Thanks for your response Hugh.
You may be right about Tom, being that I am not familiar with Tom’s thinking or writing at all except for the corporate person-hood work he did. (Although I do wonder why it would take a CIA shill to bring out some relevant elements that were missed by possibly more honest thinkers within the progressive community).
HMW wrote...
Ever heard of the Trojan Horse?
Or cred props (credibility props)? See Chip Berlet and Jane Mayer and Russell Baker.
Yes I am aware that by choosing an incorrect ‘higher’ imperative, many people impair their ability to have an honest relationship toward information. But because this applies to most everybody, information is often constrained by its context as well as being used to constrain the context.
Hartmann lies deliberately about the CIA-FBI-DIA murders of President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, and Rev. Martin Luther king.
Yes but his deliberation might be a strategic ploy (of more simple origins) to get ‘mainstream’ status; he may even be hoping to make amends by being a fearless warrior of some other stripe. The deliberate lie has a long and storied history. As Berel Lang points out in his book ‘Philosophical Style’, “teachers’ in the old days used to present exaggerated versions of orthodoxy in the hope of keeping their job, their heads and still be able to inspire their students to refute the dogma on account of its inherent stupidity.
To get away with this he spouts anti-corporatism, a limited hang-out ploy meant to take the focus off of the National inSecurity State alphabet agencies who use corporations as their proxy forces.
Well, focus is as focus does. I might just as well say that corporations result from individuals desire to not be responsible for their actions. The National inSecurity State is then a proxy for corps, which are a proxy for individual irresponsibility. So who outproxies who in a clusterfuck world.
This diversion was used in the decoy movie, 'Network,' when Congressional inquiries were exposing the CIA's gross crimes of social control. The scapegoating of corporations and eclipsing of CIA domestic social control has continued ever since.
I can imagine ‘corps’ accepting the scapegoat role if it can be of service to the empire. But the empire is built by corps and bankers who might not always play nice with each other. (Hence the shadow boxing of the left with the corps, while the right shadow boxes with the banks.)
Sadly, almost all progressives focus on the brackish water of corporate culture and ignore the battleships of military social control that use corporate culture as a transmission device for fascist values, beliefs, and attitudes.
Yours seems like a good direction to move here, in that techniques of social control seem to have gotten more sophisticated lately. But if the parameters of social control were well set many centuries ago, the part that the CIA plays while perhaps significant probably does not get real close to answering what it takes to break this social conditioning.
The net effect is to encourage you to oppose many thousands of organizations trying to make money ("Hey, I want some, too") and thereby ignore the one organization coordinating social control and oppression....the CIA.
(The One Organization? Please.)
Part of growing up is in learning to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible ways to make money. Given that corporations normalize improper ways for making money they are a legitimate threat to the long term viability of society. As is the CIA no doubt. But I still do not see a great difference between making the CIA into the favored scapegoat in preference to corps.
Because I consider that ‘reality’ may be vastly different than are our pictures of reality, I tend to have more allowance for wrong thinking. (If it’s allowed to be) given that the whole community uses incorrect premises to create this picture, it cannot be surprising that insight would be mixed in liberally with delusion. The insights sometimes seem to be accidental byproducts of a desperate desire to establish internal consistency for ones modeling of reality. Now I like internal consistency and modeling of reality, but as for accidental byproducts and desperate desires, not so much. Still if this is the manner that aggregate consciousness advances in understanding, then fine. So we have rubber and many other ‘accidentally’ produced compounds. And it’s good that gasoline was not dumped on the ground for long as a waste product because the first drilled for oil was refined for use as lubricants. Yet here we are a hundred years later, still mutually hypnotized into thinking that ‘internal combustion devices’ are required as motive power to get from point A to point B.
And here we remain, going three steps forward then three steps back, with an occasional trip or skip forward, usually by accident.
This must be the result of something much bigger than the CIA.
