We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, September 8, 2012

“A Lot of People Believe This Stuff”: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Public Relations

Click here to access article by Andrew Gavin Marshall from his blog. 

This brilliant, young Canadian reveals the history and the methods of the Empire's shadow government in their ongoing effort to create the illusion of democracy. The methods are the sophisticated grandchildren of the public relation industry of the 1920s. These public relations specialists have developed their expertise to such an extent that war crimes and other crimes against humanity can be packaged and sold as humanitarian programs and their economic disasters as the fault of irresponsible home buyers. However, the tremendous gap between their illusions and reality that continues to grow shows signs of undermining the public's belief in the illusions. Perhaps that is why the Empire's political operatives are beefing up their police agencies, surveilling our activities, and maybe planning to convert cities into corporate run enterprises.
Whether Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, they are all parasites, whose purpose is to manipulate the public into granting them the “consent” to govern, while they govern for the benefit of corporations and banks to plunder, exploit, and profit at the expense of the population, both at home and around the world, which is often facilitated through war, coups, repression of liberation movements, genocide, and impoverishment. To these people, the public – you and I – are nothing but a “bewildered herd” of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who must be kept as the “interested spectators of action.” The more talented a politician is at “manufacturing consent,” the more praise he or she gets from the media, and thus, from the public, itself.
I think that these politicians can more aptly be described as slick used-car salesmen than simply parasites. Except for people like the Bushes and FDR who are/were solid members of the ruling class, many like Obama and Clinton are/were merely employees of the enterprise hired by the One Percent's shadow government (board of directors of the used-car lot).