Listen to a reading of this article:
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You’d think the revelation that the CIA planned to assassinate an award-winning journalist for journalistic activity would have been a bigger deal.
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Capitalism hinders progress because it ensures that all mass-scale human behavior will be driven by the pursuit of profit. For example, a huge global issue we have right now is cleaning up the pollution in our oceans. That is an easily solved issue if you take out the profit motive; you don’t wait for market forces to find some way to make it profitable, you just get in there and clean it up. But with the profit motive it’s almost impossible to conceive of it ever being solved.
How often have you been excited by a great idea only to feel that familiar disappointment wash over you as you realize that it will never happen because it won’t make anyone any money? That’s how the profit motive stunts innovation.
The profit motive will never find a way to leave a forest alone or minerals in the ground. There’s no business plan that makes money out of moms being paid to bring up healthy, happy, secure children. You can’t find a way to make money out of people driving less or buying less. There is no money in curing an illness, only treating it. There is no money in solving poverty, only in setting up a multi-million dollar “charity” that never actually intends to solve poverty because it’s a business and a business requires endless expansion.
People who proffer the market as a solution to our massive problems have either never really thought about the restrictions of the profit motive, or they are heavily invested in pretending those restrictions don’t exist. I don’t respect either of those positions.
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The corporations are the government. If you didn’t believe it before, believe it now that human rights lawyer Steven Donziger has effectively been sentenced to six months in prison by Chevron itself.
Human rights lawyer @SDonziger was sentenced to six months in prison today for contempt of court. For the first time in US history in such a case, he was prosecuted not by the US Justice Dept, but by a private attorney who worked for Chevron. #FreeDonziger https://t.co/mm8P3jS8ZJ pic.twitter.com/P5TmiChBRh
— Greg Palast (@Greg_Palast) October 1, 2021
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Never attribute to an elite cabal of Satanic pedovores what can be adequately explained by capitalism.
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Jeff Bezos steals $2537 per second.
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Remember when we learned that a very wealthy person can for a relatively small fee hire an army of former Mossad agents to terrorize, intimidate and subvert any private citizen?
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It’s pretty fucked up how our criminal justice systems are like a century behind our understanding of developmental psychology, trauma and addiction.
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Imagine if young people deployed to remove plastic from the ocean instead of to kill foreigners for Lockheed Martin.
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The US and its allies have every obligation to absorb the immigrants fleeing the conditions created by the imperialist warmongering and economic exploitation inflicted upon them by that power alliance. If you want people to stay in their own countries then stop destroying those countries.
It’s funny how defenders of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations often bleated “You break it, you bought it,” but they always meant “We broke their country therefore we need to continue the occupation” and not “We broke their country therefore we need to take in all the people fleeing the conditions we created.”
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Wow Australia’s such a mess, I don’t understand how a continent-sized military base with no bill of rights that was built on prison labor and genocide and apartheid could be experiencing human rights issues.
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Picture the most intrusive, Orwellian government you can possibly imagine: watching your every move, controlling everything you do. That’s the kind of power we should have over any system of government. Total transparency and accountability to the people, total control by the people.
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I just cannot understand why all these damn anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists don’t trust a government that actively works against the public interest 100 percent of the time.
I mean if you can’t trust institutions that are deliberately constructed to subvert the common good for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful at every turn, who can you trust?
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Leaving aside the horrifying normalization of worldwide online speech being controlled by Silicon Valley plutocrats, does anyone actually believe that censoring vaccine skepticism will lead to increased trust in the vaccines? Does that really sound like something that would work?
“Obviously the best way to convince conspiracy theorists to trust their institutions is to have an elite cabal of billionaire megacorporations in Silicon Valley coordinate the blanket censorship of their online speech.”
Yeah great idea, dipshit.
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If there are future humans on the other side of the existential hurdles our species is approaching there is a zero percent chance that they still destroy the environment to manufacture useless junk because they all need jobs to keep numbers in their bank accounts so they don’t starve.
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When you actually love someone you are intensely curious about them and fascinated by them. You want to know everything about their inner world and what makes them tick, and you delight in what’s revealed to you with profound appreciation. If this isn’t happening, it isn’t love.
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A lady in a spirituality group I used to frequent announced she was filtering the fluoride out of her water and made a really big deal about it. Every day she’d gush about her amazing third eye visions and how great she was feeling and how she pities all our poor calcified pineal glands. Then one day someone showed her that the filter she was using doesn’t actually filter out fluoride.
I think about this often.
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So much of what we call spirituality is just the mind searching for things that are already the case. Peace. Freedom. Presence. Boundlessness. Unconditional love. These things are already here, are already you. Just obscured by the mind’s flailing around trying to create them.
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13 responses to “The Corporations Are The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
❖ Never attribute to an elite cabal of Satanic pedovores what can be adequately explained by capitalism.
Perfect
It all went pear shaped when corporations were given the same rights as individuals.
Corporations only exist on paper, but they wield weapons like terrorists.
and who did all of it ? lawyers and phony judges who are usually failed lawyers !
Caitlins perspectives are usually spot on as a voice all along the Watchtower.
My favourite here is the one about manufacturing useless junk. I don’t often see it spelled out clearly that most jobs are simply part of a wildly dysfunctional way of distributing the wealth created by machines and nature. And that we are persuaded to go along with it by the tiny minority who make a fortune by skimming.
Caitlin,
Bang on again!
Capitalism these last few decades even fails on its own terms. Ask any entrepreneur with a genuinely cutting edge awesome idea — ‘the market’ doesn’t want that. The history of innovation is littered with people who invented something utterly amazing a decade or two before a pitchman could devise a way to get people (who probably didn’t need it) to part with their money. Like Don Draper says, “People want the same, just with a new spin.”
In my local chamber of commerce I meet lots of hard working and truly innovative and problem-solving people who take great pride in their legitimately good craftsmanship or service. Indeed, I am convinced it’s a rare small business person who doesn’t truly care about their product. Meanwhile, many of them are demoralized because in the end it all comes down to sales, and most of these good people (rightly) feel that most of sales amounts to stuff like hyping identity narratives to people and has nothing to do with the awesomeness of the actual thing someone is lovingly crafting.
The successful ones run data crunching and focus groups on the front end to find out ‘what the market wants.’ Recently a huge success story is a couple who is now running flavored popcorn stands in North Carolina. Sugary flavored popcorn. This is what the brightest people with innovative minds and grit and tolerance for personal risk end up being pushed to make because it’s ‘what the market wants.’ I don’t know how to describe how sad this kind of thing is.
As I said, capitalism fails on its own terms because it outputs more sugary flavored popcorn, not the things people actually want. You are right that it can’t make clean oceans or pristine forests. I am saying it cannot even make the innovative awesome stuff it promises at anything other than a snail’s pace, because it is subject to lowest-common-denominator market forces.
It’s like how after all the sound and fury the system outputs AOC and Bernie instead of, you know, *functional liberals who actually do anything.*
Jonathan
thanks. comments help people. the venting. the hello. the hear ye hear ye…
it’s human. not perfect.
that’s where you come in. feel the endorphins: yur good.
funny thing tho ’bout perfect: no one is. so that.
but there are such things as a perfect flower.
or a perfect bullet.
91121
False corporate patriotism wrapped in capitalism
Flags with their invention
Television politicians lied and were lied to
No airplane at Arlington Gen. Lee
No shit Rummy
Body counts identify terrorists
In the land west of Eisenhower
Just like a movie those towers came down
Just like a movie
The bombs killed people
Commodified and sewn into a flag
Televised and burnt to a scar
A war on humanity
Ten years from Japan
Many more from Dallas and LA
A disgusting revenge of innocents
Children of Baghdad
Children of Kabul
Israelites rejoice the drones
Americans are dumbfounded
Bedouin hoardes gently smile and look away
Peter Stoup
September 11, 2021
Imagine, what we’d be learning about immunity, pro-inflammatory cytokine & all auto-immune disease; while diligent epidemiologists, astute clinicians, whistleblowers, prescient journalists ALL informed essential workers how to protect themselves, with timely union, OSHA, CDC and…
Oh, that’s right; our retired yuppies & Creative Class™ can elect kleptocrats to FEED mostly Black & LatinX worker’s loved ones’ serendipitously vacant homes, W4 jobs & equity to PhARMA, FIRE Sector oligarchs (as NASDAQ portfolios go up 80% in 6 months, monitizing more excess fatalities than the US Civil War?)
Nevermind!
The day is dawning when the words “corporate” and “capitalist” will replace the words “fascist” and “nazi” as the most vile epithets, and we will use names like Gates and Bezos as examples of ultimate human depravity the way we currently use the name Hitler.
Then soon there will be an internet rule that calling someone a Bezos automatically means the other person wins the argument.
Thank you! This commentary is spot on.
This has been obvious since the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens’ United case but has been true, … well, … hmmm, since before the Revolutionary War.
Thank YOU! By the time Franklin & Washington “liked” Ecuyer’s smallpox blankets & extirpation by settlers’ attack dogs; largely in fear of slave uprisings during Pontiac’s War. ALL of this was pretty familiar to indentured serfs, sacrificed to infect Shawnee, Wyandotte and 96 Christian Lenape, casually butchered with mallets by our well regulated militia (Bacon’s Rebellion, rent strikers, Shay’s and Whiskey Rebellion ALL taught piss-poor ofay Christians Ponzi politics?
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” some Dixiecrat who tried to kill me