Earlier today I published a couple of micro-blog posts that touched on why the capitalist liberal establishment simply cannot be our allies in the fight against fascism. Unfortunately, because ruling class propaganda in America has a stunning power to transform the very meaning of words in our society, I'm concerned that folks may not even understand what I mean when I say "the liberal establishment." Sure, I'm talking about the Democratic Party, but only because they are the most visible (and feckless) face of that establishment in America. The Pig Empire liberal establishment however, comprises virtually the entire capitalist class, and many of their overseers in the petite bourgeoisie.
Today then, I'd like to use this November 8th, 2021 post by Sharon Zhang on Truthout, to both expose that larger liberal establishment and demonstrate how they instinctively support fascism, regardless of the presumed lean of their social politics. With a big assist from a report produced by watchdog group Accountable.US, Zhang reveals that at least eight major U.S. corporations that signed a pledge to support the John Lewis voting rights act, have given thousands of dollars this year to GOP Senators actively blocking it. And we're not talking about the My Pillow guy here either. These are major players in corporate America, all of whom at least front a socially progressive position to consumers; companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Obviously, the focus here for liberals is going to be on the hypocrisy involved; after all, this story pretty much comes down to a bunch of billion dollar corporations trying to craft a socially progressive image that will entice customers, while openly supporting politicians who threaten the franchise. This matters, but it's also important not to miss the forest for the trees in this story. The message corporate America is delivering here could not be more obvious; they're completely fine with fascism because it doesn't interfere with the capitalist order and their bottom lines. Hell, electing Trump actually got them the mother of all tax cuts last time!
I hate to say it kids, but when I tell you fascism is an inherently capitalist reaction, I'm not speaking in metaphors here. The private sector isn't going to help us fight fascism, and neither are their in-pocket politicians or muppet stenographers in the media. If this is going to end in anything other than mass graves, it's going to be on the people to stop reactionary ruling class elites from driving the car off the cliff. Clearly, if it's a choice between working with nazis, or paying his taxes, you can pretty much bet guys like Jeff Bezos are going to find a way to get comfortable with fascism.
That's what I really mean when I say the liberal establishment would prefer fascism, to sharing.
Editor’s Note: In the Aggregate is a regular round-up feature over on NIDC, that showcases and expands on my social media analysis from around the web.
It's All in the Wrists
Well my friends; the world doesn't stop just because you've had a difficult week and you'd rather play with kittens. This weekend I'm back with a new edition of In the Aggregate; collecting the very best of my social media analysis from all across the internet. I hope you've got a comfy chair because this is a long one. Touching on topics like climate crisis, supervillain billionaires, and the growing menace of American fascism, this edition of our bi-weekly roundup is a swirling vortex of bullsh*t repellent. Join me this week on NIDC for "In the Aggregate: Critical Overload."
Hello folks, how's your morning going? Mine could be better!
Last night I learned that when the universe is trying to tell you something, and you refuse to listen, she can go out of her way to make sure you grasp the point. In one three hour period, it became utterly apparent to me that I was going to have to change some things, long term, about the way my writing is organized.
First, a few of my most loyal readers approached me on social media to express their misgivings about the micro-analysis blogging I've been doing on Facebook. Specifically, they wanted to read my weekday blogs, but they had no desire to help a company as evil as Facebook in any way. This immediately put me in an awkward spot because while I like some of the technical aspects of blogging on Facebook, and a great number of my readers use only Facebook for their social media needs; I can't disagree with folks who want to boycott the platform.
There's no denying the fact Mark Zuckerberg is literally a supervillain billionaire reactionary whose business model harms journalism, and helps fascists; whether that's his intention, or not. As an independent writer, I'm pretty much required to use Facebook to reach new readers; it's just how the business works in 2021. Without a proverbial gun to my head however? I'd almost certainly boycott the platform myself; there are far better social media services available for free these days, although some of them also tend to be run by reactionary billionaire tech bros.
A little while later, I was still mulling over the problem while working on the latest edition of Film Sessions here on Media Madness. That series has been featured on this blog because when I first started it, the posts I was making were very much blog material; just a quick intro, an embedded video link and some keyword tags. Over time however, these Film Sessions posts evolved into heavily-sourced essays in their own right.
Now I don't know how much you know about the software Blogger uses to let me create this website, but my experience working with it has taught me a few things. If what you're asking Blogger to do is let you bang out a few ranty paragraphs, attach a picture, and link to a few sources, this platform is really good at its job. If on the other hand you ask the platform to work like a full blown website, letting you post multi-thousand word essays with hundreds of links and embedded video player boxes, things break down quickly. Specifically, Blogger starts eating your links and bizarrely, some of the spaces between words and sentences.
You can see where this is going, right? While I was pondering ways to solve the Facebook conundrum, Blogger ate a whole bunch of my research links and chewed up the article formatting. This is not even remotely the first time this has happened to me here on Media Madness, and while it may be my fault for not saving my research links in another location, that doesn't change the fact that I lost hours of hard work in one sitting this time.
At that point I found myself approaching what I assumed was my absolute peak of white-hot rage; as it turns out however, I assumed wrong. A few moments later, while I was out of the room trying not to punch my monitor, Google Chrome triggered an automated update I'd forgotten to turn off. The open websites auto-restore failed, and failed again a few minutes later when I tried to do it manually. In other words, I lost every open tab on my browser and with it literally all the research links I've been saving; compromising progress on as many as four or five projects I'm working on.
Naturally then, I started laughing; but not in a happy way.
When I finally stopped thrashing about on the floor in anguish however, I decided that there probably were a few easy solutions to my converging problems. Going forward, I'm going to make some changes in terms of what types of articles go where in my down-market media empire (snicker) and in doing so, alter how I use this site in particular:
I'm going to start using Media Madness as a media-focused blog. Pursuant to this, I'm going to migrate my weekday blog posts (which always include an article link) to this website; we'll call the new feature "Nina-Bytes" because I like making a horse's ass of myself, clearly. I will continue to cross post these micro-analysis blogs for the Facebook only crowd, but their home base will remain here. Other posts will likely include blog-length social media discussions, short take downs, and advertisement links for my full length media essays on NIDC.
I'm moving the Film Sessions feature, and all full length essays off Media Madness, and on to ninaillingworth.com (NIDC.) While I will still posts linked advertisements for those features here, I'm absolutely done losing any more work to Blogger's buggy software. I will also be moving the new In the Aggregate feature to NIDC and altering its composition slightly to allow for easier compilation of all my social media writing.
Obviously, none of this is how I wanted to spend the wee hours of my Tuesday morning, but I feel the technical limitations of the Blogger platform have pretty much forced my hand here. Throughout the day I'm going to slowly transfer the pre-existing seven Facebook blogs to this website; subscribers are asked to please excuse unwanted notifications in advance. Hopefully by tomorrow this will all be a bad memory and we can just proceed forward as if I've always been smart enough to use the blogging software for, well, blogging.
Editor's note: right, so as I mentioned last night, ongoing Facebook f*ckery is forcing me to move my weekly film sessions posts over here, to Media Madness. Thankfully, this is the last backlogged video I have to crosspost and then going forward I'll just post new film sessions here and on Facebook simultaneously.
Okay, it seems like maybe I’m going to put things in the can for Christmas after all, despite having no plans really for this plague holiday. I’m feeling pretty run down, social media isn’t very much fun since this Dore-AOC debate broke, and my hype-man needs time off to recharge and visit loved ones. I did however promise a Sunday film study, and I’m here to deliver – albeit a day late.
Ideally, over the break I plan to finish another two film study posts and probably another Media Madness blog, if I can fit in some time after Christmas, but before the new year. Otherwise, please accept my hopes that you find a way to make a happy holiday out of these unique circumstances and I’ll be back with more formal writings sometime around January 2nd, 2021.
Earlier this week, I found myself hunting for a specific quote from New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, when I stumbled across this remarkable eighteen minute Tedx Talk he gave that I'm going to share with you today in our weekly Film Session.
First things first, I should remind you that as a Tedx Talk, and not just a regular TED Talk, this event merely copies the TED Talk format and was put together independently by people in Traverse City. Which makes a certain amount of sense, because Perkins describes precisely the kind of networks of economic power generated by corporations, the U.S. and American-aligned governments, the Pig Empire's covert agencies and yes, the U.S. military, that the truly elite Tech Bros and Davos Divas really would rather not talk about. So who is John Perkins and what is his book really about? Let’s turn to Wikipedia for a more concise answer than I would have written:
“The book heavily criticizes U.S. foreign policy and the widely accepted notion that "all economic growth benefits humankind, and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits." Perkins suggests that, in many cases, only a small portion of the population benefits at the expense of the rest, pointing to, as an example, an increase in income inequality, whereby large U.S. corporations exploit cheap labor, and oil companies destroy local environment.
Perkins describes what he calls a system of corporatocracy and greed as the driving forces behind establishing the United States as a global empire, in which he took a role as an "economic hit man" to expand its influence.
Perkins' function, according to the book, was to convince the political and financial leadership of developing countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with debts they could not hope to pay, such countries would then be forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues that these nations were effectively neutralized politically, with their wealth gaps driven wider and their long-term economies crippled. In this capacity, Perkins recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an economic hit man as follows:
Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.”
Of course, to say that given this type of backstory Perkins himself is a bit of an odd duck, would be a massive understatement, and when he first published Confessions of an Economic Hit Man back in 2004, his quirky personality and bizarre work history, were quickly weaponized by various appendages of the establishment to try and discredit the damning story his book had just told the world.
A funny thing happened when folks started to investigate into Perkins however, they discovered that on the whole, most of the claims that would be verifiable, checked out. Yes, he was in fact an economist with the then-powerful, U.S. government connected but widely anonymous firm Chas T. Main, yes he was in the developing countries he said he was, during the times he said he’d visited them, and yes, at one point Perkins’ boss at the firm said: “Basically his story is true.… What John's book says is, there was a conspiracy to put all these countries on the hook, and that happened. Whether or not it was some sinister plot or not is up to interpretation, but many of these countries are still over the barrel and have never been able to repay the loans” - although it should be noted that the executive, Einar Greve, would later walk back admitting the firm’s association with the NSA and some minor, but salacious parts of Perkins’ personal backstory.
The real eye-opener however was when the U.S. occupation and sham rebuilding of Iraq was exposed as a complicated American corporate welfare and influence trading scheme, virtually identical to the trap of debt, bombs and murder Perkins described in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. You’ll even hear him bring up a famous name from both his story, and the Iraq privatization scandals – Halliburton; remember them? Overall, there is a certain spy games, or cloak and dagger element to Perkins’ telling of his life story, but the simple truth is that this web of personal economic incentives for neocolonialist elites, trade agreements contingent on the installation and maintenance of a neofeudalist economy, or the brute force of Pig Empire missiles, taken together to form the system of control the author describes, are today well known as the tools by which America maintains global supremacy in a post-Cold War world.
Although this eighteen minute video below represents a decent enough overview of what Perkins exposed to the world, and the man is certainly no socialist, I would still encourage you to read (The New) Confessions of an Economic Hitman as a study in how the forces of debt, violence and capitalism come together to propagate Pig Empire rule over most of the planet. Furthermore, as I suggested in my original Instagram post, you could consider combining this with a review of Stanley Butler’s “War is a Racket” and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ “Adults in the Room” for a very thorough examination of how global capitalism actually works, from a behind the scenes perspective offered by actors in multiple different parts of the filthy drama and swindle.
In the meantime, please check out this short introduction spoken (rather quickly) by John Perkins himself, and try not to get caught up in his bizarre insistence that that there’s a difference between “good capitalism” and “predatory capitalism.”
Unfortunately I got tied up this past weekend finishing off a couple of essays and in the commotion, I forgot to leave time for our weekly film session. Now that I’ve published a few things and had a chance to catch my breath, I thought I’d post a make-up session today.
This time I want to take a look at a rather lengthy video (55 minutes) by a creator who is really quite new to me; What the Theory’s Tom Nicholas. Now according to his rather thin Wikipedia stub, Nicholas is “a British economist currently the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School” - which is kind of funny because he looks like the kid who shags balls at a football match, and most of his videos seem to be about philosophy, or political and social theory. Whether or not this is as a result of a Wikipedia identification mistake featuring two guys with the same name (the picture looks like the same dude,) I couldn’t tell you, but based on my extremely limited sample of one video – Tom is a pretty smart guy, with at least a reasonably nuanced grasp of media theory in a capitalist environment.
More interesting to us however, is the fact that while he’s hardly Leon Trotsky, Nicholas does appear to be at least a bit of a soft socialist; perhaps a low-key Corbynite running just a bit left of the average American democratic socialist. Although a quick scan of his Youtube channel shows that as a younger creator it took Tom a while to find his stride, and the pop culture and politics videos he makes seem of very dubious quality, his left perspective on major political and social theories videos are absolute master-classes in nerdy, informative Youtube videos; including shockingly high production values.
In today’s extended-length What the Theory video, Nicholas takes an extremely granular look at the reality of media bias under private control inside a supposedly adversarial and heroic free press; which as you may well know by now is a subject near and dear to my heart. What makes Tom’s work here at least a little unique however is that he combines the ideas of media theorists Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, as well as a little bit of Marxist sociologist and foundational cultural theorist Stuart Hall, with key observations using an actual BBC story from earlier this year, about the so-called “migrant crisis,” a British version of the American “migrant caravan” scare, to demonstrate how the propaganda model works to establish bias in practice. Indeed, the overall thrashing Nicholas gives the supposedly unbiased, public broadcaster (the BBC) is frankly worth the price of admission on this video by itself, but American viewers will discover that Tom consistently finds ways to relate content about British media back to the American media environment, which prevents the piece from becoming too localized to be of use to half the people reading this.
Nicholas opens by dissecting a BBC Newsnight presentation about a raft full of Iraqi asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel, and shows how through the use of framing, suggestive language, and a careful selection bias of consulted experts, the program strongly encourages you to assume certain ideas about, and attitudes towards the migrants. As will undoubtedly be all too familiar to U.S. viewers constantly inundated with propaganda demonizing migrants, these things are all bad; ideas like migrant crossings are a national crisis, migrants might be dangerous to British citizens, and something must be done to stop, um, destitute refugees fleeing Pig Empire wars. With this analysis as background context, Tom then goes on to explain the political, cultural, and of course financial reasons why the Newsnight program adopts these positions and encourages its viewers to do the same. Finally, using both the propaganda model, and Stuart Hall's theories about representation and meaning, our presenter demonstrates that not only is the media biased on behalf of wealth and power, but also in favor of the social and cultural hierarchies necessary to maintain the current order; which in today's Pig Empire society, means an order of unrestrained corporate power.
The end result is a satisfying (albeit earnest) video that does a very good job of bringing media bias bible Manufacturing Consent out of the late Cold War period, and into a thoroughly modernized and corporatized context. A great example of this might be how despite Manufacturing Consent’s hyper-focus on the issues of American imperialism and media bias, Nicholas demonstrates how the five propaganda filters work to shape coverage of issues the viewer will directly counter in their everyday life; like coverage of policing, Astroturf campaigns, and yes, the nature of establishment reporting on the so-called “migrant crisis.” Coincidentally, the fact that Nicholas’s work builds on the Five Filters of the Modern Media video I shared with you months ago, and touches on or reinforces some of the things I’ve been writing myself about the propaganda value of distorted framing in media stories, and the corporate media origins of “fake news” and lack of trust in the media institution as a whole, is just icing on the cake. I’ll include a number of related links for you to explore more if you so desire, in the comments below.
If I had to quibble with Tom’s work here, my first complaint would probably be the failure to even mention Michael Parenti and his 1986 work Inventing Reality; a book which Herman and Chomsky clearly borrowed from liberally (pun intended) without attribution – which is sometimes called “plagiarism” when you’re not America’s most celebrated “anarchist” intellectual. Furthermore, I would have liked to have seen a little more direct attack on the capitalist distortion of the final media product consumers are presented with, ala McChesney, and maybe even some explanation of how all encompassing the media propaganda sphere is, drawing on say a theorist like Marshall McLuhan. Given that the video is already fifty-five minutes long however, perhaps that is too big of an ask at this point.
All in all, this is a wonderful video if you’ve never read Manufacturing Consent, and still a reasonably worthwhile experience if like me, you most certainly have. That’s why I picked it for this week’s extremely late film study.
Now keeping in mind that this video was published on October 24th of this year, and thus some of the commentary on the (then) upcoming US election is slightly out of date, it's also fairly clear that Johnson recorded the material assuming that Joe Biden would in fact win the election - which due to the screwed up way the American electoral college works, and Trump's temper tantrum "chicken coup," was a little touch and go for way longer than it should have been, but ultimately did turn out to be the correct assumption.
With that noted however, the reason I'm sharing this video here today is because I'm tired, and after taking a tremendous amount of abuse for calling a fascist Trump administration, well, fascist, both over the past four years and astoundingly, even quite recently on social media from black helicopter leftists who read a lot of Ben Beanwald - someone sent me this video to remind me that I wasn't the only one who saw Trump and Trumpism for what they really were; I was just perhaps among the first.
In this thirty-nine minute feature, Cody Johnston manages to humorously examine vast swathes of American history to expose the triangle between capitalist exploitation, codified white supremacy, and the fascist backlash against any social progress by the marginalized, particularly African Americans. Johnston draws clear parallels between Jim Crow era America, and the modern fascist movement that solidified in American politics as Trumpism, while simultaneously demonstrating the role neoliberalism has had in creating the conditions necessary to produce fascism in the first place. It's funny, it's informative, and most importantly Cody is correct; which is a consistent feature of Some More News videos about American fascism.
Although it's not the entire focus of this episode, and Johnson's examination of the role of Jim Crow laws in particular (instead of general white supremacy and the doctrine of white nationalism, as I had) are crucial to the production, I can also say that Cody managed to fit about 90% of the things I wrote about the Pork Reich and all-American fascism into roughly half of a 40 minute video. Just about the only thing I wished he'd spent more time on here is the role of tech bro fascist billionaires in backstopping and funding this whole sh*tshow.
In the end, realizing that folks like Johnston were also seeing what I'd seen, was just the antidote I needed to get over being gaslit by crypto-reactionaries, who aren't even anti-capitalists, claiming to be "the real left" online - including many popular influencers like Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, and others.
I'll place some related links in the comments, including another short video by the Gravel Institute on why the Electoral College is bullsh*t, for added value. But yeah, I told you so; and if you're smart, you'll listen when I tell you that beating swine emperor Trump doesn't mean we've beaten fascism - these guys aren't going anywhere.
Well, I think at this point it's safe to say it's been a productive, if tiring ten days or so - in addition to two fully cited essays, this first week of blogging yielded another seven or so pieces of varying lengths. Obviously, I probably can't keep publishing something every day forever without burning out, but I'm feeling pretty good about the start we've got off to so far. As such, I'm going keep this post short, sweet and relaxing.
Of course, nobody ever said that relaxing couldn't be educational and that's where today's video comes in. In light of the fact that we just looked at a seventy minute video about Ben Shapiro (by Cody Johnson at Some More News) earlier this week – I thought it might be nice to briefly bask in the intellect and eloquence of one of American history's greatest minds and greatest orators; James Baldwin. Today's clip comes to us from the end portion of Baldwin's opening argument in his now famous 1965 Cambridge debate against the truly odious conservative faux intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. - for those of you interested, I'll include a link to the full debate below and an article that talks about why this debate was so important (and tragically remains so, to this very day.)
So roughly speaking – who were these men, and why should you be interested in this debate?
Well, James Baldwin was an African American writer, speaker, activist and intellectual whose work across a myriad of mediums (novels, plays, poetry, essays and public oration or, as we shall see below, debate) focused heavily on issues of marginalization in the Pig Empire; including distinctions of race, gender, sexuality and class as they function in Western social hierarchies. To say that Baldwin was a brilliant man is something of a massive understatement. Frankly I'm of the mind that the less said about Buckley the better but by way of brief explanation please allow me say that now deceased founder of the National Review spent most of his adult life serving as living proof that it's always been pretty easy to get away with nonsensical racist double-speak in America, if you happen to deliver it with a mid-Atlantic accent.
Taken together, these two intellectuals publicly represented some of the most eloquent representatives of two separate positions on racial equality in America; at least on the surface, and until this very debate exposed Buckley and 1960’s American conservatism for the sham repackaging of cracker supremacy that it really is (and remains today.) For you see my friends, there is really no question about who “won” the debate; Baldwin destroyed Buckley with the whole world watching.
The real question here, and the one I’d like you to keep in your mind as you watch this clip of James Baldwin speaking is why there was even a debate at all? As you listen to Baldwin calmly and emphatically explaining to a (primarily white) audience of British students that African Americans are indeed human just like them, and that racism is not only real, but a function of direct choices made by our entire society, never forget that the topic of this debate was seriously the question of “whether or not the American Dream has come at the expense of the American Negro” - a question that becomes repugnant in its own right once one remembers that the wealth and power of America was forged on the bloody, beaten backs of African Americans subjected to chattel slavery; even without considering the open white supremacy that fuels our society to this very day.
And that I suppose is both the real triumph, and the real tragedy of this clip; even after making one of the most brilliant men in American history stoop to defending his own humanity against an assclown like Buckley, for the entertainment of the viewing audience and perhaps the education of some college kids – we still, to this day, have learned almost nothing about what Baldwin said, as a society.
We didn’t deserve James Baldwin in 1965, and we still don’t deserve him today; and yet there he remains, forgiving our ignorance and calmly exposing the fundamental lie of white supremacy, that a man can be superior to another man by right of birth and the color of his skin, decade after decade – I hope, some day soon, we will finally learn to listen.
