What is totally overlooked, are the underlaying dynamics.
The elephant in the room is the secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. The wars are just a burn pit, to make it go away, so more can be borrowed. The military industrial complex is just the trophy wife of the banks.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking mirror blood and the circulation system. While we have evolved to the point of understanding government has to be a public utility, we've yet to reach the same realization about banking. Which has given banking the upper hand, since they are not as subject to the same oversight and don't have to plan around election cycles.
Consequently they have hollowed out government, leaving a bunch of flunkies, sociopaths and prostitutes to fill the roles, whose primary function is to create all that public debt the banks depend on, in order to function.
The reality is that money is a social contract, enabling economies to function, but it is treated as a commodity, to mine from the economy, to save and store. The medium has become the message. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. They are related, but certainly not synonymous.
So to store the asset, sufficient debt has to be generated to back it.
It's not like this is a new problem. Michael Hudson wrote a book, some years ago, called Forgive Them Their Debts. About how the Ancient's political systems and financial systems/oligarchs were in natural conflict, between drawing societies together and using compound interest to suck them dry. So debt jubilees were developed as a circuit breaker. Two thousand years later, we are still stuck in the same rut. Remember, Jesus was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the money changers.
When Pilger and company focus on the effects of this dynamic and ignore the causes, they are doing their own efforts a disservice. Yes, the heavies in the military will stomp your brains out, if you cross them, but if there was an effective, coordinated campaign to explain why society has to move to public banking, then it's only an abstract threat. Think if all the alternative media did a few stories a month on how banking drives so much of this disfunction, developing all the myriad angles of how it has come to control society. What are they going to do? Call it disinformation?
Back in the day, people raised their kids and were taken care of in old age. Now we have retirement accounts, mostly backed by masses of debts that will never be repaid and will eventually only be covered by printed money, while the kids are buried under mountains of debt.
John Pilger is a remarkable man. I've often said that there is no right or wrong, only consequences. Typically, right would be associated with good consequences and wrong withe bad consequences, but, of course, not always. It is remarkable to me that Mr. Pilger can keep his equanimity whilst watching the seemingly inexorable advance of the empire....
Here's Pilger in a truly disgusting paean to the dead dictator of Venezuela. Has there ever been such a suck-up in the history of journalism? Pilger should go back now and explain to the starving and dying why they should still love that pig.
John Pilger: I traveled with Hugo Chavez across Venezuela. I have never known a national leader so respected and held in such affection as Chavez. He was an extraordinary man, who never seemed to sleep, who was consumed by ideas. He would arrive at a farmers’ meeting with a stack of books under his arm: Dickens, Orwell, Chomsky, Zola.
He had marked passages to read to his audience and people listened intently; he saw himself as the people’s educator. He was also, incorruptible and tough – tough in the sense that he was brave.
He was also mischievous. Once, I feel asleep in the sun during one of his long outdoor meetings, I awoke to hear my name being called out, and people laughing. To ease my embarassment, ‘El Presidente’ presented me with a local wine. “He is Australian; he likes red wine,” Chávez told the crowd.
I should say I almost never speak of politicians in this way. His flaw was that essential power flowed down from him; he was Venezuela’s caudillo and idealist-in-chief; and when he died, the gap was too great.
Readers with an interest in the media, propaganda, and censorship might find my recent two parter rip on the New York Times of interest. See below ⬇️ for more information ℹ️.
As a writer, one of my preoccupations has been the myriad shortcomings of our establishment media. In this one cannot talk about the so-called Fourth Estate without reference to the role they’ve played in ushering in the regime of propaganda and censorship under which we're all now subjected. I believe the conduct of our establishment media on both counts represents one of the greatest threats to our democratic way of life. I have come to calling this combination of propaganda and censorship a slow 'blood poisoning of the body politic'. With all that that entails. For those with an eye to these things, the past two or more years has removed any doubt about any of this, a further pointer if it was needed as to whose side they are really on.
That said, it cannot be denied they still hold considerable sway over our political dialogue and public debate, even influencing our scholarly discourse. And from there, holding sway over our collective perceptions of the events and developments which to all intents define the world in which we live, our very understanding of history, and which inevitably determine our future. The recent revelations about the genesis of the so-called Russia-Gate affair and election fraud in the US—and the MSM's role in facilitating and then covering up these monumental travesties—serve only to underscore the inordinate power the establishment media wields in shaping public opinion, and from there public policy.
What follows then is an unflinching, warts n' all analysis of the "Old Gray Lady", America's most revered, influential establishment media institution. By extension, it’s also a ‘deep n’ meaningful’ meditation on the state of the global corporate media in general, albeit with the 'le grande dame de journalisme' holding centre stage. It covers quite a bit of 'real estate'. But then so too does the Fourth Estate.
If I had a fundamental aim with this exploration, it was for it to stand as something of a 'fashion statement' on American Media’s ‘Finest’, revealing especially for those still under the sway of this perfidious entity, some naked, yet necessary home truths. Please circulate as you see fit via your networks and preferred platforms and encourage your contacts to do same. It is increasingly vital for us to share the efforts of those amongst us trying to get out some home truths about those who seek to rule over us. Time is against us all. Stay strong, remain righteous! — Greg Maybury, Dispatches from the No Fly Zone
All the News that’s Fit to Fake & Hide — Part One: The Slander, Calumny, & Lies of an Old Gray Lady, by Greg Maybury
Thanks to John Pilger and The Scrum for this. A subject close to my heart. I drew upon this interview with Riefenstahl as inspiration for my 2019 article (originally published on my now discontinued blog, now republished on my Substack page). Readers might find it of interest. See below.
ARTICLE: Inside the Submissive Void — Propaganda, Censorship, Power, and Control
PREAMBLE: The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies. Yet the history of how western governments and their ever-vigilant junkyard dogs in the media, financial, and business spheres have controlled the political narrative of the time via these means is a long, storied and ruinous one, going back well before 1914.
Along with serving the contemporaneous political objectives of its perpetrators as contrived, such activities often continue to inform our understanding, and cement our interpretation, of history. If as the saying goes, “history repeats itself”, we need look no further than this as to the main reason why. In this wide-ranging ‘safari’ into the propaganda, disinformation, fake news, and myth-making wilderness—“The Big Shill”—Greg Maybury does indeed look further, and concludes that “It’s the narrative, stupid!”
A Taster: “Whether we know it or not or like it or not, no matter how clever we think we are, or how mindful we might be—and from that consciously resistant to—of the pernicious effects of media propaganda and censorship, we’re all susceptible to the enervating forces they unleash, with complacency, arrogance, ignorance, and self-delusion being but a few of them.”
Oh my. This man is so poisoned by his hatred of the US that he can barely think. He seems unable to sort through claims with a modicum of sense. He writes that 'It proposes “multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor.” In other words, nuclear war.'
NO. In other words, fighting against countries that HAVE nuclear arms, even if they do not use them.
No, dear, China has not eliminated abject poverty. That is a sheer fantasy. Millions of people -- 40%, according to Li Kejiang, or roughly 550 million people -- live on about $150 a month. I am not sure how low you have to go to reach "abject" poverty, but surely that is low enough.
What changed the impression of China is its blustering threats, its claim that the entire South China Sea belongs to it and that Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. have no claims at all, its treatment of the Uighyurs, and its invasion of Hong Kong in violation of the treaty with the UK, along with pervasive monitoring of the population at a microscopic level. China has made enormous and impressive gains and its achievements in raising the wealth of the population are admirable, but that shouldn't make you blind to other issues.
Western analysts have indeed downplayed the influence of fascist forces in Ukraine, but they have covered this issue. Yes, there are fascists in Ukraine. No, they aren't very powerful. No, that is not why Putin invaded. (How naive can you be to argue that this vast war which has killed perhaps 50,000 Russian men was conceived of to deal with crimes such as the killing of "dozens" of Russians by some paramilitary thugs? Well, he is not that naive, he's just lying.) Constantly twisting issues to suit your preferred narrative is not going to convince anyone except the already basically convinced.
What really annoys the author is that his own propaganda and corrosive hatred is not echoed in the submissive void but rather that someone else's is.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts”—except one.
Almost everyone I read condemns the invasion. How can this be condemned when there was apparently no way short of war to stop the empire?
What is totally overlooked, are the underlaying dynamics.
The elephant in the room is the secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. The wars are just a burn pit, to make it go away, so more can be borrowed. The military industrial complex is just the trophy wife of the banks.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking mirror blood and the circulation system. While we have evolved to the point of understanding government has to be a public utility, we've yet to reach the same realization about banking. Which has given banking the upper hand, since they are not as subject to the same oversight and don't have to plan around election cycles.
Consequently they have hollowed out government, leaving a bunch of flunkies, sociopaths and prostitutes to fill the roles, whose primary function is to create all that public debt the banks depend on, in order to function.
The reality is that money is a social contract, enabling economies to function, but it is treated as a commodity, to mine from the economy, to save and store. The medium has become the message. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. They are related, but certainly not synonymous.
So to store the asset, sufficient debt has to be generated to back it.
It's not like this is a new problem. Michael Hudson wrote a book, some years ago, called Forgive Them Their Debts. About how the Ancient's political systems and financial systems/oligarchs were in natural conflict, between drawing societies together and using compound interest to suck them dry. So debt jubilees were developed as a circuit breaker. Two thousand years later, we are still stuck in the same rut. Remember, Jesus was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the money changers.
When Pilger and company focus on the effects of this dynamic and ignore the causes, they are doing their own efforts a disservice. Yes, the heavies in the military will stomp your brains out, if you cross them, but if there was an effective, coordinated campaign to explain why society has to move to public banking, then it's only an abstract threat. Think if all the alternative media did a few stories a month on how banking drives so much of this disfunction, developing all the myriad angles of how it has come to control society. What are they going to do? Call it disinformation?
Back in the day, people raised their kids and were taken care of in old age. Now we have retirement accounts, mostly backed by masses of debts that will never be repaid and will eventually only be covered by printed money, while the kids are buried under mountains of debt.
WHY. DOESN'T. ANYONE. CONNECT. THE. DOTS!!!!!!!!!!!!
John Pilger is a remarkable man. I've often said that there is no right or wrong, only consequences. Typically, right would be associated with good consequences and wrong withe bad consequences, but, of course, not always. It is remarkable to me that Mr. Pilger can keep his equanimity whilst watching the seemingly inexorable advance of the empire....
Here's Pilger in a truly disgusting paean to the dead dictator of Venezuela. Has there ever been such a suck-up in the history of journalism? Pilger should go back now and explain to the starving and dying why they should still love that pig.
John Pilger: I traveled with Hugo Chavez across Venezuela. I have never known a national leader so respected and held in such affection as Chavez. He was an extraordinary man, who never seemed to sleep, who was consumed by ideas. He would arrive at a farmers’ meeting with a stack of books under his arm: Dickens, Orwell, Chomsky, Zola.
He had marked passages to read to his audience and people listened intently; he saw himself as the people’s educator. He was also, incorruptible and tough – tough in the sense that he was brave.
He was also mischievous. Once, I feel asleep in the sun during one of his long outdoor meetings, I awoke to hear my name being called out, and people laughing. To ease my embarassment, ‘El Presidente’ presented me with a local wine. “He is Australian; he likes red wine,” Chávez told the crowd.
I should say I almost never speak of politicians in this way. His flaw was that essential power flowed down from him; he was Venezuela’s caudillo and idealist-in-chief; and when he died, the gap was too great.
Readers with an interest in the media, propaganda, and censorship might find my recent two parter rip on the New York Times of interest. See below ⬇️ for more information ℹ️.
As a writer, one of my preoccupations has been the myriad shortcomings of our establishment media. In this one cannot talk about the so-called Fourth Estate without reference to the role they’ve played in ushering in the regime of propaganda and censorship under which we're all now subjected. I believe the conduct of our establishment media on both counts represents one of the greatest threats to our democratic way of life. I have come to calling this combination of propaganda and censorship a slow 'blood poisoning of the body politic'. With all that that entails. For those with an eye to these things, the past two or more years has removed any doubt about any of this, a further pointer if it was needed as to whose side they are really on.
That said, it cannot be denied they still hold considerable sway over our political dialogue and public debate, even influencing our scholarly discourse. And from there, holding sway over our collective perceptions of the events and developments which to all intents define the world in which we live, our very understanding of history, and which inevitably determine our future. The recent revelations about the genesis of the so-called Russia-Gate affair and election fraud in the US—and the MSM's role in facilitating and then covering up these monumental travesties—serve only to underscore the inordinate power the establishment media wields in shaping public opinion, and from there public policy.
What follows then is an unflinching, warts n' all analysis of the "Old Gray Lady", America's most revered, influential establishment media institution. By extension, it’s also a ‘deep n’ meaningful’ meditation on the state of the global corporate media in general, albeit with the 'le grande dame de journalisme' holding centre stage. It covers quite a bit of 'real estate'. But then so too does the Fourth Estate.
If I had a fundamental aim with this exploration, it was for it to stand as something of a 'fashion statement' on American Media’s ‘Finest’, revealing especially for those still under the sway of this perfidious entity, some naked, yet necessary home truths. Please circulate as you see fit via your networks and preferred platforms and encourage your contacts to do same. It is increasingly vital for us to share the efforts of those amongst us trying to get out some home truths about those who seek to rule over us. Time is against us all. Stay strong, remain righteous! — Greg Maybury, Dispatches from the No Fly Zone
All the News that’s Fit to Fake & Hide — Part One: The Slander, Calumny, & Lies of an Old Gray Lady, by Greg Maybury
https://tinyurl.com/2p9542kx
All the News that’s Fit to Fake & Hide — Part Two: In the Citadel of Truth & Certitude, by Greg Maybury.
https://tinyurl.com/33mejhs2
#NewYorkTimes #Covid #Propaganda #Censorship #FakeNews #MSM #911
Thanks to John Pilger and The Scrum for this. A subject close to my heart. I drew upon this interview with Riefenstahl as inspiration for my 2019 article (originally published on my now discontinued blog, now republished on my Substack page). Readers might find it of interest. See below.
ARTICLE: Inside the Submissive Void — Propaganda, Censorship, Power, and Control
https://gregmaybury.substack.com/p/inside-the-submissive-void?s=w
PREAMBLE: The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies. Yet the history of how western governments and their ever-vigilant junkyard dogs in the media, financial, and business spheres have controlled the political narrative of the time via these means is a long, storied and ruinous one, going back well before 1914.
Along with serving the contemporaneous political objectives of its perpetrators as contrived, such activities often continue to inform our understanding, and cement our interpretation, of history. If as the saying goes, “history repeats itself”, we need look no further than this as to the main reason why. In this wide-ranging ‘safari’ into the propaganda, disinformation, fake news, and myth-making wilderness—“The Big Shill”—Greg Maybury does indeed look further, and concludes that “It’s the narrative, stupid!”
A Taster: “Whether we know it or not or like it or not, no matter how clever we think we are, or how mindful we might be—and from that consciously resistant to—of the pernicious effects of media propaganda and censorship, we’re all susceptible to the enervating forces they unleash, with complacency, arrogance, ignorance, and self-delusion being but a few of them.”
Oh my. This man is so poisoned by his hatred of the US that he can barely think. He seems unable to sort through claims with a modicum of sense. He writes that 'It proposes “multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor.” In other words, nuclear war.'
NO. In other words, fighting against countries that HAVE nuclear arms, even if they do not use them.
No, dear, China has not eliminated abject poverty. That is a sheer fantasy. Millions of people -- 40%, according to Li Kejiang, or roughly 550 million people -- live on about $150 a month. I am not sure how low you have to go to reach "abject" poverty, but surely that is low enough.
What changed the impression of China is its blustering threats, its claim that the entire South China Sea belongs to it and that Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. have no claims at all, its treatment of the Uighyurs, and its invasion of Hong Kong in violation of the treaty with the UK, along with pervasive monitoring of the population at a microscopic level. China has made enormous and impressive gains and its achievements in raising the wealth of the population are admirable, but that shouldn't make you blind to other issues.
Western analysts have indeed downplayed the influence of fascist forces in Ukraine, but they have covered this issue. Yes, there are fascists in Ukraine. No, they aren't very powerful. No, that is not why Putin invaded. (How naive can you be to argue that this vast war which has killed perhaps 50,000 Russian men was conceived of to deal with crimes such as the killing of "dozens" of Russians by some paramilitary thugs? Well, he is not that naive, he's just lying.) Constantly twisting issues to suit your preferred narrative is not going to convince anyone except the already basically convinced.
What really annoys the author is that his own propaganda and corrosive hatred is not echoed in the submissive void but rather that someone else's is.