Walter Lippmann on the 6¢ stamp, part of the US Postal Service’s Great American Series.
Those who have been following the world wide push to get people to accept massive cuts to just about every service available must be amazed at the depth of the cuts and the way the matters are being handled. As part of the propaganda so necessary to keep a capitalist system afloat it requires the manufacture or creation of consent on the part of the people to allow their money to go to such frivolous matters as are decided to be in the national interest and not to be used for real challenges needed to be addressed.
It is this concept of the ‘national interest’ that distinguished the capitalist system as a rampant and incorrigible authoritarian exercise in what has come to be known as ‘human relations’. The pioneer of this movement and concept was an American Bernays, who later along with Lipmann and Lasswell became the founding fathers of the means to control the minds of the people so that by their consent they accepted the concentration of wealth to a tiny number of the elite and the dissipation of funds from the general fund that allows this to take place. It was this consent that allowed the very very few to gain control of the assets of the many and to control all aspects of life.
Perhaps in Freudian slip fashion Obama recently made some quite pointed references to allowing people in other parts of the world to have government by consent, as if that was the shrine needed to be worshipped at to gain freedom and justice as well as equality. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth. With relentless precision the elites have taken jsut about anything not nailed down and created a massive consumer state/s in order to keep an entirely avaricious and greed driven system to survive. Endless wars are fought to allow the constant circulation and creation of money and power. Far from the general fund being used to promote the well being of the people that own it and to allow them to exercise the right to have what Chomsky has called “thinkable thought” it is used only to preserve the concetration of control bt yhe few over the many.
Against all this background when the capitalist system faces moments of crisis the immediate push is to get ‘bailed out’ by the general fund, the people’s own money. As this is done all that occurrs is a reshuffling of the deck some of the elite simply get shed and the rest continue on totally enriched by the whole experience. The recent rioting in the UK is a prime example of creating a group of people with no hope for the future despite the fairy tales that abound about the self made men (note it always seems to be men) who after struggling make it to the top. But that type of logic is best kept for casinos and racetracks and lotteries where in fact you do get winners who only do so because theu purchased a ticket, had a bet or rolled the dice. That number is so small that it is negligible compared to the number of people who have to work everyday to survive and allow the massive consumer machine to eat its way through the entire social fabric.
The Germans between the wars saw the effect of just how you can keep printing notes so that you need to wheel a pram full of them to a store to even hope to buy bread. Add to this the effect of the immorality of dealing in shares and getting rewards only because you paid a required admission fee to the circus and you have a recipe for disaster. But it is a disaster for capitalism. What the propaganda and the devotion to the elite that is called the national interest has done is to create the complete delusion as Rocker put that salvation only comes from above and that we actually need to be enslaved to survive.
The bad news unfortunately will continue until the people themselves demand that their assets and wealth is used on them and not for and on behalf of the elite.
George Ikners ikners.com
Related articles
- The capital project and the beginning of the public relations monster and Manufacturing Consent (ikners.com)
- Britain’s Riots: Thuggery, Looting, Lawlessness… By the Ruling Class – by Finian Cunningham [MUST READ] (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
- Capitalism Does Not Need a “Makeover” (rogueoperator.wordpress.com)
- How does the Capitalist economic system solve fundamental economic problems (wiki.answers.com)
- When it comes to finding money to balance their debts the capital project always goes back to the people (ikners.com)
- “”The future will be a total disaster, with a collapse of our capitalistic system as we know it…” (underpaidgenius.com)
- Thuggery, Looting, Lawlessness… By the Ruling Class by Finian Cunningham (dandelionsalad.wordpress.com)
- An Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, interview with Noam Chomsky (ikners.com)
- Unemployment is Killing People (dissenter.firedoglake.com)
- A Sydney University release on June about the Peace Prize and the recipient Professor Noam Chomsky (ikners.com)
- The “Benefits” of Deregulated Capitalism (robertlindsay.wordpress.com)
- Chomsky article from February this year. On Islam and the US (ikners.com)
- Mind Control Theories and Techniques used by Mass Media (revolutionizingawareness.com)
- Mass unrest on violence on the streets (sleender.wordpress.com)
- “Manufacturing” or “engineering” of consents – A follow up on my previous post (anduraru.wordpress.com)
- Unregulated Capitalism and the destruction of the Middle Class… and what we can do about it. (underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com)
- Employment Sponsored Immigration (afranklinlawoffice.wordpress.com)
- Profits in a Capitalist Economy (jimdew.wordpress.com)
- Why Capitalism Is Worth Defending (lewrockwell.com)
- Capitalism Can Become Tyranny….If Enabled By Government! (stevekuriigamba.wordpress.com)
- Harvey on the Flow of Capitalism (bretxu.wordpress.com)
- Marxism As a Tool for the Analysis of Capitalism (robertlindsay.wordpress.com)
- New Technology Challenges a Profit-Based Economy the World Over (prweb.com)
- The Poverty of Nations (rogueoperator.wordpress.com)
