Michael Macfeat
The Redacted Document Provides the Citizenry with the Calm that Emanates from a Dearth of Disturbing Information
Enjoy the increasing quietude of an inevitable increase in governmental secrecy, couched in the jargon of the War on Terror.
The enlightened citizen of our contemporary society learns to expect an absence of meaning in the language of State (Staatliche Lügen).
Censorship is a word that always carries a negative connotation, despite the fact that it is capable of producing positive results.
Censorship, this ancient system of mendacity has a calming influence on the public, the result of the withholding of disturbing or controversial information.
The majority of Americans consider Al Jazeera sympathetic to Al Qaeda and Arab terrorism in general, despite never having seen any broadcasts from the station. I make a point of asking someones opinion on Al Jazeera if the situation presents itself. Everyone I assumes that Al Jazeera openly displays their fealty to radical fundamentalist Islamic theocracies and that they support terrorism. Also 100% of the time, not one person has ever seen even one broadcast emanating from the Arab news agency since it is de-facto banned from American television networks and these people make no effort to seek the information outside the traditional news agencies in the United States. This is in part due to the thinly disguised racism against Arabs since 9/11 and people that are often mistaken by the ignorant to be Arabs, the most common example being Sikhs. People that would never openly use derogatory language against African-Americans freely discriminate against those of Middle Eastern decent. It is ugly and for the most part ignored in the United States, considered justified by 9/11 and for the most part continues unexamined.
Before I sought information about Al Jazeera, I must confess that I somewhat expected broadcasts dedicated to radical fundamentalist Islamic thought myself. After viewing several Al Jazeera news broadcasts on YouTube I was shocked by the even handed coverage and the similarity in tone and programming to what appears to be their paradigm, the highly respected American news network, CNN.
The rioting in Egypt resulted in Hosni Mubarak banning Al Jazeera from Egyptian airwaves in one of several moves to hamper the flow of information. There was also a brief attempt to shut down the internet. By the time the internet was silenced the genie of insurrection was already out of the bottle. Mubarak's departure was a matter of when, not if.
The perception of the government of Egypt concerning Al Jazeera is oppositional to that of the American public; that Al Jazeera is dangerous precisely because they side with the spontaneous expression of the Egyptian people and their demands of democracy, freedom and the end to the regime headed by Mubarak and his use of repression and torture.
Please take a moment to see for yourself what Al Jazeera presents as news on the internet, since it is not available on the vast majority of televisions in America. This banishment from the airwaves continues despite the fact that the American government professes to have the same goals in Egypt that the Egyptian people have; a democratic government, freedom of expression and the end of repression and torture. It would be dishonest to claim amnesia regarding the support given Mubarak for three decades, which made Egypt the second largest recipient of American aid despite their abysmal record of human rights violations.
Yet Al Jazeera, echoing the desires of the United States government, remains a pariah in here America.
This is a perfect example of the conflict between reality and perception. Al Jazeera and the United States agree that democracy, freedom and the end of repression are non-negotiable in Egypt and that the Egyptian regime is incapable in that role. This agreement is not examined publicly in the US, since this agreement would belie the popular concept of biased journalism at the station, a popular concept perpetrated by the U. S. government after 9/11 and in the early halcyon days of the Iraq War, when George Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" during his star turn on the aircraft carrier, even though American troops continue to be stationed on Iraqi soil even today.
Al Jazeera is certainly not nearly as biased toward fundamentalist Islam as Fox News is in the direction of the lunatic fringe of the fundamentalist Christian right. Not that many years ago, biased news reporting as seen on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News was unthinkable. There was at least a pretense of neutrality and civility with regards to politics and the shrill caterwauling of Glen beck would have been restricted to the private, late night drunken revelry by conventioneers at a the John Birch Society soiree.
The same people that rail about the Barack Obama's birth certificate are content to receive all of their right wing agitprop from Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, an Australian. I suspect that Michelle Bachman, the vocal spokesperson for the all-white, extrmist Tea Party, is as ignorant of that fact as she is the majority of her American history. I am not sure, however, whether she thinks she can see Russia from her house but she does seem to have a problem with bogeymen.
Without the upset produced by an unpleasant truth, we can relax into a quiescent ignorance of direct and more subtle forms of censorship.
The government mandate is for the protection of the wealthy against the ever expanding hoard of the impoverished and it will continue to be so.
As long as the majority is denied access to information that would act as a catalyst for unified action against the injustice of the present system of wealth distribution, the greed of the ruling class continues unabated.
Working in conjunction with the absence of information, there is a deliberate strategy of filling this void with inconsequential controversies such as the furor over burning of the flag of the United States during the Bush administration and Barack Obama's birth certificate now.
These distractions help create the divisiveness between various sub-groups of the poor, few as successful as racial division, which prevents the vast majority (60%) from organizing a united effort against the oppression of ruling elite, a mere 20% of the population. The uni-racial Tea Party is a blatant example of poor whites siding with the rich on legislation designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, simply because they identify with a wealthy white elite on the basis of race. Poor whites envision themselves as being middle-class but all of the evidence points that they are lower class and getting poorer by the day. They would rather bask in the glory of a bogus racial superiority than admit that they have considerably more in common with African-Americans and Hispanics. The long-standing and single most successful divisive tactic in the US is the skillful manipulation of racist agendas that insure that blacks and whites of the same social class are too busy hating each other to organize against their real oppressors. African-Americans are widely perceived as the race of poverty in the US despite the sheer numbers of an obvious vast white majority in the lower class.
The media helps perpetrate this myth that allows lower class whites to see themselves as superior to their black peers, which is why the impoverished whites relate to the policies of the Republican Party despite the fact that the Republicans are transparently the enablers of the inequity of the present economic situation and its escalation. They are beholden only to the rich and corporate America.
The Democrats are also in the employ of the oligarchy, the difference being that they cannot count the ranks of the poor white trash as supporters. They have been consistently outmaneuvered by the Republicans in this area.
The Republican Party in the United States is so skillful at the machinations of censorship and distraction that they can get poor whites to rally in the streets, demanding that they have no access to health insurance. They have been sold on the evils of Socialism and they will not be a part of it. Without health insurance, poor Americans are guaranteed a shorter life but the Republicans have skillfully manipulated them to prefer illness and death than the indignity of living under a "Socialist" agenda. The largest percentage of Americans unemployed since the Depression of 1929 are uninsured because the United States is the only country in the world with employer based health insurance.
Can you imagine the mandate of a presidential candidate receiving 60% of the vote?
The top 1% of the population in the United States controls 43% of all financial assets.
The next 4% controls 40% of all national income.
The next 15% comprises the remainder of the ruling class, totaling 20% of the population in the Upper class.
The next 20% is considered the middle class.
The bottom 60% are mired in poverty and this number steadily increases as the ruling class increases their holdings dramatically and while the top 1% receive 2/3 of all gains in national income!
The two pronged strategy is the limiting of access to information combined with the media dramatization of distractions of meaningless social issues. The absence of real political information is deliberate and must be maintained or else it would expose this system of unmitigated ruling class greed fed by a system of mendacity.
The media, at the behest of the oligarchy, is able to convince lower class wage earners that they are actually members middle class, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The reason the economy appears to be pulling out of the recent depression is that consumer sales are up. Paradoxically this is having no influence on the double digit unemployment.
The reason is that the ruling class, expanding their holdings at unprecedented rates, are able to purchase more without any deleterious effect on their lifestyles. The 60% at the bottom of this Ponzi Scheme play no part in this increase of the consumer index and are the victims of unemployment caused by the outsourcing of American jobs to India and China, a move radically fattening the coffers of the rich. When Ohio Art, the manufacturer of Etch-A-Sketch, paid workers a wage of $11 an hour. Ohio Art did not want the price of the Etch-A-Sketch to exceed $20 so they outsourced the jobs to China, where the workers earned 87 cents an hour and frequently worked 80 hour weeks with no increase in pay for overtime work in excess of 40 hours. The profits in labor savings alone are enormous and the social costs of a vast army of unemployed and uninsured workers is completely ignored.
Corporations have no responsibility or loyalty to their workforce when they outsource jobs. Although the wealthiest Americans are often involved with political parties, make donations to them and consider themselves patriotic, they exhibit no sense of responsibility or remorse for the destruction of the fabric of American society and the human suffering caused by outsourcing jobs and suddenly making millions of workers without jobs, pay or health insurance. The Republicans rail against big government and corporate America feels no responsibility to their former workers. It is a wonder who the oligarchy expects to solve this problem.
60% of this country is mired in abject poverty and confronted by an unsure future with no social net to protect them from the indignity of complete economic collapse and homelessness.
What percentage of the lower class, many of them formerly and comfortably nestled among the ranks of the middle class, will have to find themselves and their children living on the streets, homeless, before they attempt to organize themselves against the indignity of this system designed to permanently benefit the oligarchy?
The Redacted Document Provides the Citizenry with the Calm that Emanates from a Dearth of Disturbing Information
Enjoy the increasing quietude of an inevitable increase in governmental secrecy, couched in the jargon of the War on Terror.
The enlightened citizen of our contemporary society learns to expect an absence of meaning in the language of State (Staatliche Lügen).
Censorship is a word that always carries a negative connotation, despite the fact that it is capable of producing positive results.
Censorship, this ancient system of mendacity has a calming influence on the public, the result of the withholding of disturbing or controversial information.
The majority of Americans consider Al Jazeera sympathetic to Al Qaeda and Arab terrorism in general, despite never having seen any broadcasts from the station. I make a point of asking someones opinion on Al Jazeera if the situation presents itself. Everyone I assumes that Al Jazeera openly displays their fealty to radical fundamentalist Islamic theocracies and that they support terrorism. Also 100% of the time, not one person has ever seen even one broadcast emanating from the Arab news agency since it is de-facto banned from American television networks and these people make no effort to seek the information outside the traditional news agencies in the United States. This is in part due to the thinly disguised racism against Arabs since 9/11 and people that are often mistaken by the ignorant to be Arabs, the most common example being Sikhs. People that would never openly use derogatory language against African-Americans freely discriminate against those of Middle Eastern decent. It is ugly and for the most part ignored in the United States, considered justified by 9/11 and for the most part continues unexamined.
Before I sought information about Al Jazeera, I must confess that I somewhat expected broadcasts dedicated to radical fundamentalist Islamic thought myself. After viewing several Al Jazeera news broadcasts on YouTube I was shocked by the even handed coverage and the similarity in tone and programming to what appears to be their paradigm, the highly respected American news network, CNN.
The rioting in Egypt resulted in Hosni Mubarak banning Al Jazeera from Egyptian airwaves in one of several moves to hamper the flow of information. There was also a brief attempt to shut down the internet. By the time the internet was silenced the genie of insurrection was already out of the bottle. Mubarak's departure was a matter of when, not if.
The perception of the government of Egypt concerning Al Jazeera is oppositional to that of the American public; that Al Jazeera is dangerous precisely because they side with the spontaneous expression of the Egyptian people and their demands of democracy, freedom and the end to the regime headed by Mubarak and his use of repression and torture.
Please take a moment to see for yourself what Al Jazeera presents as news on the internet, since it is not available on the vast majority of televisions in America. This banishment from the airwaves continues despite the fact that the American government professes to have the same goals in Egypt that the Egyptian people have; a democratic government, freedom of expression and the end of repression and torture. It would be dishonest to claim amnesia regarding the support given Mubarak for three decades, which made Egypt the second largest recipient of American aid despite their abysmal record of human rights violations.
Yet Al Jazeera, echoing the desires of the United States government, remains a pariah in here America.
This is a perfect example of the conflict between reality and perception. Al Jazeera and the United States agree that democracy, freedom and the end of repression are non-negotiable in Egypt and that the Egyptian regime is incapable in that role. This agreement is not examined publicly in the US, since this agreement would belie the popular concept of biased journalism at the station, a popular concept perpetrated by the U. S. government after 9/11 and in the early halcyon days of the Iraq War, when George Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" during his star turn on the aircraft carrier, even though American troops continue to be stationed on Iraqi soil even today.
Al Jazeera is certainly not nearly as biased toward fundamentalist Islam as Fox News is in the direction of the lunatic fringe of the fundamentalist Christian right. Not that many years ago, biased news reporting as seen on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News was unthinkable. There was at least a pretense of neutrality and civility with regards to politics and the shrill caterwauling of Glen beck would have been restricted to the private, late night drunken revelry by conventioneers at a the John Birch Society soiree.
The same people that rail about the Barack Obama's birth certificate are content to receive all of their right wing agitprop from Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, an Australian. I suspect that Michelle Bachman, the vocal spokesperson for the all-white, extrmist Tea Party, is as ignorant of that fact as she is the majority of her American history. I am not sure, however, whether she thinks she can see Russia from her house but she does seem to have a problem with bogeymen.
Without the upset produced by an unpleasant truth, we can relax into a quiescent ignorance of direct and more subtle forms of censorship.
The government mandate is for the protection of the wealthy against the ever expanding hoard of the impoverished and it will continue to be so.
As long as the majority is denied access to information that would act as a catalyst for unified action against the injustice of the present system of wealth distribution, the greed of the ruling class continues unabated.
Working in conjunction with the absence of information, there is a deliberate strategy of filling this void with inconsequential controversies such as the furor over burning of the flag of the United States during the Bush administration and Barack Obama's birth certificate now.
These distractions help create the divisiveness between various sub-groups of the poor, few as successful as racial division, which prevents the vast majority (60%) from organizing a united effort against the oppression of ruling elite, a mere 20% of the population. The uni-racial Tea Party is a blatant example of poor whites siding with the rich on legislation designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, simply because they identify with a wealthy white elite on the basis of race. Poor whites envision themselves as being middle-class but all of the evidence points that they are lower class and getting poorer by the day. They would rather bask in the glory of a bogus racial superiority than admit that they have considerably more in common with African-Americans and Hispanics. The long-standing and single most successful divisive tactic in the US is the skillful manipulation of racist agendas that insure that blacks and whites of the same social class are too busy hating each other to organize against their real oppressors. African-Americans are widely perceived as the race of poverty in the US despite the sheer numbers of an obvious vast white majority in the lower class.
The media helps perpetrate this myth that allows lower class whites to see themselves as superior to their black peers, which is why the impoverished whites relate to the policies of the Republican Party despite the fact that the Republicans are transparently the enablers of the inequity of the present economic situation and its escalation. They are beholden only to the rich and corporate America.
The Democrats are also in the employ of the oligarchy, the difference being that they cannot count the ranks of the poor white trash as supporters. They have been consistently outmaneuvered by the Republicans in this area.
The Republican Party in the United States is so skillful at the machinations of censorship and distraction that they can get poor whites to rally in the streets, demanding that they have no access to health insurance. They have been sold on the evils of Socialism and they will not be a part of it. Without health insurance, poor Americans are guaranteed a shorter life but the Republicans have skillfully manipulated them to prefer illness and death than the indignity of living under a "Socialist" agenda. The largest percentage of Americans unemployed since the Depression of 1929 are uninsured because the United States is the only country in the world with employer based health insurance.
Can you imagine the mandate of a presidential candidate receiving 60% of the vote?
The top 1% of the population in the United States controls 43% of all financial assets.
The next 4% controls 40% of all national income.
The next 15% comprises the remainder of the ruling class, totaling 20% of the population in the Upper class.
The next 20% is considered the middle class.
The bottom 60% are mired in poverty and this number steadily increases as the ruling class increases their holdings dramatically and while the top 1% receive 2/3 of all gains in national income!
The two pronged strategy is the limiting of access to information combined with the media dramatization of distractions of meaningless social issues. The absence of real political information is deliberate and must be maintained or else it would expose this system of unmitigated ruling class greed fed by a system of mendacity.
The media, at the behest of the oligarchy, is able to convince lower class wage earners that they are actually members middle class, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The reason the economy appears to be pulling out of the recent depression is that consumer sales are up. Paradoxically this is having no influence on the double digit unemployment.
The reason is that the ruling class, expanding their holdings at unprecedented rates, are able to purchase more without any deleterious effect on their lifestyles. The 60% at the bottom of this Ponzi Scheme play no part in this increase of the consumer index and are the victims of unemployment caused by the outsourcing of American jobs to India and China, a move radically fattening the coffers of the rich. When Ohio Art, the manufacturer of Etch-A-Sketch, paid workers a wage of $11 an hour. Ohio Art did not want the price of the Etch-A-Sketch to exceed $20 so they outsourced the jobs to China, where the workers earned 87 cents an hour and frequently worked 80 hour weeks with no increase in pay for overtime work in excess of 40 hours. The profits in labor savings alone are enormous and the social costs of a vast army of unemployed and uninsured workers is completely ignored.
Corporations have no responsibility or loyalty to their workforce when they outsource jobs. Although the wealthiest Americans are often involved with political parties, make donations to them and consider themselves patriotic, they exhibit no sense of responsibility or remorse for the destruction of the fabric of American society and the human suffering caused by outsourcing jobs and suddenly making millions of workers without jobs, pay or health insurance. The Republicans rail against big government and corporate America feels no responsibility to their former workers. It is a wonder who the oligarchy expects to solve this problem.
60% of this country is mired in abject poverty and confronted by an unsure future with no social net to protect them from the indignity of complete economic collapse and homelessness.
What percentage of the lower class, many of them formerly and comfortably nestled among the ranks of the middle class, will have to find themselves and their children living on the streets, homeless, before they attempt to organize themselves against the indignity of this system designed to permanently benefit the oligarchy?