This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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The Morrison government has cranked up Australia Day funding tenfold in two years to promote a celebration of which we can be proud. Pride means different things to different people. Callum Foote investigates the National Australia Day Council and finds them hard to find
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Is a third of the Australian continent planning to stay cut off from the other two-thirds forever. Mark Sawyer ponders the future of the great state of Western Australia.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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I’ve been kicking around some ideas for a dystopian novel lately, and I was hoping readers might be able to provide me with some feedback.
I’m picturing a story set in a world where everyone’s a slave but doesn’t know it. People think thoughts they believe they came up with themselves, make decisions and lifestyle choices that they think are their own, buy things they sincerely believe they want, consume entertainment they honestly feel they enjoy, vote for political candidates they truly think they support, when in reality they’re all marching in complete obedience to an elite ruling class whose high-level mastery of mass-scale psychological manipulation has bent the public to their will.
In my novel people will be funneled from early childhood through an education system designed by plutocrats and social engineers to create efficient and compliant gear-turners, then when they are grown their programming continues in the form of mass media indoctrination. If they become politically aware they are funneled into artificially constructed ideological perspectives that are designed to look truthful and appealing but which don’t challenge existing power structures in any meaningful way.
In the same way, the political system in this dark alternate reality is designed to look free and democratic, but there’s no real connection between how people vote and the way their civilization actually functions. An unacknowledged, unofficial alliance of plutocrats and government operatives makes the actual decisions about how money, industry, government, and military forces will behave from day to day, and this secretive alliance controls the official political system the public believes is responsible for overseeing those matters. What people call “elections” are actually just the public choosing between two lackeys of that ruling alliance, and their only meaningful disagreements are on how the will of those rulers should best be advanced.
My dystopian society is built on endless violence, oppression and exploitation, but because in this world the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation is so advanced, people don’t even know that it’s happening. Mass murder is committed continuously in nonstop military operations overseas, and the public is successfully convinced that it’s to promote freedom and democracy and keep them safe from terrorism. People have to work multiple jobs in the wealthiest nation in the world just to put food on the table, and they are brainwashed into believing it’s their fault for not making better life choices. People die of exposure on the streets while billionaires rake in exponentially more wealth, and the public is programmed to believe it’s because the latter work harder than the former. Police forces and prison systems keep expanding in order to exert more control and people are trained to believe it’s to make them safe from crime. Journalists are imprisoned for telling the truth and people are told it’s to protect national security. Information on the internet is aggressively controlled and people are propagandized into accepting that it’s to protect them from dangerous speech.
In my dystopian novel the powerful will simply do as they please and then promote narratives to explain why those actions were justified. If a smaller, weaker government isn’t sufficiently obedient to the world’s dominant power structure, reasons will be manufactured to explain why they must be ousted. If it’s necessary to exert more control at home or abroad, justifications will emerge for why military expansionism is needed in this or that geostrategically important region or why increased domestic surveillance is required to keep people safe. The armed goons and war machines move wherever they are needed, and the public is either kept in the dark about those movements or told made-up stories explaining why they must occur.
Endless mass military slaughter is essential for the existence of the ruling power structure in this dystopia, because without it the world’s governments would simply behave in whatever way advances their own interests. The government is so profoundly corrupt that the corporations who manufacture military weaponry are inseparably intertwined with the decision-making apparatus of its foreign policy establishment and are permitted to actively lobby for more wars so that more of its expensive weaponry will be used. Mountains of human corpses are amassed for no other reason than because it is more profitable to launch weapons at them than to leave them alone. Nuclear weapons are stockpiled and placed around the world for no other reason than because it is profitable to make more of them.
It’s the same with environmental and economic policies. A global system is held in place at gunpoint in which mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake, so environmental and economic policies just like military policies are formed not based on what would be best but on what would be most profitable for the plutocrats who shape those policies. Industry moves in whatever way rakes in the most money, no matter who it hurts, no matter how badly it imperils humanity.
And everyone just marches along with it, because they are manipulated into accepting this disaster by sophisticated propaganda systems, by movies and TV shows designed to normalize the dystopia they exist in, by tightly controlled information access, and by their own psychological compartmentalization since the reality of their situation is too disturbing to look at directly. They turn the gears of their dark world and then stay up late binging on soulless comedy shows to distract them from the horrors lurking just beneath the surface.
Obviously such a dystopia would be completely unsustainable and the most obvious ending would be to kill the whole world off within a few books by nuclear war or ecological disaster or something equally terrible, but maybe I could have the populace simply wake up to the manipulations and take back their will and shrug off the elites’ control like a warm coat on a summer’s day? I dunno. Something tells me that for some unknown reason today’s readers are too inured with learned helplessness and knee-jerk pessimism to be able to even imagine such a scenario, let alone accept it as a believable development.
Anyway, that’s my pitch. What do you all think? Does this thing have legs? Or is it too different from today’s world for people to relate to?
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Feature image by Ray Dumas, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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The Morrison government’s campaign to toss tennis star Novak Djokovic out of Australia is an attack on the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Seems like almost every day now the mass media are blaring about the need for speech on the internet to be controlled or restricted in some way. Today they’re running stories about Joe Rogan and Covid misinformation; tomorrow it will be something else.
The reasons for the need to control online speech change from day to day, but the demand for that control remains a constant. Some days it’s a need to protect the citizenry from online disinformation campaigns by foreign governments. Sometimes it’s the need to guarantee election security. Sometimes it’s the need to eliminate domestic extremism and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it’s Covid misinformation. The problems change, but the solution is always the same: increased regulation of speech by monopolistic online platforms in steadily increasing coordination with the US government.
It’s actually pretty comical at this point, once you notice it. It’s like if you had an expensive Prada bag that your friend really coveted and she was always making up excuses to try and take it home with her. “Gosh I’m carrying all these small objects and I have nothing to carry them in!” “You’re going on vacation? I’ll look after your Prada bag for you!” “Oh no you slipped and now you’re clinging to a cliff’s edge! Quick! Throw me your Prada bag!” Once you know what they’re actually after, their attempts to obtain it look clownish and silly.
Caitlin Johnstone: The Obedient Censors at Meta https://t.co/M2ewa4zK1A
A monopolistic Silicon Valley mega-corporation deleting political speech about an important historical figure because Washington says he was a terrorist is a notably brazen act of censorship. pic.twitter.com/JooPenFZfY— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) January 7, 2022
Whenever I talk about how the immense power structure which the mass media serves and protects has a desperate need to control online speech, I’ll always get a few people objecting that the powerful don’t care about what ideas and information the ordinary riff raff share with each other on internet forums. They just do what they want regardless of public opinion, like Greek gods on Mount Olympus.
And really nothing could be further from the truth. Controlling the thoughts we think about our nation and our world are of paramount importance to our rulers, because it’s only by controlling what we think that they can control how we vote, how we act, and whether or not we get fed up with being exploited and oppressed by a loose alliance of unelected plutocrats and government operatives. There is nothing, literally nothing, that these people would not do to maintain this control. Their very survival depends on it.
Michael Parenti summed this up perfectly in his 2015 book “Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies” with this passage that was recently shared by Louis Allday:
“But they don’t care about what we think. They turn a deaf ear to us,” some people complain. That is not true. They care very much about what you think. In fact, that is the only thing about you that holds their attention and concern. They don’t care if you go hungry, unemployed, sick, or homeless. But they do care when you are beginning to entertain resistant democratic thoughts. They get nervous when you discard your liberal complaints and adopt a radical analysis. They do care that you are catching on as to what the motives and functions of the national security state and the US global empire are all about at home and in so many corners of the world. They get furiously concerned when you and millions like you are rejecting the pap that is served up by corporate media and establishment leaders.
By controlling our perceptions, they control our society; they control public opinion and public discourse. And they limit the range and impact of our political consciousness. The plutocrats know that their power comes from their ability to control our empowering responses. They know they can live at the apex of the social pyramid only as long as they can keep us in line at the pyramid’s base. Who pays for all their wars? We do. Who fights these wars? We do or our low-income loved ones do. If we refuse to be led around on a super-patriotic, fear-ridden leash and if we come to our own decisions and act upon them more and more as our ranks grow, then the ruling profiteers’ power shrinks and can even unwind and crash—as has happened with dynasties and monarchies of previous epochs.
We need to strive in every way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a revolution of organized consciousness striking at the empire’s heart with full force when democracy is in the streets and mobilized for the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come from nowhere yet is sometimes able to carry everything before it.
There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic.
Preventing their replacement with a system that is more responsive, just and democratic is precisely why our rulers are so keen on controlling the way we think, act and vote. They exert this control with their total domination of the mass media and mainstream education systems, with Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and with the rapidly increasing normalization of internet censorship.
The dawn of the internet sparked great hope for those who knew that the ruling power structures of our day retain supremacy by controlling and manipulating people’s access to and understanding of information; the possibility of billions of human minds freely spreading awareness of what’s going on in our world and sharing revolutionary ideas to address our problems spelled beautiful things for our future to anyone with a lucid understanding of the obstacles we face.
Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity
"The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment."https://t.co/6M7FKYw668
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) January 3, 2022
Unfortunately, our rulers understood the significance of that moment too. They’ve been working tirelessly to ensure that the internet serves as a net positive for themselves and a net negative for the rest of us, manipulating the large-scale movements of information so that dissident voices are increasingly marginalized and inconsequential while giving themselves the ability to funnel propaganda into public minds far more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. If they succeed in their objectives, ordinary people will wind up no better at sharing unauthorized ideas and information than they were before the internet, while our rulers will be far more effective in controlling the way we think at mass scale.
That they will succeed is by no means guaranteed. We are living in an entirely unprecedented moment in human history with many large-scale systems on the precipice of failure while technological advancement creates many other unpredictable factors; gaps could open up at any time to let light shine through in the massive movements that humanity is poised for. There is no way to accurately predict the future in a situation the likes of which we’ve never seen before, where patterns are crumbling and narrative is hitting white noise saturation point.
Anything can happen. Win or lose, this is a hell of a time to be alive.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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PM Scott Morrison came out strongly against Novak Djokovic again this week, claiming “rules are rules” but his government are prolific rule breakers
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Covid has spread like wildfire to around 500 aged care homes as the government failed to deliver RATs, booster vaccines and a surge workforce
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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The Morrison government, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke and the business lobby desperately want a surge in immigration to fire the economy but 330,000 migrants remain stuck on bridging visas as the permanent migration program remains mired at an intake of 160,000.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Around the world, governments deliver free Covid testing. So the news did not go down well that Harvey Norman and Chemist Warehouse, allies of the Coalition (and in Harvey Norman’s case, grand JobKeeper spongers too), were looking to turn a profit by selling Rapid Antigen Tests
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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There is no doubt that that Tony Abbott, as a former prime minister, will have a federal electorate named after him after he dies. If he didn’t, a century-old tradition would be overturned.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Even those fleeing the Taliban, asylum seekers who helped our war effort in Afghanistan, face indefinite detention for another year. Lawyer and human rights advocate Alison Battisson reports on the victims of Australia’s detention regime and their fight for freedom.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Malcolm Turnbull may have memorably coined the term miserable ghost for Rudd and Abbott, but he and his superannuated colleagues in the Ex-Prime Ministers Club are no misers.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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The flood of black money into Australia proceeds apace, pushing up property prices, as the government dithers on its international pledge to enact money-laundering laws.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Regional and rural individuals and organisations believed that their application for a grant would judged on merit. They were sadly mistaken.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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The decision by Gladys Berejiklian to not contest the seat of Warringah deprives us of what would have been one of the marquee battles of the 2022 federal election. But there are many other independent v Liberal contests looming
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Parliament is in recess and another year has gone without the Morrison government honouring its promise to establish a federal ICAC. It is clearly reluctant to do so at all, while rorts and scandals continue to erode trust in our politicians.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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A little administrative juggling, and an unlikely set of funding proposals magically turns into reality, writes Jommy Tee in his continuing series on regional grants.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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With an election looming, the Coalition government will attempt to recultivate its image as the party for efficient government, and Labor as the party of bureaucratic red tape. Callum Foote investigates how the government has been run.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Our financial analysis of the major earners from the publicly funded jobactive model suggests that it is primarily American-owned multinational…
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Australia’s slide into corporatocracy continues apace. Executives of oil giant Exxon flat out lied about their tax havens to a senate inquiry and were not sanctioned. Not even a slap on the wrist. Now the senate’s Privileges Committee has allowed the Tax Commissioner to thumb his nose at the Senate by by refusing to release JobKeeper data.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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“We don’t live in a democracy anymore. We live in a plutocracy. The Australian political system is a wholly owned subsidiary of big corporations.” An investigation reveals donors paying top dollar at political fundraising events for exclusive access to ministers
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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In spite of the Liberal party’s small-government rhetoric, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is overseeing the most expensive government in recent memory with departmental expenses outstripping both tax revenue and Australia’s GDP; and dwarfing Labor. Callum Foote investigates
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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It will be up to the Senate to hold the line against one of the Morrison government’s most alarming sleights of hand regarding the welfare of Australia’s elderly. Sarah Russell investigates.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Australia’s Jobseeker rate is second lowest in the OECD. The $40 billion wasted through JobKeeper could have funded a raise for over 5 years.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Scott Morrison’s National Recovery and Resilience Agency was formed in May to oversee an eye-watering $8 billion in disaster relief funds. Is it doing the job was intended to do? Callum Foote investigates the Prime Minister’s secrecy-loving new agency
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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New evidence shows the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) interfered in denying a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Michael West Media (MWM) into Scott Morrison’s sacking from Tourism Australia in 2006
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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Asia Pacific Report newsdesk
Pacific Islanders believe corruption is a big problem in both their governments and the business sector, says a new report.
About one third of 6000 interviewees across the region believe that most or all members of parliament and staff in heads of government’s offices are involved in corruption, says Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer – Pacific 2021.
The survey subjects across 10 countries and territories were asked what they thought about corruption, if they have directly experienced it, and whether things could change.
Transparency International says the result is the most extensive public opinion data on corruption ever gathered in the region.
Corruption was perceived to be worst in Solomon Islands (97 percent) and Papua New Guinea (96 percent), followed closely by the Federated States of Micronesia (80 percent). It is also bad in Vanuatu (73 percent), Fiji (68 percent) and Tonga (62 percent).
Despite more than half of respondents reporting a “fair amount” or a “great deal” of trust in their government to do a good job and treat people fairly, 61 percent believe corruption is a significant problem in their government and 56 percent think it is getting worse.
Impunity also appears to be a problem, with less than a fifth of respondents (18 percent) believing that corrupt officials frequently face appropriate consequences for their actions.
Added to this, only 14 percent believe their government regularly considers them when making decisions.
Bribery common
About one in three paid a bribe“One of the most significant results was how often ordinary people in the Pacific directly encounter corruption in their daily lives,” says the report.
“Thirty-two percent of interviewees recently paid a bribe to receive public services – a higher rate than any other region surveyed by Transparency International.”
However, rates differ widely by country.
The most common reason given across the region for bribery is to receive a quicker or better public service.
Bribery appears to be a problem across a range of government services, from applying for official government documents to dealing with the police.
Only 13 per cent of those who paid a bribe for a public service reported it. This rises to around 30 percent in Fiji and Kiribati.
‘Sextortion’ also a problem
“Even more worrying is that 38 percent of respondents say they or someone they know have personally experienced ‘sextortion’, where an official requests sexual acts in exchange for an essential government service,” says the report.About a quarter of respondents have been offered a bribe for their votes. This has serious consequences for the integrity of national and local elections.
In addition, 15 percent of people have received threats of retaliation if they do not vote in a specific way.
It is not only their governments which Pacific Islanders are concerned about. A majority of people interviewed feel that corruption is a big problem in business, too.
“A corruption ‘hotspot’ appears to be government contracts, which more than two thirds of respondents believe businesses secure through bribes and connections,” the report says.
“Almost half of the people we surveyed think there is little control over companies [which] extract natural resources, which is of particular concern given that this is one of the largest industries in the region.”
The good news, says Transparency International, is that “more than 70 percent of respondents say that ordinary people can help to fight corruption”.
“More than 60 percent also think their government is doing a good job at combating corruption”
How Pacific Islanders in the 10 surveyed countries perceive corruption … French Pacific believed to have the least corruption. Graph: Transparency International
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Sydney’s Muslims are considering a complaint to ICAC over Premier Dominic Perrottet’s apparent favouritism towards the Catholic Church’s attempted takeover of NSW cemeteries, reports Callum Foote.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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The electorates of Coalition ministers Mark Coulton and David Littleproud have benefited hugely from some juggling of the funding rules.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
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The decision of whether to hand control over Sydney’s most valuable cemeteries to the Catholic Church may be made tomorrow.
This post was originally published on Michael West Media.
