{"id":147031,"date":"2021-05-03T09:05:14","date_gmt":"2021-05-03T09:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=193800"},"modified":"2021-05-03T09:05:14","modified_gmt":"2021-05-03T09:05:14","slug":"daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/05\/03\/daily-deluge-billionaires-rule-the-people-lose-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Deluge: Billionaires Rule, The People Lose"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"In
In Remembrance-<\/em> Leni Riefenstahl<\/p>\n

It would take 1,000 me\u2019s and 1,000 hours in a week for a thousand me\u2019s to keep up with just some of the infamy and horror that is global capitalism. Capitalism\u2019s putrid fuel:  pollution and many millions of collateral damaged souls.<\/p>\n

<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The entire mess is masterfully managed by monster media and handled through the machinations of the prostituted politicians.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, up against 25,000 barrels of DDT leaking, near Catalina Island. Some Arizona politician is positive for \u201cCovid-19\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

One of my friends keeps reminding me we are in the Matrix, or that we are in this pseudo news events time frame.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Daniel J. Boorstin\u2019s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America<\/em> |<\/p>\n

But, reality is reality, in one sense \u2014<\/p>\n

\n

Small businesses had a brutal pandemic. Amazon\u2019s earnings more than tripled.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 just one percent shy of the pandemic high, 23 percent, in May 2020.<\/p>\n

And a new report from the U.S. Small Business Administration found that \u201cthe number of people who were self employed and working was 20 percent lower in April 2020 than in April 2019,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s profits probably won\u2019t escape the attention of regulators. Source<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Amazon<\/p>\n

Amazon workers in Europe mark Black Friday with \u2018we are not robots\u2019 protests \u2013 CNET<\/p>\n

I deal with things like Walter Lippman, 1922, Public Opinion<\/em>, too, for the pseudo events \u2014 Walter Lippmann\u2019s Public Opinion<\/em>, published in 1922, is the most persuasive critique of democracy I\u2019ve 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\u2019s book \u201cthe most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Lippmann put it, \u201cThe democratic ideal, as Jefferson molded it, consisted of an ideal environment and a selected class.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The question for Lippmann, then, wasn\u2019t 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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

You might read this and think, \u201cCitizens don\u2019t have to have an intelligent opinion on every issue confronting the community. Instead, they choose the party they trust to serve their interests.\u201d On this view, citizens don\u2019t need to be \u201comnicompetent,\u201d to borrow Lippmann\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no vision of democracy worth defending that doesn\u2019t 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\u2019re forced to live in \u201cpseudo-environments,\u201d in which they reduce the world to stereotypes in order to render it intelligible.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>). Here,<\/p>\n

\n

Daniel Boorstin, in The Image<\/em>, coined not just the term \u201cpseudo-event,\u201d but also the epithetic descriptions \u201cfamous for being famous\u201d and \u201cwell-known for well-knownness\u201d; 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 \u201creality\u201d as a genre as much as a truth, the book also managed to predict them\u2014so neatly that it reads, in 2016, not just as prescience, but as prophesy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe image\u201d is, in Boorstin\u2019s conception, both literal (pictures, photographs, etc.) and figurative: a short-hand for images\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2014the 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. \u2014 Source<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Genius Of Beyonc\u00e9 Reshaping The Image Of Black Motherhood \u2013 YouTube<\/p>\n

Not only do we not know what history is or means, we do not care, as Huxley predicted in A Brave New World<\/em>, about facts, history. \u201cExterminate all the Brutes<\/a>\u201d is deeper than just the heart of darkness:<\/p>\n

\"Exterminate
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

That sucker born every nanosecond \u2014 from the old minute !<\/p>\n

\n

Phineas T. Barnum once displayed, in his American Museum in New York City, the corpse of a \u201cmermaid\u201d 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 \u201cThe Only Mastodon on Earth.\u201d He once \u201cexhibited\u201d a woman named Joice Heth as the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington (and as \u201cThe Greatest Natural & National Curiosity in the World\u201d). He then wrote to newspapers to make a confession: Joice was not, actually, Washington\u2019s nurse. She wasn\u2019t even, in fact, human\u2014but merely \u201ca curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numerous springs,\u201d operated by a hidden ventriloquist. \u2014 Source<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"The
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 \u201cDan Quayle\u201d Harris. . . As the world burns, whitey is heading for Mars and the rest of the world is head down, scrolling up and down their \u201csmart\u201d phone bomb. The fleecing isn\u2019t undercover anymore. It\u2019s not accidentally out in the open. It is regaled by Mainstream Media, and the rich are laughing all the way to the vaults.<\/p>\n

\n