Radio Free never accepts money from corporations, governments or billionaires – keeping the focus on supporting independent media for people, not profits. Since 2010, Radio Free has supported the work of thousands of independent journalists, learn more about how your donation helps improve journalism for everyone.

Make a monthly donation of any amount to support independent media.





Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose

In Remembrance- Leni Riefenstahl
In Remembrance- Leni Riefenstahl

It would take 1,000 me’s and 1,000 hours in a week for a thousand me’s to keep up with just some of the infamy and horror that is global capitalism. Capitalism’s putrid fuel:  pollution and many millions of collateral damaged souls.

War profiteering, mercenary economic war, banking billions while communities retract, the homeless swell, and the sick and dying expand are just some of the juxtaposing features of this dirty thing called Capitalism.

And, sure, parasitic, zombie, casino, cutthroat, criminal, all those words, and many other modifiers, add to the cornucopia of how bad the bad is. Capitalism is hyphenated.

The entire mess is masterfully managed by monster media and handled through the machinations of the prostituted politicians.

Story after story, if you hook into some news aggregator like like Bing or Yahoo, or any of the Fox affiliated ones, Sinclair Broadcasting, what have you, all of the mush on the mass media digital world, those stories are insane.

Murders of blacks by cops, next to million dollar deals for some You Tuber; climate emergencies all over the place, against the news that mega cruise lines are going full capacity soon. Elon Musk hosting Saturday Night Live, up against 25,000 barrels of DDT leaking, near Catalina Island. Some Arizona politician is positive for “Covid-19” weeks after her two jab chemical dose, against stories of Bezos and Company making more profits in the planned-demic year, 2020 than the previous three years combined.

One of my friends keeps reminding me we are in the Matrix, or that we are in this pseudo news events time frame.

Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America |

But, reality is reality, in one sense —

Small businesses had a brutal pandemic. Amazon’s earnings more than tripled.

On Main Street, the story is entirely different. According to a report from Facebook and the Small Business Roundtable, 22 percent of small businesses in the U.S. were closed in February — just one percent shy of the pandemic high, 23 percent, in May 2020.

And a new report from the U.S. Small Business Administration found that “the number of people who were self employed and working was 20 percent lower in April 2020 than in April 2019,” with Asian, Black, and Hispanic people hit the hardest. Rebuilding has been slow going, and the current number of self-employed people who are working is still 3.6 percent lower than before the pandemic.

Amazon often says that it empowers small businesses by allowing them to reach customers through its marketplace. Then again, Amazon takes a cut of those sales, and even copies the products of independent sellers when they happen to do especially well. As the world gets back on its feet, Amazon’s profits probably won’t escape the attention of regulators. Source.

Amazon workers in Europe mark Black Friday with 'we are not robots' protests - CNET

Amazon workers in Europe mark Black Friday with ‘we are not robots’ protests – CNET

I deal with things like Walter Lippman, 1922, Public Opinion, too, for the pseudo events — Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published in 1922, is the most persuasive critique of democracy I’ve ever read. Shortly after it was published, John Dewey, the great defender of democracy and the most important American philosopher of the era, called Lippmann’s book “the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived.”

As Lippmann put it, “The democratic ideal, as Jefferson molded it, consisted of an ideal environment and a selected class.” The racism and sexism notwithstanding, that environment looks nothing like ours, and the range of issues voters are expected to know something about today vastly exceeds the demands at the time of the founding.

The question for Lippmann, then, wasn’t whether the average person was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose intelligently. And he made the point using himself as an example:

My sympathies are with [the citizen], for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community.

You might read this and think, “Citizens don’t have to have an intelligent opinion on every issue confronting the community. Instead, they choose the party they trust to serve their interests.” On this view, citizens don’t need to be “omnicompetent,” to borrow Lippmann’s term, they just have to know enough to pick the team that represents their interests. But to do that, voters have to know what their interests are, and which party actually represents them.

There’s no vision of democracy worth defending that doesn’t assume a minimum level of competence from a majority of voters. Lippmann doubted this level of mastery was possible because citizens are too removed from the world to form concrete judgments. Consequently, they’re forced to live in “pseudo-environments,” in which they reduce the world to stereotypes in order to render it intelligible.

But there are all sorts of ways we are trapped in this cult of money-image-events-pseudo events and the planned pandemic (planned pandemic, err, pandemic). Here,

Daniel Boorstin, in The Image, coined not just the term “pseudo-event,” but also the epithetic descriptions “famous for being famous” and “well-known for well-knownness”; he was, it would turn out, an extremely reluctant herald of postmodernism. While The Image may have arrived on the scene, chronologically, before the comings of Twitter and Kimye and an understanding of “reality” as a genre as much as a truth, the book also managed to predict them—so neatly that it reads, in 2016, not just as prescience, but as prophesy.

“The image” is, in Boorstin’s conception, both literal (pictures, photographs, etc.) and figurative: a short-hand for images’ cultural primacy, and for an approach to reality itself that is blithely Barnumesque in its assumptions. The image, strictly, is a replica of reality, be it a movie or a news report or a poster of Monet’s water lilies, that manages to be more interesting and dramatic and seductive than anything reality could hope to be. The image is the spectacle that is most spectacular when it is watched on TV. It is the press conference and the press release—the media event that finds news being created rather than simply reported. It is the logic of advertising, with all its aspiration and transaction, insinuating itself into culture at its depths and its heights. It is the public expectation, even preference, for celebrities who are manufactured, as goods and as gods, because the only thing more compelling than stars themselves is our ability to question their place in our arbitrary firmament. — Source.

The Genius Of Beyoncé Reshaping The Image Of Black Motherhood - YouTube

The Genius Of Beyoncé Reshaping The Image Of Black Motherhood – YouTube

Not only do we not know what history is or means, we do not care, as Huxley predicted in A Brave New World, about facts, history. “Exterminate all the Brutes” is deeper than just the heart of darkness:

Exterminate All The Brutes: Lindqvist, Sven: 9781847081988: Amazon.com: Books
The power of stupidity and consumerism, smoke and mirrors, Madison Avenue, political and national propaganda, and now Facebook and the WWW, we are left empty, with lots of images of Bezos and his new woman’s mansions, or the Michelle and Barack Obama shows on Netflix. We smell the sulfur of the devil every time we tune in and tune out, and that stench is not enough for us to find out own agency to maybe just throw one wrench (or Molotov cocktail) into the gear-works.

That sucker born every nanosecond — from the old minute !

Phineas T. Barnum once displayed, in his American Museum in New York City, the corpse of a “mermaid” that was in fact the preserved head of a monkey sewn onto the preserved tail of a fish. He once advertised a large but otherwise extremely average elephant as “The Only Mastodon on Earth.” He once “exhibited” a woman named Joice Heth as the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington (and as “The Greatest Natural & National Curiosity in the World”). He then wrote to newspapers to make a confession: Joice was not, actually, Washington’s nurse. She wasn’t even, in fact, human—but merely “a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numerous springs,” operated by a hidden ventriloquist. — Source.

The Myths Of The Victorian Freak Show - HistoryExtra
Now, story after story of the SARS-CoV2 turning into CoV3/4/5/99, so, the trillions in profits from the mandatory chemical jabs, and the trillions in profits to Target-Amazon-Walmart-Safeway lockdown jitterbug, or the trillions to the military offense complex in pseudo man Biden and his Kamala “Dan Quayle” Harris. . . As the world burns, whitey is heading for Mars and the rest of the world is head down, scrolling up and down their “smart” phone bomb. The fleecing isn’t undercover anymore. It’s not accidentally out in the open. It is regaled by Mainstream Media, and the rich are laughing all the way to the vaults.

Newborn jabs —


And there is no question about these experiments? No robust debate about the efficacy, the long term negative results, the who-what-why-when of it all? No precautionary principle, and this is it — No question(s), and the times have changed since The Image or Lippman and Benjamin: we are in a total bombardment of hyper managed lies and PR spin, all over the internet, within all channels the average bloke accesses. It is like a long-term (well, rather short since the planned-demic started) brain damaging experiment. PANDEMIC!

In late June 2001, the U.S. military was preparing for a “Dark Winter.” At Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, several Congressmen, a former CIA director, a former FBI director, government insiders and privileged members of the press met to conduct a biowarfare simulation that would precede both the September 11 attacks and the 2001 Anthrax attacks by a matter of months. It specifically simulated the deliberate introduction of smallpox to the American public by a hostile actor.

The simulation was a collaborative effort led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (part of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Analytic Services (ANSER) Institute for Homeland Security and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. The concept, design and script of the simulation were created by Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center along with Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of ANSER. The full script of the exercise can be read here.

The name for the exercise derives from a statement made by Robert Kadlec, who participated in the script created for the exercise, when he states that the lack of smallpox vaccines for the U.S. populace means that “it could be a very dark winter for America.” Kadlec, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and a former lobbyist for military intelligence/intelligence contractors, is now leading HHS’ Covid-19 response and led the Trump administration’s 2019 “Crimson Contagion” exercises, which simulated a crippling pandemic influenza outbreak in the U.S. that had first originated in China. Kadlec’s professional history, his decades-old obsession with apocalyptic bioweapon attack scenarios and the Crimson Contagion exercises themselves are the subject of Part III of this series. — “All Roads Lead to Dark Winter” By Whitney Webb

But my friends and family say, “Fuck it. You don’t know this time around. These are amazing scientists, blessed by the dust of stars, amazing in their genius, amazing in their scientific acumen. How can you debate the things these amazing people — many are BIPOC, remember — are inventing? You are out of your league trying to take on St. Fauci and all the others. They are not part of any experimental mass population sterilization of eugenic program. Stick to your 9/11 conspiracies’ of CIA murdering JFK.”

You know, one can say that the rush to get emergency authorization for these hundreds of “vaccine makers,” the rush to quash any discussion on herd immunity, squashing the effects on the virus mutating during harsh lockdowns of healthy people, and, well, we can say this and that about questioning why the rush, why the new pills, why the second, third, yearly boosters, why the shot for babies, AND still not go there: “RFK, Jr. Responds to Daniel Pinchbeck: The Historical Role of Vaccines in Eliminating Infectious Disease Mortality“.

Or, “I think . . . auto-immune disease can be triggered by these gene-based vaccines”  Professor Sucharit Bhakdi

That is the grandest pseudo event, which has turned into THE event. What, Time Magazine’s person of the year, Mr./Ms. Covid . . . .

Coronavirus & COVID-19 Overview: Symptoms, Risks, Prevention, Treatment & More

Coronavirus & COVID-19 Overview: Symptoms, Risks, Prevention, Treatment & More

This entire North America, and now the entire plugged in, WiFi-ed loaded world is one lost horizon, full of empty calories, dead and suffocating. Just looking at the news tickertape shows, I see how the world is entertained to death: New Dystopian TV series, Roman Polanski directing another movie, a guy guilty of threats against members of congress, retiring cop who oversaw the murder of Breonna Taylor, NYC opening up, melt rate of glaciers rising, People of Color more vulnerable to pollution because of where they live, NFL draft night, Biden is getting more diverse judicial nominees, and so many other discordant headlines, again, meaningless in the scheme of daily, hour by hour lives in America or Armenia or Antarctica.

Yet the meaning is inside the message, and the message is all about distraction, about complete control of emotions, dopamine hits, the lizard part of the brain, as we scroll up and down the “smart as a master” phone.

Amazon.com: Triumph of the Will (Remastered IHF Deluxe Edition): Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Werner Von Blomberg, Werner Von Fritsch, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Leni Riefenstahl: Movies & TV

Paul Kirk Haeder has covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/ community journalism in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He’s worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative high schools, language schools, and PK12 districts. He organized part-time faulty. His book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. He blogs from Waldport, Oregon. Read his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul’s website.
Print
Print Share Comment Cite Upload Translate Updates

Leave a Reply

APA

Paul Haeder | Radio Free (2021-05-03T09:05:14+00:00) Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/03/daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose/

MLA
" » Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose." Paul Haeder | Radio Free - Monday May 3, 2021, https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/03/daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose/
HARVARD
Paul Haeder | Radio Free Monday May 3, 2021 » Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose., viewed ,<https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/03/daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose/>
VANCOUVER
Paul Haeder | Radio Free - » Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose. [Internet]. [Accessed ]. Available from: https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/03/daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose/
CHICAGO
" » Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose." Paul Haeder | Radio Free - Accessed . https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/03/daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose/
IEEE
" » Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose." Paul Haeder | Radio Free [Online]. Available: https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/03/daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose/. [Accessed: ]
rf:citation
» Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose | Paul Haeder | Radio Free | https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/03/daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose/ |

Please log in to upload a file.




There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.

You must be logged in to translate posts. Please log in or register.