An old adage known as Betteridge’s law of headlines asserts that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
There’s a Bloomberg story trending on Twitter right now about China having the ability to control the weather, with the headline reading “Has China Mastered Weather Modification? Should We Worry?”
According to Betteridge, no.
It just goes on and on and on. Every single day the western mass media are bashing us in the face with stories about horrifying scary things other countries are doing which we all need to be afraid of, and from which we must turn imploringly to our own kind and beneficent rulers for protection.
Today China is controlling your weather. Yesterday the Russians were hacking your mind. The day before it was Kremlin microwave guns. Before that it was Chinese super soldiers. Tomorrow Venezuela will be using communist gamma rays to ruin your performance in bed.
And on and on and on and on. And, strangely, at no time will these media institutions warn you about the fact that your government is constantly murdering people in other countries every single day while you and your neighbors struggle to survive.
Right now the hot topic in US lefty discourse is the fact that Americans are struggling financially and medically as a result of Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdowns, yet the US government is doing virtually nothing to help with this. Americans received a piddling one-time $1200 payment eight months ago, and now after all this time they’re looking at receiving an even more ridiculous one-time $600 stimulus check.
There’s also the debate that’s been raging in US left circles over the call initiated by commentator Jimmy Dore for House progressives to force a floor vote on Medicare for All legislation, a big part of the argument being that it’s more important than ever to start pushing for a normal healthcare system in the United States right now. Millions of people are being thrown off their employer-provided insurance during the economic downturn and it is both a necessary and opportune time to either implement universal healthcare or at least draw public attention to which elected officials are standing in its way.
Both the campaign to get the US government to implement a proper healthcare system, and the fight to get meaningful financial support during the pandemic, will fail. Necessarily.
They will not fail because there’s a lack of public support for these things. They will not fail because of the number of seats controlled by members of a given party in the House or the Senate. They will not fail because “It’s just not realistic right now”.
They will fail, ultimately, because an entire globe-spanning empire depends upon keeping Americans struggling financially.
The US has a system of deliberately institutionalized poverty because if wealth were more evenly distributed in the most powerful nation on earth, there’d be no ruling class to ensure the domination of the globe-spanning empire. Plutocrats wouldn’t be able to use their massive wealth advantage to buy up influence over the political class and control public thought by purchasing mass media outlets and other mechanisms narrative control in order to ensure the continuation of the global status quo upon which those plutocrats have built their kingdoms. The system would belong to the people.
This is the real wall US progressives keep crashing into in their fight for economic justice in America. Ultimately their efforts to work within the official political system to implement economic justice fail because that system is set up to preserve economic injustice. It’s not ultimately about this or that political faction or any one particular politician, it’s the fact that there’s a massive amount of power riding on the ability to keep Americans too poor and powerless to interfere in the operation of the nation which serves as the hub of a massive global empire.
It’s like attempts to end the war in Afghanistan. Anyone who isn’t a brainwashed dupe knows there’s no legitimate reason for western forces to continue that 19-year occupation, yet whenever there’s a major push for withdrawal something always comes up. We can’t leave because of Al-Qaeda. We can’t leave because of women’s rights. We can’t leave because of Russian bounties. The official talking heads of the political/media class agree that it would be great to withdraw from Afghanistan, but for this or that blah blah reason, “It’s just not realistic right now”.
The unspoken reality is that those troops are in Afghanistan primarily due to that nation’s prime geostrategic location relative to the most powerful nations who oppose the dictates of the US-centralized empire, namely China, Russia, and Iran. The fall of those unabsorbed governments is the only thing that could ever bring about a military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In the same way, the American left is fed all kinds of reasons for why they need to remain impoverished for a few more years until conditions change in some way, when really the only reason is because there’s a massive globe-spanning power structure which depends on their remaining impoverished. It’s a larger-scale version of the real reason why Palestinians need to remain oppressed instead of treated as equal citizens in Israel: there’s just too much power riding on the control of that crucial geostrategic part of the Middle East for a population with no loyalty to the empire to be given any control over what happens there.
American leftists and progressives will keep crashing into this wall, over and over and over again, every time they try to work within the official US political system to ease the crushing poverty and inequality in the wealthiest nation on earth. If by some miracle they are able to overcome all the many, many, many obstacles built into the plutocrat-controlled system and put themselves in a position to implement policies of economic justice by following all the rules to a ‘t’, there will be an antisemitism scandal. There will be a Russia scandal. Someone will say they were raped. Whatever needs to happen to keep the people from obtaining wealth and power which could disrupt the global world order which depends on endless warmongering that benefits zero ordinary Americans.
Americans will never succeed in fighting economic injustice by appealing to the official US political system, no matter how many charismatic lefty politicians they find and no matter how energized their grassroots campaigns are. Only direct action outside the system, with the people using the power of their numbers to force real change, stands any chance of changing this.
But the bastards have bolted shut that escape route as well. People are prevented from using the power of their numbers to force real change by a highly sophisticated domestic propaganda operation controlled by the media-owning plutocratic class and heavily influenced by sociopathic government agencies. As long as people are being successfully propagandized by mass media manipulation into accepting the status quo, they will never rise up and make it change.
So the US left needs to address the problem of establishment narrative control first, before any change can even begin to occur. This can happen by way of a grassroots information rebellion with a sufficiently forceful push to help their countrymen realize that they are being propagandized. Trust in the mass media is at an all-time low and our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high, so we absolutely do have the ability to pry the rapey fingers of the establishment manipulators out of the minds of the public and help people see that they can have something better. If enough people awaken to the lies of the propaganda machine, they can shrug off the oppression machine like a heavy coat on a warm day, without a shot fired.
But it needs to happen soon, because our rulers understand this as well. This is why we’ve been seeing escalation after escalation in internet censorship protocols being rolled out by government-aligned Silicon Valley tech giants; they know they need to cut us off from our ability to wake each other up. And they know they need to hurry, because we’re already rapidly beginning to do exactly that.
That’s where you need to place your emphasis if you ever want economic justice, America. On overthrowing the establishment propaganda machine, and doing it now. Save yourselves and you might just save the entire world.