Perhaps a global political apocalypse has already arrived.
Activists and dissidents should understand that evil forces and tyrannical governments have evolved. Just as human knowledge and science expand, so do the strategies and instruments used by rulers, elites and plutocrats. By learning from history and using new technology they have smarter tools of tyranny. The best ones prevent uprisings, revolutions and political reforms. Rather than violently destroy rebellious movements, they let them survive as marginalized and ineffective efforts that divert and sap the energy of nonconformist and rebellious thinkers. Real revolution remains an energy-draining dream, as evil forces thrive.
Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections. The toughest lesson is that ALL elections are distractions. Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. Few Americans accept that their government has become a two-party plutocracy run by a rich and powerful ruling class. The steady erosion of the rule of law is masked by everyday consumer freedoms. Because people want to be happy and hopeful, we have an epidemic of denial, especially in the present presidential campaign. But to believe that any change-selling politician or shift in party control will overturn the ruling class is the epitome of self-delusion and false hope. In the end, such wishful thinking perpetuates plutocracy. Proof is that plutocracy has flourished despite repeated change agents, promises of reform and partisan shifts.
The tools of real rebellion are weak. Activists and dissidents look back and see successful rebellions and revolutions and think that when today’s victims of tyranny experience enough pain and see enough political stink they too will revolt. This is wrong. They think that the Internet spreads information and inspiration to the masses, motivating them to revolt. This is wrong. They await catastrophic economic or environmental collapse to spur rebellion. This too is wrong.
Why are these beliefs wrong? Power elites have an arsenal of weapons to control and manipulate social, political and economic systems globally: corruption of public officials that make elections a sham; corporate mainstream media that turn news into propaganda; manipulation of financial markets that create fear for the public and profits for the privileged; false free trade globalization that destroys the middle class; rising economic inequality that keep the masses time-poor and financially insecure; intense marketing of pharmaceuticals that keep people passive; and addictive consumerism, entertainment and gambling that keep people distracted and pacified.
The biggest challenge for dissidents and rebels is to avoid feel-good therapeutic activism having virtually no chance of removing evil and tyranny. Idealism without practicality tactics without lofty goals, and symbolic protests pose no threat to power elites. Anger and outrage require great strategic thinking from leaders seeking revolution, not mere change. And social entrepreneurs that use business and management skills to tackle genuine social problems do nothing to achieve political reforms. To the extent they achieve results they end up removing interest in overthrowing political establishments that have allowed the problems to fester.
What is the new tool of tyranny? Technological connectivity achieved through advanced communications and computer systems, especially the rise of wireless connectivity. The global message to the masses is simple: Buy electronic products to stay plugged in. Connectivity may give pleasure, but it gives even more power to elites, rulers and plutocrats. It allows them to coordinate their efforts through invisible cabals, to closely monitor everything that ordinary people and dissidents do, and to cooperatively and clandestinely adjust social, financial and political systems to maintain stability and dominance.
In this dystopian world all systems are integrated to serve upper class elites and the corporate state, not ordinary people. When ordinary people spend their money to be more shackled to connectivity products, they become unwitting victims of largely invisible governmental and corporate oppressive forces. They are oblivious that their technological seduction exacerbates their political and economic exploitation. Though some 70 percent believe the country is on the wrong track, they fail to see the deeper causes of the trend. And if Americans were really happy and content with their consumer culture, then why are they stuffing themselves with so many antidepressants, sleeping pills and totally unhealthy foods? In truth, the vast majority of people are in denial about the rotten system they are trapped in (aka The Matrix). They are manipulated to keep hope alive through voting, despite the inability of past elections to stop the slide into economic serfdom.
Increasingly, the little-discussed phenomenon of economic apartheid ensures that elites live their lavish lives safely in physically separated ways. Concurrently, economic inequality rises, as the rich extract unusually high fractions of global wealth. When the rich get richer, the powerful get stronger. Does some economic prosperity trickles down to the poorest people? Perversely, the middle class is moved into the lower class. In this new physics of evil, wealth transfer is not from the rich to the poor, but from the middle class in wealthier countries to the poor in developing nations, where a few new billionaires join the global plutocracy.
Some data on economic inequality: The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005, while middle class income remained flat over the last 4 decades. The richest 0.01 percent of earners made 5.1 percent of all income in 2005, up more than 300 percent from just 1.2 percent in 1960. Bad economic times like the present just exacerbate inequality. Even as most Wall Street companies lost billions in the sub-prime mortgage debacle after they had already made billions, they gave obscene bonuses to their employees: the average topped $180,000 for 2007, tripling the $61,000 in 2002. Scholars used to predict that high levels of economic inequality like we have today would lead to rebellion. But there are now insufficient tools and paths for rebellion, because the plutocracy has eliminated them. Instead, citizens are offered elections whose outcomes can be controlled and subverted by the ruling class.
The New World Order is getting what it wants: a stable two-class system, with the lower class serving the elitist upper class. The paradox is that along with rising economic inequality and apartheid is mounting consumerism and materialism that is used to pacify, distract and control the masses. That’s where easy credit and cheap products from low-wage nations are critical. The poor can have cell phones, 24-7 Internet access and increasingly cars, while the bejeweled upper class travel in private jets and yachts, vacation on private islands, and have several gated mansions maintained by servants and guarded by private police. We have a technologically advanced form of medieval society. It is working in the US and China and most other places. Elections just mask economic tyranny and slavery.
The ruling class knows how to maintain stability. Keep the masses distracted, fearful, brainwashed, insecure, and dependent on government and business sectors for survival. Train people to see themselves as relatively free consumers. Maintain the myth that ordinary people can become wealthy and join the ruling class, which theoretically is not impossible, but of no statistical significance for the masses.
There are no easy paths to restore power to the people. But here are three strategies worth considering. First, the real power of the masses is as consumers, not as voters, workers, activists, or Internet users. Weakened unions, globalization, technology, and illegal immigration have sapped the power of workers. National economies, especially the US, depend on consumers. Suspensions in discretionary consumer spending used as a political weapon could force reforms. But curbing personal spending and saving money has become a rare form of civil disobedience. Consumers buy stuff when they want it, not when they can afford it. Rulers have replaced chains with debt and no political leader in a very long time has championed economic rebellion.
Second, because they are more a tool of tyranny than rebellion, the masses should stop giving credibility and legitimacy to faux democracies by boycotting elections. Plutocrats cleverly equate patriotism and good citizenship with voting while at the same time ensuring that no genuine change agents can succeed even if elected. All election results can be subverted by the forces of corruption. Those promising change, like Barack Obama, do not pose a lethal threat to forces of evil and corruption. Sadly, refusing to vote in corrupt political systems is another worthy but unpopular form of civil disobedience. The compulsion to vote is a political narcotic that sustains democratic tyranny.
Third, people must seek forms of direct democracy that give them political power. National ballot measures and initiatives are needed to make laws, impose spending mandates and recall elected officials. A most important tool is constitutional conventions outside the control of status quo preservationists to obtain systemic reforms that governments will never provide, as explained for the US at www.foavc.org. No greater example of ruling class power exists than the absence of massive public demands for using what the Founders gave Americans in Article V: the convention option to circumvent and fix the federal government that – amazingly – has never been used, and that no presidential candidate has supported, including constitutional champion Ron Raul.
[Joel S. Hirschhorn can be reached through www.delusionaldemocracy.com; he is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention at www.foavc.org.]
kimmy
We all believe in freedom.
Just now, we are free to do as we are told.
It used to be the economy ran the stock market ran the economy. Now the stock market runs the economy.
In other words. The corporations are telling us what to do to make them richer. And like sheep, we are obeying.
A good example; I buy heating parts for furnaces. The wholesaler charges $40 for a hot surface ignitor. Through a friend that works for a manufacturer, I buy them for $7 . That is what they pay for them.
Where is the fairness?
echc;
Wholesale for less will subvert "the corporations"?
Competition is not as simple as it looks.How do you know the part you bought for $7 will last as long as the one that costs $40? How do you know your ignitor is not a knockoff?
Blue Jeans made in the US lasted 10 years, or more. Jeans that come from China at half the price last for 3.
kimmy
They are the exact same part.
We are being ripped off.
Argue with me all you want.
We are being ripped off.
Play it Again Uncle Sam Play what again? You know. The game. What game? The game called “Fuck you Buddy” that American society is based on. Who invented the game? A mathematician called John Nash who was working for the highly secretive Rand Corporation in the 1950s. Didn’t he suffer from paranoid schizophrenia? Yes he did. Is it wise to base an entire modus vivendi on such a cynical assumption? Read “Play it Again Uncle Sam” and find out. ****************The Rand [research and development] Program was initially set up by the US military to develop new weapon systems after the war. However in 1948 it separated out into a non-profit making body supposedly to promote world peace and democracy, funded by the Ford Foundation. Because of the secrecy surrounding its work, it soon aroused suspicion as to its real motives, which were not allayed when it was discovered that there were links between its sponsors, the Ford Foundation, and the CIA. One was Richard Bissell, an early President of the Foundation who went onto to join the CIA and oversee the U2 Spy plane program. JFK was later to remove him from office over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Another was JJ McCloy, a personal friend of CIA Director, Allen Dulles. During the 1950’s Rand employed many top class mathematicians who developed a revolutionary concept called “Game Theory,” a system of strategies to be used by two or more players. The game could be applied to any potentially confrontational situation with the aim of achieving a state of “equilibrium,” from which neither player could better their position by deviating from their chosen stratagem. It was initially designed to predict Soviet responses to cold war confrontation but was later applied to all social interactions in society at large. One of its main architects was the mathematician, John Nash, an eccentric loner who had concluded that humans were ultimately selfish and devious creatures who schemed constantly to get one step ahead of each other. So cynical was he of “human nature” that he and his colleagues actually devised a board game called “Fuck you Buddy” to illustrate his paranoid hypothesis. Four players were given 7 coloured chips each with the ultimate goal of capturing all their opponents’ chips. Acceptable strategies included forming coalitions and agreements to cooperate, even though these would all eventually be reneged on. The winner was the last surviving player and the game seemed to work as long as it was understood that the modus operandi was to behave selfishly and outwit your opponents. But when the researchers initially tested the game out on their secretaries, they chose to cooperate, thereby ruining the ethos of the game, but this was conveniently ignored and even though Nash was exhibiting the early symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, the game was still launched. Throughout the fifties and sixties game theory was used to justify the arms race and the US nuclear strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction [MAD] which, because there was no all out war with the Soviet Union, was widely believed to have worked. It was also applied to the war against Vietnam, often with genocidal consequences. But even more controversially the game was used to give credence to the ideas of right wing economists like Friedrich Von Hayek and James Buchanan. These men insisted that even elected leaders and their bureaucrats were only self seeking tyrants with no genuine concern for the public good, and therefore all power was to taken away from them and the populace exposed to unfettered market forces. This would provide one explanation for the witchhunts of the fifties, where any politician even thinking of tinkering with the free market was denigrated, and in some cases terminated. The idea of society or community was consistently rubbished and the citizens of America encouraged to believe they were simply mindless consumers, whose only meaningful interaction with their fellow man was in the market place. Their primary responsibility was therefore to themselves and their families who were encouraged to consume as conspicuously as possible. One of the end results of this game has been a rapid decline in social mobility where the income of the bottom 10% actually fell in real terms, with the middle class seeing a small rise in their living standards and the over class seeing a quadrupling of their assets. This, unsurprisingly, has led to a destabilision of society with rising levels of violence and other anti-social behaviour as the “have nots” battle the “haves,” for their slice of the American Pie. The winners get to live in gated communities while the losers are herded into the ghettos of the inner cities. But not content with experimenting on its citizens, the US has exported this dysfunctional model of social disharmony via the Military/Industrial Complex, which has usually imposed it on third world societies around the world under the banner of “globalisation.” This has been portrayed by the western media as a positive force, especially in those areas of the world deemed crucial to US business or vital resource interests, especially the oil states of the Middle East and the “banana” republics of Latin America. This was achieved by citing “expansion of democracy in the region” whilst forcing regime change and unleashing market forces. This has invariably led to an overclass lording it over long established tribal or community based societies, often with disastrous consequences, including vengeful acts of terrorism. So what has happened to those opposing the imposition of the game? Over the decades there have been many foreign leaders, usually elected, determined to stop their country being drained if its natural resources and its people used as cheap labour. This has been particularly true of the countries of Latin America, a region that the United States has always regarded as its backyard, a repository of riches to be raided at will. Unsurprisingly many leaders of these countries have tried to stand up to this blatant imperialism, often by attempting to nationalise foreign owned businesses to regain control of their economy. This has always been met by outright hostility from the CIA who have helped organise coups and in some cases, assassination, of such interferers in the game. One of the most successful of these leaders has been Fidel Castro in Cuba. He terrified American Corporations when he came to power in 1959, after overthrowing the US backed Dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and confiscating American assets on the island. They were worried that his example would be followed by others in the region, so the CIA was instructed to get rid of him as quickly as possible, using any means at its disposal. However the US’s involvement in this illegal act was to be hidden at all costs so they covered their tracks using the concept known as “plausible deniability,” the euphemism for framing someone or some group to take the blame. But all their attempts failed and eventually they had to turn to the professional killers, the Mafia, to carry out the contract. But amazingly they too failed. However CIA assets did manage to infiltrate Cuba to attempt to foment counter revolution from within, the likes of Frank Sturgis and E Howard Hunt, two men who, a decade later, would play a pivotal role in the Watergate scandal. However some of these men, who were being manipulated like pawns in a game, turned out to be, or pretended to be, double agents working both sides of the fence. One such Agent was allegedly William Alexander Morgan, a man who had been trained at the Atsugi Air Base in Japan by US Military and a few years later turned up on Cuba fighting for anti-Castro forces on the island. Ironically the men under his command initially assumed him to be a CIA plant, so were understandably confused when he suddenly gained the confidence of Fidel and switched sides. Back in the States, in a probably staged press release Morgan was stripped of his American citizenship and labelled a traitor. But one year on, when Castro discovered he’d probably been a CIA plant all along, he was executed. Following in Morgans’ footsteps was another probable double Agent, Lee Harvey Oswald who amazingly had also been trained at the US base at Atsugi, although a few years after Morgan. He was to make a high profile defection to Russia, only to return three years later, with a Russian bride, whose uncle just happened to be a high ranking KGB officer. Amazingly his passport and citizenship were quickly restored with few questions asked. There is now little doubt that Oswald, or his double, was being manipulated by CIA Agents involved with psychological operations, to play a key role in the assassination of Castro and then possibly to take the blame. But, like Fidel, he, or his co-conspirators, proved too clever and the whole operation was turned and President Kennedy assassinated instead. This whole cock up has necessitated the biggest cover up in the history of the western world, a smoke screen that is still being maintained today. It is high time the US Intelligence community came clean about its role in this disaster but in the meantime read my novel “Play it Again Uncle Sam,” which is based on these events.www.playitagainunclesam.com
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