Tuesday, June 30, 2009

TAKE THE EMOTIONAL HIGH GROUND


For some time now I’ve suffered from this unfocused fear that, here in the new 21st century depression, it all looked too fucking normal. No oakies. No railroad bums. No starving kids with flies buzzing around their eyes. While friends and acquaintances lose jobs, run out of money, and look quietly but increasing more desperate, the superficial world goes on with an appearance that everything – and by that I mean corporate capitalism – goes on as if there was no cause for concern. Although worrying, the feeling was sufficiently nebulous that I hadn’t managed to actually write anything about it. And now Munz has sent me this on-the-money piece by Chris Hedges from Common Dreams I guess I don’t need to because Hedges – give or take a point – voices many of the these uneasy thoughts.

“The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton's draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.
Our economic crisis-despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford's marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest incarnation, Brüno-barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.”
Click here to read the rest.

The secret word is Deception

9 comments:

Gerin said...

and what democracy? that word is just an opium for the people.
let's call it a corporate slavery, it's more apropriate.

Mick said...

Hey Gerin. I thought we'd lost you.

Dick Headley said...

TV is the Great Sedater. If it's not happening on TV it's not happening. Even if it is happening on TV it's not really happening.

mo figuls said...

thank you so much for that article...sometimes it's hard to express one's thoughts, then somebody comes along and does it for you...

again, thanks...

mo figuls said...

btw, on a common thread, did you chance by this recent article?

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4697/

mo

Mark Haspam said...

Thanks for the link, Mick. Truly powerful article.

we must all prepare for the mental fight and gather as many mental weapons as we can.

we can't just get mad like Howard Beale said - it has to go beyond human emotion. Because human emotion is nothing but clay for the corporate world, they can do whatever they want with it.

Obama was the last lesson.

stu said...

i may be wrong but i love the chaos

Gerin said...

hi Mick, glad to see that nothing has changed on your deck. I was absent but now I'm back (who said that?)... until the end of corporate world. let's hope it to be very very soooon! looking forward for that beautiful day! birds shall be singing again, monsanto & similar pimps will be flying to the saturnian Io
satelite to stay there for good... and the good old anarchy will reign on Earth forever. la vie sera belle de nouveau.
WV=nulmad. nice!

butlincat said...

NASA’s LCROSS mission launched a lunar orbiter on June 19, 2009 and isintended to bomb a location on the south pole of the moon on October 9, 2009with a 2-ton kinetic weapons, creating a crater on the moon nearly 5 mileswide. This bombing violates space law, including the U.N. Outer SpaceTreaty and the Moon Treaty, and may trigger conflict with extraterrestrialcivilizations based on the moon, which the U.S. government (NationalSecurity Agency and NASA) have known about since the mid-1960s. The LCROSSbombing should be aborted before Oct. 9.