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A Century of Conscious and Intelligent Manipulation

The year 2012 will be interesting. The usual coalition of money, politics and propaganda will fight for their privileges to: not follow any rules, to not bear any responsibility and never ever admit mistakes.

We could empty our overcrowded prisons in a day if we used the same justice for all.

Corruption in a small society takes on a contracted form of mutual insurance.

It was said that all the players in the meltdown could fit into a restaurant, the difficulty is that so can the jurors of their peers

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Propaganda (1928)
Taking the Risk out of Democracy
A Century of Spin
Selling Free Enterprise
–
PR! – A Social History of Spin
There Are No Conspiracies
Justice under seege
The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One

Debt: The First 5,000 Years


“Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter system–to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.”

“Interest rates spiked and the indebted became slaves. And the system perpetuated itself with tremendously violent consequences, with only the rare intervention of kings and churches keeping the system from spiraling out of control.”

Chomsky describes this out of control spiral here and concludes, – ”By shredding the remnants of political democracy, the financial institutions lay the basis for carrying the lethal process forward — as long as their victims are willing to suffer in silence.”

As we saw from “The Lost Science of Money” most economists steadfastly refuse to learn anything from history, – which is all the more peculiar for a “discipline” claiming to be “scientific” and on the outlook for the optimal truth and not a cult worship.

David Graeber.
Debt The First 5,000 Years
Mad Max
–
9,3% between deposit and lending rates (IMF)
kiva
P2P lending

The Option of Public Utility

“Competition is a sin.”  ~ John D. Rockefeller

naked capitalism
–
Growth Dies
The Oil Drum
Coup d’etat.
–
Klein’s errata

Treasure Islands

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens

“And now we have “too big to fail” banks and this offshore system, the ability of banks in the United States to go elsewhere to do things that allow them to grow faster and take more risks, away from the democratic curbs. It’s one of the reasons why they’ve grown so powerful and why we have got such a difficult situation today with Wall Street having such power over the politicians in this country and my country and others.”

Treasure Islands
Amazon
Nicholas Shaxson on Democracy Now
_
War By Other Means
Plutocracy, Get Used To It
(or hangthebankers)
_
Stiglitz on the upper 1% …
E. Warren “We are in trouble”
“Mad” Max & Janet Tavakoli
-“- & our enslaved Gaelic mothers
Iceland’s St. Pete connection
_
And the media coverage

The Triumph of Newspeak

  1. We should all be able to internalize Patriotic doctrine to the extent that it becomes a gut instinct – a feeling in the belly.
  2. Any WikiCrimes from Oceania are ungood while WikiCrimes from Eurasia and Eastasia are plusgood.
  3. A true Patriot could automatically, and without thought, expunge any “incorrect” information and totally replace it with “true” information from the Minitrue.
  4. Goodthink, is approved by the Miniluv, and is the opposite of crimethink.
  5. Goodsex is any form of sex considered acceptable by the Inner Party, all other forms of sex are sexcrimes.
  6. Anyone who enjoys virtual solitary in front of his Telescreen is subversive and thus suspicious.
  7. An unperson is a person who has been “vaporized”; who has been not only killed by the state, but effectively erased from existence. Such a person would be written out of existing books, photographs, and articles so that no trace of their existence could be found in the historical record.

Newspeak
AnonOps (svt)
Frost over the World
Murky backgrounds & affiliations
Cass Sunstein [Cognitive infiltration]
More than meets the eye
Disinformation
From INGSOC and NEWSPEAK to AMCAP, AMERIGOOD & MARKETSPEAK
“common heritage of mankind.”

Ministry of Truth

Life in a totalitarian political system, was much alike in 1984 as it is in 2010, the ruling party (with many names) achieved psychological mastery over its subjects by willfully altering the past. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”

The infamous Central-bank governor was as always first on the mark, when he got is Editor to translate the SIC report, and subsequently made himself the Editor in chief to ensure proper workmanship.

Having been advised to go through a thorough public relations image radiosterilization, the other players in the meltdown are now preoccupied with publishing their accounts of events. Ministers, who should have been impeached, escaped because of our stealth quality nepotism and where exonerated by their pairs.

Memorable was a blistering speech by the head jailer of the country, who feared for the “rule of law”, if her party mates should have to risk her hospitality.

It is thus understandable that all hell broke loose when a worker at one of the memory holes (squarely faithful to the party) got fired from the news manufacturing room.

No wonder that they all want to own influential media, as we are all to believe that their inherent qualities of: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride have over night turned into: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.

The Propaganda model explains factors such as Agenda Setting which predetermines, selects, shapes, controls and restricts by the selection of topics, distribution of concerns, emphasis, framing of issues, filtering of information, and bounding of the debate.

The systemic filters, concentrate on private ownership, strict bottom-line profit orientation, over-reliance on governmental and corporate sources for news, primary tendency to avoid offending the powerful and a religious worship of the market economy, strongly opposing alternative beliefs.

Against the ruling masters of our cognitive systems, manipulating the actual experience of remembering we have: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, mis-attribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. – May God help us all

Nineteen eighty-four
Propaganda model
Black, Galbraith, & Stiglitz ?
The news about the news [1], [2].
Some good stuff from the Grapevine
The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers?

Taming the Monster

Five Ways to Tame the Financial Market Monster:

  1. Control the Banks! (Glass-Steagall)
  2. More Equity Capital! (Bad loans – high yields, Extraordinary leverage, No meaningful loss reserves)
  3. Quality Controls for Financial Products! (Bubbles)
  4. Monitor the Hedge Funds! (Derivatives Time Bomb)
  5. Control the Ratings Agencies! (Paid Escorts)

Five Ways to Tame the Financial Market Monster
Emry – Billions for Bankers – Debts for the People (1982)
Martenson – The Crash Course
Money as Debt
Renaissance 2.0

The Comedians

For almost two years now, we have been blessed by a “problem” which has shielded us from looking at our own selfs. The haunting shadow of our own failure of our own weakness has been but forgotten.

Somehow, I’ve been reminded of Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians. There are similarities to our own fate. The country was governed for a very long time by “Papa Doc” and his “Tontons” have been woven into the fabric. There is a sustained denial of any wrong doing. Nothing which was done in the years up-to the crash may be personalized or even given a name. Or as Stieg Larsson put it, “fraud that was so extensive it was no longer merely criminal—it was business.”

We the Demos handed over our responsibility to Representatives,just as in the days when the horse was the fastest form of communication. Now we look at our representatives in horror and only 13% or less have any faith in their abilities or intentions. Professionally educated people have been prominent in this saga. Few questions have been asked about the state of their education. Science or Junk are we shielding educators that have forgotten the search for knowledge, and  replaced it with the manufactured truth?

In crawling our selfs out of this quicksand there will be no grand victories, only small ones, if we are lucky.

Will The Truth Report alleviate any of my trepidations??
Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why…
… a tide in the affairs of men
Infinite representative wisdom

Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time

“I used to think of Wall Street as a
financial center.
I now think of it as a crime scene.”

– Filmmaker Danny Schechter, Plunder (2009)

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men,
they create for themselves in the course of time,
a legal system that authorizes it,
and a moral code that glorifies it.”

– Political economist Frederic Bastiat, The Law (1850)

Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time

Financial Crime: Did white collar crime and fraud trigger the meltdown?
Above the law? Thinking Allowed investigates white collar crime
Suite Violence: Why managers murder and corporations kill
Robin Hood (Toibin) Tax

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