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, March 31, 2018

Americans Trust ‘Our’ Intelligence Agencies. Should We?

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Added the last two paragraphs to my commentary at 11:30 AM and 8 PM Seattle time.)

Zuesse, like all well-indoctrinated academics and other upper-middle class people (in general), consider bourgeois (capitalist) "democracy" as the real thing. These people were rather easily seduced by the extra privileges and income given them by the ruling capitalist class in order to keep the capitalist system functioning and give it a superficial appearance of legitimacy and authenticity as a "democracy". Millions of Americans now regard what we formerly had as "democracy" and believe the current lies of the government and corporate media because of their work for the ruling capitalist class. Only recently some of them have discovered a growing police state, evidence of a growing fascist government, and an increasing promotion by the ruling class of foreign wars and subversion of legitimate governments. A few of them, like Zuesse, are coming out of their privileged woodwork to criticize what is happening, and in this piece about the profusion of lies by the government. However, he seems to blame the victims.
Something’s deeply wrong here. Government by deceit, cannot be a democracy. And, yet, the public still don’t get the message, even after it has been delivered to us in history-books. By then, it’s no longer in the news, and so only few people really care about it. The message of history is not learned. The public still accepts the ongoing lies — the new lies, in the new ‘news’, for the new atrocities.
This paragraph reveals the underlying superior attitude of this class toward the classes below them. They wrote the largely fake history in these books and taught capitalist ideology to impressionable young people in public schools and colleges. Such deceit is an integral part of the divisive ideology that the ruling class superimposed on members of the upper middle class (academia and public school administrators are members) to justify their privileges. 

Elsewhere in the economy we see these upper-middle class "professionals" pleasing their capitalist masters (Zuesse always refers to them as an "aristocracy" thus hiding the system which has given them so much power) and bosses in corporate media, Hollywood, corporations, and government in order to live a luxurious lifestyle compared to that of workers "below" them who are steeped in debt and working two or three jobs in order to survive.