Caitlin Johnstone: Plutocrats have put a lot of energy into influencing government policy in order to create legislation which ensures the continued growth of their wealth and power. A lot of maneuvering has had to happen over the course of many years to create a political system wherein government bribery is legal in the form of campaign finance and corporate lobbying, wherein deregulation of corporations is the norm, wherein tax loopholes are abundant and tax burdens are shifted to the middle class, wherein money hemorrhages upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while ordinary people grow poorer and poorer. What incentive would these powerful oligarchs have to risk upsetting that delicate balancing act by helping to circulate ideas which challenge the very governmental system they've worked so hard to manipulate to their extreme advantage? How hard would it be to simply decline to give anti-establishment voices a platform, and platform establishment loyalists instead? How easy would it be for a wealthy media owner or influential investor to ensure that only establishment loyalists are given the job of hiring and promoting editors and reporters in a mainstream media outlet? wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Jay Rosen: What doesn't get considered is that there could be anything radically wrong with Washington, that the entire institution could be broken, that there are new rules necessary. That idea, that the institutions of Washington have failed and need to be changed, doesn't really occur to the mainstream press, because they're one of those institutions. And they're one of the ones that failed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Noam Chomsky: The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it's the responsible men who have to make decisions and to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it's a democracy they - the herd, that is - are permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That's called an election. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Fascism is able to count on the assistance of the greater part of the State forces, of the higher army staffs, of the police authorities, and of the lawcourts and magistracy, who exert all their force to crush working-class opposition, while treating Fascist illegality with open connivance (banning of the Red Front alongside permission of the Storm Troops). Finally, has Fascism "conquered power" from the bourgeois state dictatorship? Fascism has never "conquered power" in any country. In every case Fascism has been placed in power from above by the bourgeois dictatorship. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The revolution of 1848 struck a deadly blow at all these vociferous, motley and ostentatious forms of pre-Marxian socialism. In all countries, the revolution revealed the various classes of society in action. The shooting of the workers by the republican bourgeoisie in Paris in the June days of 1848 finally revealed that the proletariat alone was socialist by nature. The liberal bourgeoisie dreaded the independence of this class a hundred times more than it did any kind of reaction. The craven liberals grovelled before reaction. The peasantry were content with the abolition of the survivals of feudalism and joined the supporters of order, wavering but occasionally between workers' democracy and bourgeois liberalism. All doctrines of non-class socialism and non-class politics proved to be sheer nonsense. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David Swanson: Presidents Clinton and Bush Jr. avoided the Vietnam War, Clinton through educational privilege, Bush through being the son of his father. President Obama never went to war. Vice Presidents Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden, like Clinton and Bush Jr., dodged the draft. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Jean Baptiste Colbert: The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest (number) of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
S. Brian Willson: The 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruled that limits on any independent corporation's political expenditures are unconstitutional as a matter of law. Thus, the long trend of private power having undue influence over the public political process is more deeply entrenched than ever, such that lawmaking itself is conducted by the bribed, selected agents of the most powerful corporations. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Krieger: All the public concern about "fake news" was just a ruse - the tech giants were just pretending to care about it. The real objective was to appease angry politicians by finding an excuse to erase and de-rank opinions that don't conform to the dispositions and leanings that dominate the executive suites of the largest tech companies and the power players in establishment Washington D.C. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Amilcar Cabral: Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Amilcar Cabral: The colonists usually say that it was they who brought us into history: today we show that this is not so. They made us leave history, our history, to follow them, right at the back, to follow the progress of their history. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Amilcar Cabral: We must walk rapidly but not run. We must not be opportunists, nor allow our enthusiasms to make us lose the vision of concrete reality. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Amilcar Cabral: Educate ourselves, educate other people, the population in general, to fight fear and ignorance, to eliminate little by little the subjection to nature and natural forces which our economy has not yet mastered. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Edward Zehr: I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Rand Paul: What is the one thing that brings Republicans and Democrats together? War. They love it, the more, the better. Forever war, perpetual war. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Chris Hedges: The two parties are in fundamental agreement about the underlying economic, political and military structures which are largely responsible for our decline. The power elites do not question the permanent war economy, unfettered capitalism and the rise of the security state, and voices that do are, in effect, censored out of the commercial press because they have no power base.The lie told by newspapers and traditional news is the lie of omission, which is not as bad as the outright lies told on Fox News, but in the end it is still a lie. Our power elite are bankrupt, and the press, tethered to the elite, is as bankrupt as those it covers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Bourgeois ideologists, liberals and democrats, not understanding Marxism, and not understanding the modern labour movement, are constantly jumping from one futile extreme to another. At one time they explain the whole matter by asserting that evil-minded persons "incite" class against class-at another they console themselves with the idea that the workers' party is "a peaceful party of reform". Both anarcho-syndicalism and reformism must be regarded as a direct product of this bourgeois world outlook and its influence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Andrew Gavin Marshall: Think tanks are created with the intent to bring elite interests together from a wide array of institutions: financial, industrial, corporate, academic/intellectual, media, cultural, foreign policy and political spheres. In think tanks, top officials from these sectors are gathered in a single institution where they work together to plan strategies for economic and foreign policies, for establishing consensus between elites, and to serve as training and recruitment grounds for officials to enter the political and foreign policy establishment, where they are capable of enacting the very policies developed within the think tanks. Notable think tanks with immense influence - specifically in the United States - include the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Larger, international think tanks have been increasingly common during the era of globalization, uniting respective elites from across the powerful western industrial states, instead of simply the elites within each respective state. Notable among these institutions are the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
It's 0130. I'm trying to confuse my brain into letting me sleep by looking at a directory of radio stations. I click on the page listing ones out of Denver, Colorado. I scroll down to the Internet Only section and become curious. I clock the link to it, thinking it is a normal webpage. I let the tab launch itself. Soon my eardrums are assaulted by the autoplay. I'm scared shitless even though I have earbuds in because what if the other people in the house heard me jump? I'm able to kill the tab and return to what I was able to listen to, but now at a much lower volume.
Max Weber: The modern state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The state is a special organization of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class. What class must the proletariat suppress? Naturally, only the exploiting class, i.e., the bourgeoisie. The working people need the state only to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat can direct this suppression, can carry it out. For the proletariat is the only class that is consistently revolutionary, the only class that can unite all the working and exploited people in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, in completely removing it. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Joan Veon: Yearly the World Economic Forum (WEF)/Davos brings together the world's most powerful CEO's along with governmental policy decision-makers. ... The World Economic Forum is a facilitator for the goals and objectives of the United Nations - which is world government. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Peter Phillips: The Global Power Elite constitutes 6,000 to 7,000 people, or 0.0001 percent of the world's population. They are the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/ private jet-flying, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world-people at the absolute peak of the global power pyramid. These are the people setting the agendas at the G8, (now the G7 after the exclusion of Russia), G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO. They are from the highest levels of finance capital, transnational corporations, the government, the military, the academy, nongovernmental organizations, spiritual leaders, and even shadow elites. They represent the interests of several hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires who comprise the richest people in the top 1 percent of the world's wealth hierarchy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Gramsci: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Jim Tucker: Bilderberg is a powerful assembly of the world's leading financiers, industrialists and political operatives. It includes such internationalists as banker David Rockefeller, heads of state in Europe and high officials of the U.S. government, White House, Defense, State, Congress and others. ... High officials of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Times and of all three major networks have attended Bilderberg many times, on the promise of secrecy, to report nothing and to not use the word "Bilderberg. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Peter Phillips: In the United States today, the rift between reality and reporting has peaked. There is no longer a mere credibility gap, but rather a literal Truth Emergency in which the most important information affecting people is concealed from view. Many Americans, relying on the mainstream corporate media, have serious difficulty accessing the truth while still believing that the information they receive is the reality. A Truth Emergency reflects cumulative failures of the fourth estate to act as a truly free press. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
So, fellow butterfles, remember when I mentioned Friendica yesterday? Instances running the latest version let you post to ActivityPub, the in-house DFRN protocol, and ATProto. You'll have to give it access to a preëxisting BSky account but there you go.
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Trash Panda (friendica only does everything) • •