"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind."
Phillip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart, 1978
"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, [Sheldon Wolin, 'Inverted Totalitarianism'] since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: 'inverted totalitarianism,' a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on 'private media' than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.
It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison of any nation on Earth).
The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of superpower.
The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization [and deregulation].
One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life [culture wars] so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation.
It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control. Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin’s analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong."
Chalmers Johnson, A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled, May 16, 2008
Markets looked at the economic data this morning, and decided that the Fed is going to be handing out some rate cuts in short order.
And so we saw the reactions to expectations of lower rates.
Stocks rose sharply.
Gold and silver took off, breaking up and out through resistance, and gaining ground all the way into the close.
The Dollar fell.
VIX continued to drift lower.
It was gratifying to see gold and silver breaking out of their recent smothering in a trading range.
Geopolitical matters are forgotten for now.
Many have noticed the sense of panic setting in among the weavers of the dominant narrative. Mainstream talking heads and political operatives have been going after the differing voices in the alternative media in some uncharacteristically petty and even forceful means.
Power fades, and those who have profited by it struggle to maintain their unnatural advantages.
But when force and fraud fade way, reality remains.
Have a pleasant evening.
Related: Saudi Arabia Secretly Buying 160 Tonnes of Gold in Switzerland
