
And on and on it went. Fill in the blanks.
The cultural revolution of the late ’60s, massively opposed and eventually stymied by the government.
The Civil Rights movement, surrendered to in name only by that government as it sought to find other, more covert means to ensure an ongoing, skin-marked pool of cheap labor.
The rise of the covert forces as the secret bosses of the whole scene, controlling the media in order to control the masses and the government.
The rise of the corporate classes as total economic controllers of the government. “You don’t play ball; we won’t give you enough money to run your campaigns in our hugely expensive, totally controlled media.” End of story.
And then came the “breakthrough”…the single most important occurrence of the last 70+ years, the digital information revolution.
This one caught the ruling classes totally by surprise. The more that they sought to control it, the faster it grew. When they thought that they finally had a handle on it…cooperation from the tech giants in massive surveillance systems aimed at limiting dissent…independent groups like Wikileaks started poking holes in that control system and successfully publicizing them…holes that are still unable to be patched. It was as if a million million Berrigan brothers had descended upon the secrets of the government and let the people know just how badly they were being fooled.
And now?
Here’s what one brilliant man has to say about what is happening. From Counterpunch:
Fake News: the Unravelling of US Empire From Within
by John McMurtry
Setting the Stage of the Press-President War
US ruling ideology and Washington power have become unstuck as never before. A war of opposing certitudes and denunciations is waged day to day between the long-ruling US corporate media and the White House. Both continuously proclaim ringing recriminations of the other’s `fake news’. Over months they both portray each other as malevolent liars.
US bully pulpits are now beyond show disagreements and successful media inquisitions of the past. Slanderous accusations long confined to vilifying the designated Enemy have crept into accusations of the President himself. `The Russians are coming’ is returning as the final recourse of smear to stop deviations from the global program of hugely profitable enemy hate and perpetual preparations for foreign war.
The ruling big lies of the US money party and corporate globalization have divided into opposing camps. The Press and the President denounce each other non-stop on the public stage, while US dark state agents take sides behind the scenes.
Fake news is the medium of battle.
Tracking the Real Fake News Built into Corporate Globalization
Beneath the civil war of official narratives, cognitive space opens for truth long suffocated by `the Washington Consensus’. Even the US-led G-20 has recently agreed not to automatically condemn `protectionism’ as an economic evil. The battle slogan of transnational corporate rule over 30 years has been quietly withdrawn on the global stage.
Is the big lie of `free trade’ finally coming to ground? It has long led the hollowing out of societies and life support systems across the world in a false mass promotion as “freedom and prosperity for all”. In fact beneath the pervasive fake news, a closed-door transnational corporate command system forces all enterprises across borders into a carbon-multiplying trade regime with thousands of rules to protect the transnational corporate looting and ruin of home economies and environments as the only rights enforced.
Propagandist names and fake freedoms are proclaimed everywhere to conceal the reality. The corporate-investor regime has stripped out almost all evolved protections of workers, ecologies and social infrastructures. Non-stop liquidations and roboticizations of local jobs and enterprises are reversed in meaning to `jobs, jobs, jobs’ and `higher living standards’, the very opposite of the facts. Destabilization and bombing wars attack resource-rich and air-defenceless societies outside the circle of treaty subjugation.
—snip—
The consequences covered over by pervasively false cover stories are speeded-up ecocidal extractions, permanent disemployments, and wastes haemorrhaging into cumulatively more polluted oceans, air, atmosphere and life habitats. Corporate-state solutions of carbon markets for pollution rights have nowhere reduced any of these life-and-death crises, but only further and selectively enriched transnational corporations.
—snip—
Trump’s rogue elephant charge on Washington-led lies, war, and dispossession of the working class is no solution to life-blind corporate globalization. Trump in office is a US nationalist oligarch commanding policies even more blindly rapacious in despoliation of the environment and transferring far more public wealth to the rich.
The common ground of all our lives, collective life capital, does not exist for any government in `the free world’ or any policy of `globalization’. The lies that must be promulgated to advance the private corporate agenda are built into its transnational command system from the beginning.
—snip—
It goes on. Read it in its entirety. You will understand more than when you started. Bet on it.
For-profit private corporations are the ever more empowered legal vehicles of this transnational system which is set to select for systematic self-maximization of the rich by all market, state and war means that can be constructed to enable it, starting with the US Constitution (as explained above). This set-point is built into the legislative, judicial and executive branches so that today the system outcome is a constitutionally ordered money-party control of all three branches of government as well as the funding systems of social sciences and philosophy.
Fake news in the widest sense provides a continuous cover story to mask and justify the underlying program which is not seen – the money-war party’s limitless take from life within and without the US that depends on a designated Enemy as perennial pretext to strip the US and global commonwealth against effective opposition or change.
What’s going to happen next? If of course we don’t all fry or drown first?
More of the same until it breaks down of its own moral and tactical faults. And then of course, something else will happen.
Bet on that as well.
What, exactly?
Beyond my pay grade.
Sorry.
Martin Luther King Jr.-The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Yup.
In minuscule but readily apparent increments, it must be said. From whirling, molten planet to human beings and beyond.
Evolution.
The life of Life.
Watch.
Something will happen.
Sooner rather than later, it’s looking to me.
Sooner rather than later.
Watch.
AG