Revisiting Orwell's "1984" - Our "Fair and Balanced" Media

Well, gosh – here we go again. Another of the great minds agrees with stumbling, mumbling, Neanderthal me. This one says his piece in language so close to the language I used when I said it long before – three years in this case, but usually more recently – that my friends all think these guys are reading my website. Rita, my wife, will never be convinced otherwise.

Actually, it may indeed be coincidence. Most of this stuff isn’t rocket science (which, even if it were, I’d still get right), you know, and – since it’s still just logic and math – unbiased people have to get the same answers. Two and two are four, whether you’re adding or multiplying, in any language. It doesn’t make any difference whether you’re Democrat or Republican, either.

Yes, I know you THINK it does, but it doesn’t.

The latest example of what I’m talking about is today’s story that Comptroller General of the U.S. David M. Walker is warning us of “looming disaster for America's economy if an effort isn't made to control spending.”

Well, now. General Walker heads the Government Accountability Office (talk about your oxymorons), the supposedly independent, nonpartisan Congressional watchdog that evaluates the spending of American tax dollars and advises Congress on improving government programs. I don’t know how they manage to say stuff like that with a straight face - I always expect a punch line right after something like “independent, nonpartisan” - but it IS the kind of thing they always say.

Anyway, Walker says the “decision-makers” – his terminology, again; I couldn’t say that with a straight face, either (the words “decision-maker” always makes me think of Iraq and how we got into that mess) – “suffer from tunnel vision and myopia.”

Stop right there. It sounds like he’s on our side, doesn’t it? “Independent?” “Non-partisans?” DAMN – you haven’t been paying attention!

I thought by now you’d recognize a CIA-style “limited hangout” when you saw it; guess not. Walker says that “getting the budget under control could even require steep tax increases if action isn't taken now.” NOW do you get it?

What’s this, the latest “limited hangout” about? Yes, Mordecai, it’s about justifying more tax raises and concomitant impoverishment of even more people.

But this guy is good – with the rhetoric, anyway. Among the Goebbels-ian deceit he puts into his talk is this little gem. Asked during the course of these U.S. Senate hearings about President Bush’s cost estimates for sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq this year, Walker said. “It is unclear what much of the $5.6 billion is to be spent on."

Yeah, we noticed that, too – and it didn’t take a Ph.D. in accounting, either.

At any rate, the news story emanating from the hearings had the Comptroller saying that since the year 2000, America's total social insurance commitments and other fiscal obligations have increased to $50 trillion from $20 trillion, a number representing four times the nation's total economic output.

Book-keepers like Walker don’t deal in exponential growth, apparently, because my numbers come out closer to sixty-five trillion. He probably, I suspect, didn’t add all the illegal aliens we’ll be adding to the Social Security rolls before the Bush League leaves office. Throw in the time it will take the dithering Congress to come to realization and do something, you have the whole twenty million aliens drawing Social Security.

Wait a minute! If I put that into the mix – at the rate illegal immigration from Mexico is pouring in – the number comes closer to 71 trillion (70,666,000,000,000, matter of fact). According to the “Comp General,” rising national health care costs are the greatest culprit, and if that doesn’t tell you our government intends to make all of us who’ve been working all our lives to provide for our own retirement pay for the Mexicans, too, nothing will. It might tell you about social programs in general, matter of fact.

I’m afraid it’s Tubesville, folks – as in “down the tubes.” Now that you have a celebrity wonk telling you, you’ll maybe forgive me for my “I told you so” here and years ago. You might consider the fact, though, that my friends and I have been planning for it all for several years now, knowing damned well what is coming.

Actually, Walker holds out hope (don’t forget, of course, this is CIA-style “limited hangout” – they figure you’ve got more to give) by saying that we could save the country by cutting federal spending by sixty percent or by doubling federal taxation.

Well, we know for certain what chances are for that first one, so that leaves the second. He said tax revenues should be more than 18.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product, but below 25 percent.

Incidentally, I’d have liked to be at those hearings, because nothing here adds up. Nothing! Have a look at that “sixty percent or doubling taxation.” And twenty-five percent of GDP is about 3.25 trillion. Even at today’s prices and without projecting for inflation and the like, the taxation Walker is talking about won’t so much as cover, once they’ve grown to welfare size, the “anchor babies” of the twenty million Mexicans who are already here illegally. Pie in the sky, anyone?

And did I say “Tubesville?” Yeah, I think I did.

I told you this was “limited hangout.” As we used to say in the scatological jargon of the military, BOSEHIC – “Bend Over and Spread ‘Em, Here It Comes.” To know how right I am, and have been for a long time now, you’d have to have some idea as to what a trillion dollars is. I haven’t the space here to do what our wondrous public schools education doesn’t seem to have bothered to do for you, but suffice it to say that the entire Gross Domestic Product – that’s the total market value of all the goods and services produced within the borders of a nation during a specified period (wages + rents + profits + interests + adjustments for dividends, corporate income taxes, and corporate profits) – is less than thirteen trillion.

When I noted that my friends and I have been planning for years now, expecting this, I might have added that I, personally, saw it coming even earlier. That has a great deal to do with my defensive eaves-dropping on the government, but it also has to do with my avocationally passionate study of history. The wars we fought in Korea, Vietnam, and two in Iraq are not the only wars “Americans” are fighting. There’s one in its own way even more brutal where the poor and middle class are concerned. That war is the class war, the all-but-always vicious assault being waged by the rich in order to become even richer. Greed, history taught me, is an addiction that makes all the other addictions pale by comparison. Look around, as I’m wont to say.

The U.S. class war has now reached proportions to which few historians – none, that I can find – have ever dreamed. By fraudulent finesse – usually, in the form of lobbying Congress and the state legislatures - and deceit protected by the legislation so obtained, without so much as getting their hands dirty, let alone firing a shot, the richest five percent of “Americans” have increased exponentially since 2000 their wealth and power.

The remaining ninety-five percent of the population has on the other hand seen their income and opportunity plummet. Eavesdrop in the halls of Congress for a half hour and you’ll know why.

Only a few years ago, incidentally, and curious about the trend made inexorable by the mere fact of Internal Revenue Service – it’s purpose, you know is to redistribute the nation’s wealth; either they’re doing it or they’re a near total failure – I compiled these figures: the approximately (I don’t have the same research capabilities as, for instance, the news media has) five hundred billionaires in the world have an income equal to that of the poorest fifty percent of the people here. These five hundred have wealth equal to that of approximately three billion human beings. Finally, the exploding wealth of the greed-obsessed means that sometime in the year 2,012, 6.9769 X108 (.00000006.9767) of the world’s people will have income equal to the rest.

I leave it to the reader to calculate what will happen then. As Thomas Jefferson once observed, “. . . man is the only animal which devours his own kind; I can think of no milder term to apply to the general prey of the rich upon the poor."

Neither is there any room for doubt about why the United States' plebian five percent are slaves to the patrician ninety-five percent. The losers are, pure and simple, so because they do not have access to their supposed representatives in Washington, D.C. They don’t have access to the courts, either. The cost of both is far beyond their means, kept there, of course, by their opponents in the class war.

Oh, yeah – I hear it every time I bring it up. It’s the anthem of people like FoxNews host Bill O’Reilly. The rich are rich because they deserve it, because they’re smarter, because they’re more talented, because they work harder. What Bullshit! I’ve known them, eaten with them, drunk with them, and protected their soft asses. The truth is – and if you can’t see that by watching what happens when one gets too big for his breeches and buys his way to public office, you’re too far gone to save – that I wouldn’t trust most of these clowns with my checking account, let alone my finances or life. Certainly not with the nation’s finances or life.

O’Reilly, incidentally, with his bosom buddy, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, often and blatantly encourage – in the case of O’Reilly, even demand - that the rich wield their economic power to control the news media and public’s information, that in order to keep the poor ignorant of what's going on. You need more proof of the effect of CIA Operation Mockingbird? Consider the assault independent and un-funded by government public radio and television networks are under.

Contrary to indoctrination of yourselves and your children by the government-controlled news media and educational systems, the rich are seldom the big-leaguers they are made out to be. I’ve known dozens of corporate CEOs, for some of the nation’s biggest companies, and I can tell you that I wouldn’t trust them with “executive operating” of a lemonade stand. Most of these guys got where they are by lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, and walking all over their co-workers. They excel, all right – they excel in acquisitive rapacity, greed.

Uh-uh, save it! I’ve not only broken bread with the Captains of Industry, drunk with them, and covered their butts, I listened. I’ve heard their contempt for everything they profess publicly to believe, from the people they exploit to the system and government that gave them their power. I’ve heard them betray their concupiscent lust – not a few times twisted and depraved – their fascination with fame, and their willingness to prostitute literally anything and anybody for money and power.

How else do you explain the individual who makes a hundred and fifty times what an employee of his company makes, then cheats to get even more (how many Enrons have been in the news of late, huh?)?

There’s a better question, too. How is it that we can elect these same people to high office, then wonder when the government and nation comes to be in the shape it is? It’s like putting the town drunk in charge of the liquor, then wondering where it all went. There’s no reasonable doubt about why we’re in the shape we’re in as a nation, why we’re in Iraq, or any the rest of our troubles. NONE!

Some things, as I said, are just numbers – book-keeping. Numbers add and subtract the same no matter who’s doing them. George W. Bush created wholesale the economic hardship we’ve come to by orchestrating horrendous debt. “Orchestrating.” What else do you call cynical tax cuts intended to benefit the richest five percent I speak of here (in fact, the richest one percent got as much as forty percent of his tax forbearances). Add to that the societally insane war in Iraq, where no one has benefited (unless you consider military industrial complex corporations like Halliburton).

The day before our Comptroller General testified, the news channels were telling us that the administration and its prat-falling generals say we’ll be in Iraq, “for generations.” We’ve spent there nearly $600,000,000,000 – six hundred billion dollars, thus far. How much did Mr. Walker say tax revenues will have to be?

Had you any money left after the taxes you’ll be paying, you should buy Halliburton – that way, you’ll be paying one hand with the other.

‘Splain to me, Luci, how it is that Mr. Bush – planning it all without error as he does everything else - could justify tax cuts to corporations whose annual incomes already average in the billions. I can’t imagine it, but I have no doubt whatever that he’d try. The man seems to have no shame (he’s of the patrician class, don’t forget).

Which brings us back to the Comptroller General and the latest “limited hangout” by the rich and federal. Just as it is in real warfare, deception is the critical weapon in class warfare. Do you really believe, when a wonk like this begins to wring his hands about the “state of the union,” that he really gives a shit? First off, David M. Walker works for the federal government, a government owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military industrial complex corporations. He knows, as does every blathering bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. what would happen were he to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

And you know, too. Compare what will happen, now that he’s said as much as he has, with the current global warming debate. Go out on the highway: See anybody slowing down in order to burn less fuel and put less hydro-carbons in the air? Sure you do. Private debt in the U.S. isn’t in the dozens of trillions (excluding the federal, it’s almost forty trillion, now) because the public is so self-disciplined, self-controlled, and moderate. Here’s a site that should be entertaining. http://mwhodges.home.att.net/nat-debt/debt-nat.htm

In order to take back control of our country – which is to say win the class war - we need first to take back control of ourselves and our own lives. When we can’t be used as cannon fodder like slaves, we’ll know we’ve done that. That's for just one thing; there are many more “things.” Suffice it to say that to take governing power back again means that the people have to take the weapons of class war out of their enemy’s hands. Only when one corporate lobbyist doesn’t have more power than the voters of several states (or more) have can that be done.

Fifteen years ago, I took power over me and my affairs back from the rich. I stopped using their system, both economic and legal. I went to the wilderness, lived entirely off the land, and I rode a bicycle. It isn’t necessary, however, that the public flee to the wilderness. The experience taught me how powerless the government can be made. Government in the United States is a kind of “pigeon drop” swindle, wherein the dupe must be a participant in order to be defrauded. Simply refusing to take part in the electoral process, for instance, would send a message that would shake the patrician royalty to their boots. They have the French Revolution seared into their memories, you know. It’s part of every Patrician’s education; and it is his worst nightmare. Society has its absolutes, too.

“This country with its institutions,” as Abraham Lincoln observed, “belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.”

That’s why the first time the super rich in the guise of the military industrial complex’s new CIA risked betraying their coup d’etat was the program of deceit by propaganda known as Operation Mockingbird. The only way to fight a bull as powerful as a nation’s people is with a cape – the cape of deception. It has worked magnificently. In the words of the poet Markham writing about the French Revolution, “stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox,” the people of the United States have been reduced to the pitiable level of the peasant who was the object of Markham's poem. Using state-of-the-art propaganda and opinion-control devices more effective and powerful, even, than those of the “Inner Party” of another writer, George Orwell, the “American” public is kept living in a reality only virtual, believing contradictory nonsense their grandparents would have scoffed at angrily.

To restore the Land of the Free, the people must wake up, wake up to the fact that they have the power to rule their lives any time they decide to recover it. The way to re-take our nation is refusal to be deceived. We need to take back the free press. Contradictory nonsense like that of the last few days – the Comptroller General’s “revelation,” the specious global warming “debate,” and the odiously dissimulating like repeated again and again – amounts to nothing more than a demonstration of the pitiable, docile and subservient state to which the public and its poor have been brought.

This, in short, is nothing more than the latest newspeak and doublethink from the ruling military industrial complex plutocracy. Nothing but a stunned, stolid, and stupefied “Man with a Hoe” would believe this claptrap, but it permits the rich to control his money and his very life.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

"The Moojas Know We Can't Stay Forever . . ."

The Fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975.

Everything seems to be about word definition these days. In a world where for most people reality is made up all but entirely of words, that’s crucial. Put another way, the power to manipulate opinion by manipulation of language is the stuff political power is made of today. Equivocating, twisting, and otherwise torturing the meaning of words is the chief stock in trade of the modern government and its resident propagandists.

Think about it. Not only does democratic rule depend upon control of the public’s opinion, so does tyranny. No tyrant doubts that the people can pull him down: there are always too many “subjects” to defeat in open warfare, should they revolt. Tyranny, of course rules by fear – “kill one and terrorize a thousand.” So, however, does democracy. “Government,” George Washington observed,” is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

But whereas tyranny originates from fear, democracy begins with public choice. And choice depends on opinion. “There,” Shakespeare said, “is the rub.” The tyranny of the majority must not only obtain power by shaping the public’s opinion, it must keep power the same way. Is it any wonder, then, that in the Twenty-First Century with its marvels of science and technology – space flight, nuclear-powered vessels, brain and heart surgery, and the rest – propaganda and the methods of mind and opinion control should have been a proportionately funded and concomitantly developed science? Assured control of what you think, my friends, is of paramount importance to those who aspire to power and control of your money and destiny. It is in point of rationally incontrovertible fact the matter daily uppermost in their minds.

And we, the people of the United States, live largely – decisively so, anyway – separated by science and technology from the real world and its reality. Recently, I learned that most children in a local high school didn’t know what a callous was. Most were incredulous when I explained. Amusingly perhaps, all but a tiny percentage gave a job at MacDonald’s as an example of hard work.

Where things like the war in Iraq are concerned, everything becomes surreal for most – a percentage as high as eighty percent. No one, including young men and women about to leave for Iraq and mortal combat, has any real idea about the reality of a gunfight. Some years ago, teaching law enforcement personnel, I found the same thing. In every instance of the kind of ignorance encountered and refer to here (and I interviewed literally hundreds over a period of years and across the length and breadth of the nation), I found reality supplanted by a Hollywoodian special effects, made for television, virtual-only reality.

During preparation of this website, I took issue over something pontificated to the public by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that being the “humanity” of our precision bombing (surgically accurized ‘Shock and Awe”). When I pointed out the actual effect of a two-thousand bomb’s detonation, a number of people honestly questioned my description. They didn’t believe me, apparently even when they had read the same figures on internet websites. It didn’t take me long to realize why. All of the same people had no concept whatever of blast effect. The gas-fire explosions of Hollywood and television, you see, produce only fire and smoke in theatrically huge proportions, no blast. Debris from the special effects “blast,” moreover, floats through the air, rather than hurtles at screaming, bullet-like velocity.

During premier of the movie entitled Saving Private Ryan, I was among veterans interviewed by a local television station concerning the flick’s then much-vaunted reality. I said I hadn’t seen the movie, probably wouldn’t bother, and that the idea of reality in a movie about war struck me as pretty silly. To the interviewer’s protestations, I responded with the question, “How does the combat in Saving Private Ryan smell? Have you any idea how a bunker smells after everyone in it has been blown to shreds by a shell or grenade?” The woman at the table next to mine choked, then sat staring at her plate obviously struggling to keep ingested the bagel she had been eating.

And so on. TV and the movies are at least a virtual reality, a visual, even emotional depiction. Words are something else, too – something capable of even more surrealism. I used to entertain and tease my sons by demonstrating that I could with words alone create in their minds a ten-ton chocolate Sunday, topped by a five hundred pound cherry. I could create a king in France (there is no King of France, you know), marry him to a princess – the Princess of Lower Slobovia, no less – and the like. It was great fun.

And it’s the stuff political power is made of. I won’t bore the reader here with a re-iterated description of the staggering volume of prevarication to which the public is being subjected these days by our media and government, however. My point relates more to a news item on television this morning, that having to do with the most recent tactical device to be employed by “insurgents,” combatants engaged in “sectarian violence,” or whatever today’s bon mot may be. The tactic, first Fox News, then CNN, said, is that of including small children among occupants of an explosives-laden vehicle intended to first penetrate check points, then be detonated with the children inside once the bombers have exited the vehicle and fled.

Horrible. Depraved. Despicable. But there’s a problem with the story - whether to believe it. In the first place, I – for one – actually find it hard to believe that any human being can stoop that low. It simply doesn’t seem humanly possible (at least until you consider carpet bombing, “shock and awe” with 2,000 lb. bombs, and the rest). Then there’s the fact that FoxNews has time and time again demonstrated itself willing to say almost literally anything in order to further the public’s support of this all but totally asinine operation. You can’t, in fact, rationally believe anything they say or portray having to do with the present administration and its demagogueing, messianic-appearing machinations.

More, I know about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA propaganda program designed specifically to serve exactly that purpose – to create, in other words, the Orwellian nation in which we have come lately to live.

Looking for corroboration, I switched to CNN, then channel after channel, trying to find another report of the story. After a time spent dodging the advertisements – more outright lying and fraud designed in the state of the art by the very best of opinion control experts – I found the story again. Sure enough, it was also being reported elsewhere. But was it true? This is a story about Iraq, after all, and the major media are also ruled by IRS and the government. When I had checked the BBC and Frankfurter Zeitung, the German newspaper online, I also found the story, but both sources got their story from a report by a U.S. Brigadier General, Michael Barbero.

Tilt. What’s the truth? Well, I’ll have to check with my sources in Iraq. I’ll know in a few days.

The experience nevertheless serves to make my point having to do with the Mockingbird media and the effect of words on the mind. In the hands of a skilled propagandist using state-of-the-art technology and the super-funding available to governments like ours, the mind becomes putty in the hands of an artist.

The “state of the art” has reached heretofore unimaginable proportions, none more insidious than what I’ll call pointedly the Anna Nicole Smith Tactic. Desperate to keep the public distracted from the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of divert attention from the fact of what the taxpayers are getting for their two-thirds of a trillion dollar a year military spending, the media hides this and similar truth behind the smoke and mirrors of lurid tabloid material masquerading meretriciously as news reporting.

I’ve spoken of it here before, but the latest example of the smoke and mirrors deception is more subtle, and a good example of the genre. I speak of the current flap over firings of U.S. Attorneys by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (incidentally, have you ever seen a man with a more vapid, “what’s going on – where am I?” look?). Having sworn to do something about getting our much put-upon (three and four tours in combat sounds more like German troops in World War Two than U.S. soldiers) troops, the poltroon congress needs – desperately, as I said – a distraction. Anyone who has watched these affairs can predict what will happen, and I won’t waste ink here except to point out what the Congress would undeniably rather be doing.

The pandering of lobbyists in the halls of Congress must resemble the feeding frenzy of sharks, all to assure that our young men and women stay in combat, dying and being maimed solely in order to assure continuingly massive profits for the military industrial complex. “America,” the final outcome of this as plain as the nose on your face. Worse, you have had what must certainly be the most object and demonstrative lesson in history, that of Vietnam.

And yet you stand by, in the words of Markham, “stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox.” Brain-dead, rendered effectively unaware by relentless Operation Mockingbird propaganda disseminated by the nation’s Uriah Heep media, you stand by while thousands are being maimed and killed. Buffaloed by words being wielded like a bullfighter his cape, you suck up cynical, Orwellian slogans and logically half-baked argument like the lurid prophesies of what will happen in the aftermath of our leaving.

Think! What will happen not only became inevitable with the invasion that will forever remain astonishing in my mind for its utter tactical and strategic stupidity, there is no way for us to stop it without causing over time its equivalent. People are going to die (oh, there’s a way to prevent that, but you – Mockingbird brain-washed and indoctrinated – would never do that), lots of them and no matter whether we stay or leave. We did that; we did it when we elected George W. Bush and the swine in Congress.

To quote Herb and others writing from Iraq, "The Mooja's know we can't stay forever, and when we leave, the place is all theirs. It's their country."

Yesterday, I answered mail from a U.S. Senator concerning, it said, national security. “Security?” I answered. “The way you can give us security is impeach that moron, then resign – all of you!” They won’t do that, of course – not as long as the press can go on covering up what they are. People are going to die on account of our “Mission Accomplished,” all right. Congress and the media see to that. The question is how we can justify forcing our own to be among the dead by keeping this Jack S. Phogbound gang in power.

Human sacrifice intended to appease the gods and expiate crime like what we have done in Iraq went out of fashion long ago. At that, only because it was the Mayans and the Aztecs was it ever the “American Way.”