The 'alternative media', such as JC, got many things right about 'covid' but were then exposed to certain narratives. The same media fell for (or worse) the propaganda that the UN/WEF/globalists/NATO/EU/Jews/Israel is using Palestine as a test in a plot to destroy the west with faked climate change, mass migration and 15 min cities. Obviously the same interests, who control the information space, are behind both narratives about 'covid' as about climate.
The US based interests are in oil, animal ag, pharma, finance, tech, AI, entertainment and arms are largely responsible for causing climate change and the exploitation that leads to migration.
Israel is being a proxy and scape-goat. The alleged plot by 'globalists' was deliberately created to cast doubt on the climate crisis and turn addressing both it and global inequality (which threatens US interest’s profits big time) into dirty words.
We need to make that clear if we are to have any chance of resisting these interests.
Regardless of who’s elected prime minister or president, Far West governance is heavily steered and may therefore be weakened by domestic corporate/oligarchic interests, sometimes through the latter's economic intimidation.
All political candidates thus parties are elected via the First Past The Post ballot system, which by way of its dynamics enables a covert rule by way of potently manipulative/persuasive corporate and big-monied lobbyists. While the FPTP system may technically qualify as being democratic within the democracy spectrum, it’s nonetheless democratically lacking.
It's a system that enables big-money lobbyists to pull our (typically politically vulnerable) governments by the nose. High-level elected officials can become crippled by implicit/explicit corporate and/or oligarchic threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and/or capital investment, thus economic stability, if ‘requests’ by big-monied interests are not met.
The lobbyists also write bills for our governing representatives to vote for and have implemented, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time writing them up. (The practice may have become so systematic that those who are aware of it, including mainstream news-media political writers, don’t find reason to publicly discuss or write about it.)
Low-representation FPTP-elected governments are the easiest for lobbyists to manipulate or ‘buy’. Perhaps it's why such powerful interests generally resist (albeit probably clandestinely) grassroots-supported attempts at changing from FPTP to more proportionally representative electoral systems of governance, the latter which dilutes corporate influence on government policy and decisions.
Meanwhile, the biggest of businesses (at least here in Canada) get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation.
Ergo, maybe some Far Western governments like Canada’s need to cling less to an outdated capitalist-manifesto mentality and instead open their eyes to increasingly disturbing insatiable greed that's ignoring, if not exploiting via profiteering from, the legitimate needs of nations and in particular the growing number of financially struggling citizens within.
A few social/labor uprisings or revolutions notwithstanding, the superfluously rich and powerful have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their big-money/-power interests, even over the basic needs of the masses.
Even today, the police and military can, and I believe they probably would, claim (using euphemistic or political terminology, of course) that they had to bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations, especially those against economic injustices. Indirectly supported by complacent or compliant corporate news-media, the absurdly unjust inequities/inequalities can persist.
I can imagine there were/are lessons learned from successful social/labor uprisings — a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, maybe? — with the clarity of hindsight by big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses.
Perhaps ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine’s very memorable line in the film Our Brand Is Crisis is essentially true: “If voting changed anything [in favor of the weak/poor/disenfranchised] they’d have made it illegal.”
Every country has a Memorial Day, or something like it. A day to stand before the dead and pretend to understand what was taken. Wreaths are laid. Flags are raised. Anthems are played. And then everyone goes home, having remembered only themselves or bathed self-righteously in patriotism and bread & circus.
Memorial Day, ANZAC Day, Remembrance Day, Memorial/Canada Day, Volkstrauertag — they all share the same sickness: the dead are sorted. Ours are honored. Theirs don’t exist.
It's actually not the case that these people "subordinating their personal beliefs and values to the interests of a rapacious, predatory class of capitalists" in order to get into power.
Values, beliefs, principles : these kinds of things are not conditional.
What is really going on, is that these are sociopaths who were always pretending and never held those values or beliefs in the first place!
And that points to a problem in our societies, which is that people are horribly gullible. They jump to follow anyone who is attractive or charismatic - or who is simply promoted enough in the media - and they do not screen or test, they ask few or NO hard questions. They have the attention span of parakeets, and cannot or will not follow issues over time and look for patterns.
All of which makes it laughably easy for a steady stream of charlatans to show up and fool the people. Politics is loaded with these charlatans, and even before one set is done, another set is rising up.
If you look at US politics, one can see that already while this group of charlatans is about to leave the stage, that stage is being set of another one, Tucker Carlson, to pretend to be in opposition to power. But his very long history shows that he is no man of the people, and in fact has a record of some vicious demagoguery. So he is currently pretending to hold values, that in fact, are implausible, given his history.
Once in power, same old story, over and over Because people never really ask questions.
HITLER was a brave man. His Iron Cross wasn't costume jewellery. And the toothbrush moustache was adopted by soldiers in the trenches of WW1 because the lush handlebar moustaches they previously proudly boasted compromised the seal of gas masks.
His very appearance on a platform declared: "I am one of you. I am a hero amongst you. I stand with you."
And he was and he did.
(AND UNLIKE his charlatan student TRUMP, he had principles, too. Perverse principles but real, unfortunately for Europe and the world.)
"I don't think it helps to see virtually every politician and official in the West as some sort of alien class of sociopath, entirely divorced from the rest of us. As Chomsky observes in The Corporation, given the right circumstances, anyone can become a gas chamber attendant. Sadly, he – and we – found out how right he was – and that that insight could apply to him too."
I think the sociopathy is broader than the politicians. You can find it in business, in NGOs, in govt administration etc. Many places.
It is a function of group dynamics and who reaches for power.
Is also why any claim of serving democratic goals must come with severe limits to concentration of power. Which are glaribgly lacking in gor example the British parliamentary system. And even worse in Britain's former colony across the pond.
One major reason the neoliberal west insists on these specific political systems and even on imposing them on other countries, is precisely because they allow for hijacking and installatiion of sociopathic puppets.
Sociopathy can exist on its own but lack of empathy is slso and rise in self entitlement are induced having power in group settibgs.
Neutrality Studies did a recent episode where a psychologist detailed the mechanics of it.
What also has worsened this is recent dynamics in the west in which intergenerational class mobility is reduced. Piketty has extensive coverage of this. And the OECD did a study on it around a decade ago, that is now well buried. Because it showed the US and UK as laggards among rich industrial countries.
So you have a tendency towards sociopathy, made viral and entrenched by massive inequality.
But what is clear is that these are endemic problems in human groups - and completely different mechanisms of limiting power are necessary in order for western liberal democratic systems to actually deliver what is claimed on the tin.
The 'alternative media', such as JC, got many things right about 'covid' but were then exposed to certain narratives. The same media fell for (or worse) the propaganda that the UN/WEF/globalists/NATO/EU/Jews/Israel is using Palestine as a test in a plot to destroy the west with faked climate change, mass migration and 15 min cities. Obviously the same interests, who control the information space, are behind both narratives about 'covid' as about climate.
The US based interests are in oil, animal ag, pharma, finance, tech, AI, entertainment and arms are largely responsible for causing climate change and the exploitation that leads to migration.
Israel is being a proxy and scape-goat. The alleged plot by 'globalists' was deliberately created to cast doubt on the climate crisis and turn addressing both it and global inequality (which threatens US interest’s profits big time) into dirty words.
We need to make that clear if we are to have any chance of resisting these interests.
You covered it all, Jonathan, succinctly.
Anything I would say would be profane and not allowed in print!
Regardless of who’s elected prime minister or president, Far West governance is heavily steered and may therefore be weakened by domestic corporate/oligarchic interests, sometimes through the latter's economic intimidation.
All political candidates thus parties are elected via the First Past The Post ballot system, which by way of its dynamics enables a covert rule by way of potently manipulative/persuasive corporate and big-monied lobbyists. While the FPTP system may technically qualify as being democratic within the democracy spectrum, it’s nonetheless democratically lacking.
It's a system that enables big-money lobbyists to pull our (typically politically vulnerable) governments by the nose. High-level elected officials can become crippled by implicit/explicit corporate and/or oligarchic threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and/or capital investment, thus economic stability, if ‘requests’ by big-monied interests are not met.
The lobbyists also write bills for our governing representatives to vote for and have implemented, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time writing them up. (The practice may have become so systematic that those who are aware of it, including mainstream news-media political writers, don’t find reason to publicly discuss or write about it.)
Low-representation FPTP-elected governments are the easiest for lobbyists to manipulate or ‘buy’. Perhaps it's why such powerful interests generally resist (albeit probably clandestinely) grassroots-supported attempts at changing from FPTP to more proportionally representative electoral systems of governance, the latter which dilutes corporate influence on government policy and decisions.
Meanwhile, the biggest of businesses (at least here in Canada) get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation.
Ergo, maybe some Far Western governments like Canada’s need to cling less to an outdated capitalist-manifesto mentality and instead open their eyes to increasingly disturbing insatiable greed that's ignoring, if not exploiting via profiteering from, the legitimate needs of nations and in particular the growing number of financially struggling citizens within.
A few social/labor uprisings or revolutions notwithstanding, the superfluously rich and powerful have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their big-money/-power interests, even over the basic needs of the masses.
Even today, the police and military can, and I believe they probably would, claim (using euphemistic or political terminology, of course) that they had to bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations, especially those against economic injustices. Indirectly supported by complacent or compliant corporate news-media, the absurdly unjust inequities/inequalities can persist.
I can imagine there were/are lessons learned from successful social/labor uprisings — a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, maybe? — with the clarity of hindsight by big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses.
Perhaps ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine’s very memorable line in the film Our Brand Is Crisis is essentially true: “If voting changed anything [in favor of the weak/poor/disenfranchised] they’d have made it illegal.”
Every country has a Memorial Day, or something like it. A day to stand before the dead and pretend to understand what was taken. Wreaths are laid. Flags are raised. Anthems are played. And then everyone goes home, having remembered only themselves or bathed self-righteously in patriotism and bread & circus.
Memorial Day, ANZAC Day, Remembrance Day, Memorial/Canada Day, Volkstrauertag — they all share the same sickness: the dead are sorted. Ours are honored. Theirs don’t exist.
https://griobhtha1.substack.com/p/memorial-day-in-memoriam-remembering
It's actually not the case that these people "subordinating their personal beliefs and values to the interests of a rapacious, predatory class of capitalists" in order to get into power.
Values, beliefs, principles : these kinds of things are not conditional.
What is really going on, is that these are sociopaths who were always pretending and never held those values or beliefs in the first place!
And that points to a problem in our societies, which is that people are horribly gullible. They jump to follow anyone who is attractive or charismatic - or who is simply promoted enough in the media - and they do not screen or test, they ask few or NO hard questions. They have the attention span of parakeets, and cannot or will not follow issues over time and look for patterns.
All of which makes it laughably easy for a steady stream of charlatans to show up and fool the people. Politics is loaded with these charlatans, and even before one set is done, another set is rising up.
If you look at US politics, one can see that already while this group of charlatans is about to leave the stage, that stage is being set of another one, Tucker Carlson, to pretend to be in opposition to power. But his very long history shows that he is no man of the people, and in fact has a record of some vicious demagoguery. So he is currently pretending to hold values, that in fact, are implausible, given his history.
Once in power, same old story, over and over Because people never really ask questions.
Tucker Carlson is a brave man.
HITLER was a brave man. His Iron Cross wasn't costume jewellery. And the toothbrush moustache was adopted by soldiers in the trenches of WW1 because the lush handlebar moustaches they previously proudly boasted compromised the seal of gas masks.
His very appearance on a platform declared: "I am one of you. I am a hero amongst you. I stand with you."
And he was and he did.
(AND UNLIKE his charlatan student TRUMP, he had principles, too. Perverse principles but real, unfortunately for Europe and the world.)
HUMANS are responsible.
Call it Politics, Capitalism, Law etc - The buck stops at the top.
Morality is exchanged for material gain, power, prestige and Pack Mentality.
As I said elsewhere:
"I don't think it helps to see virtually every politician and official in the West as some sort of alien class of sociopath, entirely divorced from the rest of us. As Chomsky observes in The Corporation, given the right circumstances, anyone can become a gas chamber attendant. Sadly, he – and we – found out how right he was – and that that insight could apply to him too."
I think the sociopathy is broader than the politicians. You can find it in business, in NGOs, in govt administration etc. Many places.
It is a function of group dynamics and who reaches for power.
Is also why any claim of serving democratic goals must come with severe limits to concentration of power. Which are glaribgly lacking in gor example the British parliamentary system. And even worse in Britain's former colony across the pond.
One major reason the neoliberal west insists on these specific political systems and even on imposing them on other countries, is precisely because they allow for hijacking and installatiion of sociopathic puppets.
That's just a roundabout way of conflating sociopathy with class interest. It's not illuminating. It's confusing.
No, they are interlinked.
Sociopathy can exist on its own but lack of empathy is slso and rise in self entitlement are induced having power in group settibgs.
Neutrality Studies did a recent episode where a psychologist detailed the mechanics of it.
What also has worsened this is recent dynamics in the west in which intergenerational class mobility is reduced. Piketty has extensive coverage of this. And the OECD did a study on it around a decade ago, that is now well buried. Because it showed the US and UK as laggards among rich industrial countries.
So you have a tendency towards sociopathy, made viral and entrenched by massive inequality.
But what is clear is that these are endemic problems in human groups - and completely different mechanisms of limiting power are necessary in order for western liberal democratic systems to actually deliver what is claimed on the tin.