Listen to a reading of this article:

Don’t side with the powerful against the less powerful. Just don’t. Don’t side with police against protesters. Don’t side with the US against the targets of western imperialism. Don’t side with Israel against Palestinians. Siding with the powerful means you’ve taken a wrong turn.

It sure is a strange coincidence how all the US government’s grave concerns about Julian Assange endangering national security all manifested in ways that just so happen to look exactly the same as the world’s most powerful government persecuting a journalist for telling the truth.

May all the journalists who helped manufacture consent for Assange’s persecution one day look in the mirror and see someone who helped the most powerful government in the world torture an autistic person for doing their job better than them.

Watching TV when you’re not used to it is like a nonstop machine gun punch-in-the-face reminder of how completely unsustainable capitalism is.

Q: What is capitalism?

A: Capitalism is a system of transferring blame for society’s problems from the people who cause those problems onto the people who are hurt by them.

Q: What is democracy?

A: Democracy is getting to choose between a political party who doesn’t think the abuses of capitalism are excessive enough and a political party who thinks the level of abusiveness is just about right.

There is no “good” version of capitalism. Any system in which human behavior is driven by profit will necessarily see a steadily mounting rise in exploitation, inequality, ecocide and militarism, because all of those things are profitable. We need to end the profit motive itself.

Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that wealthy and powerful people would manipulate global affairs in all sorts of immoral ways over a paltry trillions of dollars.

Indie media figures who spend a lot of time sniping at and talking shit about other indie media figures do so solely because their interest in social climbing and sectarian tribalism grew to exceed their interest in the values which brought them to indie media in the first place.

Nobody really talks about the way you get pulled into different factions once you start gaining a following in indie media, but it’s very much a thing. You get added to group chats, people cozy up to you and amplify you and ask to be amplified, then before you know it you find yourself involved in agendas and sectarian spats that have nothing to do with your values. Takes a lot not to get drawn in.

Remember when CNN staged a scripted interview with a seven year-old Syrian girl to have her explain that Assad was responsible for a recent sarin gas attack and drum up support for US military interventionism?

I think about this a lot. She’s plainly either reading or reciting from a script, which means CNN’s Alisyn Camerota necessarily had the other half of that script. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

“Why don’t you talk more about Covid and vaccines, Caitlin?”

Yeah why don’t I spend my life trying to explain a nuanced and evolving perspective about a hot-button issue to hysterical people on the internet who are all determined to misinterpret the words I’m saying, sounds fun.

People say Marx was smart but I’ve read his stuff and he barely spends any time at all yelling about Jimmy Dore.

AOC’s habit of word-salading on difficult issues is what you get when you have news media driven by access journalism who politicians know will never try to pin them down on their answers and say “Yeah nothing you just said makes sense. Please explain what you meant by that?”

Politicians of a certain level understand that as far as the media are concerned it doesn’t matter so much how you answer as that you answer. If it’s a difficult question you just keep your mouth moving without actually saying anything until the question goes away.

This is why it always feels like you’re being lied to when you watch presidential debates. Candidates understand how to keep their mouths moving and word salad about freedom and American democracy and whatever without actually giving a concrete answer to a difficult question.

They do it because they know it works. And they know it works because they know the plutocrat-controlled media are driven by empire apologia first, ratings second, advertisers third, and holding the powerful to account somewhere near the bottom of the list.

Democratize the media, free the internet, end government secrecy, end corporate and financial secrecy, end patents, establish centers for psychedelic use and consciousness expansion, eliminate most laws and thereby most police and prisoners, govern in rotating shifts like jury duty, eliminate mass-scale manipulation including advertising, build systems for collaboration with each other and our ecosystem, end all war and militarism, get mothers all the material support they need to raise mentally and physically healthy children, end wealth inequality, give everyone enough, make shelter, water, food and air inalienable human rights.

_______________________

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22 responses to “There Is No ‘Good’ Form Of Capitalism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”

  1. Here’s a nuanced and evolving perspective about Covid and vaccines, that hardly anyone on the internet can misinterpret: https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/beyond-industrial-medicine

  2. Robert Heuermann Avatar
    Robert Heuermann

    I hesitate to leave a comment. Though I am literate and speak well, my written communications often fall flat. However, I would ask you to reconsider your condemnation of capitalism. I believe you consider capitalism a political system. It is not. It is an economic system, reduced to the voluntary unfettered exchange of goods and/or services between two parties. Politics has nothing to do with this exchange. Indeed, once an exploitative political system appears, capitalism is perverted. And indeed most of your recent condemnation (rent, exploitation, and impoverishment) are products of State-imposed, State-regulated and encouraged exploitation. For me it is almost impossible to imagine economic activity without the plundering by the Sate. But if you can think that the mere legal existence of corporations as they are now, is designed and supported by the State, then the source of all wrongs becomes obvious. I do not believe this is at all obvious. The presence of the State is ubiquitous and taken for granted. But it is NOT capitalism per se that requires State support. It is the State that requires the support of capitalism to survive. I think if you can tease the effects of State involvement out from the workings of the economy you will see this.

  3. Tunnel vision:
    A tendency, habit, or conscious decision to only focus one’s energy or attention on a single particular thing or aspect, without regard for anything or anyone else.

    Backpedal:
    To quickly and often abruptly reverse or retreat from one’s position or opinion on a given subject.

    Why is it that politicians and the all seeing, all knowing MSM are stuck on the first and only do the second for the sake of expedience?

  4. Caitlin,

    You are, of course, correct.

    I don’t know what your sabbatical included, but your writing has absolutely been bang on since you got back. A lot of what you say nowadays clearly takes courage.

    Keep rocking it.

    Your last paragraph is obviously what is needed, and I am watching curiously to see when and how it will come to pass. The sure thing is this: Soon humans either make a sharp turn for the better or self-destruct.

    There’s a scene in Mario Puzo’s classic book, the Godfather, where a doctor is talking to a guy laying on a bed drinking himself to death. He says that he tells people all the time, “Stop drinking or it will kill you in a few years,” “Stop smoking or it will kill you in a few years,” “Exercise and eat better or it will kill you in a few years.” He would tell them as animated and intently as he could. But you know what? Nobody every did anything differently when he said that. The only people who change are the ones where the doctor can say, “You’re going to die tomorrow if you don’t stop drinking immediately.”

    Well, we’re coming up on the point where the prognosis is, “We are going to die tomorrow if we don’t change immediately.”

    The good news is, when people actually take *imminent* death as their advisor, they wake up and make far wiser decisions.

    As I said, very good work lately. You have a new sharpness. Keep using it.

  5. If you do not want More Of The Same, do not vote for another R or D, ever, no matter what an R or D promises!
     

  6. Ah, rewriting definitions and demonizing the wrong things, that is what this era is all about.
    I don’t buy into your definition of capitalism. I don’t buy into profit making being the root of all evil – however, the globalists will thank you – it is feeding into their narrative for the Great Reset.

    The changing of definitions are in vogue now. The WHO changed the definition of pandemic to make this Covid farce stick. They changed herd immunity too. And the CDC has been changing definitions too – like vaccines.

    So if we asked the American citizens or Australians to define “capitalism”, do you think they would produce your definition? I doubt it.

    Capitalism to me was my dad with a skill (plumbing) and a truck and wrench (capital goods) supporting his family and saving for his future retirement by making a profit. He was an honest man who did an honest days work.

    If you don’t have your own business and you work for someone else and make more than you need to pay your rent/mortgage, buy your food, pay your water bill and buy your clothes – you are making an evil profit. Do you feel evil?

    It isn’t capitalism, socialism, communism that is the problem. It is corruption and it exists in any form of “ism” if you let it. It stays in check when you have the proper internal controls (checks and balances). We had checks and balances in the US and one by one we let them remove them. Who voted for and signed the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act? Corrupt officials.

    When we start valuing honest and integrity as the most important qualities to have, then evil and corruption will slowly dissipate as it can’t thrive in that environment.

    1. Glad to see at least one person here that knows what they are talking about. The super elites/Totalitarian class can exist in any form of government whether “capitalist democratic”, “Communist” and anything else between. See their real intentions through their real actions not words or party “labels”.

  7. Houston is getting a psychedelic therapy clinic, one of nine in North America, & a friend of ours is starting work there soon! I hope (a) it’s as much of a groundbreaker as it appears and (b) all the appointment times don’t get sucked up by bored millionaire housewives.

    https://www.fieldtriphealth.com/locations/houston

  8. What a funny old world we live in.

    The insatiable French Capitalists are pissed off at the insatiable Australian, British and US Capitalists for cancelling the Australian TAXPAYER FUNDED 90 BILLION DOLLAR submarine contract.
    “We have one million French citizens in the South Pacific” spewed Macron

    Gee, I wonder how that happened.

    I’ve changed my mind.

    It’s not a funny old world.
    It’s an utterly FUCKED world.

  9. The core of the problem is that the natural bend of power is power abuse and the natural bend of profit-making is robbing people blind. When you throw fear porn based propaganda into the mix, you even get the victims to go along with it. Well funded think tanks work 24/7 to make sure this unfolds seamlessly and most people are too busy to look beyond what the Ministry of Truth tells them and feel entitled to enforce The $cience in a permanent Milgram experiment.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
    The current Covid vaccine power and money grab is a textbook case with an all time masterpiece that even Franz Kafka or George Carlin, in two different genres, would never have thought of: you’ve got to vaccinate in extenso to protect the… vaccinated when everyone until 2020 (starting with Edward Jenner) thought this was precisely what the vaccine was for. Can’t make that stuff up! And yet the whole shebang works a treat thanks to concerted corporate bamboozle and public infighting – for “we the people” is an illusion sitting on both sides of an aisle in a permanent rehearsal for civil war.

    1. Herman Cain used to say stuff like that. Then he died of covid and we all had a good laugh.

  10. “Indie media figures who spend a lot of time sniping at and talking shit about other indie media figures do so solely because their interest in social climbing and sectarian tribalism grew to exceed their interest in the values which brought them to indie media in the first place.”

    I watched Markos Moulitsis become drawn into the “mainstream” as he was increasingly incited to pundit panels to express his “indie” views. I stuck with it for as long as I could stand it, but DailyKos has become very much a mainstream conservadem stronghold within which which I no longer can stand to participate. “Crashing the gates?” You bet! Crashing them to get away from normalizing the very policies it was created to oppose and overcome.

  11. I do not agree with you definition of “capitalism’. You’ve chosen the politically-driven, Marxist-tainted definition designed to LEAD TO CONCLUSION that is fabrication and not reality.

    Try this: CAPITALISM is: An economic system based upon HUMAN ownership of capital making the economic decisions for that property, “capital”. Ownership is INDIVIDUALISTIC. You control what you own legally.
    Defining capitalism this way lays responsibility and property ownership directly with the individual who owns it, not others laying claim to something they have not worked for nor invested any consideration into. That is tyranny of the masses, such as any icky flavor of COLLECTIVISM. You define capitalism as any collectivist-minded, which is reprobate thinking in my way of reckoning of things.

  12. Let me expand here. Very narrow minded to focus on one system. All systems can fit in this category of “no good form” if the government whether capitalist, communist, socialist, is CORRUPT. History has proven that. Also historically proves that ALL governments given enough time will become Kleptocratic and oppressive. That’s the nature of the Governing Beast in man – ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY.
    I have allegiance only to the people. The rest of you keep on believing the lie that any government can be good & just. No such a thing.

  13. Re the us uk aus “tripartite alliance” it would be wise for Australians to realize that the us and uk are fixing to use Australia in The Coming War With China (John Pilger film) the same way Hitler used Poland.

  14. “There is no ‘good’ version of capitalism. Any system in which human behavior is driven by profit will necessarily see a steadily mounting rise in exploitation, inequality, ecocide and militarism, because all of those things are profitable. We need to end the profit motive itself.” YES, CERTAINLY, but there are better forms of capitalism which could serve as transitions into eco-socialism, that never-yet-seen form of government into which we either evolve or die. Since we won’t be snapping our fingers and going directly from neoliberal capitalism to eco-socialism, even with a mass consciousness-raising, we should respond positively to some of the recent Davos rhetoric, which suggests that the purpose of a corporation should be redefined to include human and environmental flourishing, not solely profit-seeking. That’s precisely the kind of transitional stage we must pass through, whether we like it or not. Many on the more radical left mocked this Davos rhetoric in knee-jerk fashion, which was a HUGE mistake, rather than taking this rhetoric and running with it. But God forbid!–that would entail collaborating with “the enemy,” and we’re too pure, too virtuous, too prophetic, too woke, for that. This same self-defeating purity dynamic is behind the ludicrous and counterproductive catfighting all over today’s leftist indie media, to which Caitlin alludes while still seeming to give Jimmy Dore a pass on his major contribution to kicking off this melee.

  15. I, once again, agree wholeheartedly with everything you said. Capitalism is the true evil in the world. And the masses have been brainwashed to believe that it is the best thing for them, when in reality it spells their doom. As I can do nothing to unbrainwash them I simply observe as the world races towards it’s own demise. Thank you, again, for bringing some light into a very dark place.

    1. “Capitalism is the true evil in the world.”

      Ah, yes, I see…And what would be your better alternative? Please Mr Owens, (and Caitlin for that matter) do enlighten us. And when considering your response, bear in mind how the Communist system killed, by conservative estimates over 80 million. So don’t go there.

      Perhaps benevolent dictatorship? Likely not. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

      Fascism? I’m talking actual fascism here, aka Italy circa 1930s and 40s, not what currently passes for fascism in America and much of the West. That didn’t work out so well.

      There are other systems too, and they all have their flaws, as does Capitalism.

      But consider: Capitalism has done more for humanity than most any form of government tried so far. Try advanced medicine, modern conveniences we all take for granted, food production for billions of people….the list goes on and on. Do you suppose that this forum that we are
      sparing on would exist under any other system? Not likely.

      So Caitlin, and others who wish to slag Capitalism, get a cup of coffe or tea, sit down, smile! and marvel in the fact that Capitalism made everything you take for granted in your lives possible.

      1. Capitalism is a monetary system, not a political system. When corruption seeps into any system it becomes evil. All forms of government use capitalism as a means of exchange. It’s corruption that destroys systems.

        1. Technically it is an “economic” system not a monetary system and in theory not all forms of govt use it as it relies on “private” ownership of goods.
          What we see now in America is not real capitalism – its been corrupted. Call it corporatism, crony-capitalism, etc, but it is now all manipulated by a few.
          Why the push towards demonizing “capitalism”? Because in the “Welcome to 2030 world, where I own NOTHING and have no PRIVACY and life has never been better” – you can’t have capitalism.
          If we were all honest with ourselves and were asked “who destroyed this nation and its people” – we would answer it was that face staring back at me in the bathroom mirror, that’s who. Too many decades of “free” stuff, airline miles points, “I have nothing to hide”, etc.

          1. It is not my intent to “demonize” capitalism. I demonize the corruption of “any” system. All systems allow for some form of private ownership of goods. And I agree that it has been corrupted. It is corruption that is the problem. And anything can be corrupted.

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