027 Dare to Debate

The solution to our free fall into dystopia is to force open public debates and stop listening to biased political, pundits and their incessant neo-liberal preaching.

Problem, Reaction, Solution

Problem
I wonder if someday in the future, long after people will have learned how essential honest debate is to maintaining and defending a functional democracy, if those citizens will look back at our era and the way “news” is defined, filtered, polished and disseminated by corporations and have pity on our timidness and ignorance of the importance of true, honest debate? If we’re lucky they will feel shame for us, for our intellectual primitiveness and cowardliness; more likely, facing ever worsening global climate and ecological crisis, social strife, widespread poverty, starvation, and global wars, they will seethe in anger at our utter failure to hold our institutions and ourselves accountable for speaking and otherwise communicating truth.

The fact we have allowed the institutionalized, oligarchy-controlled mainstream media to dictate what news is and what news is not will be of no consolation to the future generations. They will hold their parents and grandparents accountable—us, just as we hold our forbearers accountable for having blind trust in financial institutions, chemical cartels, pharmaceutical conglomerates, intelligence agencies and multi-national for-profit corporations. The generations of the 1960s-through the present made some strides at questioning the benevolence of corporations, however, we are much slower off the line to question the motives and machinations of the mainstream media. This is a good a time as any to add that many self-proclaimed “alternative media” are not alternative to any meaningful degree.

Despite so many people today confessing to not trusting mainstream media, far too many people are still naïve enough to allow the media to prioritize what stories are worthy and then to assume the role as official narrator and dictate the parameters of discussion about the day’s “breaking news.” This anachronistic notion that the media shoots straight and anyone who offers a significantly different opinion is to be considered holding extreme views is nonsense at best, mendaciously manipulative at worst.

These future generations will be encumbered with cleaning up the calamitous messes of previous generations—our current generation. They will wonder how we endured living under the sham of “democracy” because they will have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight and know we could have done much better had we only had more passion for truth. They will know how foolish we were/are to keep referring to our socio/political/economic system as a democracy when it fact it is an oligarchy, or plutocracy if you prefer. They will have long figured out the mainstream news is and most always has been owned and controlled by the oligarchy and the terminology we accept and use is defined by the very same oligarchs as a means to dupe us and keep us passive.

The media uses the word democracy as a place holder for oligarchy knowing full well working class citizens will not continue fighting for and handful of privileged brats. The beleaguered public will not blindly continue to support the institutions that oligarchy hold up as respectable, beneficial and essential for civilization simply because they renamed them “democratic” institutions. The citizens would not knowingly vote for an authoritarian, a dictator, a king or queen, but if the oligarch-owned media slyly presents the oligarch-vetted candidate as a warrior for the people, fighting for democracy, freedom, strength, independence, God and country, then their candidate can ascend to the throne and continue doing what oligarchs have always done: championing the interests of  Wall Street and the interconnected boards of directors of global banking, military, chemical, oil, pharmaceutical and media, (an abbreviated list, I realize) who live by the code of quid pro quo. The fact so much was made about Trump’s quid pro quo with Ukraine is laughable despite it being true and despicable, in light of the fact that there are around 12,000 professional lobbyists vs. 535 congress critters, meaning virtually every transaction between government “representatives” and corporations is quid pro quo.

In the future, on the brink of personal exhaustion and societal collapse, people will have figured out the only way to insure civilization can survive and quality of life can be enjoyed by the rest of us is to insure the truth is learned and told, and the only way to insure the truth is learned and told is to guarantee real debate on crucial issues is not only allowed, but encouraged, not only encouraged, but mandated by the government (of by and for We the People Government, not the corporate-owned government we have now). The people own the public airwaves so we need to assume responsibility for what plays on those public airwaves. The way we receive news—ostensibly– today and in the past has been an utter sham and distortion— it’s deceitful propaganda laced with shards of truth!

Reaction
Woke people, by growing numbers, understand the machinations of the global financial scam and are, on various levels, trying to alert those not yet fully aware of the indoctrinated scheme against the general public—social media and quality internet web sites are weapons against the corporate media. On the opposite side the banksters know they need to control the narrative of basically everything just as they always have so that each generation comes into this world expecting lifelong debt as normal.

The global financial wizards have the big guns of mainstream media at their disposal and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Google heads are patrolling for signs of free speech on social media. For now it’s asymmetric information warfare. But the legions of people garnering and sharing information on the structure and motives of oligarchy increases rapidly. In fact, the public awareness of their rulers is expanding so quickly that it is easy to see the panic and desperation by the oligarchs to get total control of the unwieldy social media and in general the Internet. They are playing every card available to regain total control over the narrative of everyday events.

Without having to waste space here in retracing each and every revision of law that has allowed corporate media to merge and conglomerate into giant mega-media outlets, it is enough for this argument to know that democrat and republican administrations have been compliant in the metastasizing of media monopolies.

I was and still am a big fan of letters to the editor during newspaper and magazine days, and now I peruse comments under web site articles and YouTube videos, and, of course, Twitter is basically an endless stream of commentary but with little structure or true debate mechanisms. In my home town 25 miles outside of Seattle, we used to get the Seattle Times and Seattle Post Intelligencer. I preferred the PI because they included many letters to the editor. I like to read the columnists, not so much for information and certainly not for the disinformation, but to see what the corporate-syndicated pundits are saying about current events. I get a much better sense of where society is from reading the comments that follow. The PI stopped publishing hard copy in mid-March 2009. That left the Seattle Times and they are very circumspect in their letters, mostly allowing only one or two articles to appear to the public which is why I dropped them. From my perspective this exclusion of public comment is an overt attempt to control the public voice and is what helped kill the newspaper business.

The internet is an open can of worms, the Genie is out of the lamp, and it makes it easy to find information from all over the world, not necessarily vetted by the corporate media. I totally disagree with those today who lament that there is so much information mixed in with disinformation that people don’t know what’s real or what’s not anymore. This is totally false because well informed people, who have life experience and are educated can refine what they are hearing, reading or seeing and can filter out the bullshit for themselves.

The greatest awakening during the advent of the internet was that it was easy to see what the corporate, institutionalized, “respected” traditional news sources were conveniently leaving out of the everyday conversation. The more information that became available to the public, the easier it was to see how much critical information the mainstream media was not revealing. Prior to the internet, one bought and read books in order to expand ones knowledge and understanding of a particular subject.

It did not help the mainstream media when the public at large discerned the media was largely responsible for exaggerating the threat of Iraq leading to the ongoing disaster in the Middle East that is still on a low boil. The “newspaper of record,” The New York Times’ writer Judith Miller is but one example of corporate war mongering by “respectable” news sources.

When MSN stopped printing comments below their eclectic array of articles and news stories on their homepage it was obvious too much truth was creeping in and the oligarchs were getting nervous. Unlike letters to the editor in newspapers, on internet sites it’s fairly easy to include a link to a video or news story that more than makes the point or counterpoint you’re trying to make.

Finally one day the MSN home page editors alerted readers that the comments section was being revised, I knew it was never coming back and it never has. They still have their mix of news stories, but they don’t allow the public to chime in. I realize there are a lot of angry, uniformed, heavily biased dipshits that have nothing better to do than clog up sincere, intelligent discussion on internet sites, but every garden has its weeds and any good internet site has to edit a fine line between maintaining engaged discussion, controversial or not, and censorship.

 

Surely MSN can afford a few more on-line editors, but it was much easier and safer for their financial overlords to simply cut off public input.

Solution
As I stated in my last article Message in a Bottle, more and more people distrust the mainstream media and are getting their news and analysis from on-line sources and that can be both good and bad, depending on a lot of things, but the mainstream media has only themselves to blame for the exodus from their biased infotainment format. The one problem they ALL have in common is they all PREACH the news or PREACH analysis. They do not allow real debate, what debate they do allow is choreographed and regulated, the parameters are understood. So the first part of the solution is to understand a bit of history about mainstream news and since the few remaining newspapers are more of a part of history than a part of the daily narrative I will exclude them from present scrutiny only for the convenience of brevity, but newspapers were and are as controlled as are these behemoths: CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX News. Who controls them is the germane question?

Indirectly its big money and those interlocked boards of directors of the major industries as mentioned above that have mutual common interests of maximizing profits and control to the detriment of any and all other things. Wall Street knows they need to spin a good yarn to get the hard working public to accept such nonsense as trickle-down economics and war leads to peace.

They need a lot of CGI and theater to convince working people that having a hand full of billionaires with more money than the bottom half of the country is somehow good for Americans. This is where the media’s role comes in and it’s important to tie this together with why they are getting more desperate to control the freedom of information exchange. Anybody with any curiosity and a sense of social justice has by now clued into the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird (CIA’s infiltration of the media) and the subsequent Church Committee’s investigation of same. You will have most likely listened to John F. Kennedy’s speech on the repugnance of “secret societies.”

You should know that Kennedy wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and fired CIA director Allen Dulles and that Dulles, after Kennedy’s very public assassination, helped guide the investigations and non-investigations of the Warren Commission. You may not know yet that Dulles hailed from Sullivan and Cromwell the notorious law firm of Wall Street. Currently Donald Trump’s financial advisor, Steve Mnuchin hails from Goldman Sachs, otherwise known as Government Sachs and the Goldman Sachs–Sullivan Cromwell relationship is so tight they sometimes share office space. Most all president’s cabinets and advisors have been Goldman Sachs alumni, republican and democratic. Hillary Clinton was rightfully pilloried by Trump for giving well-paid speeches for Goldman Sachs and then it was Trump’s turn to be inundated by Goldman Sachs.

In fact Goldman Sachs and other prominent Wall St. financial institutions actually encourage and pay huge bonuses to their executives who quit their firm and take jobs in the U.S. government. During the calamitous housing collapse of 2007-2008, the Secretary of the Treasury was Goldman Sachs’ former president Hank Paulson. The Federal Reserve was headed by Goldman Sachs’ Alan Greenspan, a member of the Republican Party. His wife is Andrea Mitchell, the Foreign Correspondent for NBC/MSNBC. Also on the MSNBC ostensibly “liberal” cabal (sic) channel is Mika Brezinski, daughter of Zbigneiw, one of the founders, along with David Rockefeller, of the Trilateral Commission. Mika recently married MSNBC’s co-host of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough, himself a former Republican house representative.

It’s easy to see the surest way to the top of broadcast journalism, isn’t to be the best, most inquisitive journalist with impeccable English and writing skills, Hell NO! The way to the top is to be well connected to the top international banksters and policy shaping institutions. Once you’re marked as a player, you can then go to conservative FOX or liberal others. Even MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is not as far removed from FOX, the network MSNBC pretends to hate. In this Washington Post article it is apparent she and Roger Ailes were far from being acerbic toward one another. Between MSNBC (liberal) and FOX (conservative) the bankster controlled cable infotainment channels are very successful at getting Americans to hate the other Americans. Divide and conquer is alive and unwell as ever.

The point in bringing this up now is to point out how much critical information the media has kept hidden from people. Their knee jerk cry-wolf response to anyone bringing these obvious connections up is conspiracy theorist. Just to further inform you as to why and how the mean streak media anchors and pundits can sing the chorus you should do some research, if you already haven’t, on the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and their membership in the media. And lest you think the CFR is an unfounded conspiracy theory, here is their address and coordinates. 58 E 68th St, New York, NY 10065—Lat. 40.768558, Lon.-73.966148.

MSNBC often has CFR president Richard Haas on as a guest analysist. Of course I’m barely scratching the surface of “secret societies,” or better, special interest groups, think tanks, etc., with interlocking boards of directors, influencing what is and what should not be presented as news.

So without delving into the many various associations it’s time to look at the solution to this deliberate, so far successful, strategy to deceive and censor the American public. But first, just as an inducement to dig further and to not get side tracked on picking a side, just remember, in the 2006 presidential election, Skull and Bonesman George W. Bush (R) ran against Skull and Bonesman, John, F. Kerry (D). When the late Tim Russert, then host of NBC’s Meet the Press asked each one in turn, on separate shows, to reveal what being a Bonesman meant, both responded they couldn’t talk about it because it was a secret. Shouldn’t all news organizations with journalists keen to break the big story want to delve into this Ivy League elitists club? But much like the annual Bilderberger meetings, the mainstream media self-censors in respect to their financial overlords. I trust if you’re interested you will do your own research, the preeminent scholar on Skull and Bones is the late Antony C. Sutton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=39&v=orOmL2_IV4c&feature=emb_logo

All this brings us back to the premise of this article, we need to have regular, free and open PUBLIC debates so that these subjects and many others can be vigorously argued so that the populace can make their own determinations. As it is now, our media outlets preach the gospel of global hyper-consumerism, the worship of Wall Street’s closing daily stock price as a measure of economic health rather than the work that is produced by workers. They preach our military machine is the bringer of democracy to countries in need of regime overthrow, mainly to countries that are gravitating away from the U.S. dollar as world’s reserve currency and have a preponderance of natural resources to plunder.

Just as many of you do, I also read a lot of good, trusted website writers, book authors, academics and read the letters and comments from the public whenever they are made available. I am grateful for the insight and analysis provided by many very intelligent, benevolent, caring writers, yet after a long while, the articles seem to be never ending chronicle of the maladies of society, of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, war mongering, religious extremity, hyper patriotism, racial bias and bigotry, over and over ad nauseum. This constant hand wringing and gnashing of teeth without offering actionable solutions is wearying and makes some people apathetic.

Surely the insight on neoliberalism and neoconservatism slowly awakens people to the intricacies, histories and projections of the social/political disorders facing us. But they constantly remain short on solutions and the solution is very simple: FORCE PUBLIC DEBATE. No more having one-sided pundit propaganda preaching without immediate challenge only to have the other side preach the opposite leaving those looking for answers spinning in circles. Imagine if a court room were conducted the way the media is; no cross examinations, no challenges to bullshit, no objections.

The recent Senate hearing on the impeachment of President Donald Trump is just one example. As it played out recently (Jan. 31, 2020), the republican dominated senate refused to allow democratic senators to call witnesses or present documents. So this information, whatever it may have been, whomever it may have helped or hurt, was not allowed to be heard by the American public. And this, my friends, is exactly how the media, corporations and congress works each and every day. The people are kept at a safe distance from information that may hurt anyone in the oligarchy that could expose the financial infrastructure. When the public picks a team, democratic or republican, they tend to root too hard for their team and too hard against the other team. They forget we are all team-America-first. Conservative working people should have looked past their team colors and demanded that all the information was heard. The democrats should also always want to hear all the story where Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, with no knowledge of the energy sector and no special knowledge of Ukraine just happened to land a lucrative position with Burisma Holdings, an energy company in Ukraine. If Joe Biden says there was nothing untoward in the arrangement, then he’s a “Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldier.” The Senate hearing should have been an open courtroom hearing with prosecutors and defenders with any and all witnesses and documents made available. We the American people are the jury, but justice was withheld by the highest “legislative body in the land.” What a travesty.

This duopoly, the playing of one side against the other, is exactly how the oligarchy is able to rule. In the 2016 presidential election, the oligarchy, during the primaries, successfully removed all candidates from both parties not deemed to be perfectly malleable to their global ambitions, I can’t think of any republican candidates that were preferable to Trump, (being as how Ron Paul did not run in 2016 ,and that was before experiencing three years of Trump as president–I am chastened.), so will move on to the despicable manipulations by the media and the democratic leadership in undermining Bernie Sanders just as the democrats did to Dennis Kucinich’s campaign in 2008. The carefully guarded voting system insures the lesser or two evils duopoly format forces red and blue-blooded Americans to pick their team captain and hope for the best. The rest is history–for now.

As of this writing the debacle of the Iowa caucus is behind us. The democratic caucus relied on new technology known interestingly as the Shadow app that screwed up the counting of the popular vote and delegates. Buttigieg was quick to come on the mendacious mainstream media to claim victory despite zero percent of the ballots being counted. As it fleshed out, Senator Sanders was and remained ahead of the popular vote. Now New Hampshire primaries are history and Senator Sanders won the popular vote by a slim margin. He and Buttigieg tied on delegates in that state but somehow Buttigieg has two more going forward.

One thing to note before leaving Buttigieg, he hired former Goldman Sachs vice president and Google executive Sonal Shah to be his campaign’s national policy director. Much like the medieval times when the “universal” Catholic Church had a clergyman in virtually every city-state kingdom throughout Europe, Goldman Sachs aka “Government” Sachs, makes sure they are represented in every Whitehouse in remembrance. Sanders has also claimed many times recently that Buttigieg has over 40 billionaires contributing to his campaign. It should be clear why the mendacious media is pulling for Buttigieg. They were all in for Joe Biden but it’s clear to all that Ole’ “Sleepy Joe,” as Trump calls him, is not impressing folks no matter how many times he invokes Barak Obama’s name. The Goldman Sachs/bankster-controlled media hates Bernie because Bernie is campaigning against oligarchy and for working people. Biden is not their last card; along with Buttigieg they also have another plutocrat to root for and take money from: multi-Billionaire, and former republican Michael Bloomberg. If he also fails then they will once again play their Trump card.

Please go to 028 Dare to Debate Part II where we take a look at where and how real debates are a necessary part of the rule of law, and we list the most crucial issues that absolutely need to be revisited and vigorously debated. Finally we will offer concrete actionable measures that, if acted upon by enough people, will force the mendacious media to allow real debates to finally happen–and when they do, the oligarchy will collapse and out of the ashes will rise a government Of, By and For, We The People.