“With “capitalism in danger of falling apart” (a rare, cryptically honest quote from Al Gore), and years of stagnant global economic growth now in a free fall, the Greta campaign must be understood for what it is. An elaborate distraction that has nothing to do with protecting the natural world, and everything to do with the manufacturing of consent. The required consent of the citizenry that will unlock the treasuries and public monies under the guise of climate protection.” – Cory Morningstar and Forest Palmer , from The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – For Consent: The House is on Fire & the 90 Trillion Dollar Rescue, 2019

“One might think that if someone were conscious enough to recognise that global ecology was compromised and that pollutants were destroying fresh water, and the land, and that global warming was quite possibly going to make huge swatches of land non arable — you might think that person would look for solutions in a political frame. After all it was global capital that had brought mankind to this historic precipice. But instead, many if not nearly all the people I speak with, frame things in terms of personal responsibility. Stop driving big diesel SUVs, stop flying to Cabo for vacation, stop eating meat, etc-. But these same people tend to not criticize capitalism. Or, rather, they ask for a small non crony green capitalism. I guess this would mean green exploitation and green wars? For war is the engine of global capitalism today. Cutting across this are the various threads of the overpopulation theme. A convenient ideological adjustment that shifts blame to the poorest inhabitants of the planet.” – John Steppling, Trust Nothing, 2019

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” – Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, 1998

“Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse. It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion.” ― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

It is hard not to notice a stirring of consciousness regarding humanity’s dire ecological predicament beginning to seep into the mainstream these days. How can it not? Year after year records are shattered. Month after month scientists continue to be shocked and demoralized by more and more evidence of rising seas, a climate careening into a chaotic and terrifying unknown, and countless species succumbing in a biosphere perpetually under siege. Even the corporate media which has been designed as a mouthpiece of capitalist interests cannot completely veil our collective crisis. Unsurprisingly, the ruling class has begun to react, not in a way that meaningfully addresses the death cult of the current socioeconomic order, but to ensure its survival albeit with a greener face. Their cynical approach to what is the biggest existential crisis of our age is using youthful optimism and justified outrage and terror to cloud their machinations.

One such prominent youth these days is Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old Swedish girl who delivered a rousing speech at the UN Climate Change Conference and before the world’s wealthiest at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Indeed, her speech was inspiring and I do not doubt her passion or honest devotion to climate activism for a minute, but to ignore the powerful machine looking to co-opt her message would be a grave mistake. For instance, Thunberg has been given interviews in the corporate press, has been endorsed by a tech start-up company (We Don’t Have Time), and has been lauded by industry for promoting “sustainable development.”

Now certainly Thunberg is not the one manipulating any of these actors, and she should not face any kind of criticism for her part in addressing the greatest existential issue of our times. But it should be clear that most people who get interviews in the corporate media are generally not deemed to be a serious challenger to the status quo political/economic order. Corporate approved dissent is a form of censorship that gives the illusion of a lively debate, but essentially establishes a firm line in the sand when it comes to radically questioning or opposing the capitalist framework itself. And if finance companies are behind something we can be pretty sure that they are primarily in it for the money. In addition to this, the term sustainable development is meaningless on a planet that is literally on the edge of a cliff, but under the dominant economic dictatorship of money the co-opted mainstream environmental movement has pumped out these tropes making them a form of collective social conditioning.

And this ties into the notion of personal responsibility. Solutions to our environmental crisis have been reduced to “life style changes” which have also become the en vogue activism of the day. It is a line of thinking that is accepted and even endorsed by corporations, banks and neoliberal governments because it poses no real challenge to their power or their ongoing destructive practices. To the mainstream, tweaking one’s lifestyle is all that is needed. Buy an electric vehicle or use a bicycle. Don’t take a plane on your vacation. Buy reusable bags. Choose organic only. Go vegan. Buy reusable straws. While there is nothing wrong with doing these things in general, they must be understood as individual choices that are based on privilege and that have little impact in addressing the urgent crisis our biosphere is facing right now.

What they do manage to do is deliver an added punishment on the poor and working class, people who are struggling to make ends meet. It places an unfair level of guilt on ordinary people whose impact on the environment is relatively negligible compared to the enormous destruction caused by the fossil fuel industry, mining companies, plastic and packaging production, shipping and the military industrial complex. Seldom (if ever) questioned are the basic foundations of the current economic order which is driving the decimation of the biosphere for the benefit of the wealthy Davos jet set.

It has in fact become only about “sustainability” despite the contradiction of sustaining a system that is at its core omnicidal. Corporations have been actively branding themselves with empty greenwashing euphemisms like “green” or “earth friendly” in the decades following the first Earth Day. It is as if our species were somehow alien visitors to this planet and being friendly to it was merely a diplomatic concern. Certainly a handful of corporations did in fact change some of their practices under public pressure and for the sake of image. Some of those changes had beneficial effects for certain species and areas. But the primary engine of capitalism that has led us to the brink of devastation is never questioned. It is sacrosanct.

With this in mind political solutions, like the Green New Deal, are being trotted out by democratic socialist and neoliberal politicians that merely cloak the problem, never identifying the root of it all: Capitalism. In fact, many of these policies are weak on protecting nature and are simply designed to keep capitalism afloat. At its core this is a system that is incapable of even beginning  to address climate change or biospheric degeneration. Its principles are based upon the exploitation of the environment for the material gain of the ruling class, kept alive through institutions of repression and corporate state violence. Under this rubric environmental causes may be soothed for some; but the poor and working class are continually battered and raped by industry and the corrupt governments that house and protect them. Indigenous peoples, who face the worst exploitation, continually see their lands desecrated and denuded by state policing factions at the behest of powerful corporations. And militarism, which is of course wedded to capitalism, ensures that all of this exploitation can continue and expand virtually unopposed by bourgeois society.

It may be a hard pill for many to swallow, but there are simply no viable answers to be found in Washington, or the hills of Hollywood, or the board rooms of Wall Street, or even at the United Nations which generally capitulates to the demands of the ruling class. They have molded each of these institutions, media industries and government bodies to fit their censorious narrative in order to suppress dissent against the current economic order, under which they so handsomely profit. And one would be wise to approach whatever they offer with great caution. After all, they have been labouring for years to dismember the commons, grow their inordinate wealth through plunder, and maintain their dominance through corruption, militarism and distraction. The sacredness of the public sphere has been defiled by the inviolable liturgy of free market dogma. And they have manufactured a culture of cruelty, devoid of character and predicated on colonization and the commodification and exploitation of everything and everyone that exists. In this way neoliberalism, the last and most ruthless stage of capitalism, has become the most elaborate and successful form of brainwashing and social control the world has ever known, convincing hundreds of millions of people of the absolute necessity of its economic tyranny and omnicidal madness.

But despite the machinations of the ruling class to obfuscate, infiltrate and co-opt movements, there remains a genuine longing for connection to the ever besieged living planet and solidarity with one another that transcends the indifferent and sadistic brutality of the capitalist order. This is especially true as capitalism begins to implode and the biosphere continues to degrade. Therefore the most coherent response to what we are witnessing will always come from ordinary people in community, especially the poor and especially indigenous peoples who are on the front lines of a war being waged by governments serving the interests of the wealthy ruling class and global capitalism. But we can be assured that anything that emanates from the halls of power will be merely another ploy to maintain their control and fill the coffers of the uber-rich at the expense of the rest of us and the living earth itself. And they have no problem using the innocent passion of a 16 year old girl to hide all of their crimes.

Kenn Orphan   2019

With most media attention in the US on the government shutdown and border wall stand-off spectacle, the Trump administration has been quietly ramping up US militarism around the world. And it has set its sights on Venezuela, once again, by supporting a coup. Whether or not one supports the policies of Maduro or any other leader is inconsequential in this regard because, despite the empty mythos, the American Empire has never been interested in defending democracy. After all, its list of allies include fascist strongholds, a murderous medieval kingdom, a ruthless apartheid regime and several compliant, neoliberal states.

The ruling class of the US imperium will simply not tolerate any government that opposes its financial and geopolitical dominance, attempts socialism, or transfers its nexus to another powerful state entity, like Russia or China for instance. If one chooses to do so it is instantly targeted for assault either by crippling economic sanctions or embargoes, which make governance nearly impossible and primarily harms the general population, or covert subversion, or by direct and indirect military intervention. And the corporate media, when it chooses to cover these issues, generally parrots State Department and Pentagon talking points and obfuscations about the intentions of the US government, the role of corporations and global capitalism, and the character of the governments the US happens to be opposing at the time. And all of this is done with virtually no historical analysis. But of course none of this is new.

Whether it was for Reagan in Grenada or Bush Sr. in Panama or Kuwait, or Clinton in the Balkans, the American mainstream media has dutifully peddled the lies of Washington. The media cycle was drenched in the lies of the Bush administration about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. Despite Iraq having absolutely nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11, the corporate media did little to underscore this fact at a time when the Empire was ratcheting up the war machine. Those who questioned it often lost their jobs or were marginalized. Now that this foray resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians, mass migration, and the decimation of an entire region many in the media and some politicians have looked back with selective remorse. As if that helps the dead in any way.

The corporate media came to the aid of the Obama administration when it targeted Libya, repeating stories, many unsubstantiated, about atrocities being carried out by the Gaddafi government. When Gaddafi himself was brutally murdered by a mob his death was talked about in the parlance of empire. “We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, maniacally proclaimed in a television interview. And the media barely lifted an eyebrow of shock. On the contrary, they laughed and applauded it. Now that country, once one of the most prosperous in Africa, has become a haven for slave traders and a focal point for the migration crisis in Europe. But one would be hard pressed to find many big news stories once the US/NATO war machine has finished bombing their intended target. All the monumental failures and brutality of militarism should rationally signal its end, not only in the US but everywhere. The interests of capital, however, drive its continued expansion. And the corporate media has been its ever faithful mouthpiece.

The mendacity of a sycophantic corporate press has allowed for decades of unrestrained plunder and whole scale destruction of entire societies, regions and ecosystems. It speaks in a language sanctified by empire which, of course, cannot mention the word “empire” or “imperialism” at all. It is, after all, a media governed and guided by corporate interests and those interests are tied to some of the most lucrative industries on the planet. Business is booming, in fact, for American and multinational companies that profit from war and militarism, like Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Other companies, like those in the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure development contracting, wait in the wings for the aftermath of each new exploit like vultures waiting to feed on carrion.

The corporate press understands how sacrosanct the military is to the elite establishment in the US. One can see this in the copious amount of “experts” on cable news that are members or former members of the US military, the CIA and other agencies of empire. No one at the top dare question how much money the military gets, this year it is slated to get at least $716 billion, or call it out as the biggest polluter on the planet and contributor to global warming. The ones who do in the mainstream are swiftly chastised or silenced.

No tears can be shed for America’s so-called “enemies” either. A hospital? A school? A wedding party? An ambulance? None of these garner the same outpouring of sympathy that just one American soldier receives. They know, too, that the culture has been conditioned into obeisance to the war industry. This is the same machine which bamboozles young men and women with scant economic or educational opportunities into “defending US interests” – code words for being cannon fodder, a term buried long ago, or mercenaries for the protection of corporate investments.

Of course militaristic jingoism is nothing new in the US. It has played well for decades at nearly every single sporting event getting slicker with more techno flash every time. With jets tearing the sky into shards over packed stadiums festooned with red, white and blue everything, crowds of disenfranchised youth are encouraged to buy into the lie that bombing impoverished and largely powerless people elsewhere to smithereens will somehow defend their homeland.

High schools and even colleges welcome recruiters often to “career day” events. The organized murder game is often their only option for employment or educational advancement. But should they return home from a deployment damaged, with PTSD or in financial straits they are generally scuttled out of the spotlight. Suicide, domestic abuse, and homelessness are skyrocketing among them, but you would hardly know that if you watch cable news or read most mainstream newspapers. True, they are occasionally trotted out onto podiums by politicians for empty patriotic accolades, but only if they are telegenic and useful for the continuation of the war machine. Should they dissent from the narrative, they are rendered invisible.

Hollywood acts as an arm to this media intoxication when it comes to the military. Watch virtually any action, sci-fi or suspense movie these days and notice how militarism is seamlessly laced through most of the plot lines. Military hardware is easily available for these productions. Soldiers are almost always cast as virtuous. And this also demonstrates the strain of pernicious authoritarianism within American culture. FBI and CIA agents, detectives, prosecutors, all of them are portrayed with an air of troubled, perhaps flawed, but intact unassailable nobility.

And this gets to the covert actions of the American Empire which are obscured or talked about in muddied terms even more. Those actions masterminded in the dark halls of the surveillance state. Whether it be supporting coups, kidnapping dissidents, targeted assassinations, or training and funding death squads, the US has a long history of destabilizing democratically elected governments or infiltrating democratic movements with subterfuge. It did this in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when it murdered its first president, Patrice Lumumba. It did so in Iran when it toppled the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. It did it in Chile when it aided the coup against Salvador Allende. It did it in Indonesia, and El Salvador, and Honduras and so on. So there should be no doubt that it is doing it again, right now, in Venezuela.

The ones rendered expendable by the American mainstream media, who are seldom if ever spoken of, are the civilian victims of the American Empire’s endless wars, occupations and covert actions. They are ghosts that roam the sphere without glorious tombs in which to repose. No imperial-sanctioned, wreath clad monuments adorn their graves. No days of remembrance. They may have met their end in the killing fields created or fostered by the Empire thanks to a brutality paid for in full by the US taxpayer, but they are not important enough to be mentioned by the American media except maybe in passing. It is as if uttering their names might summon a spirit of vengeance from a mountain of corpses, the sediment of imperialism itself.

Of course other nations around the planet, including Russia and China, use brutal militarism as well to crush dissent. But none of them invests or spends nearly as much as the US in this regard, nor use it to the same extent. And this is what makes American imperialism the most dangerous on the planet. The business of the American Empire, after all, is war, whether it is selling weaponry to its client states who are actively engaged in genocide, occupation or repression, be it Saudi Arabia, India or Israel, or engaging in war games itself throughout Africa and Central Asia. And as the Trump administration lurches toward an even more aggressive foreign policy, and even more sanctions and threats of military actions against Venezuela or Iran or North Korea, we will be seeing a lot of the same sycophantic and ahistorical propaganda being pumped out by virtually every corporate media outlet. While they might loath Trump’s vulgarity and overt racism, they will never oppose his belligerent foreign policy. The enemies of the American Empire will always be vilified accordingly as the enemies of democracy because mendacious doublespeak is the official language of a media inextricably wedded to its corporate masters.

Kenn Orphan   2019

I don’t know this boy, but I know that smile. I know its cruelty; its sadism born in notions of supremacy. I’ve seen it when I’ve been mocked at antiwar rallies, or anti-racist demonstrations, water and land protection ceremonies, or LGBTQ events. I’ve seen it from young men whose insecurity cannot abide another’s liberation.

I’ve seen that face chasing me down the block with clenched fists or preceding a spit at my face. It is easily recognizable, that face, that smile. It is the smile of mockery that precedes violence, that is the precursor to atrocity.

I usually don’t write about this side of American culture, but it is hard not to these days. The man in the photo is Graham Allen, an “internet personality” (a meaningless, convoluted term I despise) who nevertheless has over millions of followers on Facebook and Twitter. He is known best for his “Rant Nation” and appearances on Fox News and other rightwing media. The photo was posted on Facebook and Twitter with the caption:

Practicing our “toxic masculinity”

Hey Gillette does this offend you?! 😂😂

I’ll raise my kids the way I believe they should be….thanks for your advice😉

To be clear, I despise corporate moralizing and virtue signaling. It doesn’t matter which corporation is doing it, Gillette, Nike. It’s a cynical and puerile marketing strategy designed to latch on to some au courant trend in bourgeoisie society. It inoculates consumers to the loathsome and abusive character of corporate capitalism and the record of egregious labour or human rights policies of these companies in particular. But what is interesting is that the Gillette ad had actually nothing to say about gun rights. It was an ad denouncing (albeit in the smug parlance of corporate doublespeak) that bullying and sexism are wrong. It was, in essence, the corporate sanctification of the #MeToo movement. But it is an interesting study into the psyche and entrenched angst at the heart of white America.

Most of Allen’s videos are too obnoxious or stupid to sit through (I have). He is a sort of rightwing Kim Kardashian. Spectacle with no substance. His bizarre Christian Oprah-esque self-help talks are complete with sappy background music, I guess to show his audience that he is being serious. But they are also juxtaposed to tirades against the demands of millennials, working people and the oppressed, which kind of goes hand in hand with the reactionary American evangelical notion of puritanism and punitive work ethics. Most try to be humorous in a lowbrow sort of way, but several of his videos are far from harmless.

He has minimized or denied police violence against people of colour, employed Donald Trump’s vile rhetoric regarding immigrants and refugees (see him blaming migrant parents for the inhuman policy of separating them from their children at the border), supported the idiotic border wall, dehumanized LGBTQ people through mockery or even the implied threat of violence (see his copious use of guns as props in various videos), promoted feckless nationalism (enforce the pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth or kneeling for an anthem drenched in racist blood), American militarism (Allen is supposedly an Army veteran who has had 2 tours of combat and pushes the tired trope of “support the troops or else” mantra despite decades of murderous wars of imperialism), many tirades against newly elected senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or what he believes is “socialism” sans any historical or class analysis (a topic forbidden in America to both liberals and conservatives alike). His favourite rants seem to be against people who supposedly hate America (the “greatest country in the world” and “better than everyone else” on the planet according to him), socialists, activists, etc, or posting sentimental slop that erases or glosses over the nation’s imperialistic militarism or its dark legacy of racism, bigotry, genocide and colonial oppression.

Some of Allen’s videos are full of blatant falsehoods. In one where he disparages Colin Kaepernick, for instance, he trots out the lie that another football celebrity, Pat Tillman, died for his country. In reality he was killed by “friendly fire,” a fact buried by the Pentagon. There is even evidence that suggests he was possibly murdered and his personal effects, including a personal journal, were destroyed. Prior to his death Tillman came out against the war and did not want his name to be used as a war propaganda tool. But Allen doesn’t care about those wishes. He would rather parrot Pentagon talking points that excuse the imperial war machine in Washington.

But Allen’s recent photo is rather emblematic of the toxic rot at the heart of American society. Celebrity internet personalities are experts, albeit unwittingly, at illustrating this cultural degeneration. Excessive posturing to the point of making one appear more like a caricature than a human being, historical revisionism via sentimental language, belligerent nationalism for the sake of belligerence alone, a deep seated loathing for any intellectual curiosity and no real interest in the issues that ordinary working class people are actually facing or the systems that cause strife to begin with. But he operates in an echo chamber that can be found among liberals as well. Insulated to reality and uninterested in anything that contradicts or dissents from their worldview.

This particular photo isn’t offensive because it fetishizes guns (it does, of course) but this phallic-like obsession is indeed associated with a pervasive insecure masculinity that is endemic to American culture. This photo is a sort of micro-study in how the culture itself has steadily become infantilized. Gillette’s ad was annoying in the same way all corporate moralizing is annoying. But the backlash is mostly hype. That there is no discussion of the malfeasance of corporate capitalism itself tells us who is narrating, directing and moderating this so-called discussion.

Allen, like so many of these “personalities” today, embodies this odd disconnect from reality we see on display among the corporate and political class and the mainstream media as well. While he posits himself as being different from his liberal nemeses, he is really the same. Peddling manufactured outrage about manufactured issues and nonexistent threats, e.g. attacks on masculinity or gender, terrorists coming over the southern border, communists, government taking away guns. And I would guess he makes a tidy sum doing so.

Meanwhile, the lived realities of most Americans are rendered a pale shadow. Nationalistic xenophobia becomes the narrative forced on the working poor by people like Allen who hardly represents them. Meanwhile, most Americans have blended families. Families with LGBTQ, people of colour, and members on either side of several borders. Families of faith or no faith at all. Families with little to no healthcare coverage, that have to commute hours to at least two or more jobs because they cannot afford rent or mortgage closer to them, and that could not economically survive beyond one paycheck. Families struggling to survive under corporate capitalism, imperialism, and the dictatorship of money that is, in fact, the real United States.

Kenn Orphan   2019

Despite White House kitchen staff being furloughed thanks to a government shutdown (the longest in US history) Donald Trump still invited Clemson, the college football national title team. He remarked that he could have had his wife (and VP Pence’s wife for that matter) make salads, but that the team would prefer this slop instead saying “I think that’s their favorite food.” Never mind the fact that these guys probably had already eaten the rubbish he served that same week since most young, working class Americans can’t afford much more in the way of eating out. Putting the obvious sexism and bad taste aside, I guess it is because he believes “real men” supposedly eat meat even if that “meat” is highly processed garbage. After all, he has even special ordered the food on Air Force 1 for himself.

Kenn Orphan  2019