The Omnibus Spending Bill
The Odds are Never in Your Favor
The Burning Platform
“Someday when your grandchildren ask you why America and Southeast Ohio failed, you can point to this week and these weak people.”
Conservatism in the hands of people like these has become as extinct as the dinosaur.
The Power of Propaganda
The irony of the phrase “may the odds be ever in your favor” is not lost on the readers of the Hunger Games trilogy of novels or the film adaption. Despite the grimness of the story, over 65 million copies of the books have been sold. The total box office take so far has exceeded $1.4 billion for the four movies. The dystopian series tackles real issues like severe poverty, starvation, torture, oppression, betrayal and the brutality of war. It doesn’t fit into the standard film making success recipe of feel good fluff, politically correct storylines and happy endings. Each film in the series gets progressively darker, with the final episode permeating doom and gloom. The books and the movies capture the deepening crisis mood engulfing the world today. And they realistically portray the world as a place where there are no good guys in positions of power. The ruling class, in all cases, is driven by a voracious appetite for supremacy, wealth, and control.
An Ambiguous, Confusing, Dangerous World
The world is a morally ambiguous place where those in power and those seeking power utilize the influence of media propaganda and PR campaigns built around “heroes” and “icons” to psychologically control the masses, while enriching themselves and their crony capitalist sponsors. Endless war against the latest “bad guys” further enriches the arms dealers and their political lackeys who joyfully use faux patriotism and nationalistic fervor to insist upon more boots on the ground, drones in the air, bombs dropped, and missiles launched.
War is good for business and keeps the masses distracted, while the Wall Street financiers harvest the wealth of the citizens. The division of the country into 12 districts, sending their bounty to the capital of Panem at the point of a gun, while they are allocated a pittance to survive, is no different than our corporate fascist government as they extract hundreds of billions in taxes, fees, levies, tolls, and fines from the productive class, while regulating, enforcing, mandating, and authorizing the plebs to death.
We live in a confusing world of anxiety, hate, greed, deceit and immorality, where governments throughout the world are nothing but rotting cesspools of psychotic despots desperately clinging to power while using any means necessary to keep the masses sedated and docile. Good people, with noble intentions, still exist in this decadent world, but they do not seek power or have any say in the governance of this world. The oppressed are hopelessly enslaved in debt, kept submissive by welfare transfers from the corrupt state, dumbed down by the state education system, amused by technological gadgets and vacuous entertainment, and kept in perpetual fear of seen and unseen enemies. We are told who to hate, who to fear, who to love, and who to believe by a nameless faceless state run by people we didn’t elect, constituting the invisible government.
The world is a dangerous place, made more dangerous by a willfully ignorant populace who mindlessly go about their day to day existence without thinking, questioning, or considering the possibility their leaders are corrupt lying thieves. We are told Putin, Assad, China, Iran and ISIS are the bad guys. Previously we had been told Hussein, Gadaffi, Bin Laden, Mubarak, Al Qaeda and the Taliban were the bad guys. It is true that none of these men or organizations are good.
It is also true that no one in leadership positions in Washington DC, on Wall Street, in corporate America, or in the mainstream media are good. The entire world is under the control of deceitful, cunning, egomaniacal, corruptible, psychopaths who will stop at nothing to fulfill their personal agendas. They are human beings who have allowed their dark sides to dominate their actions. There are no good guys, just varying degrees of evil imposed upon the masses by erratic unpredictable people with wildly differing levels of intelligence, patriotism and judgement.
The Power of Propaganda
It’s a tribute to the propagandists who have taken Edward Bernays’ teachings to another level as they have molded the minds of millions, consciously manipulating the opinions and beliefs of the masses to further their agenda of world domination. Once the Cold War ended, the ruling class sought enemies to keep their military industrial complex and Wall Street financiers enriched and happy. 9/11 was used to further that agenda as war on a tactic (terror) will never end. Perpetual conflict is a chief goal of the establishment. Orwell would be impressed with how our keepers have perfected the “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” propaganda tool to perpetuate their goals. Both parties continue to promote war and increase the profits of the military industrial complex.
The U.S. invaded Afghanistan fourteen years ago to get bin Laden and rid the country of the Taliban. Bin Laden was supposedly killed in 2011, but no documentary evidence has been revealed to substantiate that claim. The Taliban is stronger than ever in Afghanistan after hundreds of billions in expenditures and thousands of lives lost. The occupation continues. The neo-cons convinced the dimwitted Bush to invade Iraq in 2003 because Hussein was a bad guy with weapons of mass destruction. Amusingly, he was our buddy when he was fighting our Iranian enemies and we provided him with the WMD (gas) he used on the Kurds.
After spending $1 trillion, we left Iraq as a festering quagmire of religious zealots with a bombed out infrastructure and a corrupt incompetent puppet running the show on our behalf. Then it was on to leaving Libya in a state of chaos because we overthrew another bad guy. We didn’t like the democratically elected leader of Egypt after we overthrew Mubarak, so we overthrew Morsi and installed another military dictatorship. The propaganda storyline is always about democracy and getting rid of bad guys, not the truth about securing oil resources, weakening the enemies of Israel, and keeping the profits flowing to our “vital” defense industry.
It seems the empire ran into a bit of a snag with their plan to remove the latest “bad guy” in Syria. Another “bad guy” – Vladimir Putin – saw through the American plan to eliminate Assad and have their co-conspirators in Saudi Arabia and Qatar build a gas pipeline to Europe. After overthrowing the democratically elected president (and friend of Russia) of the Ukraine and waging an unsuccessful war against Russian backed rebels in Eastern Ukraine, Europe was left at the mercy of an angry Putin as far as not freezing to death during the upcoming winter.
Putin is a strongman leader of a country with a nuclear arsenal capable of blowing up the earth several times over. He will do what is in the best interest of his country and will not blink when confronted with the likes of corrupt feckless toadies like Obama, Kerry, Hollande, Merkel, and Edrogen. His counter measures and revelations about the true nature of U.S. and Turkish actions in Syria and Iraq have blown the lid off of U.S. plans in the Middle East.
The latest fear mongering propaganda device for the vested interests has been the dreaded ISIS. The captured mainstream corporate media fails to mention the U.S. created, armed and continues to fund ISIS as part of their master plan to overthrow Assad. The U.S. left Iraq in such a state of chaos and lawlessness, fanatical Islamist radicals used the vacuum of power and the billions of dollars’ worth of top notch U.S. military hardware to create a safe space for themselves within Iraq and Syria. The U.S. has been funding and arming the supposed “moderate” Islamic radicals fighting Assad for the last few years, while attempting to use a false flag gas attack to wage all-out war. The U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Turkey created ISIS in order to further their economic and political interests. Lead neo con warmonger, Maniacal McCain, even had a photo op with his ISIS homies.