Media Deception

We're living in the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, replicating the decadent times of the Roman empire, except more high-tech and on a global level. This is what we're observing.

The rich get obscenely richer either by environmental or monetary theft or by media promotion and advertising. We tune in at prime time after a hard day at work to watch the mega-secure buy houses, clothing, jewellery and luxury goods. The media records their every move from their butt implants to their real estate appointments - singers, movie stars, sports heroes, entrepreneurs, property tycoons and mainstreamed porn stars. If it weren't for the media, we wouldn't know who the obscenely rich were. The ones they want us to know. We can name them, their children and their designer dogs.  

It's not only that these people in the media are fabulously rich and flaunt their wealth indiscriminately, but also a great percentage of them are psychopathic, decadent and criminal in their behavior, with little legal and social repercussion. Think of scum like Hugh Hefner, Cosby, Nygaard, Weinstein and thousands like them, drugging and raping women and getting away with it for years because of their stature and wealth. Or the pedophile and necrophiliac Sir Jimmy Savile who would make your skin turn pimply through the creep factor; he also got away with it for years. Why? Because I'm a star! I can do anything! Anything goes! Who needs values or morals? Many people were loath to speak up about their criminals because they knew no one would believe their stories. 

Who, in my estimation, most epitomizes narcissistic wealthy decadence? Who broke the mold for vulgarity and bad taste? Madonna, who I would love to see on a reality show being dragged behind a car naked as her nipples get razor burned and erased. Maybe she would finally put whatever's left away. She does nothing to elevate women and her talent is vastly over-rated. 

Accessorizing her look with three adopted black children, Madonna represents everything that is deplorable about American social culture and a good reason for other countries to mock American values. Her shows are obscene, she takes delight in offending, she's culturally insensitive and she takes revolting to a whole new subterranean sub-level. She's been seen on television sexually humping a desk to prove that she can do whatever she wants because she sure can't sing worth a damn. Never mind what impression you make on children, they don't matter! I can do whatever I want! I'm a star! 

How is all this deluge of virtual obscenity, and it's just not Madonna, being absorbed by children and what are the effects on their mental and spiritual growth? 

Television shows are not the naive Leave it to Beaver or Gunsmoke variety of yesterday. Television has changed by turning the camera on us, the average bloke and bonus - it's cheaper. Television now capitalizes on the dumb and vulnerable and their unknowing willingness to humiliate themselves for money. It's entertainment. We laugh as we watch dumb asses stumble awkwardly through their lives and do stupid shit. They're dumb, but smart enough, functional, with an intelligent quotient a bit over 90, so that we're not seen as laughing at retarded people. But it's close. 

Currently, the famous are the newly minted social misfits - poor white trash who have become famous, or infamous - usually from Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas or some backwater state where the highest level of education is grade five. It's a bottomless pit of theatre. If we are bored or embarrassed by their stupidity, we can turn the channel and watch the lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy as they go about their simple business of trying to decide which twenty-million-dollar house to buy and bonus, which fifteen-million-dollar yacht to sail to Monaco, while pontificates like George Clooney and Leonardo Dicaprio, who has yet to date anyone with pubic hair, tell us to cut back.  

In between all the madness, of course, is the advertising. Four to five minutes of sheer brainwashing every ten minutes, when the volume gets louder as dude burps and heads to the kitchen for another bowl of chips and another beer. Advertising - which usually consists of an ad for some sort of medical device or sleep aid or medication or a cruise vacation. How about those hemorrhoids! Wouldn't you like to go on a vacation! Be like the rich and famous!  

However, it's not only television media that is saturated with false advertising. It's everywhere. Walk down any street, city or country, and you won't see one building or tree trunk that isn't scarred with advertising.

Social med has squelched debate. Educated political journalists like John Pilger have been sidelined or silenced. Critical thinking and discussion has been muted. There is little to no sensible, truthful debate on television and when there is, it's a faux-debate usually hosted by a tired old network fart who asks no hard questions and whose guests are usually soft leather shoe salesmen. Pseudo-depth, plausible denial and falsehoods - that's how far you get with the network news. Make everyone think they heard something important. Hard-hitting interview, Fred! Instead, why not get world leaders to a conference table for open-mic discussions and have it broadcast live. Or - better yet for reality television and great ratings - set up a boxing ring and have world leaders duke it out in there instead of collecting billions and billions of dollars through taxes in order to support the rush to global annihilation? 

Where are the journalists and writers and local politicians, a people's forum, on television? Where is there a program or platform that could specifically bring world leaders together to resolve some of the world's most pressing problems, instead of meaningless photo ops at the White House?  Today's media has forced us to push our own vomit back down our collective throats and called it The Fear Factor. 

World leaders for important change have been silenced. There will never be another world leader on the scale of Gandhi or King or Malcolm X because those popular few who dared try to lead the people out of the darkness will be shot, poisoned or framed and thrown in jail. Whistleblowers like Julian Assange have shared this fate and he will be forgiven nor released. He exposed the American government's lies about Iraq, specifically the cover-up of an American Apache killing five men who turned out to be Iraqi journalists. That's not going on television. Kill three people in a mall and plead insanity and you may be out in fifteen years with good behavior and the trial will be on television for the benefit of our collective outrage and horror. Assange, however, uncovered too many lies and too many people were outraged, so he's in a dungeon, where he'll stay for the rest of his life.    

We're re-enacting the last days of the Romans through our excessive, gluttonous behavior, while millions in other countries starve or get hacked to pieces through civil war. We've been saying the end is coming forever, but currently we're stepping on the accelerator. We don't know who or what we are. Children are questioning their sexual identity, men are becoming women, women are becoming men, outrageous behavior has been normalized and social critics silenced.

Why No Sanctions For America?

Although this article was written almost ten years ago, it still applies now.

Richard Becker wrote on July 5 2012

July 1 marked the start of a new round of sanctions designed to destroy the economy of Iran, create widespread suffering among the Iranian people, and thereby effect regime change in that country. The ostensible reason for the sanctions is that Iran has a nuclear program, which Washington and its allies allege is leading to the development of nuclear weapons. The Iranian government has denied any such intention, stating that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Iran is far from the first country to suffer from a cutoff or sharp reduction in trade due to sanctions. Over the past several decades, the U.S.—sometimes through the United Nations Security Council, sometimes in coordination with its imperialist allies, sometimes on its own—has imposed sanctions, embargoes and blockades on dozens of countries. Some of the sanctions regimes have lasted for decades, in the case of Cuba a half-century.

The justifications for imposing sanctions have included alleged human rights violations, lack of democracy, military aggression in violation of international law, and engaging in terrorist acts. But a giant asterisk must be attached here, with a notation reading: “Not applicable to the United States, its imperialist allies, surrogates and puppets.”

At Washington’s prompting, the UNSC imposed a blockade on Iraq in 1990. The blockade, which was enforced by the U.S. Navy, lasted 13 years and took over a million Iraqi lives, half of them children under the age of five years. The pretext for the most stringent sanctions regime in modern history was Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990, after a long dispute between the two states. Iraq charged that Kuwait, which it had long claimed as part of its national territory, was stealing Iraqi oil and undermining its economy.

After Iraq was driven out of Kuwait by a six-week U.S.-led bombing campaign that destroyed most of the country’s civilian infrastructure, the sanctions were kept in place. A new pretext was now needed and quickly found: Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction.”

Top U.S. officials were well aware of the devastating impact on the Iraqi population. When asked on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May 1996, whether the deaths of a half-million Iraq children due to the sanctions were “worth the price,” U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright replied, “we think the price is worth it.” Albright’s remarks actually constituted a confession to war crimes.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton declared that “some want to see the sanctions ended, I am not one of them,” and signed the “Iraq Liberation Act,” declaring the official policy of the U.S. to be what it had actually been all along: regime change in Iraq. The new justification was a supposed concern for “human rights.”

Five years later, having not achieved its goal by other means, the U.S. invaded and occupied Iraq under the resurrected claims of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” It was not some “intelligence failure,” as later claimed by neo-con and liberal imperialists alike.

The U.S. occupation cost a million more Iraqi lives and thousands of U.S. lives. At least 4.5 million Iraqis were displaced and Iraqi society torn apart. Torture was commonplace for the tens of thousands of Iraqis imprisoned. Taken together, the Twenty Years War the U.S. waged on Iraq killed, wounded or forced into exile more than one-third of Iraq’s population. All of this death and destruction in a war justified on fabricated pretenses, also known as lies.

Then, there is the on-going U.S. war and occupation in Afghanistan, and the drone missile strikes killing people every day in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. In the 1990s, there was the bombing and blockade of the former Yugoslavia as well as Iraq, and in the 1980s the invasions and interventions in Central America and the Caribbean. And before that came Vietnam, Chile, Korea, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Congo, Iran, Guatemala, etc., etc.—a long and bloody history. Where the U.S. succeeded in overthrowing revolutionary or progressive governments, they were replaced with right-wing, police-state dictatorships.

None of the above countries threatened or could threaten the United States, meaning that all of those wars and interventions were the most serious violations of international law—crimes against peace.

Washington has sent hundreds of billions of dollars and vast amounts of military aid making possible Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The U.S. has propped up and protected the most repressive and anti-democratic regimes in the world, like Saudi Arabia and the other hereditary monarchies in the Middle East.

And, of course, the U.S., which possesses thousands of nuclear warheads, is the only country that has actually used those weapons, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians near the end of World War II.

So why are there no sanctions against the U.S.? Why are no U.S. leaders—past or present—currently occupying prison cells or awaiting trial?

The answer is that the international “justice” system operates much like the domestic one. The rich administer punishment on the poor. The notion of “equal justice before the law” is as mythical internationally as it is domestically. Who ends up in prison or under sanctions has nothing to do with real justice and everything to do with real power.

The Obama administration and congressional leaders are today trying to win popular support for sanctions and other forms of intervention in Iran and Syria by presenting themselves as concerned about “human rights” and “democracy.

No one should be fooled.