US Elections: Theater with Deadly Consequences

A great interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, which essentially, supports what I have been saying, in my blogs here, for a while, now, that real democracy does not exist in the world. Everyone likes to talk about it but the general public does not know what real democracy is or how or what should it be? Should it be like what happens in the Western countries; America, Canada, UK, Australia etc.?

Problem is that the general public falsely thinks that as long as the elections are free & fair (that's an assumption in itself), & as long as the general public is getting out to vote & elect the person that they think is the right person to lead them and their country on the international stage, then it must be democracy. That's NOT Democracy.

Democracy is when makes every decision, or at least, major decisions, with the approval of the general public. After all, the general public is the real guardian of the country. It is akin to shareholders being the real owners of public corporation, & the directors of the company calling emergency meetings or the shareholders to vote on the major issues that company is facing. For instance, a country like, America, would've chosen to ask the citizens about invading their privacy before actually doing it, but as we all know, that's not how that issue played out in real life.

As Larry Wilkerson & Paul Jay discussed in the interview, that the democracy has become a charade in North America & other countries as well. The people in politics are all one & the same. Their political issues do not differ too much from each other. Only the faces change every few years but the major issues of the country never change or get resolved. This in turn has turned off the general public from taking part in electing their leaders, & only less than half of the general population actually votes.

Media, of course, has dumbed down the general public even further. It has played its hand in destroying the democracy very beautifully & to its full advantage. However, I will blame the public, here. Media is a business & will always provide what is in demand, & stupidity is in high demand. Public does not want to see or hear anything which would make them think critically. Of course, that just makes the corrupt politicians of the world do whatever they want to do. Hence, the drama of democracy keeps playing out where the victims don't know that they are the victims, the powerful keeps becoming powerful, & everyone thinks they they are living in a democratic country.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uh2vmEM4uc

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... I think American electoral politics and much electoral politics in many countries is much like that. It's mostly theater. There's a war of rhetoric, a war of election campaign ads, and the media treats the theater as if it's real. And it's not just the campaigning. It's while Congress and others are governing. The reality of power, the real interest beneath the politics, is rarely revealed in the media, and the media loves the partisan theater. Why? Because they make money out of it. 80% of campaign donations apparently are going to buy television ads, so it's not in television's interest to pierce the veil of this theater.

... it's very much the same thing in politics. It's got nothing to do [with] whether you know anything or not about the issues. Can you make the crowd pop? Can you make people vote for you?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think your metaphor, Paul, is absolutely spot on. It is theater. The real manipulation of power, the real abuse of power, the real use of power takes place behind this charade that is the--you might call it the charade of democracy. That's essentially what we've made it. Elections, of course, are the least important aspect of democracy. The institutions, the culture, the society, the people, they're the important aspects of democracy. But elections are something that we hype all the time, whether it's in this country or other countries. We send observers and so forth. But I agree with that overall metaphor, that it's mostly theater. And in this country, we do Shakespearean theater, if you will, because it's true theater in this country.

JAY: So, while what's being said in the campaigns are mostly just messaging and trying to come up with little catchy phrases and pick some wedge issue that will get people excited, I mean, very little to do with public policy and what real solutions are, that being said, it's not that it's theater without consequences. It does have some consequence who happens to win. So let's get a bit into that. I mean, assuming the Republicans do take the Senate--and as we do the interview, it looks like they're going to--does it matter?

WILKERSON: It's a part of our system. ...

JAY: If you go back to when President Obama was elected and the real disgrace of the Bush-Cheney administration in every level, from foreign policy to economics, I mean, foreign policy leaving a complete disaster of the Iraq War, and on economics, certainly playing a big part in the crash of '07 and '08--of course, Bill Clinton helped contribute to that, but it was a total runaway train in terms of what elites in banking and so on could get away with with Bush-Cheney. Does it somewhat shock you, if you put your mind back then, that we're in a place where the Republicans could actually control both houses?

WILKERSON: It does, because, as Gore Vidal said very eloquently at one point in his life, we're the United States of amnesia. We don't have any memory. We don't have any retrospective look. Very few of us do, anyway. Most people do what they do, whether it's vote or go to work or whatever, based on a very immediate, local set of circumstances. And going back to--.

JAY: But a lot of that has to do with the media. The media has to have a lot to do with that.

WILKERSON: Well, a lot of it does have to do with the media. It does have to do with the media. And when you have a media that is captured, basically, by the corporate interests in this country, then that media is not going to tell you much except that which keeps you in your somnolent state. And that's really what our media does. It keeps us in an apathetic, somnolent state. The media has no interest in sparking real issues, in debating those issues, in discussing those issues, in parsing those issues so that you can see the meat and the blood and the bones of those issues. They don't want to do that. My god, that might excite someone to actually become smart.

JAY: Yeah. It's also like you take, like, the NBA or any of the professional sports leagues, where they do what they can to kind of even out the teams, because if the teams aren't competitive, who wants to go pay money to go see basketball or football? I mean, the media has the same interest. If they don't keep the Republicans and Democrats competitive, then who needs to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising? So it's in their interest to rehabilitate a party and not let it collapse completely.

WILKERSON: Absolutely. You just put your finger on the heart of things, too. One of my students asked me the other day: do you really think there's that much difference in foreign-policy formulation between the Republicans and the Democrats? And, of course, my answer was no, there's not. There's hardly any distance between them. Oh, you can pick an issue here and an issue there ... but you're not going to find that big a divergence between either party. And I would even submit you're not going to find that big a divergence with regard to what corporate interests dictate those politicians do between either party either. You're going to find that there's just as much responsibility, as you just pointed out, for the current economic problems in this country belonging to the Democrats ... who engineered the disassembling of FDR's protections during the Great Depression and afterwards, as there is amongst the Republicans, who were so explicit, if you will, in the way they fought war at the same time they didn't raise any taxes and things like that. But they're both complicit in the same kind of maneuvers, in the same kind of abuse of power for their own interest, for their very parochial, narrow individual interest, and for the larger and grander interests of the corporate interests whom they represent--big pharmacy, big food, big energy, and so forth.
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The Deep State and the Power of Billionaires - David Cay Johnston on Reality Asserts Itself

If you are a regular reader of my blog posts, then you will know how I love to talk about how people around the world has a false notion of democracy & think that voting is democracy. Here, in the first part of this interview, the investigative reporter, Mr. David Johnston, talks about how instead of "one-man, one-vote" concept of a true democracy, the whole governmental system is rigged in such a way that the concept of democracy actually becomes "more wealth, more votes."

The naive, or perhaps, ignorant, public thinks that their vote matters. Before every election, the public is cajoled by the media to get out & vote because "your vote matters." Heck, I also vote in every federal & provincial elections in Canada, but I also keep in mind that my vote won't have much of an effect on the final outcome because the system has already decided who will be the next "puppet" or public "face" of the government. Most importantly, the policies of the government never change, or at least, not materially enough, to help make life any better for the poor & stricken public. The rich keep getting richer regardless of who comes in the powerhouse.

Another interesting thing to think, coming out from the interview, is how our education system churns out people who cannot think critically about their surroundings. They only care about their next paycheque. They don't care, or perhaps, trained to think about their own lives only. They are put into such a financial position that they are running from one errand to next, without ever having enough time to sit down calmly & think critically about their situation & the world around them. That's what the governments around the world want their citizenry to be & do; be a compliant little worker, who works like a machine, devoid of any critical thoughts.

One other thing Mr. Johnston briefly touched upon is that the people around the world equate wealth with virtue. Somehow, we still think that if someone is wealthy, then they must be pious & virtuous. Even most Muslims around the world incorrectly assume that if their fellow Muslim is wealthy, then he/she must be a pious person. Why? How so? Most wealthy people nowadays become wealthy by wrong means; be it morally wrong or legally wrong. They try to influence the economic & political policies of the government in their favour. They think that their wealth let them wield more power & votes over the government & the poor masses. Although, those poor masses are the ones who made them that wealth. Consequently, the poor masses stay poor, wealthy keep politicians in their pockets, & the political establishment keeps a facade of democracy on the actual face of oligarchy.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0byZ1Rl8-8

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: What does that do to your vision of America?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: Well, it's very troubling, largely because it's not seen by most people and it's not held to any kind of account. And one of the flaws in our notion that we live in a democracy is that a very narrow group of people select who we get to vote for. Someone like Dennis Kucinich might have a lot of popular appeal, but he will never be a serious candidate for president, because those people who have a lot of money in this country are going to use the system to make sure he isn't there.

JAY: And the media.

JOHNSTON: That's right. President Obama--look at how closely he's identified with Wall Street. I chuckle every time somebody says he hates white people. Almost everybody on the staff is white in the White House--overwhelmingly white. He's an enemy of Wall Street. Really? Really? Zero prosecutions of the big bankers for what are well-documented frauds, including by the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission, whose report Congress paid for and then threw in the round file 'cause they didn't want to look at it?

JAY: Yeah, African Americans may have voted for him, but he is the Wall Street candidate.

JOHNSTON: He absolutely is. And everybody who gets to run is the Wall Street candidate.

And so the fundamental problem we have is, look, most people want to live their lives, and if they can have a reasonably decent place to live and a car that'll start in the morning and a job with a reliable income and they can have a dog if they want one, they're pretty much happy. Part of that is because our education system is designed to make sure that we produce nice, compliant factory and office workers. You can have a better conversation about politics, sociology, wealth, culture with the average waiter in rural Ontario or rural Hungary or rural France than with the average MBA in a suit sitting in the first-class section of an American airplane. Trust me, I've tested this. Alright? And so we live in a society where we just put blinders on to these things we don't want to see.

I mean, think for a moment about this use of drones to take out people who I have no doubt are serious enemies of the United States, but which also have taken out wedding parties and children. Just imagine (and this, I think, can happen with the technology): somebody puts a drone up and they want to take out me because I'm seen as a horrible person, and in the process they take out a whole bunch of children who happen to be standing nearby. Do you think that we would react to that by saying, oh, well, that's just casualty of war? So we aren't thinking very carefully and deeply about the long run.

And, Paul, the biggest observation that all this has made me come to is if you look at our policies in America today, whether they're economic policies, political or diplomatic policies, if you believe, as James Watt, Ronald Reagan's interior secretary, said, that we'd better use up all the resources quickly, because Jesus is coming back and he'll be really ticked off, all of our policies make sense. But if you believe human beings are going to be here for way beyond any period of time they've already been here, our policies don't make any sense at all. We need to be thinking about the fact that we're just stewards for the time that we're here, and we should be thinking about the great-great-great-great grandchildren none of us alive today will ever see.
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JOHNSTON: And we also have this ideology that if you're wealthy, somehow that's virtuous.
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JOHNSTON: ... So within this sphere there are fractious elements, different elements, people who have different and contending interests, people who have no interest in this but care a lot about that.

But nonetheless, yes, there is a power elite, as C. Wright Mills called it. It operates on its own interests and behalf. And it certainly doesn't like people like journalists.

So what do you see has been going on now since the beginning of the age of Reagan? Bumper stickers: "I don't trust liberal media". Really? You're going to trust Fox News, where I can document to you beyond question they just make things up, and they don't correct when they're wrong, and they knowingly mislead? I mean, I've made mistakes. Journalists make mistakes. When journalist make mistakes, we not only run corrections, but the Jayson Blair episode at The New York Times, where this sociopath got loose in the newsroom, 90 percent of what he did was inconsequential stuff, didn't cause any damage--lying, but inconsequential--Times ran a 14,000 word Sunday front page self-exposé. When The Philadelphia Inquirer found out its star political reporter was the mistress of the Democratic political boss of South Philly, they ran--I think it was 32,000 words exposing how they had missed this and not seen it. You ever seen that on Fox News? And yet they tell lies all the time.

And so you understand that an important element of the wealthiest class in America maintaining its position is making sure that most Americans do not think critically about these things, that we have two-income families who are having trouble getting by, so that they are devoted entirely to trying to hold their family together and they don't have the ability to be involved in political activities, to then make it hard to vote, to reduce the number of voting machines, to challenge people's right to vote, to make these robo calls, if you go to the polls and you don't have your ID, you'll be arrested sort of stuff that is nonsense, but people who don't know better are afraid. And it's very, very troubling. And, by the way, many of the very, very wealthy people that I know in this country--and I know lots of them--they are as troubled as you and I are about this. They're just not going to assault it frontally.
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Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (Part 2 of 3)

Another interesting interview of Noam Chomsky by Chris Hedges. This one discusses how people around the world, & in the US, have been fed the idea that they are living in the most democratic country in the world. That the world should follow the lead of United States of America when it comes to democracy, liberty, & free speech. However, the reality is very very different.

As Chris Hedges says in the first paragraph that "we are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history." The general public has been given the idea that if you don't concede to government's constant monitoring, then evil people will get you & ruin your life. Fear and hysteria is used to control the masses, & the ignorant masses follow along like a flock of sheep.

Continuing onwards, Chris Hedges puts out another question to Chomsky where he says that how our "liberal" political & legislative institutions have been actually "enslaved" within the power & money paradigm of modern politics. Power & money controls every aspect of modern politics. Those few at the top of social hierarchy who have amassed power & money, usually through illegal or immoral means, wield their significant influences to control the so-called "elected" officials to get what they want from the country.

As Chomsky says that "take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. ... When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation." How is that even close to democracy? Does it really matter who the masses elect because at the end of the day, the masses will still get the same result, regardless of who is in the office. But, the ignorant & naive public of the West & around the world (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, India, Australia, Singapore etc.) still believe that democracy exists in developed countries & developing countries are not developed because of a lack of democracy & liberty. Do they even have an idea what democracy actually is because frankly, voting is not democracy. Voting also happens in Egypt & Zimbabwe, for instance, but the public masses won't recognize them as democratic countries.

Through fear & propaganda of false information, the West has made it seem to the world that it is democratic & the rest of the world must follow its lead. Powerful elites has redefined democracy, knowing fully well that the ignorant masses will accept the propaganda without giving it a second thought. How can the masses fight back & bring true democracy back when they are sound asleep? That's why, political activism is dead nowadays & the public is easily controlled & manipulated by a small minority of the powerful elites in North America & around the world.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFyFzTq1Wws

CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: But that system, of course, is constant. But what's changed is that we don't produce anything anymore. So what we define as our working class is a service sector class working in places like Walmart. And the effective forms of resistance--the sitdown strikes, going back even further in the middle of the 19th century with the women in Lowell--the Wobblies were behind those textile strikes. What are the mechanisms now? And I know you have written, as many anarchists have done, about the importance of the working class controlling the means of production, taking control, and you have a great quote about how Lenin and the Bolsheviks are right-wing deviants, which is, of course, exactly right, because it was centralized control, destroying the Soviets. Given the fact that production has moved to places like Bangladesh or southern China, what is going to be the paradigm now? And given, as you point out, the powerful forces of propaganda--and you touched upon now the security and surveillance state. We are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history. And you cannot even use the world liberty when you eviscerate privacy. That's what totalitarian is. What is the road we take now, given the paradigm that we have, which is somewhat different from what this country was, certainly, in the first half of the 20th century?

NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think it's pretty much the same, frankly. The idea still should be that of the Knights of Labor: those who work in the mills should own them. And there's plenty of manufacturing going on in the country, and probably there will be more, for unpleasant reasons. One thing that's happening right now which is quite interesting is that energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren, but under the capitalist morality, the calculus is that profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. It's institutionally-based, so, yes, we're getting lower energy prices. And if you look at the business press, they're very enthusiastic about the fact that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we'll have lower energy prices, and therefore manufacturing will come back here, and we can even undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy because we'll have this advantage.

Britain is saying the same thing. I was just in England recently. As I left the airport, I read The Daily Telegraph newspaper. Big headline: England is going to begin fracking all of the country, even fracking under people's homes without their permission. And that'll allow us to destroy the environment even more quickly and will bring manufacturing back here.

The same is true with Asia. Manufacturing is moving back, to an extent, to Mexico, and even here, as wages increase in China, partly because of labor struggles. There's massive labor struggles in China, huge, all over the place, and since we're integrated with them, we can be supportive of them.

But manufacturing is coming back here. And both manufacturing and the service industries can move towards having those who do the work take over the management and ownership and control. In fact, it's happening. In the old Rust Belt-- Indiana, Ohio, and so on--there's a significant--not huge, but significant growth of worker-owned enterprises. They're not huge, but they're substantial around Cleveland and other places.

The background is interesting. In 1977, U.S. Steel, the multinational, decided to close down their mills in Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown is a steel town, sort of built by the steelworkers, one of the main steel-producing areas. Well, the union tried to buy the plants from U.S. Steel. They objected--in my view, mostly on class lines. They might have even profited from it. But the idea of worker-owned industry doesn't have much appeal to corporate leaders, which means bankers and so on. It went to the courts. Finally, the union lost in the courts. But with enough popular support, they could have won.

Well, the working class and the community did not give up. They couldn't get the steel mills, but they began to develop small worker-owned enterprises. They've now spread throughout the region. They're substantial. And it can happen more and more.

And the same thing happened in Walmarts. I mean, there's massive efforts right now, significant ones, to organize the service workers--what they call associates--in the service industries. And these industries, remember, depend very heavily on taxpayer largess in all kinds of ways. I mean, for example, let's take, say, Walmarts. They import goods produced in China, which are brought here on container ships which were designed and developed by the U.S. Navy. And point after point where you look, you find that the way the system--the system that we now have is one which is radically anticapitalist, radically so.

I mean, I mentioned one thing, the powerful effort to try to undermine markets for consumers, but there's something much more striking. I mean, in a capitalist system, the basic principle is that, say, if you invest in something and, say, it's a risky investment, so you put money into it for a long time, maybe decades, and finally after a long time something comes out that's marketable for a profit, it's supposed to go back to you. That's not the way it works here. Take, say, computers, internet, lasers, microelectronics, containers, GPS, in fact the whole IT revolution. There was taxpayer investment in that for decades, literally decades, doing all the hard, creative, risky work. Does the taxpayer get any of the profit? None, because that's not the way our system works. It's radically anti-capitalist, just as it's radically anti-democratic, opposed to markets, in favor of concentrating wealth and power.
But that doesn't have to be accepted by the population. These are--all kinds of forms of resistance to this can be developed if people become aware of it.

HEDGES: Well, you could argue that in the election of 2008, Obama wasn't accepted by the population. But what we see repeatedly is that once elected officials achieve power through, of course, corporate financing, the consent of the governed is a kind of cruel joke. It doesn't, poll after poll. I mean, I sued Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act, in which you were coplaintiff, and the polling was 97% against this section of the NDAA. And yet the courts, which have become wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state, the elected officials, the executive branch, and the press, which largely ignored it--the only organ that responsibly covered the case was, ironically, The New York Times. We don't have--it doesn't matter what we want. It doesn't--I mean, and I think that's the question: how do we effect change when we have reached a point where we can no longer appeal to the traditional liberal institutions that, as Karl Popper said once, made incremental or piecemeal reform possible, to adjust the system--of course, to save capitalism? But now it can't even adjust the system. We see cutting welfare.

CHOMSKY: Yeah. I mean, it's perfectly true that the population is mostly disenfranchised. In fact, that's a leading theme even of academic political science. You take a look at the mainstream political science, so, for example, a recent paper that was just published out of Princeton by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, two of the leading analysts of these topics, what they point out is they went through a couple of thousand policy decisions and found what has long been known, that there was almost no--that the public attitudes had almost no effect. Public organizations that are--nonprofit organizations that are publicly based, no effect. The outcomes were determined by concentrated private power.

There's a long record of that going way back. Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist near here, has shown very convincingly that something as simple as campaign spending is a very good predictor of policy. That goes back into the late 19th century, right through the New Deal, right up till the present. And that's only one element of it. And you take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. You get a little more influence as you go up. When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation.

I mean, you see this all over. I mean, take these huge so-called trade agreements that are being negotiated, Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic--enormous agreements, kind of NAFTA-style agreements. They're secret--almost. They're not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing them. They know about it, which means that their bosses know about it.

And the Obama administration and the press says, look, this has to be secret, otherwise we can't defend our interests. Yeah, our interests means the interests of the corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing the legislation. Take the few pieces that have been leaked and you see that's exactly what it is. Same with the others.

But it doesn't mean you have to accept it. And there have been changes. So take, say--in the 1920s, the labor movement had been practically destroyed. There's a famous book. One of the leading labor historians, David Montgomery, has a major book called something like The Fall of the House of Labor. He's talking about the 1920s. It was done. There had been a very militant labor movement, very effective, farmers movement as well. Crushed in the 1920s. Almost nothing left. Well, in the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of popular activism.

HEDGES: But it also changed because of the breakdown of capitalism.

CHOMSKY: There was a circumstance that led to the opportunity to do something, but we're living with that constantly. I mean, take the last 30 years. For the majority of the population it's been stagnation or worse. That's--it's not exactly the deep Depression, but it's kind of a permanent semi-depression for most of the population. That's--there's plenty of kindling out there which can be lighted.

And what happened in the '30s is primarily CIO organizing, the militant actions like sit-down strikes. A sit-down strike's very frightening. It's a step before taking over the institution and saying, we don't need the bosses. And that--there was a cooperative administration, Roosevelt administration, so there was some interaction. And significant legislation was passed--not radical, but significant, underestimated. And it happened again in the '60s. It can happen again today. So I don't think that one should abandon hope in chipping away at the more oppressive aspects of the society within the electoral system. But it's only going to happen if there's massive popular organization, which doesn't have to stop at that. It can also be building the institutions of the future within the present society.

HEDGES: Would you say that the--you spoke about propaganda earlier and the Creel Commission and the rise of the public relations industry. The capacity to disseminate propaganda is something that now you virtually can't escape it. I mean, it's there in some electronic form, even in a hand-held device. Does that make that propaganda more effective?

CHOMSKY: Well, and it's kind of an interesting question. Like a lot of people, I've written a lot about media and intellectual propaganda, but there's another question which isn't studied much: how effective is it? And that's--when you brought up the polls, it's a striking illustration. The propaganda is--you can see from the poll results that the propaganda has only limited effectiveness. I mean, it can drive a population into terror and fear and war hysteria, like before the Iraq invasion or 1917 and so on, but over time, public attitudes remain quite different. In fact, studies even of what's called the right-wing, people who say, get the government off my back, that kind of sector, they turn out to be kind of social democratic. They want more spending on health, more spending on education, more spending on, say, women with dependent children, but not welfare, no spending on welfare, because Reagan, who was an extreme racist, succeeded in demonizing the notion of welfare. So in people's minds welfare means a rich black woman driving in her limousine to the welfare office to steal your money. Well, nobody wants that. But they want what welfare does.

Foreign aid is an interesting case. There's an enormous propaganda against foreign aid, 'cause we're giving everything to the undeserving people out there. You take a look at public attitudes. A lot of opposition to foreign aid. Very high. On the other hand, when you ask people, how much do we give in foreign aid? Way beyond what we give. When you ask what we should give in foreign aid, far above what we give.

And this runs across the board. Take, say taxes. There've been studies of attitudes towards taxes for 40 years. Overwhelmingly the population says taxes are much too low for the rich and the corporate sector. You've got to raise it. What happens? Well, the opposite.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (Part 1 of 3)

A great interview by Chris Hedges of Noam Chomsky. Nothing much to comment for me on this, except to reiterate that North American & European people think that they are living in a democratic & free society where you are free to speak & think as you wish. But it is what instilled in them through their education system.

Public Relations (PR) system works so well that it subtly sends the message to the public that you are expected to follow the authority, regardless of how wrong that authority is. A large section of the public believes whatever spews out of the governments' mouths. Another section of the public, even if it doesn't believe governments' lies, still follow what the government tells them to do because they are trained to think that that's how the system works.

How can there be any so-called "democracy" in a country when its public is considered as "bewildered herd" & "ignorant & meddlesome outsiders," & are treated as "spectators" instead of active participants in making the internal policies of the country?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwRf5HHm2Mo

CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Let's begin with a classic paradigm which is throughout the Industrial Revolution, which has been cited by theorists from Marx to Kropotkin to Proudhon and to yourself, that you build a consciousness among workers within the manufacturing class, and eventually you lead to a kind of autonomous position where workers can control their own production.

We now live in a system, a globalized system, where most of the working class in industrial countries like the United States are service workers. We have reverted to a Dickensian system where those who actually produced live in conditions that begin to replicate almost slave labor--and, I think, as you have written, in places like southern China in fact are slave [labor]. What's the new paradigm for resistance? How do we learn from the old and confront the new?

NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think we can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution. It was, of course, earlier in England, but let's take here in the United States. The Industrial Revolution took off right around here, eastern Massachusetts, mid 19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system--men and women, incidentally, women from the farms, so-called factory girls--and they bitterly resented it. It was a period of a very free press, the most in the history of the country. There was a wide variety of journals, ethnic, labor, or others. And when you read them, they're pretty fascinating.

The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings who were being forced into what they called wage slavery, which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact, this was such a popular view that it was actually a slogan of the Republican Party, that the only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for a wage is supposedly temporary--pretty soon you'll be free. Other than that, they're not different.

And they bitterly resented the fact that the industrial system was even taking away their rich cultural life. And the cultural life was rich. You know, there are by now studies of the British working class and the American working class, and they were part of high culture of the day. Actually, I remembered this as late as the 1930s with my own family, sort of unemployed working-class, and they said, this is being taken away from us, we're being forced to be something like slaves. They argued that if you're, say, a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell your product, you're selling what you produced. If you're a wage earner, you're selling yourself, which is deeply offensive. They condemned what they called the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Sounds familiar.

And it was extremely radical. It was combined with the most radical democratic movement in American history, the early populist movement--radical farmers. It began in Texas, spread into the Midwest--enormous movement of farmers who wanted to free themselves from the domination by the Northeastern bankers and capitalists, guys that ran the markets, you know, sort of forced them to sell what they produced on credit and squeeze them with credit and so on. They went on to develop their own banks, their own cooperatives. They started to link up with the Knights of Labor--major labor movement which held that, as they put it, those who work in the mills ought to own them, that it should be a free, democratic society.

These were very powerful movements. By the 1890s, workers were taking over towns and running them in Western Pennsylvania. Homestead was a famous case. Well, they were crushed by force. It took some time. Sort of the final blow was Woodrow Wilson's red scare right after the First World War, which virtually crushed the labor movement.

At the same time, in the early 19th century, the business world recognized, both in England and the United States, that sufficient freedom had been won so that they could no longer control people just by violence. They had to turn to new means of control. The obvious ones were control of opinions and attitudes. That's the origins of the massive public relations industry, which is explicitly dedicated to controlling minds and attitudes.

The first--it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell--he didn't have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan "Peace without Victory". And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn't play Beethoven. And they succeeded.

Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. Again, you can guess what it was. And they've at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into warmongering fanatics.

And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found--the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.

The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a "new art" in democracy, "manufacturing consent". That's where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was "engineering of consent". The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We're the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be--I'm quoting--"free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd", the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"--the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be "spectators", not participants. And every couple of years they're permitted to choose among one of the "responsible men", us.

And the John Dewey circle took the same view. Dewey changed his mind a couple of years later, to his credit, but at that time, Dewey and his circle were writing that--speaking of the First World War, that this was the first war in history that was not organized and manipulated by the military and the political figures and so on, but rather it was carefully planned by rational calculation of "the intelligent men of the community", namely us, and we thought it through carefully and decided that this is the reasonable thing to do, for all kind of benevolent reasons.

And they were very proud of themselves.

There were people who disagreed. Like, Randolph Bourne disagreed. He was kicked out. He couldn't write in the Deweyite journals. He wasn't killed but he was just excluded.

And if you take a look around the world, it was pretty much the same. The intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause--all sides, Germans, British, everywhere.

There were a few, a fringe of dissenters, like Bertrand Russell, who was in jail; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in jail; Randolph Bourne, marginalized; Eugene Debs, in jail for daring to question the magnificence of the war. In fact, Wilson hated him with such passion that when he finally declared an amnesty, Debs was left out & had to wait for Warren Harding to release him. And he was the leading labor figure in the country. He was a candidate for president, Socialist Party, and so on.

But the lesson that came out is we believe you can and of course ought to control the public, and if we can't do it by force, we'll do it by manufacturing consent, by engineering of consent. Out of that comes the huge public relations industry, massive industry dedicated to this.

Incidentally, it's also dedicated to undermining markets, a fact that's rarely noticed but is quite obvious. Business hates markets. ... Markets, if you take an economics course, are based on rational, informed consumers making rational choices. Turn on the television set and look at the first ad you see. It's trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. That's the whole point of the huge advertising industry. But also to try to control and manipulate thought. And it takes various forms in different institutions. The media do it one way, the academic institutions do it another way, and the educational system is a crucial part of it.

This is not a new observation. There's actually an interesting essay by--Orwell's, which is not very well known because it wasn't published. It's the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn't feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn't say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press "is owned by wealthy men" who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.

But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you've gone to all the good schools, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say--and I don't think he went far enough: wouldn't do to think. And that's very broad among the educated classes. That's why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder--you should knock off England first. That's called criticism.

And sometimes it's kind of outlandish. For example, there was just a review in The New York Times Book Review of Glenn Greenwald's new book by Michael Kinsley, and which bitterly condemned him as--mostly character assassination. Didn't say anything substantive. But Kinsley did say that it's ridiculous to think that there's any repression in the media in the United States, 'cause we can write quite clearly and criticize anything. And he can, but then you have to look at what he says, and it's quite interesting.

In the 1980s, when the major local news story was the massive U.S. atrocities in Central America--they were horrendous; I mean, it wasn't presented that way, but that's what was happening--Kinsley was the voice of the left on television. And there were interesting incidents. At one point, the U.S. Southern Command, which ... gave instructions to the terrorist force that they were running in Nicaragua, called the Contras--and they were a terrorist force--they gave them orders to--they said "not to (...) duke it out with the Sandinistas", meaning avoid the Nicaraguan army, and attack undefended targets like agricultural cooperatives and health clinics and so on. And they could do it, because they were the first guerrillas in history to have high-level communications equipment, computers and so on. The U.S., the CIA, just controlled the air totally, so they could send instructions to the terrorist forces telling them how to avoid the Nicaraguan army detachments and attack undefended civilian targets.

Well, ... it wasn't publicized, but it was mentioned. And Americas Watch, which later became part of Human Rights Watch, made some protests. And Michael Kinsley responded. He condemned Americas Watch for their emotionalism. He said, we have to recognize that we have to accept a pragmatic criterion. We have to ask--something like this--he said, we have to compare the amount of blood and misery poured in with the success of the outcome in producing democracy--what we'll call democracy. And if it meets the pragmatic criterion, then terrorist attacks against civilian targets are perfectly legitimate--which is not a surprising view in his case. He's the editor of The New Republic. The New Republic, supposedly a liberal journal, was arguing that we should support Latin American fascists because there are more important things than human rights in El Salvador, where they were murdering tens of thousands of people.

That's the liberals. And, yeah, they can get in the media no problem. And they're praised for it, regarded with praise. All of this is part of the massive system of--you know, it's not that anybody sits at the top and plans at all; it's just exactly as Orwell said: it's instilled into you. It's part of a deep indoctrination system which leads to a certain way of looking at the world and looking at authority, which says, yes, we have to be subordinate to authority, we have to believe we're very independent and free and proud of it. As long as we keep within the limits, we are. Try to go beyond those limits, you're out.

State of the World: In Search of Leadership

A good opinion piece on ineffectiveness of world leaders on leadership. Although, this piece is from last year's UN General Assembly, I have no doubt that this year's gathering will once again yield no concrete solutions but a lot of empty promises to improve the world.

A little search on Google or Amazon will get you millions of titles on the topic of leadership. Corporate world can't get enough of "leadership". But the one place the world needs leadership the most, it has the least leadership there.

Today's world leaders have big mouths but short on actually doing something about resolving several problems the world is suffering from. Today's leaders are more of "yes-people" / "butt-kissers" of the general population. Their words & actions are there to appease the general populations, just so they can be elected & money can be rolling in their bank accounts. Only difference between these so-called leaders is that some force their way in such a leadership role (dictators, for instance) & some hold so-called "elections" in so-called "democratic" countries.

Perhaps, then, we should blame the general populations of countries & even the whole regions. Today's leaders are essentially elected on the results of lofty campaign promises, not on the actual substance of their past achievements. General populations around the world have resorted to choosing their leaders based on physical attributes (Justin Trudeau of Canada, for instance) or how many lies a candidate can spew, as long as, those lies confirm the general population's own biases (Donald Trump, for instance, has been proven to state outlandish lies in his campaign speeches but millions of Americans still love him & ready to elect him their leader).

On top of that, leadership, nowadays, can be bought. Money has become the defining factor for a person to be leader, instead of, ethics, morals, empathy, conscientiousness, social responsibility, a strong sense of accountability for its own actions etc. These traits are sorely missing for today's world leaders. Instead today's leaders are the ideal definition of hypocrites. As the writer in his opinion piece says that they "preach that which they don’t practise, cause tensions, & create more problems than they solve." Furthermore, the secretary-general for Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, correctly accused the world leaders of hypocrisy "as they lecture about peace while being the world's largest manufacturers of arms, & how they rail against corruption while allowing corporations to use financial & tax loopholes."

The world indeed needs strong leadership to resolve its many problems, but, perhaps, it needs an educated & informed citizenry which chooses that kind of leadership in the first place.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/09/state-world-search-leadership-150927053354263.html 

Here they go again. And here I am: once again in New York as world leaders pose for photographers & deliver lofty speeches at the UN's "new year" party gathering.

Judging from the attendance, the opening of the 70th session of the UN General Assembly promises to be no less of a tedious ritual than previous years.
...

The problem as I see it as I look around: There are many world leaders, but no leadership.

Spiteful and pathetic

Instead of leading by example among the "Family of Nations", world leaders are acting like toxic in-laws. They come into town to preach that which they don’t practise, cause tensions, & create more problems than they solve.
...

Obama and Putin will talk about Syria and Ukraine, but I doubt they will listen.

Such is the poor state of affairs among the UN in-laws. Political & diplomatic expediency dictate their communication, just as narrow interests hamper their cooperation.

When they do meet, as in last week's US-China summit, much of the preparation is centred on protocol, which apparently prompts other important or meaningful issues. Greetings, toasting, & playing national anthems are as - or perhaps more - important than dealing with dying Syrians or persecuted Rohingya.

What does the G-2 stand for?

Presidents Obama and Xi seemed to have decided, out of domestic concerns, that they can't or won't do much for each other, &, therefore, ensured that their summit included all the trappings of success but without any concrete achievements.

The Washington Post reported that ... there was little or no progress to report on currency manipulation & cyber espionage, etc, let alone Asian security & world poverty. ...

All of which dampens the hopes (wrongly) pinned on the new dynamics between G-2 powers - US & China - to responsibly manage the global economy, especially following the last international financial crisis.

Alas, they proved that they couldn't even act responsibly in Southeast Asia, where they're further complicating the security & economic landscape instead of improving it.

And while the US, Russia, & China fail the test of leadership, those in their shadows are incapable of coordinating among themselves or making the leap towards more meaningful roles.

Even Europe, which is presumably more capable than the rest to act globally, has been either terribly divided or playing catch-up with the US & Russia.

When was the last time you heard of Japan, India or the UK taking an international initiative of any sort? How effective is the group of G-20 when the leading G-2 fail to lead?

Brazil, India, & Germany might seek a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, but how will that lead to better world governance?

Ever since the world moved away from bipolarity of the Cold War, it's been torn between the unipolarity of US leadership, the new bipolarity of the US & China, & multipolarity of various world powers & groupings.

In other words: The old world order is no more, but there's no new world order either.

The confusion allows all to blame all, & in the process, everyone escapes accountability for their lack of international responsibility.

Lessons in leadership

For all practical purposes, world leaders have set themselves up to be lectured like amateurs on the rights & wrongs of leadership by an unlikely mentor.

Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, lectured his audience at the UN with clarity, boldness, & conviction that is lacking in great power politics.

Among other reprimands, the pope rebuked world leaders for failing to put an end to the many conflicts in the world, particularly in the Middle East, & for putting partisan interests above real human beings ...

The pontiff even scolded the global financial institutions that subject countries to oppressive lending systems & subject people to mechanisms, which generate "greater poverty, exclusion, and dependence".

The secretary-general for Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, also accused the powerful leaders of hypocrisy as they lecture about peace while being the world's largest manufacturers of arms, & how they rail against corruption while allowing corporations to use financial & tax loopholes.
...

Yes, the world is better off when leaders act in their nations' best interests. But civilisation is best served when leaders also act in the best interest of their region & that of the community of nations.

That requires leadership.


Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.