Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
Unknown GMC truck Associated Oil fuel tanker, San Francisco 1935
America has managed to construct an entirely one-dimensional political system. There’s no discernible difference left between left and right, other than in spin language pre-cooked for the sole purpose of faking the concept of elections. There’s very right and ultra right. America is living proof that once money is allowed into politics, the accumulation of it, and of the power it can buy, will and eventually must fully control a democratic system, which in the process, of necessity, suffocates and dies a painful death.
What once was a proud American democracy has been turned into a circus that rolls into town every four years, filled with clowns that pretend to fight each other with over the top grotesque contraptions, but sleep in the same bed once the show is over and the audience has gone home.
In Europe that process has not yet been completed, but with the inception of the EU it is well on its way. It is a predictable process, in that the concentration of power, and of money, is irreversible as long as it’s allowed to continue its course, and the system succeeds in making people believe they still have a say in their own lives. As long as that belief is in place, it’s just an ongoing – relatively – slow corrosion that sets in and then takes its time, but never stops.
Control of the media is an obvious key element of this process, and surprisingly easy to obtain; you’d be inclined to think people would fight harder for their access to real life information. They don’t. As I said two days ago in 2014: The Year Propaganda Came Of Age, that’s what the Ukraine situation has taught me. It’s shown me how far ahead we are, not just stateside, but all over Europe as well, in living up to George Orwell’s visions. As far as I’m concerned, if Eric Blair had named his book 2014, he’d have been dead on. 2014 was the year, much more than 1984. But I don’t blame him: how was he supposed to oversee that in 1948?
Ukraine was the epitomy: no questions asked, just neverending tons of innuendo written and spoken, and a case for which to date no proof has been provided has been firmly decided in the public mind. No due process, no innocent until proven guilty, not proper defense. Everybody has the right to a lawyer, but not in international politics. Or, apparently, in the eyes of western media and citizens.
Only today, Angela Merkel once again said something to the extent that Putin must get the Donbass ‘rebels’ to stop the fighting, while she knows full well they can’t and won’t, because they risk being ethnically cleansed if they would. 4500 of them were already killed by what was supposed to be their own government.
But the German people, like all other European peoples, swallow this nonsense whole. The only counterweight comes from German businesses that lose too much money in the sanctions that make no proper sense. And if the pressure from that side gets strong enough she’ll cave in, slowly, provided she can avoid losing face. That might be the biggest risk to US regime change plans in the new year.
And those plans deserve and need to be thwarted. As do the Troika schemes to throw Europe’s Mediterrenean region ever deeper into misery, austerity and ultimately debt slavery. The EU is a one dimensional one way street into a deep dark night, construction of which is overseen by people who work for their own personal interests, not that of their people. A nice idea gone terribly astray. Let’s make sure we finish it off in 2015, and give the Greeks and Italians back their honor and their dignity. And let’s keep our own dignity in the process.
As for the US, I got to tell you, I don’t know. Obama has been a miserable failure, perhaps because he was just trying to save his skin all along, or because he was like this all along, but he sure never brought much change. Or belief. Waiting in the wings we got Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, but they’re the exact same person. They’ll sell their grandmas for cheap if they think it’ll help them along.
America needs people who believe in something other than money or power, but anyone who’d try would be swept off the Christmas table with the other food scraps in no time, and be devoured by the dogs. I got some flack for saying on my Facebook page that the Ron Paul Institute published the propaganda article I mentioned before, but girl, Ron Paul is all you have left, like him or not.
Dr. Paul is the only one I know in America who has raised his voice against the US involvement in Ukraine, the only one in the entire west even, other than those of us in the blogosphere, or the alternative media if you will. And that’s insane. That’s utterly insane. We should not allow for our voices to be silenced the way they are, not just like Ron Paul, but worse than him. We don’t deserve to be marginalized anymore than Dr. Paul does; we’re smarter than the lot of them.
I guess that is what I think those of us who haven’t died yet should set out to do in 2015. Do what we’ve been doing, and do more of it. As Andy Warhol said: the only thing that counts is work. Big dreams or goals go only so far. They mean little if you don’t put in the work. And for this ‘alternative press’ we have going, from Zero Hedge all the way down to the Automatic Earth, with all the great people in between and around it, what matters is the work. No letting up; we have the same responsibility the illegal press had in Amsterdam and Paris in the 1940s – even if we can’t stand in the shadows of their courage -: to make sure people get information that does not stem from the matrix.
An article in the Guardian today said that 2014 was The Year The Internet Came Of Age. I think I’ll stick with my 2014: The Year Propaganda Came Of Age, but the combination of the two leads to interesting questions. Like: what role has the internet played in the rise of the propaganda that led to almost none of our so-called higher-educated people asking any questions about what really happened in Ukraine, or about so many other situations the ever more concentrated powers that rule us are involved in.
First of all, obviously, the financial world. Hardly anybody may understand what that is doing to us, to the world we live in, to the people we love and those who don’t know but we should still be holding out for (those underground press guys in WWII were risking their lives for people they didn’t know). Between us, we do understand a whole lot of what’s happening. We have no choice – or at least I don’t – but to keep going at it every single day and get it out there, and hope that a few more people every day will pick up on it. Not to make money for themselves – that’s the very disease that got us where we are -, but to be more human, and to try and lead a way forward. For now the internet allows us to do that. Let’s make the best of it while we can.
