The America Of My Youth

I remember a time when my clothing was made by union labor in the United States. Those who made our clothes had well-paying jobs that could support a family with a single income. And yet the Levi’s I wore were always affordable, so that a young and irresponsible punter such as I was had more pairs of jeans in his closet than he really needed. I remember commercials for the Garment Worker’s Union on which it was sung “Look for the union label”.

 Hanes came with an inspector’s tag in each package, showing there was a real person at the other end. 

At some point our country was capable of paying fair wages to the people who made our clothes, whereas now we are told we need children working long hours in sweatshops to make them. And we’ve come to be okay with the fact that the clothes on our backs cost somebody their childhood.

I remember butchers being paid very well for the hard work they did. Hell, my grandfather was able to raise thirteen children as a butcher who later owned a small butcher/grocery store. 

There are no small, locally owned grocery stores any more, and they’ve streamlined the butchering process so that now migrant workers are paid a pittance to work at extremely repetitive tasks that wear out their bodies at far too young an age. But it’s just the way the economy works, I guess we’re not smart enough to realize how that makes things better for everyone in the big scheme of things. Thank God we have people like Thomas Friedman to make it all seem rational.

I remember being told I needed glasses when I was young. My mom took me to the local optometrist who had a little shop of his own. He wasn’t working for some larger corporation that syphoned off the profits and sent them to people who knew nothing about my eyes or cared about me. Same with my doctor and dentist, they didn’t have to work for someone else, didn’t have to share the fruits of their labor with people they didn’t know. Nowadays if you’re an optometrist or pharmacist or beautician, chances are you’re working for Walmart or some other corporation that sets wages for you and dictates how you will serve your clients. When anybody bothers to point such a change out, it is called progress. Unavoidable, don’t you know.

My sister was a cashier. Not the looked-down upon cashier of today, not one of those who should be replaced by a machine and should show more grit in order to advance herself. No, she was a cashier who worked hard at her job and was good at it, and was rewarded adequately for it. I remember her finally getting a full-time position and knew from the money she earned she would be able to provide for herself and her young son. It too was a union position.

The America of my youth was a forward-looking one: we were building agencies to ensure the environment was taken care of. We appreciated the arts and gladly funded them We offered professors permanent positions. We knew we had to start building more fuel-efficient vehicles. We were intent on joining the rest of the world and converting to the metric system, a system so very superior to our own.

The U.S. of my youth was one where we spoke to people in other nations rather than threatened them. The Vietnam War had just ended, and Richard Nixon had paid a visit to China, of all places, proving we could work diplomatically with just about anybody. We debated and we argued with nations we disagreed with, but we did so to a great extent within the confines of the United Nations, a democratic institution based upon the principle of peace. Today we act through the military alliance known as NATO, where we do not negotiate but threaten.

We had fewer news channels in the 70’s, but they managed to provide us with a much greater degree of perspectives. I don’t recall the angry talking heads that are all about us now. Perhaps that was because for every point there was a counterpoint, so that everyone had to be respectful lest they get back what they dished out. Audiences today can find their own niche, where they never have to listen to opposing positions.

Those televisions on which we watched fewer channels with greater diversity were most likely made in the United States and those workers were adequately compensated for their labor. Many of the components to today’s TVs are made in Malaysia, Thailand, or China. In my youth, I don’t recall any stories of workers committing suicide or companies installing netting to keep workers from jumping to their deaths, but perhaps time has dimmed my recollection of them. As if time could ever erase such memories.

We were able to pay for people to answer phones and provide us the answers we needed, rather than being forced to endure endless hours lost in answering systems that never resolve our issues until we are finally able to speak to a real live person. We paid people to pump our gasoline. A small thing, I know, but a nice touch. You left the gas station with a clean windshield and the knowledge you had the proper amount of oil. It wasn't yet unheard of for a doctor to make a house call or a milkman to deliver you eggs. And job security. God, we had job security, with a pension awaiting us at the end of our work-life.

What happened to us as a culture? How did we get from there to here? And how dare we continue to call such a movement “progress”? How long do we continue to accept what today’s society provides for us at the expense of those who toil and are not rewarded? Do not the very clothes you wear itch and chafe at the thought of the suffering and wasted lives of those who created them for you? Do you not long to see Walter Cronkite’s image when you turn on the television, or Noam Chomsky when you turn to PBS? When you go to your optometrist, wouldn’t you like to know he was looking out for you and not his employers? Don’t you wish the people who are handsomely, no, obscenely, rewarded for overseeing business and politics started making life better for the average man rather than worse? Damn, it’s time to make some changes in our nation. And we’re going to have to do it on our own, because the people who took us from where we were then to where we are now are not interested in you. It’s time we became active in those democratic institutions such as labor unions, politics at the grassroots level, and international outreach. Because those who have been ruling us from the top down have failed us, failed us miserably. And it’s just going to get worse.

Don't Give Sociopaths Your Trust

Imagine you were responsible for the death of an innocent or even not so innocent person. Imagine if you allowed a friend to drive home from your house drunk only to hear he wrapped his car around a tree. Such an incident would change you, so that you would likely do whatever you could to make sure you were never again complicit in such a situation.

If you hit someone with your car while texting and driving, would you not be altered by it, not feel immense personal guilt? If you did the wiring in a building and the house burned down because of it, wouldn’t you make sure you either damn well learned to install wiring correctly or else never attempt such a thing again?

The stories are many. A boxer kills another man in the ring in fair combat and can no longer pursue boxing as a career. A child dying of SIDS while in the care of a babysitter causes a young girl years of shame and guilt she must work through. A depressed family member who commits suicide can lead to unending amounts of self-recrimination for the survivors, who ask themselves what they might have done to prevent it.

We humans are often prone to taking the blame for situations beyond our control. But it is a a human response, a necessary part of coming to terms with ourselves as active agents and responsible human beings. We must grow through this sort of questioning and self-examination in order to provide meaning to our lives and insure we are the people we believe ourselves to be and want to be. We, most of us, want to be good human beings. We want to believe we have a positive effect on others and are willing to go to some lengths to insure we do no harm to others.

But not all of us. Some people are capable of the most despicable of behavior and walk right through it as though they had no hand in the matter. These people are called sociopaths. They are incapable of reflecting upon their actions, are utterly uninterested in assuming responsibility for anything they’ve done. They are built in such a way that they can only see the rewards and not the punishments. They are defective people and it is best that we weed them out from positions of power.

Unfortunately, positions of power are the exact thing sociopaths are likely to seek out. It is normal for the average person to be wary of wielding too much power, to be humble enough to doubt their abilities and viewpoints enough that they’re not eager to thrust them down other people’s throats. But sociopaths aren’t concerned with personal responsibility, all they see are the rewards available if they push themselves forward in their quest for power, wealth and fame.

Thus do we often end up with sociopaths ruling over us, especially when we neglect our responsibility in the process. Every time we get lazy, every time we achieve a degree of comfort and self-satisfaction, we open the door for sociopaths to assume positions of power they have no right to.

Which brings us to Adam Schiff. Adam Schiff pushed for and voted for the Iraq War. It cost him nothing to do so. And when the Iraq War’s popularity receded, when the reasons behind it proved false and the notion of a quick in and out operation revealed itself to be delusional, he afterwards stated, "Unfortunately, our intelligence was dead wrong on that, on Saddam at that time.”

And that’s it. No sense of responsibility for his actions. No sense that he need atone, apologize, reflect, confess. As I’ve already stated, the average person would struggle with the guilt and regret resulting in actions that may or may not have resulted in tragedy or death of a single person. Even if no one were to hold you responsible, it is hard to get rid of the notion you could have prevented death and disaster had you done things differently. At the bare minimum, it would change how you behaved going forward. Hell, even if you knew someone who had been permitted to drive drunk, even if you weren’t there at the time, you would be a little more conscious in trying to prevent a tragedy occurring again.

Not so a sociopath. A sociopath is intent in furthering his own interests, not helping others. Thus it is that Adam Schiff is capable of moving on with his life after voting for a war that killed a third of a million people and is still affecting millions of people’s lives for the foreseeable future. Rather than accept any blame, he blames our intelligence for being dead wrong.

What kind of response would I expect from someone who voted for a war on false information, information that many knew were false and refused to accept? What could such a person do to demonstrate he accepted the full moral weight of his decisions? Hara kiri would not be out of the question. Though I would not ask it of anyone, suicide would demonstrate they felt somewhat the depths of responsibility for the lives of others they could never sufficiently repair.

Leaving office in a cloud of shame would be mandatory. To forever have your name synonymous with disgrace and selfishness is a no-brainer. If you had any respect for the human race, you would need to place yourself at the very bottom of the species.

I can’t imagine how I would ever deal with that amount of blood on my hands. Perhaps if I gave up all worldly possessions, severed ties with all those I loved in order to spare them some of the reflected disgrace of being associated with me. Perhaps a lifetime spent in jail for my crimes, or in a more enlightened society, a lifetime of service to others in a leper colony or someplace where human suffering is greatest. To forever discard any garment that speaks of wealth or comfort or authority, to dress as the humblest of all humanity and eat of the simplest of foods. If I had so much blood on my hands, I could only hope that such complete abnegation of self might in some small way cleanse me.

I pray to God I never have to live with such a thing on my conscience, pray to God I never have to go before him with such crimes tied to me. Which is why I try to live a simple life, try never to assume more power than my conscience can deal with should I fail.

Meanwhile Schiff has learned nothing. He has apologized for nothing, and now lauds the very intelligence agencies he seemed to blame for his vote for the Iraq War. Again he pushes for antagonism with a foreign nation, convinced in his position in a way no rational person could be. Certain to the point of accusing Tucker Carlson of carrying water for the Kremlin. Tucker Carlson.

What else can you call a man like that but a sociopath?

Spirituality and School Shootings

Every revolution or social movement contains within it a spiritual component. How could it not? Such a great shift from a known way of doing things to an unknown and unproven one requires a great amount of faith, and faith is an integral component of spirituality.

Every great movement has within it a sense of unity, wherein people speak of equality and brotherhood. People within a movement often refer to others as “sisters” and “brothers. They see in the movement something that transcends personal interests and instead see communal interests that will in turn serve all. A sense of unity among all people and an idea of something larger than the individual is indeed a spiritual notion.

A social movement capable of making worthwhile change will embrace lofty ideals such as justice. Justice is not something to be held in the hands, not something that can be placed upon a scale and physically measured. It cannot be bought or sold. It is an abstract notion that must be brought into being by the performance of the required rites and an agreed-upon definition of what is essentially ethereal and formless. One merely feels that justice has been done or injustice perpetrated, it cannot be quantified.

A social movement calls upon the individual to make personal sacrifices for the greater good. Spirituality would be empty without a realization of self-sacrifice.

No one sacrifices and dedicates himself to the efforts needed for change without the vision of a better future, distant and unproven but shining nonetheless. How else can one let go of what is in order to reach towards what might be without an understanding that there is something beyond what is described by accepted wisdom. It is with a feeling deep within one’s heart and a conviction that a promised land is attainable that progress is made. Faith transcends fact, the spiritual becomes more real than the physical. All else is mere politics, the crude physical jostling for a slightly better position for you and yours, like animals at the trough.

We as a nation now ask ourselves after every school shooting why such a thing occurs. No, in fact we do not ask, we reach for simple solutions. Liberals say gun control is the obvious solution (and I’m not saying that is not part of the solution, but it is not a cure-all) while Republicans seem to think arming teachers is the answer. Or possibly a ban on violent video games. Or prayer in school.

The truth is more complicated. The truth is always more complicated than we would choose. The truth is there are many reasons why school shootings and other mass killings occur so much more often in the United States than any other country in the world.

When I first watched Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine, I was disappointed by it. I felt it left me hanging without any clear-cut answers. But years later I have come to appreciate the fact that it asked more questions than it answered, because I realize the problem is much more systemic and runs much deeper than I would like.

Martin Luther King Junior once warned that a nation that spent more on war than on societal uplift was one facing a spiritual death. Let me expand upon that idea a bit to suggest a society that sees competition as the only good—and violence is the most obvious form of competition—is approaching a spiritual death. A society that only thinks of the individual’s struggle for survival and the individual’s rights and liberties, is missing the single greatest component of the human psyche: love. And love, perhaps more than anything else, is at the root of spirituality. I am not talking about the purely physical longing for another, but the very real and necessary sense of connectedness to others, to the world, and to ourselves.

Karl Marx spoke of Emtremdung, the idea of being alienated from others and ourselves through lack of meaningful connection. When our work and our human interactions become too abstract and meaningless, we become distanced from any real sense of self. We have become an alienated society. We make up simplistic explanations for why society is the way it is and, like someone placing a too heavy jacket on too light a hook, place upon those simplistic notions too much weight for them to bear. We retreat from reality, and as we do, we retreat from our ability to actually improve that reality. Fearing and doubting our ability to make the world a better place, we invest our alienated need for power into institutions: governments, the media, the market, the military, religion. We give lip service to God, but it is a god devoid of spirituality. It is an idol we worship, and in it we invest the power we might ourselves harness if we invested in spiritual endeavors.

Such alienation effects all of us, affecting those most at the edge most profoundly. Those who feel detached from their fellow man are more likely to act in destructive ways. Those who feel powerless are more likely to feel that even extreme behavior does not really touch the lives of others. Even in their violent attempts at interacting with the world, they still believe themselves powerless.

But while Marx saw alienation as a lack of meaningful interaction with the world, there is still a greater detachment we need worry about. When bonds of love--which is to say meaningful activity rooted in our realization that we are the same as our fellow humans, that they feel goodwill towards us as we feel it towards them—are lacking, the most basic psychic need is unfulfilled. Detached from the world by a lack of any sort of spiritual connection, the individual becomes broken, inhuman, defective. That is the sort of person who is capable of going on a shooting spree.

We try to patch such people up with drugs, but that only makes them still more alienated. To believe that an external component is necessary to fix what is wrong on their insides gives the impression they are lacking something essential within. They feel broken because that is what society is telling them. We now have tens of millions of people walking around altered from the state millions of years of evolution have worked towards by a few decades worth of psychological theories and recent chemical inventions.

Until we are able to build a society in which even the least of us can find some degree of connectivity to the outside world (spirituality), we are doomed to relive the same scenario over and over. There is no gun law that will prevent guns falling into the hands of killers that will be as effective as creating a society that is less interested in manufacturing guns and more interested in creating connections with one another.

Perhaps this is the reason the United States so completely leads the world in gun violence: because its population is so alienated and lacking in ways to interact in meaningful and caring ways. Perhaps, for all we talk about personal rights and freedoms, the average individual feels powerless, afraid, and cut off from the world in which he lives. If this is the case, prayer in classrooms will do nothing to fix it: imposed prayer is merely the external trappings of spirituality. But creating school environments where constructive and loving interaction exists would go a long way towards fulfilling the spiritual needs humans have.

And perhaps we need to take an honest look at the sort of art and entertainment we are creating and allowing our children to consume. I’m not aware of any science to support my claim, but I can’t help thinking that music that espouses innocent love will have a more positive influence than music that espouses misogyny and the pursuit of mere physical satisfaction. It makes sense that movies and TV shows that show less random and senseless violence will lessen desensitization to violence. And I have to believe efforts could be made to turn video games into something more than orgies of shooting and killing. It just makes sense to me, makes sense to one who reflects on society through a spiritual lens.

The answer to mass shootings is a complex one that will require thoughtfulness and communication. This is impossible given the mindset we now have to point fingers and search for simple answers. The very fact that we have the problem and have not been able to solve the problem suggests the solutions are not simple ones. The most obvious and logical step is the restriction of the availability of guns, but obviously in a culture that is so accepting of violence, this has been unachievable. We must work at the root of the problem if we are ever to remove from our nation the dubious distinction of leading the world in gun violence. And there is no more fundamental place to start than at the spiritual level.

The Greater Danger

To a surprising degree these days I am amazed by the amount of agreement that exists between intelligent people on the right and those on the left. This leads me to believe there is something very wrong with the center, the mainstream, the official narratives that are only the beliefs of the majority because they are forced down our throats by the major media players.

It’s funny how it has taken me over a year to distill my thoughts, observations, and gut feelings into a simple thesis statement, but I notice even the official narrative has never gotten beyond RUSSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA! In truth, the mainstream does have a central message it never wavers from, though it does not state it explicitly. It is this: Russia is bad, Russia has harmed us, Russia is our enemy, we must do something about Russia. Whatever the other allegations, whatever the changing assertions, from hacking, to colluding, to influencing, it has never wavered from that. Turn on your TV or radio, or read the paper, and that, behind whatever the story might be, is the message you are meant to receive.

Of course, the media will never explicitly state their central thesis: liars never do. Liars and gaslighters never give you simple and honest answers, they want to keep you in the dark. They want to keep you doubting yourself so that you trust them instead. They want you to hand over to them your personal autonomy so that they can rule you. Oh, you might get a certain illusion of power in the exchange. They will permit you your rage so that you feel like you are accomplishing something, but that rage is only permitted so long as it is directed by them and supports their cause. You will only ever be permitted to punch down, never up at the ones who dictate your reality. Step out of line and you will catch all hell for it. They will demand all the obedience an army drill sergeant does, and you will find it easiest to obey until you no longer realize that that is what you are doing.

It is not your will so much that they shut down as your mind. Once your mind ceases to function logically, critically, and skeptically, will is easily overcome. Once you react in fear rather than thoughtfully, the natural response is to retreat to safety. As a child retreats to the safety of his parents, so too does the adult retreat to the safety of his government, the flock, whatever source of authority  speaks loudly and forcefully and seems to know what’s going on and what needs to be done. The mainstream media also fits that bill.

If I make a comparison to Nazi Germany, you will surely object. I merely do so to point out the worst-case scenario for how this sort of manipulation and surrender of rational thinking to fear, the surrender of autonomy to a domineering government, can occur. It can occur, make no mistake about it. I do not say that in this case it will go as far as it did in Nazi Germany, I only say it is going in that direction and no one can really determine how far it will go. But seeing as how we live in an age where weapons are infinitely more powerful than any that existed in World War II, we don’t have to go nearly as far in the direction taken by 1930’s Germany in order to come up with an unimaginably worse scenario.

I mentioned I finally distilled all my thoughts and observations and fears into a single, declarative statement. It is this: Anyone who ignores the mountain of evidence that our media has provided us with willfully deceptive information, in order to focus on the allegations that Russia should be our primary focus, is lacking any sense of proportion.

From there, the rest of the argument springs naturally. But first let me briefly support the central thesis. You can see the evidence elsewhere on my blog. I have constantly pointed out examples of journalism that is not merely incompetent but willfully misleading. I have pointed out a certainty that should never exist in any respectable reporting, a one-sidedness on par with anything Nazi Germany called news. But the primary evidence can be seen simply by turning to your favorite news source. Is it providing you with useful, actionable, accurate and nuanced information? Is it doing a good job discussing and reporting on issues such as global warming and is it giving it the attention it deserves? Did it do a good job reporting on the 2016 Presidential election? Did it do a good job of getting to the truth behind Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq or babies being torn from incubators in Kuwait?

If you can honestly answer yes to any of the questions above, then there might be some room to argue against my assertion. Otherwise, you should agree that the primary source of misinformation is our own media and therefore any attempt to place alleged Russian interference (claimed by the very media that is the admitted greater problem) as a primary concern lacks proportionality.

Now back to what can be argued from my central thesis. Anyone who has demonstrated no capacity for proportionality on the Russian issue does not deserve our trust. Whether they be willful agents of a skewed perspective or merely mindless bits of driftwood being pulled along in the great flood of the narrative, they clearly lack the capacity for leadership. If we are talking about politicians, they are unworthy of your vote. If they are journalists, they are unworthy of the time you spend reading their reports.

This is not to dismiss the Russian interference or anyone who believes that such a thing took place. But we need to acknowledge there has been an unprecedented propaganda push that has taken place. It could be argued that a dysfunctional media that sees profit as its only obligation is to blame, but cause is not the immediate concern. That can be sorted out later, the issue we need to address in the moment is that we have a media and political system that must be fixed. Only those in the broken systems, or those who have uncritically accepted their narrative, would say differently.

Oligarchs, Russian And Otherwise (or American Made Oligarchy)

I am amused every time I hear the term “Russian oligarch” used on American media that is mostly owned by a small group of billionaires.

Perhaps amused it not the right descriptor. What is the word for the feeling you get when encountering someone with either a profound mix of arrogance and ignorance or else someone with great intellect and greater capacity for deception? Perhaps there is not a word in the English language for that mixture of disgust and despair, but there should be.

You see, The Washington Post, our newspaper of note and the one most likely to use the term “Russian oligarch”, is owned by the richest person in the entire world. Part of that wealth comes from U.S. intelligence agencies. FOX News is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is worth $13 billion. The owner and namesake of Bloomberg News is worth $35 billion. So to use the term oligarch to apply to rich Russians while ignoring the worse condition that exists in the U.S. seems rather hypocritical, don’t you think?

But that is not the extent of hypocrisy, it is merely the stepping-off point. Because the mere fact that oligarchy exists in Russia today is not a symbol of an inherent flaw in the Russian people, nor does it make them our enemy. Oligarchy exists, to the extent that it does, not because of Vladimir Putin. The oligarchs were already established by the time Putin came on the scene: it was a mess he had to deal with, not one of his own making. No, oligarchs exist in Russia today because that’s the system we helped Russia set up.

It’s what we do, or rather what our oligarchs do and then pretend it was done in our name. We go into other countries in order to exploit their resources and labor, and the easiest way to do that is buy off a few people and make them co-partners in exploiting their people and their resources. We make of their nations little oligarchs in our likeness. That’s why so many people from those countries we’ve “helped” end up trying to emigrate to our shores. It’s not so much that our system is better, it’s because we’ve worked hard to make their system worse.

Any place where you see people whose skin color is darker than ours, take a look at the ones we consider our allies. If they have an extreme contrast between a few really wealthy people and a lot of really poor ones, they’re our friend. Look at Saudi Arabia. Look at Columbia: how many years have we been supporting that country militarily? Indonesia? We’ve spent decades making them what they are. If you look at any country rich in natural resources, you will find a great amount of poverty along with an immensely rich ruling class. This isn’t because they are backwards but because of how we rigged the system in order acquire their resources for our own use.

But the country with the greatest disparity between haves and have-nots is not one of our allies, not a country we supported, disrupted, or invaded. No, according to Fortune Magazine, the nation with the greatest inequality, and hence the one most oligarchic, is the United States itself. But this is still not the primary reason American media is laughably hypocritical for using the term Russian oligarchs. The real hypocrisy is reserved for the fact that their oligarchs were the result of the economic “reforms” we helped them to impose.

If you are old enough to remember the time immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, you will recall all of the “aid” we lavished upon Russia in an attempt to give them an economic system based on our model. And if you remember that, you will most likely remember terms like “austerity” and “shock therapy”. Think about that term for a moment. It was the pull the band-aid off quickly theory, and it involved a lot of old people going hungry and losing all the security they had worked for their whole lives. And it involved a few entrepreneurs getting very rich very quickly as the wealth of the nation that was once held communally found its way into the hands of a very few.

Here is a description of the conversion ushered in by the United states by Seumas Milne from The Guardian: “Capitalist restoration brought in its wake mass pauperisation and unemployment; wild extremes of inequality; rampant crime; virulent anti-semitism and ethnic violence; combined with legalised gangsterism on a heroic scale and precipitous looting of public assets.” Anyone with a sense of proportionality might want to consider if anything Russia did or allegedly did compares to that.

We created the oligarchs in Russia. We did it. They were not a creation of Putin, they were on the scene when Putin came to power. They were a situation he had to deal with, not a result of his rule.

But we blame him, blame Russia as an entity. Somehow their very Russianness causes them to be our destined enemy. Because we need an enemy, we always need an external threat to distract us from our own problems with oligarchy. It has been my personal experience that it is best not to follow those who tell you who your enemies have to be.

The troll farm, too, is most likely a result not of Putin but of the economic system we helped them learn. The alternative idea that it’s a nefarious tool of Putin seems as ridiculous as a Police Academy script. It’s called free market capitalism, doing anything for a buck no matter how sleazy and destructive to other humans. I understand people posting whatever they need to in order to draw people to their advertisers. There is no shortage of such behavior in America, as well. How else does one explain MTV? We have our entrepreneurs who buy patents to life-saving drugs in order to jack up the prices even though some will die as a result. That’s all legitimate behavior in the amoral game called capitalism.

This is the system we promote. This is our standard operating procedure. And rather than deal with the reality of our oligarchic and utterly amoral system, we distract ourselves by pointing fingers at others and calling them oligarchs. We clutch our pearls and worry over their influence on our unblemished democracy. Not that we unaided would create these fears, the media needs to feed them to us. We are constantly being directed to hate various enemies far from our shores, a rotating cast of bogeymen who threaten our very way of life. True, occasionally these threats are real, but so is the threat of an oligarchic dystopia the likes of which George Orwell or Jack London imagined.

I’m not an expert on Russia. I don’t know what Putin has or has not done, do not know if he is a good man or a bad one except for what I hear in the media. But it is obvious he is an intelligent man, and I don’t see him getting involved in the Keystone Kops plot being painted by our oligarchic media.

I don’t know the state of corruption in Russia. But I really don’t see why I need to be a Russian expert in order to point out the problems we have in my own nation, problems that are getting worse and worse as we fiddle away the hours fretting about Russian oligarchs. I earlier used the word proportionality and regarding the Russian interference there is none. There is merely a screaming irrationality of a mob too angry to think, too obsessed to take a step back and gain perspective. If I wanted to manipulate a population into going along with actions that are not in their own best interests, that is exactly the state I would want them in.

Favorite Caitlin Johnstone Quotes

I've been collecting Caitlin Johnstone quotes I like for a little while now (it's as easy as finding sand at the beach) and thought I'd share them. Links to the original articles are provided.

They put a pussyhat on Big Brother. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/fascism-came-to-america-wrapped-in-a-rainbow-flag-and-wearing-a-pussyhat-902118e62668

The spark has gone out from the eyes of the starry-eyed artists. The sincere impulse to apprehend the soul of the universe which drove them to create beauty has been snuffed out and replaced with stock portfolios and vapid award ceremonies. In the places where we used to look for truth and light we now find a bunch of stuffy millionaires cheerleading for the CIA and the new cold war. They are McCarthyists and conformists. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/anti-trumpism-has-turned-liberals-into-cia-cheerleading-finger-wagging-nerds-999da68fcf17

The left (the real left, not the “I support drone bombing children but it’s okay because I call Caitlyn Jenner by the correct pronouns” faux-left that Americans are permitted to support) is under constant assault by America’s unelected power establishment due to its opposition to war and oligarchy, both of which the US power establishment is entirely dependent upon.  https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/msm-uses-russiagate-to-punch-left-8ebda8fabb75

The fact that hatred of the sitting president has Democrats so desperate they’re not only forgiving the crimes of vestigial Bush neocons but also helping them in their agenda to sabotage any movements toward detente with Russia shows just how brutally efficient the psychological manipulations of the establishment propaganda machine have become. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2017/12/28/iraq-raping-neocons-are-suddenly-posing-as-woke-progressives-to-gain-support/

It’s not okay to be a neoconservative. In a healthy world, being a neocon would carry as much social weight as being a child molester or a serial killer.  IBID

If you publicly support an ideological direction that suggests maybe allowing plutocrats to live as totalitarian emperors and kill anyone who stands in their way isn’t the best possible direction to lead the country, you get a bunch of Democrats and Republicans coming at you babbling about ponies and unicorns. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/01/14/get-a-room/

This is going to be another one of those times where I focus on attacking Democrats for something the Republicans do at least as much, and I make no apologies for that. When you come home to find the babysitter and the baby passed out drunk, you don’t get equally mad at both of them. Democrats present themselves as the party on the American left, which means they’re supposed to be the grownups in the room when it comes to things like peace and social justice, but they’ve been anything but. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/democrats-are-feigning-outrage-at-islamophobia-they-helped-create-5a39af4a6ff6

The US always uses sanctions as a prelude to overt war, in the same way a siege was used before storming the castle of an enemy in medieval times. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/beware-the-smiling-face-of-establishment-politics-bd31a40a8fa8

Questioned in 1996 about reports that half a million Iraqi children were killed by UN sanctions, another US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said that “the price was worth it”. Like she was paying. (Ibid)

You can even get away with nonsensical accusations against a noncompliant leader of “starving his own people” by refusing to bow to the demands of US-led power, which makes as much sense as if US and coalition forces were launching Tomahawk missiles into that nation’s villages and then saying their leader was “exploding his own people.” (IBID)

A lot of Berners still maintain the belief that the Democratic establishment sabotaged Sanders’ campaign because they were afraid of him, but that’s simply not true. Bernie is just one man; the establishment was never afraid of Bernie. They were afraid of you. They were afraid of the populist insurgency throwing an unapproved candidate in the path of the Anointed Queen Hillary despite being instructed by the mass media propaganda machine over and over again that they were not permitted to choose him. They were afraid of the people. And they should be. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/stop-looking-for-saviors-6009aa7528df

At its core, establishment media is revolution poison. That is its primary function. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/01/25/some-thoughts-on-spirituality-and-revolution/

Even a small child can see that ecocidal capitalism and endless war are stupid, and that letting people starve and suffer just because they don’t have enough money is nonsense, but it continues anyway because believed narratives make our society function in an unwholesome way in the same way that believed mental narratives make an individual function in an unwholesome way. (IBID)

There is a common delusion among elitists and intellectuals that the ability to emotionally detach and analyze things without letting the suffering of the world bring you to your knees is some sort of virtue. They'll ridicule you for caring and mock your outrage. I say the hell with that; that apathy is precisely what is killing us, and your similarity to a sociopath is never something to brag about. https://steemit.com/journalism/@caitlinjohnstone/this-deeply-held-commitment-a-meditation-on-the-death-of-robert-parry

Look at the worldview of the average person who identifies as a liberal and you’ll find adoration of psychopathic authoritarian intelligence agencies like the CIA and the FBI, a significantly warmed opinion of George W Bush and the neocons he ushered into power, a total apathy toward the US war machine and Orwellian surveillance network, a seething hatred of all things Russia and a hysterical McCarthyite beef with anyone who fails to fall in line with approved establishment narratives. They have become the very flag-waving, authority-cheerleading, art-killing oppressive zealots that the counterculture of the 1960s burst free from like a drowning man finally getting his head above water and clawing his way onto the shore. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/02/07/modern-liberals-are-1950s-authoritarians/

They will scream at conservatives over this til they’re blue in the face… but you’ll never see them screaming at the US war machine that is ultimately responsible for Islamophobia in the first place. (IBID)

People are driven to embrace progressive value systems out of that sacred spark which lives in all of us which knows that it is natural for us all to get along and help each other out, but people in power figured out how to manipulate that impulse in a way that has turned its once bright-eyed idealists into a bunch of stuffy, artless church ladies who’d be right at home in J Edgar Hoover’s America. (IBID)

The progressive drive toward real change has been warped and twisted into a drive toward good manners. The push toward solving problems by equitable distribution of money and power has been neutered by the fairy tale that you can solve problems with a “Resist” hashtag and a rainbow flag. Rob Reiner has become a weird mutant Archie Bunker, an Archie Bunker who still has all his old, obsolete, establishment-friendly ideologies in place but knows never to assume someone’s gender. (IBID)

We're already answerable to the same corporatist powers which control the US, so we trot right along into every US war, every US trade deal, and operate as a US intelligence asset just the same as we would if they'd planted the stars and stripes on our capitol buildings and called us Wisconsota. Through military alliance, intelligence alliance, corporatist agreements, and a good old-fashioned coup staged by the CIA and MI6, we transitioned smoothly from subservience under the old form of imperialism to subservience under the new. A whole continent full of McDonald's-eating sheep. https://steemit.com/syria/@caitlinjohnstone/on-the-syrian-occupation-and-the-new-face-of-imperialism

The notion of meaningfully separate, sovereign governments is at this time a fairy tale told to the masses to keep us from realizing that we're all being thrown into the gears of an exploitative threshing machine that only exists to feed the avaricious agendas of a few ruling elites. (IBID)

I write about US politics because that's where I reckon the head of the beast is. Australia is essentially an intelligence/military asset of the US-centralized international empire, so there's no point writing about Aussie politics if I'm interested in helping our species avoid extinction. And that's really the only reason I write. https://steemit.com/caitlinjohnstone/@caitlinjohnstone/a-little-about-me

I have faith that ordinary people as a collective are much better governors of the world than a few depraved elites, and I have faith that humanity can wake up enough to reclaim its power. (IBID)

Russia And The Threat To Democracy

I have seen the proofs. Many times, too many times to mention. I literally could not escape them even if I tried. I half-suspect that were I to take up residence in some remote part of Alaska a plane would fly overhead and drop leaflets upon me. And now with social media, others are too willing to share them with me, each a slam-dunk case for the fact that Russia hacked our election or interfered with our election, or sowed discontent after the election. The essential point is still not quite clear. If there is a precise accusation today, it is not the same one it was yesterday, and likely will change tomorrow.

Those smoking guns that I have managed to inspect carefully—and I have reviewed quite a few—have inevitably been filled with blanks. I don’t mean to suggest that some articles were incomplete while others leaned too heavily on the words of anonymous sources within intelligence agencies that have been known to tell a whopper or ten when they’ve felt it was fitting to do so. No, I mean any half-critical read of any one of them revealed serious flaws in the journalism that pointed to something far beyond mere incompetence.

Let me give you an example. An extreme example, certainly, but not too far from the average. Regard this article from The Hill, a publication that is generally thought of as a respected news source. Note the headline, “Trump building in Panama tied to Russian mafia, international crime: report”. Pretty provocative and damning, isn’t it? Smoking gun and all that. Now read the article. What you will notice if you actually read it, is that there is not a single reference to Russia in it. No reference to Vladimir Putin or any Russian business or businessperson. Nothing. An absolute nada burger with a headline that says it ties Trump to the Russian mafia. I’m not making this up, read it. (1)

I say this example is not too far from the norm because with the exception of an added paragraph at the beginning, it is identical to most every other article I’ve read on the subject. Usually an initial paragraph promises to provide some kind of evidence before veering off into a story that actually provides no evidence for the assertion made in the headline. This article is different only in that they apparently forgot to include the initial paragraph.

The most typical story I read—in other words the kind most often sent to me as proof of collusion or whatever it is they are trying to prove on a given day—comes from a (allegedly) respected newspaper. Regardless of the paper, the words “as reported by the Washington Post” soon appear. So I source the original article, which without fail says “according to unnamed sources within intelligence agencies”. It doesn’t take long to spot the pattern.

But that is not journalism, that is dictation, dictation from secretive organizations that lie for a living. These are the same organizations that tried to get Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide, and I haven’t ruled out the possibility that they ultimately did him in. (2) Secret government organizations don’t exist to help the common man. They never have in any country in any time. Go ahead, give me an example of a secretive unaccountable government organization that improved the rights, freedoms and powers of its citizenry. The KGB? The Gestapo? So journalism, at least the “respected”, not “fake” news sources, don’t bother to question the information they get from such agencies, they simply pass it on as “news”. If that is not propaganda, please give me an example of what is.

Why? Why this sudden intense flood of really faulty journalism? Are journalism schools handing out degrees nowadays without asking students to pass any exams? Has it always been this bad and I just haven’t noticed until now? Have I for too long clung to alternative media for my information that I have neglected to realize just how far down mainstream media has fallen? Or is it something more sinister. I cannot help thinking it is something more sinister.

Which is the central reason why, when the Russian Hacking Narrative stories arise, nothing Russia did or did not do is as big a concern to me as the complete falling apart of our sources of information. If Russia actually did something to change our election, there are pretty simple and obvious steps that can be taken to insure the integrity of our elections going forward. But nobody is doing anything about it. Instead the conversation is about how evil Russia and Vladimir Putin are and how we need to punish them, which makes me realize it isn’t the sanctity of our elections that is important but the need to demonize Russia. Which means they’re telling us one thing and doing another. Which means they’re lying. Whatever Russia might be guilty of, the media really doesn’t care about it. The media’s main concern is to direct all of your anger and attention at Russia. Forget about voting machines that could easily be rigged. Forget about purging of the voter rolls.

This is so, as far as I can guess, for one of two reasons. The first is that the powers that be have no desire to fix the real problems that face our society and so deflect your attention with the diversion of Russia the way they distract you with celebrities, sports, and wedge issues. This is bad. The second is that those in control of our highly concentrated media want you to hate Russia as a way to justify aggressive behavior towards them by our government. This is much worse. And it is the much more likely explanation.

I recently witnessed a discussion in congress between Marco Rubio and Daniel Coats, the Director of National Intelligence. You can watch it here. It was quite shocking to me that with Russia currently on their plate, they are already discussing how China is the biggest threat on the horizon. They are discussing how China is looking to overtake the U.S as the primary power on the planet.

The problem with this line of thinking is that we see the successes of any other nation as a threat to our own. Rather than taking the approach of co-existence, we feel the need to do something towards other nations before they become powerful enough to escape being subservient to us. In short, we feel the need to place every other nation at our mercy, need to maintain the position of power over all the planet. This is not who we claim to be, we promote ourselves as a beacon of freedom and democracy. But again, what we are being told does not match our behavior.

This is a very dangerous attitude to have. This is an attitude that inevitably leads to conflict, and the only tool the United States has for dealing with conflict is war. War is an incredibly wasteful, foolish, ultimately counter-productive way of dealing with other nations. It's evil, too. It has cost our nation thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq, and that war is not over and does not look to end anytime soon. We may think we have managed the Iraq War, but we still have no idea what the ultimate ramifications of our deeds there are. History stretches beyond news cycles, and nations have long memories and are capable of harboring grievances in perpetuity.

We use aggression against any nation whose interest do not align with ours. And while that is a dangerous approach when dealing with countries such as Iraq and Libya, it is exponentially more so when using such methods when dealing with Russia and China. If for some reason it works against Russia, and I don’t care to contemplate the quite literal fallout should it not, China is next in line. From the video clip I included, it cannot be denied.

The sad thing is, we will never really know what Russia did or did not do. Our sources of information are too unreliable to provide us any certainty. They daily prove their interests are anything but providing us with truth and context. To trust them, to put our safety in their hands or to act on their assertions, is absurd.

We need to find alternate paths to the truth, organizations and individuals that have earned our trust. But the result of the propaganda of the whole Russian narrative is completely the opposite of that. For years the mainstream media has pushed journalists who have proven themselves trustworthy to the margins. Now, lacking anywhere else where they can report their findings, they appear on RT and the mainstream propaganda claims they are Russian puppets. Using the excuse of Russian bots, the internet is slowly being constricted so that our access to alternate media is being strangled. YouTube Channels are being de-monetized, Google searches are showing less, and flat-out banning links to certain sites is now the norm on Facebook.

I am not up on the latest bombshell, so I cannot comment on it. In fact, there are a ton of articles I’ve missed. I simply cannot respond to every assertion that has been made, the propaganda blitz is a tidal wave that overwhelms. But I’ve caught enough of them, read them critically, followed the links and connected the dots, enough to know there is a bigger story going on here than anything Russia is a part of.

Nothing Russia has done or can do, and I am extremely dubious of the official narrative precisely because of the way it has been pushed, can harm our democracy as much as this current wave of propaganda and urge for censorship. We have a system that’s broken and the entire Russian narrative is doing nothing to fix it, it is in fact making it worse. Much worse. And there is no greater threat to democracy than censorship and our sources for information being in the hands of the unaccountable few.

(1) The scary part of this nothing burger is the fact it was shared over 13,000 times, presumably by those using it as evidence of Trump/Russia collusion. Did they not read it? Did they apply no critical thinking skills at all? Are we so flushed with articles about Russian interference in our election that we mistake sheer quantity as proof?

(2) That doesn’t make me a conspiracy theorist. A jury in 1999 found that MLK’s death was the result of a conspiracy. Coretta, Martin Luther’s wife, had this to say “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband.”