Assange and Trump: Real Hero, Fake Villain

The rapid descent of the nation, the system and the planet under the domain of private-profit-first capitalism continues with opposition growing but still far too much acceptance that only agrees to new employees at the level of state rule who represent the same class interests but in more polite forms. This means some benefits for some groups but always at far more cost to others. Affirmative Action, to mention only one program created to supposedly amend some of racism’s worst social malevolence towards a minority, did far more to advance women, who represent a majority, while bringing growth to the black middle and upper middle classes but even greater growth in black poverty and a massive increase in black prisoners crowding America’s penal colony. A profit for some always entails a loss for others and as long as this system prevails, so will that rule.

A Trump regime more feared by Republican Party wealth than Democratic Party wealth feared Bernie Sanders is holding true to those fears in that it might rush the empire to ruin even faster than what was inevitable anyway. While Trump has some tendencies that put him left of what, under current perverse standards, passes for liberal, his inability to maintain a position from the start of a sentence to the end is most feared by the ruling class, which is why it’s liberal sect-cult has been moving towards impeachment since the day before his inauguration while the conservative-cult-sect has seen to it that he is surrounded by dunderheads and murderers who make him seem almost thoughtful by comparison.

As his administration’s policies, not always his, help bring Russia, China and really the rest of the world closer together both in immediate fear and long-term hope, the American people have to understand that we are part of that group and act that way rather than continue performing as humanity’s self-chosen rulers. We are fast approaching a point at which not just future generational threats are forecast but those in which tomorrow morning could bring on a colossal blunder that creates a war beyond anything even the brain-dead and morals-free who cause it might have imagined. The present crisis with Iran is simply the long term Israeli occupied American government policy writ larger, more dangerously and, if possible, even dumber than in the past. But this closely follows the near destruction of Venezuela which has failed but at critical cost to that nation, suffering along with too many others the death rattle abuse of an imperial power which still rules for the moment only as a result of being able to kill more people more quickly than any other nation. That awesome and ugly power is fading, too, but hoping that it will happen soon enough isn’t enough. The American people will have to bring about radical change, a transformation here that will greatly aid in the transformation of the globe into a community of cooperation, peace and social justice, to replace the bloody animosity and injustice so long accepted as reality.

Present trends are hopeful only under continued lesser evilism that enables voters to select leaders appealing to minority identity groups and performing beneficially for them while still aiding and abetting the system that will create a few more billionaires but far more poverty, war, and far less humanity the longer it is tolerated. Continued stress on individual villains posing as leaders and minorities disguising humanity as special identity groups is the divide and conquer strategy of our rulers.

If there is a single individual that warrants any attention beyond that of the human race, at least for the moment, it should be Julian Assange, whose persecution and suffering after performing as a heroic servant of the people is a disgrace to supposed if yet unrealized democracy. The future of a truly informed public able to act with full knowledge of what rulers are actually doing, after generations of living in forced atmospheres of propaganda passing for material reality, is under greater threat than ever. Assange, and one of his prime sources, Manning, are imprisoned by social forces that represent a menace to the human race and by individuals in leadership among that force who have pond scum between their ears and pus running through their veins.

These are the creatures who can rule that foreign nations must bow to the imperium or be destroyed because it knows best, is best, and represents future freedom and democracy, even if present slavery, mass murder and authoritarianism are its most important tools. These are the paid servants who report (?) and comment on reality as stenographers to power and call it “journalism” and “punditry”. And they are a tiny minority of the human race, running the nations, the people and the planet into the ground at an ever-faster pace, while we are distracted by false consciousness beyond the imagination of past social critics who invented that term.

Showing his contrasting skills, among them the negative of acting like an oaf with a nuclear weapon in his hand but the positive of at times being a crystal clear communicator, the ego-maniac in the white house has popularized the term “fake news”, instantly understood by just about everyone as describing the political establishment, corporate media and those holding power over the means of communication. That power is now fading as well, by what is still anti-social but has great possibilities of becoming truly social media. At present, it is still a market tool to make some richer at the expense of consumers, but Assange and Manning are prime examples of what it can mean in truly spreading information to the people and not just the latest product for sale or celebrity to admire or paid politician to vote for. 

While the issues of climate and atmospheric plague, threats of more war, greater poverty and approaching capitalist bankruptcy must be confronted and dealt with for the longer term, the short term threat to Assange and Manning is a crisis for not just them but for humanity and any possibility of opening the books and files to reveal real rather than fake news. Freeing them is far more important than simply getting rid of Trump. Not just for them and the American people, but for what that will say about America to the people of the world.

Noam Chomsky Explains Gargantuan Waste Spending Through the Pentagon

 December 13, 1989, KGNU Radio

Caller:  "I'd like to ask you about . . . the Pentagon budget, which is only about 6 percent of the GNP, and military procurement is only 2 percent or 3 percent of the GNP. If you think that exists to benefit high-tech industries, it seems like it would make more sense for the government to directly fund high-tech industries if they wanted to do that. Probably the public would be even more supportive of it, like they are in Japan."

Noam Chomsky:  "The figures about percentage of GNP are almost totally meaningless. The point is that the corporate managers in advanced industry - this is true of electronics, computers, pharmaceuticals, etc. - expect that the government, meaning the public, will pick up the costly parts of the production process, the parts that are not profitable - research and development. That's got to be paid for by the public. Furthermore, the public, through the Pentagon, provides a state-guaranteed market, which is available for waste production if commercial markets don't work. That is a gift to the corporate managers. It's a cushion for planning. When something can be sold on the market, you sell it. If not, the public purchases it and destroys it. Furthermore, the public pays the cost while the corporation makes the profit. If you take a look at particular industries you can see how this works. 

"Take, say, the computer industry, the core of the modern industrial economy. I'm kind of smoothing the edges here, but the story is essentially accurate. You can put in tenth-order effect, if you like. In the 1950s, computers were not marketable, so the public paid 100 percent of the cost of research, development and production through the Pentagon. By the 1960s, they were beginning to be marketable in the commercial market, so the public participation declined to about 50 percent. The idea is that the public pays the costs, the corporations make the profits. Public subsidy, private profit; that's what we call free enterprise. By the 1980s there were very substantial new expenditures required for advances in fifth-generation computers and new fancy parallel processing systems, etc. So the public's share in the costs went up very substantially through Star Wars and the Pentagon, etc. That's the way it works. Percentage of GNP doesn't tell you anything relevant to this process.

"As to why the government doesn't just come to the population and play it the Japanese way, the answer is, in my view, and this has been the answer that business has given and I think they're right, that the public here wouldn't tolerate it. This is not a docile, submissive population like Japan. You can't come to the population here and tell them: Look, next year you're going to cut back on your consumption by this amount so that IBM can make more profits and then maybe ten years from now your son or your daughter will get a job. That wouldn't wash. What you tell people here is: The Russians are coming, so we better send up a lot of missiles into space and maybe out of that will come something useful for IBM and then maybe your son will get a job in ten years. Those last parts you don't bother saying.

Caller: "Who are you quoting? Are you quoting yourself or some analyst in the military or what?"

Chomsky: "What I'm saying is what politicians in the United States say."

Caller: "I've never heard them say that."

Chomsky: "You've never heard a politician in the United States say, the Russians are coming, we have to have more missiles?"

Caller:  "I've never heard them say that we need it because we have to fund some high-tech industries."

Chomsky:  "You didn't hear what I just said. I said that the last two sentences I added were not what is publicly said. How you do it in the United States is you say, look, we've got to defend ourselves, we need Star Wars, we need the Pentagon system, and the effect of that is to achieve what I just described with regard to the computer industry, or whatever. That is because this is a relatively free society.

"If politicians were to approach the public telling them, look, we've decided that next year you're going to cut back on your consumption so that IBM will make more profit, the reaction in the United States would be a healthy reaction: Who are you to tell me to cut back so that IBM will make more profit? If it's going to be a social decision of that kind, I want to take part in it. And that's precisely why business does not want to be put in those terms. They do not want social policy, which is going to organize people, to become involved in making decisions over investment. This issue has come up over the years, many times, in the business press. Go back to the 1940s where they point out there are two techniques: one technique is the military system, the other technique would be social spending, infrastructure development, hospitals, services, etc. or useful production. But the latter is no good. It will work from a technical, economic point of view, but it has all sorts of unwelcome side effects. For example, it tends to organize public constituencies. If the government gets involved in carrying out activities that affect the public existence directly, people will want to get involved in it."

-----Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent - Interviews With David Barsamian, pps. 178-82

What is so rare as a - fake news - day in June? *

While the continued mental assault on what is left of public consciousness still features the idiot fiction of Russiagate, or how the evil Putin arranged to trash our great American democracy and defeat holy mother Hillary on behalf of cursed father Donald, the month of June offered not one but two major fictional treatments of historic reality to further reduce innocent minds to enslaved mentalities. The fables of D-Day, celebrated every year in glorification of a war actually won by the Soviet Union but taught as America’s gift to the global marketplace, and the unholy terror alleged by evil China in the infamous Tiananmen uprising treated here as a story worthy of creation by Disney, Spielberg, Mother Goose and Ronald Reagan combined.

While American troops paid a heavy price and contributed mightily to the victory over Germany in WW2 with the attack on the French coast memorialized as D-Day, that beachhead of some 50 miles was dwarfed by the 1500 mile wide eastern front where Russia absorbed more death and destruction than any other nation in that massive bloodbath. D-Day was a much belated response from America and Britain to endless pleas that an attack be conducted in the west to spare some of the terrible toll on Russia. That nation suffered as many as 20 million dead, entire cities and villages reduced to giant cemeteries and rubble while   a post war fairy tale was spread of American GIs rescuing Europe, giving candy bars to children, creating fictional democracy and real pregnancy wherever they went. French brutality towards its women who allegedly fraternized with the German enemy, many doing so to help their families survive, was covered somewhat in newsreels released here. But American troops impregnating hordes of French women, reducing many to prostitution under conditions of wartime poverty and hardship, was hardly mentioned. The entire history of that so-called “great” war is as smothered in propaganda and fiction as any story of American conflict and we still pay a price of belief in alleged glory participating in an orgy of mass murder that may have taken the lives of far more than fifty million and was deemed totally unnecessary by many critics at the time. They, of course, were quickly labeled as fascists, communists or non-sectarian free thinkers and dismissed from any hearing by the public. Critical thinking about ruling propaganda has no place in a democracy. And boiled excrement makes for a nutritious meal.

While that war put America, untouched by any of its horror on our mainland while Europe and the pacific were nearly destroyed, at the top of the industrial pyramid of capital by its end, its controlling global position has lasted until the present historic moment. This finds the world reeling under a series of political, economic and environmental breakdowns all due to the reduction of humanity to commodity consumers in a vast shopping mall that is reducing the planet to a garbage dump, and an ever growing ghetto of multitudes reduced to poverty while a small group enjoy riches beyond the wildest fantasies of past or present royalty. That reality has produced many conditions of revolutionary aspirations among people disgusted with the status quo, none of those having succeeded yet but some coming closer to ideals growing more necessary as more of humanity sees the potential horror of continued operation as an anti-human system of alleged democracy passing for a market place in which the rich and poor enjoy supposed equal access to the fruits of life. This political economic religious fanaticism is coming face to face with the political economic science that finds anti-social reality reducing humanity to a future that threatens to be much shorter than its past. The controlling mindset that perpetuates the madness plays a further role in the second June historic moment treated as myth by western mind management. What is called the Tiananmen “massacre” has destroyed more western consciousness than any eastern bodies allegedly taken in that event.

When Chinese seekers of more democracy and less corruption rose in protest against their government much of the organization came from outside China, in the tradition of so-called “color revolutions” of the present promoted by western capital’s agents both in and outside the country supposedly experiencing the call for freedom. More recently the events in the Ukraine were similar when an elected government was overthrown with open American involvement in league with some former Ukrainian fascists, but the 1989 demonstrations in China were not only given great coverage then but memorialized with still unsubstantiated death tolls and alleged horrors claimed which rarely if ever mention Chinese troops attacked and beaten to death by mobs of supposedly peaceful demonstrators. While originally claiming thousands killed, more recently the toll has been carefully lowered by some to hundreds, but others still shriek that thousands were murdered by the bloody monsters in China. There is as much evidence for this number of deaths as there is for Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, Israel’s great suffering at the hands of murderous Palestinians, and the injustice experienced by American women when Trump leaves the toilet seat up.

Widespread belief in these two summer fantasies of history would not last ten minutes in a nation with a truly free press able to widely distribute the stories of what actually took place, what behind the scenes activities played a role in both, and what the outcomes have actually produced. The duplicity and disinformation of much that passes for reality in the hands of stenographers and paid agents for power has led to some not believing anything they are told about anything, which is understandable but only leads to acceptance in often almost as maniacal and far fetched conclusions reached by far too many of us. But at least doubt may cause many to try to look further and find out more of what has really been kept from us and not simply relying on new fables and follies to explain old ones. A place to begin might be these two giant creations of mass mythology that could help us all learn more about the real world rather than the one presented to us by the owners and operators of our supposed democracy .

* James Russell Lowell, amended by frank scott