Who's Really In Charge?

Capitalism functions very efficiently without democracy. --Chris Hedges

You'll never stop depraved agendas as long as propagandists can manipulate a critical mass of people into consenting to those agendas. Propaganda is enemy #1. --Caitlin Johnstone

Who’s Really In Charge?

by C.A. Matthews

Americans worry about a lot of things that they have no control over. They also worry a lot about other people of whom they have no control over.

One recent example of this excessive worrying for naught can be seen in the numerous attempts to elect a Speaker of the House of Representatives. In the end, will it really matter to you personally who’s put into that position? Be honest with yourself. If the Speaker is either a Republican or a Democrat, then it won’t make much of a difference to you and yours, assuming you’re a member of the bottom 90% of Americans, a.k.a. the “working class.” Your life will continue along similar lines tomorrow as it did today no matter who is made Speaker.

Don’t believe me? Read our end of the year review The Year Nothing Fundamentally Changed—Again. The federal minimum wage hasn’t changed. COVID-19 is still spreading, and we still don’t have universal health care in the US. The migrant kids are still in cages. The hideous Title 42 and “Remain in Mexico” anti-asylum policies are still being enforced. Cops are still shooting people of color at an alarming rate and not reporting all of these shootings. There were only 12 days in 2022 where a police officer did not shoot someone in the US. Twelve whole days working class Americans didn’t receive a phone call telling them about the police killing one of our loved ones.

Looking at how things remained the same or worsened for the working class or bottom 90% of Americans, one could come to the conclusion that no real change occurs whenever a member of either faction of the corporate uniparty (a.k.a. “the duopoly”) sits in that top seat in the House of Representatives or the White House. Both “major parties” accept (some say they demand) corporate cash through various lobbying organizations and PACs or political action committees. PACs are a fantastically clever way to hide “dark money” or money that no one knows where it comes from. It could come from a foreigner, gangster, or banker—which could all be the same person. 

“Who cares where it comes from?” say American politicians. “Our bank accounts certainly don't!”

It has become apparent in recent times that politicians are essentially being hired to do the bidding of those who have given them the biggest checks. And they don’t seem to have any moral qualms about accepting money with strings attached, since they are often rewarded with big book deals and swanky board memberships with perks upon retiring from office.

So, who’s really in charge? It’s easy. Follow the money.

“It can’t be that simple!” some of you are screaming at this point. “Just because politicians accept huge sums of cash from PACs, corporations, and lobbying groups for corporations, it doesn’t mean they’re simply puppets for those who paid them that money.”

Are you certain about that? The infamous “Princeton Study” demonstrates that American politicians only listen to and do the bidding of those who give them the most money. That excludes those of us at the bottom. Unless you’ve been giving a politician regular sums—very large sums—of cash, the statistics prove what you as an ordinary American worker have to say to that politician is of no consequence whatsoever. They will do as their real bosses, the corporations, tell them to do anyway.

Face it—money is speech. Corporations are people. The US Supreme Court deemed it so in the oddly named Citizens United case. Since Citizens United became law in 2010, money has been firmly equated to speech in political realms. Until the law is repealed, corporations will continue to be the richest and most influential of all people in the United States of America.

Americans have really got to stop worrying about who won this or that election like it’s somehow going to be the end of the world if their preferred candidate doesn’t win. If the race is “won” by either a Republican or Democrat, we poor folks of the working class have essentially lost out to the fat cats of the corporations. We have no control to begin with since we don’t have the billions of dollars needed to buy that candidate’s allegiance, and now that the corporate-owned candidate is in office, the Princeton Study tells us that they'll completely stop listening to us.

Game over. The billionaire CEOs won the contest right out of the starting gate.

If you’re starting to feel anxious because you realize now that we little guys can never have the control over our destinies that we desire under this corrupt political-economic system, take a deep breath. Let’s repeat the Serenity Prayer together:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s time now to get wise and learn about the things we can change.

The real power on this planet is wielded not by so-called “elected officials,” but by those who run the massive corporations, most of them multinationals. (Yes, other countries are in the grips of Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big Chemical, and the like, too. May Americans take some small comfort in the fact we aren’t the only humans on the planet being screwed over by billionaires.) But what are these corporations’ motives for co-opting our governments? Let’s follow one particular money trail to see what’s happening.

The US spent over $858 billion dollars in military spending this past year. Possibly it was closer to $1 trillion dollars (that’s trillion with a “t” not a “b”), but we may never know the exact amount since the Department of Defense has never passed any of its audits in the past five years since they first started doing them. Plus, most experts count money that is credited to other agencies like the Department of Energy as being part of the US military spending as well, because money that goes toward nuclear power includes the making of radioactive materials to construct nuclear warheads for bombs. The total sum going towards the manufacturing, perfecting, maintaining, storing, and then using of these weapons is probably unknowable in any given year. It’s mind-boggling how great a bookkeeper’s nightmare the US DoD accounting system is and how confusing the actual costs of hidden expenditures (such as nuclear bombs) are.

Is this done on purpose or by accident? You tell me. The CEOs of the military industrial complex that gladly accept US taxpayers’ money don’t discuss it with us—and why should they? It’s their money in their opinion, and it’s their puppets who are foisted upon the American voters every election via a really cool trick called propaganda.

I’m certain you’ve been a victim of propaganda before. The US is well known for its propaganda tactics. If you have ever been told that you had to vote for Blue Candidate because Red Candidate is the devil himself and Blue is marginally better because he doesn’t have a Twitter account, then you’ve probably been a victim of propaganda. Because when the truth is revealed, the voters will discover that both Blue and Red accepted large sums of cash from the very same corporations. The corporations tricked you into thinking somehow these two candidates were actually different when the only meaningful differences were superficial ones.

Taxpayers’ money keeps flowing into the coffers of the military industrial complex. Corporations such as Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the like made record profits in 2022. And why is that? Could it be something to do with whatever particular Red or Blue person is in office? Or could it simply be because the US political-economic system is set up to allow our tax money to continually flow into the coffers of military industrial complex machine because corporations in reality own and run our government?

I go with the second conclusion. Why? US government policy toward private corporations hasn’t changed in any significant way since the last century (except to collude more closely with them), so whoever holds office is immaterial. But I’ve analyzed the proxy war propaganda over the past year and concluded that if ordinary Americans actually understood how the Minsk Agreements were violated by the US and NATO in order to start another endless war to generate even more business for the arms manufacturers, investment firms like BlackRock, and Big Oil/LNG, they would have never been supportive of throwing billions of dollars worth of weapons into the hands of a corrupt political puppet whose name appears in the Pandora Papers over and over again.

The U.S. power alliance could very easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost concessions like enshrining Ukrainian neutrality, rolling back its war machinery from Russia’s borders and sincerely pursuing detente with Moscow instead of shredding treaties and ramping up Cold War escalations.  --Caitlin Johnstone, Unprovoked!

Read Caitlin's entire article and click on the links. It's amazing how clear you see things when you blow the dust of propaganda away. Feel better? Let’s repeat the last line of the Serenity Prayer together:

And the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s time to wise up to how you’ve been played. The system is rigged against you if you’re a working class American, in the bottom 90%. The politicians/puppets use propaganda and lies to make you feel like you have some modicum of control when, in reality, you don’t. The corporations of the military industrial complex and Big Oil are pulling the strings and reaping the monetary benefits from sanctions and endless wars that starve, kill, and maim our fellow workers in far away places. The corporations don’t care how blood-stained the reputation of the US becomes as long as they continue to profit from it.

Now that you’re wiser, it’s time to start building up your courage to fight back against these inhuman injustices like the civil rights activists of the 1950s and 60s did. You're going to speak out boldly like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did, even if does cost you dearly because you know our children deserve better.

You're going to fight like hell for the positive change you want to see. You have to in order to exert some control over what goes on in this world. Stand up so that ordinary, working class, little guys like yourself don’t keep getting lied to and hurt by sociopathic CEOs who will never have our best interests at heart. You realize now to sit on the sidelines and let the corporations win is to sign your own death sentence.

Related Articles/Videos:

McCarthy Finally Elected House Speaker https://www.commondreams.org/news/mccarthy-elected-house-speaker

The Year Nothing Fundamentally Changed--Again https://bernie2016.blogspot.com/2022/12/2022-year-nothing-fundamentally.html 

Biden's Expansion of Title 42 Takes Us Further From Humane Border Policy https://truthout.org/articles/bidens-expansion-of-title-42-takes-us-further-from-humane-border-policy

More Than Half of Police Killings are Mislabled, New Study Says  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/police-killings-undercounted-study.html 

OpenSecrets--find out how much and where your elected officials are getting their money from https://www.opensecrets.org/

Princeton Study: Congress Literally Doesn't Care What You Think https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/

Move to Amend (How to fight Citizens United) https://www.movetoamend.org/

Why the US is Losing the Fight to Ban Toxic Chemicals https://www.propublica.org/article/toxic-chemicals-epa-regulation-failures

US Now World's Top LNG Exporter as Europe Boycotts Cheaper Russian Gas https://popularresistance.org/us-now-worlds-top-lng-exporter-as-europe-boycotts-cheaper-russian-gas/

The High Cost of Blowing Up the World https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/high-cost-blowing-world-ukraine-2023-ndaa 

Pentagon Can't Account for Half Their Assets, Fails New Audit https://youtu.be/Jkb-pTQLERw

Proof Twitter Censored Anyone CIA & FBI Told Them To https://youtu.be/Vyva84KG-nA

Dems Demanded Twitter Find Phony Russiagate Evidence https://youtu.be/tWleLq4h4qk  

Silencing the Lambs. How Propaganda Works https://www.mintpressnews.com/john-pilger-silencing-lambs-how-propaganda-works/281884/ 

Europe and the Legitimization of Deception  https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/08/patrick-lawrence-europe-and-the-legitimization-of-deception/

Unprovoked! https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/09/caitlin-johnstone-unprovoked/

Despite Outcries about Inflation, Major Arms Makers Are Doing Just Fine https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhartung/2022/10/28/despite-outcries-about-inflation-major-arms-makers-are-doing-just-fine/

BlackRock Accused of "Trying to Cash in on the Disaster..." https://www.commondreams.org/news/blackrock-ukraine

Ukraine Prepares to Give Free Rein to Property Developers https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/03/ukraine-prepares-to-give-free-rein-to-property-developers/

Revealed: "Anti-Oligarch" Ukrainian President's Offshore Connections https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/03/revealed-anti-oligarch-ukrainian-president-offshore-connections-volodymyr-zelenskiy

US Spreads Misery Across the Globe Imposing Sanctions on a Third of Humanity https://popularresistance.org/u-s-spreads-misery-across-the-globe-imposing-sanctions-on-a-third-of-humanity/

Seen on Twitter:

The dark blue line after 1973 is theft. They stole that money from their workers. But nothing happened, because capitalism legalizes theft from the working class by the capitalist class. pic.twitter.com/U0t3vQkrST

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 5, 2023

The sad thing about this quote is how intelligence agencies convinced the American "Left" to goosestep on behalf of the Military Industrial Complex, the Deep State, Blackrock, The Bank of International Settlements, Big Pharma, World Bank, IMF, Big Tech, etc during the Covid War. pic.twitter.com/mM6jSuyLB3

— Information Retrieval (@ArchaicRevival4) January 5, 2023

What's It Like To Be 3/5 of a Person?

What's It Like To Be 3/5 of a Person?

by C.A. Matthews

February is Black History Month. I thought I'd explore topics linked to the African American experience. One thing that's always been a puzzle to me as a mostly white person born in the 20th century is what it was like to be considered 3/5 of a person.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this short article. It might come as a surprise to many Americans that while enslaved people weren't entitled to vote, own land or even their own bodies they were considered 3/5 of a person when it came to the population census. This meant that the South had way more representation in the US House of Representatives than it had voters. This is one reason why slavery was allowed to grow and spread across the country in spite of reservations held by other Americans.

Now, before you object and say something like, "Well, women and children couldn't vote, either, so things were pretty fair representation-wise for voting males between the North and South," just listen to yourself. You're assuming that only African Americans males couldn't vote, and you'd be wrong. Before 1920, most white women and children at least had some legal rights, but at that time Asian immigrants and Native Americans didn't even count as persons at all.

Zip. Nada. Native Americans obtained citizenship and voting rights in 1924. Indigenous peoples are often the very last to have any legal standing in white settler-colonial societies, but Asian-Americans couldn't vote until 1948. Blows your mind doesn't it?

Do you feel super awkward in saying the pledge with the phrase "with liberty and justice for all" now? Do you feel extra stupid for ever thinking the United States of America is now and has always been a "democracy" where all human beings are treated equally? You should.

So, what's it like to be considered a partial person (or not even a person) without any legal standing? I think the closest any modern American can come to empathizing with how demoralized enslaved people must have felt is when a person finds out he/she can't afford badly needed health care.

Consider this scenario: You're deathly sick or in great pain. You go to a local medical facility, and once there you are forced to plead for assistance to ease your suffering. Hours later, you're finally told, "Sorry. You don't have any private health insurance we can bill. You don’t have enough savings in the bank to cover the costs of the treatment. We can't do anything for you. Have a nice day."

In your agony as you crawl away, you realize all hope is lost. You might look like a person, but you aren't really a person, are you? You have no legal rights or protections under the law not to suffer and die needlessly because of your lack of money or health insurance status. You're very much an object that can work a job, pay taxes, pay rent, pay off student loan debt, etc., but let's face it. If you don't have any health insurance or a personal fortune and you become ill and need medical treatment in the US you simply don't exist legally.

You simply don't exist. Just like Native Americans, enslaved Africans, Chinese laborers, and so many others on this continent have experienced over the last half-millennia, you are here but you're also not here at the same time. Perhaps we should call an individual caught in this horrible state of affairs a Schrödinger’s Person after the famous thought experiment involving a cat.

That's about as close as I can get to what being considered 3/5 of person must have been like for enslaved people. And what did it feel like for them once the Emancipation Proclamation declared they were no longer enslaved? Eventually African American males would be considered a "whole person" as a voter. I suppose on paper it sounded wonderful, but Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and other devious ways soon prevented African Americans from voting. These racist actions prevented "whole personhood" from ever fully taking. Some of these tactics continue on to this very day under the guise of gerrymandering districts, strict voter ID laws, and preventing ex-felons from being able to vote again.

Potential Black voters exist and don't exist at the same time. Sound familiar?

The saddest thing about the 14th Amendment granting personhood to African Americans is that corporations used it to argue (and win) the right to be considered "persons" in their own right. This travesty led to recent Supreme Court rulings such as Citizens United, which equates money with free speech. 

Corporations have never suffered the evils of discrimination like African Americans and others have, but they possess all the legal rights of personhood. Corporations have "free speech" through spending large sums of money to purchase politicians' cooperation at all levels of government. Bought-off politicos gladly do their corporate masters' bidding by relaxing worker protections and environmental regulations. Corporations force their workers to increase productivity but share little of the company's profits with them, thus creating the "wage slaves" of the 21st century.

Are you starting to grasp now what being 3/5 of a person really meant and continues to mean to all Americans to this day?

Isn't it time we emancipated ourselves from the tyranny of our corporate slave masters? Isn't it time to consider an Earth Day General Strike?

Happy Black History Month. Never forget that you are a whole person with legal rights. Never let the corporations take them away from you!

Related Articles:

Black History Month: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-month

Three-fifths Compromise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise

Democracy in America? https://www.rsn.org/001/democracy-in-america.html 

Democrats Renew Title 42, Trump's Racist Border Policy https://www.directleft.com/p/democrats-renew-title-42-trumps-racist 

ICE Jail Accused of Abusing Black Immigrants https://truthout.org/articles/democrats-demand-biden-close-ice-jail-accused-of-abusing-black-immigrants/

US Border Patrol Hiding Information https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/community-voices-project/story/2022-01-28/opinion-u-s-border-patrol-hiding-information

State Standards Misteach the Meaning of Reconstruction https://popularresistance.org/how-state-standards-misteach-the-meaning-of-one-of-the-united-states-most-important-eras/

Seen on Twitter:

The Biden Boom of maintaining slave wages during inflation is par for the course for this slave driver as nothing fundamentally changes. pic.twitter.com/3YkThAeutU

— #Immediatist, because I hate slavery (@Lvld_Up) February 4, 2022

This worker abuse is fucking ridiculous. pic.twitter.com/7alCW5PpbF

— ☭ 🇨🇺 jσєуաrecκ'ˢ Ɗуѕтσριαη Ƒυтυяє 🇰🇵 🙃 (@joeywreck) February 4, 2022

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Photo: Jon Krieg/AFSC Diplomacy, not weapons, in Ukraine TAKE ACTION As tensions escalate between the U.S. and Russia, Congress is debating sending even more weapons into the region.  Tell Congress: Stop the military escalation in Ukraine. Peaceful ends can only be achieved through peaceful means. Flooding the region with more weapons and military financing is not the answer. The U.S. has over-invested in the military and under-invested in diplomacy and international cooperation. Additional military funding will only increase tensions and further enrich defense contractors. Urge policymakers to say NO to more weapons and invest in diplomacy and international cooperation instead. Now is the time to engage in talks to protect human lives and dignity. Please join us in urging Congress to invest in our shared security through nonviolent means.     In peace, Aura Kanegis Director, Office of Public Policy and Advocacy, American Friends Service Committee TAKE ACTION

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A small-town Mississippi library is facing tremendous financial pressure from its mayor after putting up a display featuring pro-LGBTQ books -- and he's citing his conservative Christian faith as the reason why, even though several of the books are by Christian authors.

The display includes memoirs by a transgender pastor and a survivor of gay conversion therapy, as well as a collection of essays titled "The Queer Bible."

Now, Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is using his personal religious beliefs to justify withholding $110,000 from the library, even though he lacks the legal authority to do so. The mayor says he won't release the badly needed funds until the library agrees to remove the books.  

McGee's anti-LGBTQ bigotry doesn't reflect the Christian values of love, dignity, and equality. Let's make sure he hears from a nationwide movement of Christians who are sick of seeing our faith hijacked to censor books and exclude LGBTQ people.

Tell Mayor McGee: Blocking library funds over LGBTQ books is not Christian

In an interview with the local newspaper, Madison County library director Tonja Johnson said the mayor told her the books "went against his Christian beliefs, and that he would not release the money as the long as the materials were there."

In a stunning display of Christian nationalism -- abusing his office to merge personal religion with government -- Mayor McGee even told the library director that "the library can serve whoever we wanted, but that he only serves the great Lord above."

McGee is not only turning his back on Madison County's LGBTQ and non-Christian residents; he is also attacking the religious freedom of all pro-LGBTQ Christians. He should listen to Johnson, the library director, who gave this beautiful quote to the Mississippi Free Press about why LGBTQ books matter to the whole community:

"Those books are for all of us: whether we can see ourselves reflected in those materials or so that we can develop understanding, empathy and respect for someone else... We all live in this world together. We sit next to people in church, we work with people, we live next door to people, our children go to school with children who don't look like us and don't have the same experiences. 

"If we're going to be together, we have to at least understand each other's stories."

Tell Mayor McGee: Stop withholding library funds and censoring pro-LGBTQ books >>

Thank you for everything you do to love your neighbor and honor the image of God in LGBTQ people.

In peace,
- Guthrie, Rev. Nathan, Karli, and the Faithful America team

 

"The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice." - Proverbs 12:15

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One glaring sign of how inhumanely immigration is being handled right now: the backlog of cases in the U.S. immigration court is now over 1.6 million – that’s the size of the city of Philadelphia!  This backlog – including children, families, people in desperate need for safety – is a damning indictment of a broken system that prefers spending BILLIONS on militarized border security to treat migrants as criminals over supporting families with caseworkers to get people to safety. You know what’s cheaper than a deportation flight? A hearing in court.  One person who can fix this problem is Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Will you join us to demand he does everything in his power to restart processing so families can at last reach safety in the U.S.? take actioN NOW The immigration system that currently exists in the U.S. is flat-out dangerous for people seeking safety.  It completely denies children and families access to safety by either deporting them through Trump-era policies, like Title 42, or by putting them in the racist Remain in Mexico program where they are forced to wait for months, sometimes years, in border cities where they are disproportionately targeted for extortion and violence.  That’s why restarting and speeding up processing is so important: the faster families are processed, the quicker they are out of danger and into safety.  This is about families’ humanity, but it’s also just common sense – like actual cents. Instead of spending $330 billion over the last 20 years on border enforcement and detention centers, we could be investing in caseworkers and judges that could help families get to safety.  But instead of providing adequate safety and certainty, which would provide legal processes and order, our current immigration system almost entirely skews towards detention centers and deportation, which delivers cruelty and chaos. This is not how we should be as a country. Will you demand DHS Secretary Mayorkas do everything in his power to restart and speed up processing to make certain the United States is a country that welcomes all people seeking safety with dignity and compassion? take actioN NOW Our government must end its cruel treatment of children, families, and adults to swiftly and safely admit people seeking the refuge they need. Policies that block, expel, or jail those seeking the right to protection in the U.S. have no place here.  Thanks for taking action, Erin Mazursky | Organizing Director Families Belong Together