How the Media Dooms the US to Certain Failure
By Joseph Zrnchik for 5th Estate Media
Hillary Clinton capitalized on the cult of personality as all sense of reason and logic left her supporters. These individuals are so pro-Clinton that anything that exposes what a lunatic and sociopath Clinton is, simply can not be accepted as fact or processed neuro-physiologically. It is a fact that the limbic system, which controls the fight-or-flight response, and its associated neuro-transmitters are all active when someone’s world view is challenged by facts that are not only perfectly clear, but also by facts that would be helpful to the person who is ideologically invested in denying reality. In this case, the brain will literally cease to respond to reason as the limbic system short circuits the brain’s ability to reason. This is why many Republicans supported all the tyranny when Bush was president that they now insist is the fault of Obama and why Democrats now support all the tyranny of Obama that they had opposed when it was being done by Bush.
The calm, cool and rational elite understand human nature and use these human failings in their sophisticated media manipulations so that people remain divided on issues in which their interests would best be served by being united in support of, or in opposition to, an issue. Often times movements that threaten both Democratic and Republican control are attacked equally from both sides, as was Dr. Ron Paul’s message. In this case we have both Democrats and Republicans attacking a reasoned and logical message with equal vehemence. And since this attack is from both political parties, it allows them to falsely define reality hence making their definition of an ideology the common held belief maintained by members of their respective cults of personality.
When Lenin claimed the USSR’s authoritarianism to be socialism as he destroyed worker control over production to make workers subservient a single leader, he hence destroyed a key tenent of what was considered mainstream socialism, while incorrectly labeling this totalitarian dictatorship as being socialism. He used the support for socialism to garner legitimacy for his authoritarianism. The U.S. was all to happy to allow that definition to stand as it then used that very definition to malign socialism because they could so easily discredit what eventually because Stalinism. This helped the US whitewash the horrors of colonialism, neo-liberalism and globalism. So, the US and Stalin both ended up being two entities in opposition to each other that both wrongly defining socialism for their own reasons quite apart from each other. This is now the prevailing situation within the American political establishment with Libertarianism as both major political parties malign those who advocate a non-interventionist foreign policy and a roll-back of the military-industrial complex, the police-prison state, the warfare-welfare state and the national security-surveillance state. Both Democrats and Republicans mis-state Libertarian positions on nearly every key issue and ignore the problems created by the US acting as an imperial power.
What Americans need to understand is that the strength of democracy lies in its open deliberative processes which provide for a critical review of asserted facts, assumptions and courses of action made by those who wield political power and seek to influence or control governmental policy in all of its various domains, often for their gain or the gain of their cronies. This attempt at obtaining gain occurs at the level of one individual seeking a contract, job or ordinance change at the local level of government and is multiplied individually tens of thousands of times across the nation, and it occurs at the institutional level with lobbyists seeking gain for major corporations or entire classes of people through legislation. It is the openness in the democratic process whereby public deliberations are supposed to place a check upon those who would seek to control government for their personal interests, or for the interests of the few at the expense of the many. Democracy is supposed to serve as a decision-making process in which information is a vital and necessary component to stop abuses that would otherwise tend to become institutionalized, but those in power have worked to subvert this process for their own interests.
The political process can be likened to a free-market economy in which information and ideas act as currency. But, if the economy is flooded with counterfeit information and worthless ideas become public stock, the marketplace comprised of ideas can no longer successfully function and will soon collapse. If there is no economic reckoning, no economy of scale, no method for power to reach an equilibrium in the marketplace of ideas, then a nation will operate blindly as there is no longer any means to identify how that nation should best act in the pursuit of its interests. A nation needs a method to determine how much political capital it should expend when pursuing a particular objective, and it needs to also consider the cost to its allies when acting against the interests of its enemy or acting in what it perceives as its own best interests in any given situation. We now have no means of political reckoning as the media twists and distorts the marketplace of ideas in the same way Keynesianism distorts economic processes inherent in a free market economy.
Currently, the US seeks the EU to act against its own interests as the US attempts to portray the current Russia-Ukraine dispute as one of the EU facing an imminent and existential threat of Russian invasion. This false portrayal is being used by the US to manipulate the EU into a trade war in which the US would stand to benefit in a myriad of ways, some of which would include the US increasing its exports to the EU, the lowering of the costs of EU exports into the US due to market surplus, and the chaos created that would tend to hamper the cooperation needed to build a BRICs bank. Not only does the US want the EU to engage in an economic war, but it would like to create a situation that would foster military build-ups and the export of advanced American weapons systems since military production accounts for roughly 10% of US exports. But, make no mistake, this is a distortion the US creates and maintains through militarism.
The problem the US faces is that foreign nations are much more discerning when it comes to their leaders determining when propaganda is being used to manipulate their nations to act in a manner that is not consistent with their best interests. The US fears an independent NATO that seeks economic cooperation with Russia. It also fears its loss of influence within the EU, yet it wants the EU to pay the price for its pretended dispute with Russia to protect its hegemony when everyone now knows it was Ukraine who shot down Flight MH17. And while the world knows the US threatens Russia with its expansion of NATO and its 1,000 bases in 120 countries, it also knows that leveraged US positions are threatened by Russia merely seeking to be a good trading partner and do business. So, the US and Ukraine staged an ill-conceived and ill-executed false flag event to portray Russia as a danger. This act has damaged US credibility and has made the world question the US’s viability in maintaining its perceived unipolar status. Even more to the point, it has made the world question US judgment and even sanity as the US GOVT had literally contemplated attacking Assad and ISIS on alternating days to ensure continued insanity. This was going on as CIA-funded and Pentagon-funded rebels attacked each other.
The problem the U.S. is now facing is that the same brutality it accused Assad of perpetrating to protect his nation from Saudi-sponsored sectarian slaughter, even as the U.S. funded and supported this very slaughter, now places the U.S. in a position of having to do exactly what Assad has had to do. But, if the U.S. finds itself losing, what is the point at which the U.S. would be willing to accept defeat? The fact is a looming defeat of the U.S. would merely mean an escalation of hostilities and we could very well see a tripling of the body count for which the U.S. had demonized Assad. This shows how economy of scale for violence increases while economic reckoning and the law of diminishing returns are ignored when egos like Obama’s and Hillary’s decide on a course of intervention.
The Ukraine situation has left the US worrying that any disagreement or dispute with its allies might create yet more resistance to its hegemony. This is especially true since the U.K. had voted not to support the U.S. proposal for attacks on Assad. The US now perceives that any resistance must be crushed with all force, or at least threatened or bribed lest opposition spread. Such a situation causes nations to balance against the hegemon, and as this occurs empires start becoming too expensive to maintain. After the US refused to return German gold and then scolded Germany for not enthusiastically jumping on the anti-Putin bandwagon, many Germans not named Merkel questioned whether they could afford more enemies when they have friends like the U.S. sending Syrian refugees by the tens of thousands to Germany.
The U.S. intervened in Iraq and for all the political and economic capital it expended, it has worked against itself by meddling in the affairs of other nations in support of allies whose interests are against those of the US. It has also acted in the interests of enemies it mistakenly assumed were allies. It even acted in the interests of enemies even when those actions undermined its own strategic interests. As in the case of Iran, the US failed to realize, with regard to serious issues like Sunni radicalism, that Iran’s interests run parallel to those of the U.S. The same is true with Russia. Or, as with the nation of Syria, the U.S. sought to fight against Assad’s even though his interests were the same as the U.S.’s with regard to limiting the war by confining the opposition, and hence the fighting, to within Syria’s borders. Now the U.S. no longer has the will, money or public support to fix the catastrophe that it has created in the Middle East and Southwest Asia that gave rise to ISIL and their caliphate. It is clear that ISIL was created and grew due to U.S. hubris, tyranny, incompetence and foolishness.
There has always been a debate within the field of political science, which has carried over into the body politic, as to which system of government provides the greatest inherent advantages to those responsible for deciding the direction of a nation. But, what needs to be considered is not how effectively public policy will be carried out, but whether executing that policy is in the long-term interests of a nation. It has been said that nothing harms a nation more than that cunning politicians be confused for wise. Such people can do more harm to a nation than can that nation’s worst enemies. We have seen the harm that has befallen the U.S. due to these cunning politicians and their attacks on true statesmen amplified by a media that also has no interest in statesmanship but is beholden to corporate power whether it be from banking, energy, or the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, the media makes Putin out to be an evil genius just for acting in the security interests of his nation after the US expanded NATO to include almost all of the former Warsaw Pact members. Now the US threatens a military buildup on Russia’s border while the Ukraine cries “wolf” even as it claims victory in imaginary force-on-force major military engagements. The Ukraine military is best suited for shooting down civilian planes it misdirects and attacking women and children with artillery barages. It better back off as it was already granted a reprieve by rebels after being hemmed in by them against the Russian border while being clobbered from Russian territory with artillery.
The goal of politicians when they assert various facts and assumptions, be they legitimate or not, is to seek to promote a proposed course of action they hope will be deemed legitimate by the masses. Regardless of whether it is an autocratic dictatorship or some form of democracy, all leaders hope to devise and carry out policy that is feasible, acceptable, suitable and sustainable, but most importantly ensures the continuity of their rule with all its inherent advantages. Even Stalin, who killed tens of millions of his own people, had legitimacy and the support of the masses as he mobilized his nation to oppose Hitler. Obama was unable to meet this objective with regard to bombing Syria for the use of chemical weapons that many in the US defense establishment recognized as a false flag attack. As more and more evidence was made public, the facts finally began constrain the US’s freedom of action with regard to gaining international support for attacking Syria. It also served to expose the absurdity, mendacity and US opportunism that countries like Russia and China could no longer tolerate. This is especially true when viewed against the backdrop of what little is left of Libya’s civil society. This is why truth by the media is so important–it allows rational discussion and conclusions.
The political elite have long held that theirs is the cool, calm, calculating and rational mind and therefore it is they who should be the ones wielding the power to control society. To them it matters not whether this control is entrusted to them due to the efficacy of their leadership, or seized through intrigues and predicated upon lies, deception, brute force and the will to power. The elite operate with the understanding that it matters not by what means they achieve power, as for them they believe their end always justifies their means. It can hardly be argued that the elite act otherwise regardless of the form of government under which they operate. In fact, it is this very premise that defines and describes elitism. The old saying holds true: “They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” This is why and how the assassination of President Kennedy and his brother while running for president can be hidden from the masses by presidential administration after presidential administration while the masses accept having a two-tiered system of justice imposed upon them that will allow the elite to hide murders while the common people are held under boot for even petty offenses, and sometimes for no offense at all.
The problem America currently faces is that the elite no longer operate in the interest of the country or even in the interest of the masses, but instead operate for the purpose of protecting and promoting their interests and ensuring the continuity of a system that grants them privilege and power. What needs to be understood is that since the interests of the elite are fairly aligned with each other across the board, these interests, especially in a democracy where the masses can assert political influence, can best be protected and promoted through a system of bribery, secrecy, deception, surveillance, coercion and oppression with violence being the last resort. This is how and why the elite are able to shovel manure on us as they tell us it is gold. The fact is that those who control media have created a means of introducing lies, absurdities and distortions through a propagandized system that manufactures consent and seeks to divide those who oppose its depredations.
While violence can be used at times against the people, a system’s true goal is to get people to accept the lies, and when that fails to ignore the violence that is used against those who actually know and understand what is going on. This is why indoctrination is important as the state works to support the elites’ interests. There is little doubt that the U.S surveillance and national security state now operates under such pillars of tyranny as should cause rebellion in a people who seek liberty and justice. There is no denying that the agenda the elite support is one of a globalist nature that pits labor from industrialized nations in competition with the labor from countries which allow the exploitation of people. This is done in an effort to drive down labor costs and weaken the voice of the middle class.
Labor acts as any other commodity, and by flooding the market the elite hope to weaken the negotiating power of organized labor by increasing the supply of labor and thereby decrease its demand. This distorts the comparative advantages usually afforded companies who maintain a skilled local labor force. While at the same time the government ignores illegal immigration, it intervenes in other areas by making laws regulating other market areas based on special interests and the money these interests provide to politicians to grant them market protection, thereby driving up prices. However, it is not only labor the elite seek to control and dominate, but also the monetary system itself. With this control comes the ability to dominate the political system so as to allow the elite to dictate the value of money, debt, interest, monetary supply, political direction, social engineering and the currency unit itself. However, financing a system or empire based on bribery, propaganda, secrecy, deception, surveillance, coercion, tyranny, oppression, torture, and murder becomes an unsustainable and contradictory proposition, unless one has a way to inflate a currency far beyond what could be maintained by any single state. To maintain order the state must then have the ability to afford to get a significant portion of the population to work for the state and thus buy into forcing depredations and tyranny upon their fellow citizens for the benefit of the state and the elite who control it. It is through the mechanism of a policeman saying, “I’m just doing my job.”, that the U.S. Constitution and thus a peoples’ liberty is so easily violated by those sworn to uphold it. Unfortunately, this does not even begin to address all the instances of tyranny that occur simply due to the fact that police work draws certain types of personalities to that career field, nor does it address the willingness of the police state to excuse even the most outrageous and ridiculous justifications for police abuse.
In addition to the issue of labor and the corruption of the political process that occurs as result of money in politics, one also has to contend with the problems of a debt-based monetary system, its negative effects on capital formation and the problems that occur due to market distortions which create the boom and bust of the business cycle with its zero percent interest rates necessitated from a fear of triggering economic collapse. We can see how errors made merely in one area of the economy, namely the housing market, can cause a bubble and the creation of dangerous financial instruments and derivatives that can literally collapse an economy. The misdiagnosed cure prescribed by the banking industry itself due to the previous housing collapse, one that the government decided to follow, has amounted to little more than a junkie prescribing himself more heroin and thereby ensures this disaster will repeat itself and will probably be even worse as the biggest offenders of banking law and economic common sense have used the money provided to them through banking bailouts to buy up more banks and consolidate their power to an even greater degree. When one considers these problems and then realizes these issues become even more severe as the result of an economic system running monthly trade deficits in the tens of billions of dollars while insane personal, business and governmental debt levels driven by domestic economy built on consumerism only aggravate current economic conditions, one wonders how much longer the U.S. can continue to spend a trillion dollars a year on the military considering the rest of the world seeks to drop the dollar as the global reserve currency.
As the state becomes more corrupt the justice system becomes more abusive. This fact requires the state to overlook increasing levels of police brutality and unjustified killings by police, false arrests, malicious prosecutions, and the promotion of draconian sentencing in the establishment of a two-tiered system of justice that excuses elitist criminality as it crushes the common man for even perceived disobedience. People who attempt to assert their rights the government told them they could exercise find they are facing a malicious prosecution involving tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs and many years in jail. In fact, there is nothing more that rankles and upsets police and prosecutors than people who assert their rights.
It is through constant inflation of the money supply that the elite seek to hide the costs they impose on a people to willingly to allow themselves to be reduced to serfs. Not only do people not see and understand their slavery, but they are totally ignorant as to the costs they accept to be reduced to slaves. It is because the dollar serves as the reserve currency for the world and the U.S. has waged war upon the world to protect this system that the U.S. is able to globalize its inflation resulting from the costs of outlandish military spending that promotes and finances all the domestic tyrannies named above. Thusly, the theft of the resources of foreign nations and the tyrannies forced upon them through U.S. military might is then used to fund the tyrannies forced upon the American people. In the end a nation does as much harm to itself as the countries it attacks. It would be absurd for Americans to think they can have lawlessness and theft on and international basis and not have it migrate in a nation’s domestic policy.
As the contradictions of empire increase and become more noticeable, people rarely begin to understand that fighting for peace, destroying a village to save it, or the idea that a people must surrender liberty in the name of protecting freedom all lead to absurdities. As these absurdities pile up, cognitive dissonance forces people to cling even tighter to these absurdities. It was Orwell himself who said that people who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities. Not only do people believe these absurdities, but they cling tightly to them lest their world view and belief system fall apart. Thusly, the American people have proven themselves perfectly willing and able to engage in mass atrocities from the extermination of the Native Americans by a Christian nation, to killing Commies for Christ that led to three million dead in Vietnam, to the killing of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq through the denial of food and medicine in an attempt to harm Saddam, to creating democracy through the barrel of a gun.
But, while the media propagandizes and the government engages in secrecy, the democratic process requires accurate information if people are to govern themselves. If accurate information is not available for people to govern themselves, then democracy is merely an illusion used to make the masses buy into their own enslavement by the elite. This is why the U.S. media is the most controlled and propagandized in the entire world and is wholly owned by the elite. The U.S. media works hand-in-hand with the government to hide facts, lie and indoctrinate. As the people are the government, and indeed each person hypothetically has the right to engage in the political process, there can be no democracy in areas that are the most consequential if the information regarding what is happening and what our government is doing is not available to the masses.
Therein lies the rub. How can a democracy that espouses the cult of personality to the exclusion of policy through a media that was specifically bought by the elite for the purpose of manipulating the masses be trusted to provide accurate facts and assumptions with a correct assessment given to the weight of these facts and assumptions, especially when they are to act as the determining criteria upon which public policy is based, if that policy goes against the interests of the elite? Not only are the facts and assumptions skewed by the elite, but they also misrepresent their intentions as to the goals they are seeking to achieve and the means towards achieving them. This is why the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group are so secretive in their deliberations. Furthermore, just as much in an autocratic state as with a democratic state, the ability of leaders and elites to believe their own propaganda and ideologies further skews the decision-making process.
Often times the state of nature the elite are attempting to produce by pursuing a particular policy becomes mired in unforeseen consequences or second and third-order effects. The “War on Drugs” makes drugs more profitable. The “War on Poverty” creates permanent underclass. The drive to create a robust business environment creates banks that are allowed to perpetrate every type of fraud without fear of prosecution. Corporate boards harm their business by operating in the interests of short-term gain for those who merely seek to cash out on stock holdings. Government seeking a home for every citizen creates market distortions that destroy the free market system and make homes more unaffordable due to a false demand not being supported by market fundamentals or the nation’s overall productivity. These are all examples of contradictions, paradoxes and absurdities with which the elites have to grapple while pretending to know more than anyone else.
Often times smaller states have reality imposed on them by more powerful states that limit the amount of harm that the weaker government can impose on its people while pursuing a particular objective. Nations like the U.S. do not allow rulers of smaller countries to wage war when to do so would be against U.S. interests, be those nations allies or not. Likewise the U.S. will turn regional wars into ruinous global proxy wars when to do so furthers the elites’ political interests. Unfortunately, powerful states have the wealth and power to pursue political ends that are unsustainable without having any checks in place except for a corrupted, skewed, misinformed and propagandized decision-making process for which mass media plays a major part in manufacturing consent through the manipulation of information. Because of the lag time between poor decisions being made and the time it takes the people to understand the costs inflicted upon them for that bad political decision, it provides politicians with a time cushion in which the person and their actions become disconnected and forgotten landscape. This is what allows political rhetoric and appeals to emotion to have greater influence in the political process than issues regarding past policy decisions.
In addition to powerful states exempting themselves from international law, we can easily see their hypocrisy by their refusing to accept the norms they impose on other nations. This becomes clear in the U.S.’s use of language to define things like terrorism so that the word only applies to other nations and their actions, but never to the U.S. when it carries out the exact same actions. It would seem that smaller nations who pretend the hypocrisy does not exist would understand that they not only make themselves weaker, but also become enablers of the tyranny to which they will eventually find themselves victim. When the U.S. shot down Iranian Flight 655 and killed 290 passengers and crew, it lied about the incident and then refused to apologize for what it claimed to be a mistake as it supported Saddam’s war against Iran. Yet, the Ukrainian government purposely rerouted Flight MH17 over hostile airspace, and while it is questionable as to who shot the plane down, either separatists or the Ukrainian government, with U.S. intelligence agencies refusing to provide proof of Russian involvement, the U.S. demands the world blame Russia and therefore support its desire to engage in economic warfare and a push for direct military engagement.
It has been showed that the individual is easily manipulated to support a particular position or conclusion merely by the way a specific question is asked or presented, not to mention the all the ways people are influenced through slick marketing, lies and misinformation wrapped in political dressing and patriotism. It is a fact that media has mass psychology down to an exact science. The corporate media for whom journalists work ensure people are divided on superfluous issues, the more meaningless and divisive the issue the better their objective of keeping the citizens divided is advanced while making it appear that there is a robust and contentious political process at play. Then, people fight and are divided over meaningless issues so that the policies of the elite can be pursued while wreaking havoc on a people who accept the deprivations imposed upon them as being the result of external forces over which they have little understanding or control, or which can be blamed on the political opposition and other scapegoats. However, the reality of the situation is that these policies and their consequences are not dictated from God but are merely the decisions made by powerful entities who have discussed and carefully planned policies that often benefit them at the expense of the masses. The power to take the nation to war must be challenged, and if this power can not be justified, it needs to be suspended, or better yet given back to congress.
While it would seem that nations with a democratic process would not be subject to making such serious miscalculations as we have seen the U.S. make, the truth is that the mistakes made through groupthink in an environment that allows people to coalesce around others sharing the same ideology in a political system that rewards sycophancy, ensures that the mistakes made by an entire group of people can easily be more wrong than the miscalculations made by a single person. This is especially true when elites act in a manner in which they are not only allowed to create moral hazards, but actually profit from the misery they inflict upon the masses. When parties are not only immune to the hazards they create but actually profit from them, as is the current situation with our political elite being heavily invested in the military-industrial complex, the police-prison state, the warfare-welfare state and the security-surveillance state, the damage the elite have cause, and will continue to cause to the people’s liberty and prosperity is incalculable.
The American people were lied into waging war against Iraq. We were lied to about Saddam’s involvement in 9/11. We were lied to about WMDs. We were lied to about the Iraq War being an inexpensive proposition initiated to create democracy. As the War on Drugs gave us more drugs, and the War on Poverty created more poverty, we now have a situation in which the War on Terror has given us more terror. Yet, the people who forced Americans to pay the price for their lies continue to be able to hide the full cost of their errors from the people. They will be able to continue to do so until the consequences and costs of ignoring reality finally come due. The costs of maintaining political illusions are directly correlated to the size of the lie and the amount of time you must invest in promoting and maintaining that false reality. In the case of Iraq it is a huge lie that has gone on for a decade. In Afghanistan it has gone on for more than a decade. Meanwhile, a Taliban saying states: The U.S. military may have the watches, but we have the time. Now we can see all the spying the NSA has done with all of its costs in treasure and liberty did not allow the U.S. government to see or prevent ISIL from taking over huge parts of Iraq and Syria, and it did nothing to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. We also see that the spying being done on the American people has nothing to do with protecting the people or their liberty. We see that Iraq has spiraled out of control while the U.S. no longer has the money or political will to stop what it spent trillions of dollars attempting to prevent. What we have spent trillions of dollars to foster has proven to be little more than lies and self-deception, like the self-deception of an able Iraqi military we spent tens of billions of dollars training, equipping and arming.
The U.S. now has been shown the limits of military power. By believing in the utility of military power it gave the U.S. Government a false sense of security and allowed it to engage in hubris. Now we understand that we will end up being held hostage by change and will have little ability to influence the future and may end up eating a large helping of humble pie. Meanwhile, the elite will have bankrupted the nation, made themselves incredibly rich and reduced the people to serfs.
The time to act is now. All Americans must support the turning over of all war criminals to international justice. Those who advocated crimes against humanity, to include the media and those in government, must be surrendered to the ICC. I ask all readers to go to the website www.worldbeyondwar.org. For there is nothing more that our government now fears than a justice and reckoning that leads to peace.