JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalBecause elections don't change the real power configuration...
Or any candidate who'd genuinely threaten to do so doesn't have a chance.
Now, before the swarm attacks:
There are important differences between the two big parties. We're practically forced to choose the better one, because these differences radically affect millions of us. And because movements for change experience better conditions under one party than another. And because the local and state levels, where the differences between the parties can be much more radical, are very important.
But these differences are within a limited scope. It's not just generalized corruption thanks to the power of money, it's also the weight of history and tradition with which we must contend. "The ghosts of the past."
The power of Wall Street and its divine right to extract surplus value as rent income from all sectors of the productive economy and from the 99% will not be questioned. The finance-captured government will do all to preserve that power, to cover up Wall Street fraud, to hold no one accountable, to reward miscreants and sociopaths with higher office, to follow Wall Street ideology, and to rescue Wall Street from its inevitable crashes - regardless of cost.
This is part of the larger dominance of the oversize and transnational corporations, their money in politics, their ownership of the mass media and sponsorship of academia and policy-making institutes, and the whole global structure of dominance they've set up through devices like WTO, IMF, World Bank, NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements, EU, etc.
Also never to be questioned is the predominant role of the war machine as the primary item in the Call it what you will: The National Security State. The Pentagon system. The military-industrial-Congressional-lobbyist-corporate-media complex. The global military empire. The doctrine of full-spectrum dominance. The geostrategic wankery that upholds American Exceptionalism and the USG as a legitimate decider on what should happen everywhere on the planet. The deep state and its parapolitical extensions. "Top Secret America." The federal surveillance and control state. The cycle of manufacturing threats and enemies that supposedly compel interventions, wars, new orders and phases of transition and rebuilding, with opportunities for profit at each stage.
The drug war might fall in the foreseeable future, though. That would be an important break. What will the banks do without $400 billion in extra cash flow a year to launder? What will the surveillance and security agencies do without this important pretext?
The insane energy system also may be shakier than it looks, for unavoidable reasons of physics and ecology.
And the straight-jacket culture is loosening up on some fronts.
So it's not hopeless.
You see where this is heading...
Promoting anorexia is demonstrably wrong, but this kind of pressure campaign becomes another step in legitimating the corporate Internet up as the speech police. Whether or not they respond -- they may not because unfortunately, anorexia seems to sell -- they are still turned into an authority over user content. And as Facebook becomes a tool for such control (which it already is and wants to be, e.g. with the recent banning of "conspiracy theory" sites, plus prudishness to the point of banning pics of breastfeeding mothers), the pressure will be on the ISPs to do the same. You won't have poisonous propaganda - or anything other than the Internet as a kind of Disnified corporate mall.
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