In Our Name

Madame:

I think that will be the name of a future book, and I thank you for it, especially for relating Dan Rather’s comments to that effect.

When one travels abroad, it often becomes apparent how much the U.S. is detested for a number of things.  The good accusers make a distinction between Americans and their government, as in they like Americans generally, but despise what our government and its connected corporations do.   What they do IN OUR NAME, which in turn often gives we the individual people a bad name.

When “reporters” merely parrot official propaganda or the ideological drivel of one or more of the parties, they are doing the opposite of serving us the people, and they are certainly no check on power.  And forget about keeping us “informed.”

Good first thread!  Personal responsibility is a necessary first step.  A question is how much they can do that if they are knowingly (and probably unknowingly) plugged in and subservient to the Matrix that has been fashioned.

I believe we also need to first be more determined than the elites, and then only when a critical mass is established that way can change come, when the outnumbered elites and their vehicles—parties, corporations, media, etc.—are bent to the people’s will.  But what is the people’s will is a problem.  We cannot seem to stay focused, let alone with effective consensus, on much of anything.  And how to educate people to be more than drive-by citizens (low-information voters) is a big challenge.  A bigger one is how to get emotionally influenced citizens to listen to voices of reason instead of those emotional triggers that are used to manipulate them.

You hit the pinpoint nail on the pinpoint head about getting the denizens of this hyper-individualistic society to recognize and act on the common good.  It flashes momentarily in times of momentous crisis, but is usually mismanaged even then.

Since we are cascading with our interlocking and inter-affecting problems, if we are to have any chance of reversing and solving that volatile and complex mixture, perhaps we should not try to unravel carefully.  What if our semi-sedated society is incapable of changing itself in time WITHOUT experiencing a mega-unravelling?  A bit anarchic to say that, I know, but I do sometimes wonder if we have become a land where the irrational/emotional, the apathetic, and the lotus eaters (diversionists) are too big a majority to turn around.  Hmm.  I don’t know.  Something for me to consider further.   I would LIKE your call for education to be the answer, yet in an endless tsunami of dense information and misinformation, how that would be effected is problematic.  As the elites and corporations have demonstrated, the more ready route is to emotionally manipulate and divert, not to educate.  You and I want the struggle to occur in the arena of ideas, but that has in too many cases been bypassed.

The corporations and those who run them or own them have most of the cards in this American hand.  “These corporations have no loyalty to the country or workers. Our impoverishment feeds their profits.  And profits, for corporations, are all that count.  The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life, the social good, or the impact of the corporation’s activities on the environment.  Corporation by-laws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make the largest profits possible for shareholders.  A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefit, that protects workers’ rights, that invests its profits to limit pollution, that gives consumers better deals, can actually be sued by shareholders.” (162-163)

Corporations weaken our bodies, our minds, our energies by their food, drink, drugs, and diversions, making us docile, obedient, listless serfs who think we are free.

They create a climate of disconnected exploitation, where the true owners and stewards of the social good (us) do not feel or react when that good is destroyed.   “The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction,” one enlightened CEO says. (Hedges, 163)

Corporations have psychopathic traits of deceit and callous unconcern for others, and yet we the people grant or acquiesce to their powers.  Hedges wrote the following BEFORE Citizens United went into effect: “Under the American legal system, corporations have the same legal rights as individuals.  They make contributions to candidates.  They fund 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals to write corporate-friendly legislation and defang regulatory agencies.  They saturate the Internet, airwaves, newspapers, and magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly face of the corporation. A few media giants control nearly everything we read, see, and hear.”  They have huge legal teams to fend off lawsuits that make it through their paid for legislators and “regulators.” (163-164)  Albert Einstein in 1949 predicted this oligarchy would happen that would make a lie of capitalist-democracy; indeed, it had already begun in his time (see Hedges’ quote of him on 164).

And yet we refuse to see, or if we see, refuse to believe, or if we believe, refuse to confront reality.  The net effect is that we do little to nothing. 

And to think this is the same people that derided the Jews for “marching so docilely into the detention camps.”