Photo by Molly
Our heart knows what our mind has forgotten —
it knows the sacred that is within all that exists,
and through a depth of feeling we can once again
experience this connection, this belonging.
— Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Thursday, October 15, 2026
EXCELLENT — Peter Thiel's Secret Political Network Is Already Planning Life After Trump
This is a longer, but essential and excellent article from April which remains extremely relevant. What is illuminated here is deeply scary and also not surprising at all. These are the psychopathic narcissistic fascists who are soaked in greed, hatred, and delusion. It is deeply important for us to understand how it is that they are working methodically to take down whatever shreds of democracy that are left in our country. This also makes obvious in horrifying facts the reality that Trump is but a symptom of something so much larger and more frightening, disturbing, and dangerous than this one man. It is clear that getting rid of Trump without understanding and dismantling the structures that brought us to where we are today will only serve to perpetuate the illusion that he alone is the problem. There is a much greater picture! And this is the information that is essential to know and share and act together upon in every way possible to address these threats to the welfare of us all in our country, other nations, and our shared world. So chilling. And we are not alone. It is essential that we are empowered and inspired by the awareness of the truth and the vital need to connect in solidarity to achieve the dismantling of the perpetrators and structures of this evil. — Molly
When these people say liberal democracy has failed, they are not talking about the left. They are talking about the American ‘experiment’ itself.
Rockbridge, Ohio is not a town. It is not a village. It is not, technically speaking, much of anything at all.
The federal government, which has an opinion about everything, classifies it as a census-designated place, which is the official term for a community that has 160 people, a post office, a ZIP code, and the good sense not to overstate its own importance.
You would not stop there unless you had a reason. And in the autumn of 2019, under the roof of an inn in a town that barely exists, several billion dollars of net worth — including Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Rebekah Mercer, and Chris Buskirk — sat down together and got to work.
See, 2019 was a very transformational year for J.D. Vance, if you happen to believe in coincidence. He moved to Ohio. He converted to Catholicism, and so began the formal process of political transformation that Peter Thiel had been architecting for years.
By 2022, Vance was a Senator. Peter Thiel’s $15 million got him there, along with other donations from billionaires and millionaires alike.
It started in early 2021, when Thiel personally walked Vance into Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump — whom Vance once referred to as America’s Hitler — for the first time. Time magazine’s account of the same meeting attributes it to the suggestion of Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and financier Omeed Malik who all begged Trump to give one of his former critics a chance.
All people who are major players in this network today.
Vance had spent months before that building a relationship with Donald Trump Jr., who lobbied his father to endorse him. It worked. By 2024, Vance was Vice President. But none of that was the end goal, or the point.
The point, the thing the people in that room in Hocking County were actually building, is the end of American democracy as we know it.
I am not asking you to simply trust me. I am asking you to watch a clip of the Vice President of the United States, in his own words, on tape, from 2021, before he had any reason to be careful.
In September 2021, while running for Senate, Vance sat down with Jack Murphy, a ‘manosphere’ influencer similar to Andrew Tate, whose website once published the phrase, “feminists need rape.” This was not an accident of booking with a bad guy. This was Vance, on his way to the United States Senate, choosing his audience deliberately.
In this interview, he name-dropped Curtis Yarvin, a blogger who had spent years building a following around a single core idea: that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with something closer to monarchy. Vance goes on to say that universities need to be attacked honestly and aggressively. And then Vance described America as being in a “late republican period.”
If you did not study Roman history, here is what that means: Rome’s late republican period is the moment just before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, defied the Senate, and made himself dictator for life. It is how historians describe the last days of a republic that did not know it was dying.
At the end of Rome, the institutions were still standing. The votes were still being counted. The Senate was still meeting. The republic was already over. It just had not made the announcement yet.
When Vance used that phrase in 2021, he was not reflecting on history. He was telling anyone paying close enough attention that the courts, the universities, the democratic norms standing between this network and total power were the Roman Senate. And that someone was already sharpening a knife.
He said all of this publicly, on an alt-right podcast, while running for Senate. Nobody important was listening. They counted on that, too. They love to tell on themselves in places they think we can’t hear them.
A Network Built to Last, Built to Hide
The network they built has no website, no public office, and no press releases. What it has instead is a structure, a deliberate and layered architecture designed to move hundreds of millions of dollars while leaving as few fingerprints as possible.
At the top sits Rockbridge Network, LLC. The business at the top is not a nonprofit, and it is not a PAC, yet it oversees dozens of entities that move billions of dollars through nonprofits, Super PACs, and a venture capital fund, most of it shielded from public disclosure.
Rockbridge was able to start because of initial funding from Rebekah Mercer, who was in that room in Ohio in 2019. She is the daughter of billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and directs the Mercer Family Foundation, overseeing day-to-day operations of the family's vast political ‘projects.’
She co-founded 1789 Capital and sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025.
She was a primary person behind Steve Bannon’s rise, a primary funder of Breitbart, and an architect of the Cambridge Analytica scheme. She wastes no breath on public pageantry; her purse holds all the eloquence she needs.
It’s a textbook example of the éminence grise dynamic — named after Père Joseph, the right-hand man to Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century.
Historically, the most successful shadow operators realize that standing in the spotlight just makes you an easy target. And the network they created — Rockbridge Network, LLC — is a perfect for that as a private, for-profit limited liability company.
It is incorporated in Delaware because Delaware asks the fewest questions.
An LLC has no public disclosure obligation for its ownership. The people who actually control the entire operation are legally permitted to remain nameless, and they have taken full advantage of that permission.
Below the holding “parent” company, the Rockbridge structure fans out into a series of purpose-built vehicles, each with a different legal status and a different function to meet their goals.
There are four 501(c)(4) nonprofits that legacy media has named, a designation that allows them to spend on politics without disclosing their donors:
Better Tomorrow (EIN: 87-2086524): pays people to knock on doors and drive voters to the polls on Election Day.
Over the Horizon Action (EIN: 88-0696885): find new conservative voters, get them on the rolls, and make sure they show up.
Faithful in Action (EIN: 93-1558726): turns Sunday sermons into voter mobilization, using the church as a political organizing infrastructure.
Firebrand Action (EIN: 92-0533628): calls itself a journalism nonprofit, but what it actually does is fund polling that flows directly into RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, the two most-cited polling averages in American political media.
Control the data, and you control what everyone believes is true
All four of these ‘nonprofits’ list the same phone number on their IRS-990 filings: 202-813-9118.
What Peter Thiel and his confidantes call a donor network, history may yet call something else entirely. PACs, Super PACs, advocacy groups, media firms, and fundraising vehicles scattered across multiple states, all connected by a single ten-digit thread that nobody was supposed to pull. But I did.
But the numbers make sense knowing that Rockbridge now holds semi-annual summits at Four Seasons hotels and the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne, where roughly 250 donors pay between $100,000 and $1 million each for a seat at the table.
Their annual budget is $75 million.
Buskirk and Omeed Malik have created a private membership club in Washington called Executive Branch, where Trump-supporting business leaders pay $500,000 a head to rub shoulders with cabinet officials. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has attended Rockbridge events.
So has the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
So has Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was gifted a $100,000 speaking fee from one of the network’s nonprofits (Over the Horizon Action) three months before he was confirmed to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
Known members include: Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, PayPal Mafia co-founders Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, Blake Masters, and Tucker Carlson, who was in the room at that first meeting in Ohio. Each of them pays between $100,000 and $1 million a year for the privilege of being in the room.
The Super PAC's top donors in 2024 included Wisconsin roofing billionaire Diane Hendricks at roughly $11 million, Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren at $10 million, and Richard Uihlein, who funneled $2.5 million through his own Restoration PAC.
That same phone number also appears on the filings for American Mission Florida, a state-level PAC.
In early 2026, American Mission Florida received $3 million from Leading the Future, a $100 million Silicon Valley Super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, built to push AI-friendly candidates into Congress during the 2026 midterms.
The money flows from Silicon Valley through a Super PAC in Henderson, Nevada, and lands in a Florida PAC that shares its phone number and compliance infrastructure with the Rockbridge Network.
Marc Andreessen is already a confirmed Rockbridge member. The same people keep showing up on both sides of these transactions, wearing different hats each time.
Architecture of Anonymity
I know this is a lot of data, and many of you are wondering, how does all of this money actually move?
Start at the top. A wealthy donor writes a check to Rockbridge Network, LLC. Because it is a private LLC, there is no legal requirement to disclose who that donor is. Their name never appears anywhere.
Rockbridge then passes that money down to Better Tomorrow, or another one of the 501(c)(4) nonprofits under their umbrella. Because of the way 501(c)(4)s work, they do not have to disclose where its money came from either. The donor has now disappeared behind two layers of legal protection.
From there, the “non-profit” sends grants to the other nonprofits in the network, like Over the Horizon Action, Faithful in Action, and Firebrand Action, or in friendly adjacent ones.
On paper, these look like separate organizations making independent decisions.
In reality, the same handful of people run all of them.
Chris Buskirk is an Arizona insurance entrepreneur most Americans could not pick out of a lineup.
He is president or leader of nearly every node in this network simultaneously. He runs the Super PAC, he founded the nonprofits, and he co-founded both 1789 Capital and the network itself.
In the words of Oren Cass — who was also in that room in Ohio — Buskirk is “the convener of that ecosystem.”
Janna Rutland is the network’s treasurer, the financial plumbing connecting the donor side to the spending side.
But Janna does not work for Rockbridge. She works for a company called the Crosby Ottenhoff Group, a political ‘compliance firm’ based in Chicago run by Caleb Crosby and Benjamin Ottenhoff.
What do they do? Well, PACs and nonprofits are legally required to name a treasurer on their filings. Crosby Ottenhoff rents one out.
Rutland is that person for Rockbridge, and many others. She is listed as treasurer on dozens of political organizations simultaneously, from Rockbridge’s nonprofits to Winning for Women to the White Coat Waste PAC to Save Our Country PAC and many, many more.
The phone number that appears on all those filings — (202-813-9118) — is not Rockbridge’s number. It is Crosby Ottenhoff’s number. That is why it shows up on hundreds of organizations. It is the compliance firm’s switchboard.
Rutland is not just signing paperwork. She is the financial plumbing connecting the donor side to the spending side of the entire operation.
She is treasurer of the Rockbridge entities and is also named on the filings of Red Eagle Media Group, which was paid $56 million by Republican political committees in the 2024 cycle to place their advertising.
Red Eagle is actually a Virginia fictitious business name for National Media Research, Planning and Placement, the same company implicated in allegedly illegal coordination between the NRA and the Trump campaign in 2016.
The Campaign Legal Center has already filed FEC complaints alleging that Crosby Ottenhoff ran “shell super PAC” arrangements.
Janna Rutland has no public profile and has never given an interview. Yet, she controls the flow of tens of millions of dollars, and almost nobody knows her name. In these types of operations, that is by design.
By the time the money exits the system as field operations, ad buys, or polling, it has passed through three or four entities controlled by the same two or three people. The original donor is invisible.
Every step is technically legal, and tax deductible.
Patriotic Capitalism
And then we of course, we have to talk about the venture capital arm of Rockbridge… 1789 Capital. The venture capital firm was co-founded in 2022 by Mercer, Buskirk, and Omeed Malik, with Donald Trump Jr. joining as a partner after the 2024 election. They call it “patriotic capitalism.”
By early 2026, 1789 Capital — which has over a billion dollars in assets now — has invested in roughly 30 companies. They say the fastest way to a man’s loyalty is through his wallet and his ambition. At 1789 Capital, they deal in both.
These companies include, but are not limited to:
Firehawk Aerospace: A startup that uses 3D printing to make rocket fuel in just a few hours, rather than the usual two months.
Hadrian: A company that uses AI to run automated factories for military and aerospace equipment.
Vulcan Elements: A small company that makes special magnets. Just three months after 1789 invested in them, the Pentagon gave them a record-breaking $620 million loan.
All three of these companies — which are linked to the Vice President of the United States and his friends — have millions of dollars in government contracts.
They are not separate events — but instead all connected — as AI needs rare earth minerals. You can’t build the chips, data centers, or energy systems without them, and China controls almost all the global supply.
Now remember this every time you see the Trump admin making moves on rare earth minerals and AI, whether it's Project Vault, the 2025 critical mineral executive orders, or the mineral deals they're cutting with countries like Australia, Japan, Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia.
Trump declared a national security emergency, which let him skip normal bidding rules and pour hundreds of millions in Pentagon money into companies like Vulcan Elements.
The catch? The presidents son's firm — 1789 Capital — had just invested in Vulcan three months earlier.
So, to review: Trumps son invested first. The Pentagon's hundreds of millions came three months later. No review, no competition, no questions asked. Your taxes, their profit.
Common Good Catholicism
There is one more thing the four nonprofits share, and it’s one of the most disturbing. Read the 990 filings. All of them have in their mission statements their goal is to, “further the common good.”
That phrase sounds harmless. It is not.
“The common good” is the central organizing idea of a political movement called postliberal common-good Catholicism, and it has a very specific meaning: that liberal democracy has failed, that individual rights have atomized society, and that the state must be redirected by a counter-elite who will impose a moral order from above, whether the public asks for it or not.
A professor named Deneen wrote a whole book saying America needs a new ruling class. Vance wrote an official blurb for his book, Regime Change:
"Deneen does more than show how our present ruling class has declared war on beauty, tradition, and the social institutions that make life worth living; he articulates a vision for a populist politics that can rebuild what has been torn down." — J.D. Vance
Vance is their ‘guy’ in politics. He converted to Catholicism, buddied up with the Heritage Foundation, and still name-drops Deneen publicly. Vance wrote the official foreword for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts's book, Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.
And look at the language:
The old conservative money used words like “Prosperity” and “Freedom.”
The new right picks names like “Better Tomorrow” and “Faithful in Action.”
And before your eyes glaze over at the phrase “liberal democracy,” understand what it actually means. It does not mean progressive politics. It does not mean the Democratic Party. Liberal democracy is the system of government the United States was built on.
It is the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, free elections, individual liberty, and the idea that the government answers to the people rather than the other way around. It is America as we know it.
When these people say liberal democracy has failed, they are not talking about the left. They are talking about the American ‘experiment’ itself.
The 22nd & 25th Amendment
Members of Congress, from both parties, are formally calling for the President’s removal under the 25th Amendment.
The Rockbridge Network has been patient. They may not need to be patient much longer. The only thing standing between Vance and the Oval Office is Donald J. Trump — a man whose public decline the nation watches in real time, and who forms his understanding of the world primarily through whatever Fox News decides to show him that morning.
In September of 2025, Trump mobilized federal troops against American citizens because Fox News showed him five-year-old protest footage and told him it was happening now. Oregon’s governor had to call Trump personally to explain that the courthouse he thought was under attack was not under attack.
A man this responsive to whatever is put in front of him is not running the country. He is being run. What the ever-elusive Rockbridge Network has built is not a simply another dark-money political network. It is a succession plan.
If Vance reaches the Oval Office after January 2027, the 22nd Amendment allows him to serve nearly a decade.
I know what you are thinking. Vance is not electable. He isn’t as popular as Trump. And right now, you are not wrong. As of April 2026, Vance holds the worst approval rating of any vice president at this stage in office, a 21-point swing in the wrong direction since January 2025.
Rockbridge is not waiting for Vance to become popular. They are building a country in which popularity matters less than infrastructure.
Since 2021 — before Vance won the Senate on Thiel’s money — they have funded redistricting efforts, voter turnout operations in swing states, and litigation designed to rewrite election law.
Their own internal planning documents put $3.75 million toward rewriting election law, $3 million for what they literally called a “government-in-waiting,” and $6 to $8 million per state in Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan.
And this wasn’t some abstract plan. James Blair was running polling for the network’s nonprofit. He left to become Trump’s campaign political director. After the election, he got named White House Deputy Chief of Staff.
The guy went straight from the network into the West Wing. This is the Koch model, turbocharged and stripped of its libertarian pretense. Charles Koch publicly opposed Trump and lost his influence after 2018, and Rockbridge was purpose-built in 2019 to replace him.
They're not playing for the next election. They're playing for the foundation of every election after it. Trump was never the destination — he was the vehicle — and the people who were in that room in Ohio are still driving.
People love to comfort themselves by saying Rome wasn’t built in a day. They conveniently forget it didn’t fall in one, either. It crumbled slowly, imperceptibly, while very smart people stood around arguing over the acoustics in the Colosseum.
Please go here for the full original article: https://dissentinbloom.substack.com/p/peter-thiels-secret-political-network?utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e0_tv1_a1demo0eeb6it0
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Kelly Hayes: This Is a Long Fight
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| My husband's protest sign. |
Multiple things are true here.
This is a fascist, authoritarian administration.
It has not yet fully consolidated power.
Some of its efforts to do so have been frustrated.
Trump is a doddering, confused egomaniac who started an unpopular war that's costing everyday people a lot of money.
The demagoguery doesn't work as well when people are paying high gas prices.
The GOP is in bad shape ahead of the midterms.
This is going to be a time of desperate Trumpian shenanigans because, as y'all may recall, they don't believe in fair fights and never admit to losing anything.
Some people, and I don't just mean Trump, have been moving through the world as though they would never face a consequence for any action ever again, because they never planned on losing power. That means they think they can't afford to lose now. There are a lot of desperate moves ahead.
They can lose. But it's going to be messy and dirty.
And btw, the midterms are not a lock. They will pull every dirty trick in the book, and then some. We are playing the game at a disadvantage and have to win anyway. That's no easy task.
And even if they take huge losses during the midterms, we've still got a very ugly road ahead. These people will thrash about and cause tremendous harm. They will keep killing, jailing, kidnapping, and bombing.
This is a long fight.
I am not trying to discourage anyone. I want us to orient ourselves.
And remember, all of this is happening amid the AI buildout. AI, which is not a coherent set of products and services, but rather a commercial and political project, can be understood as a full-spectrum class-war offensive. An offensive waged by one industry, which put their guy Vance in the WH.
People talk about AI not turning a profit and how it's a massive bubble—they're not wrong. But remember when Uber was willing to take tremendous losses FOR YEARS to engineer dependence and bleed out the competition? AI is basically that for the whole economy and the workings of government. It's a bleed-out of current conditions. Not all of these companies are going to make it, but the billionaires are counting on a situation in which existing social relations can no longer be reproduced. A re-ordering.
It's not about placing themselves at the top. They're already at the top. It's about putting us more firmly under control. Deskilled, devalued, hyper-surveilled, desperate. That vision of fascism won't be defeated in the next two elections.
It's a long fight.
Big Tech can lose, too. But we're going to have to organize for our god damn lives.
So, if you're feeling tired, burnt out, or discouraged, do what you've gotta do. Tend your wounds. Hug your cat. Watch some bad TV. Don't argue in circles with strangers on social media. Don't tell everyone they're doomed. The world does not need your particular spin on giving up.
Find your team. We need a multi-tendency movement of movements.
Find your front. And trust, it won't be the last.
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| All photos are taken at several of countless protests my husband and I have participated in. |
Monday, October 12, 2026
Indigenous Peoples’ Day: Leonard Peltier on Resistance, New Film & Fighting for Freedom
For Ingenious Peoples' Day!
Democracy Now! —
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we feature a conversation with one of the world’s most prominent champions for Indigenous rights, Leonard Peltier. “Indigenous Day is a day that’s been long overdue for any type of recognition,” says Peltier. “I am not going to give up, because we are not free yet. We are in danger. Trump and these organizations, they’re talking about doing away with our reservations and our treaties and everything else. … We’re going to stay here. You’re not going to get rid of us.”
Peltier is a longtime political prisoner who spent nearly half a century behind bars for a crime he says he did not commit — the 1975 fatal shooting of two FBI agents. In the final hours of his administration last year, President Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence, but his conviction has not been overturned, and he remains under home confinement on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota.
“It was one crime against the justice system after another in order to frame Leonard for the assassination of these two federal agents,” says David France, co-director of the new documentary Free Leonard Peltier. “And although he and his team were able to prove over and over that every bit of evidence used against him in his conviction was brought into question, he was never able to get a retrial.”
Please go here for the original program and full transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2026/10/12/leonard_peltier
Michael Parenti: Substituting Opinions For Facts, the Essence of Capitalism, and the Most Insidious Forms of Oppression
There are so many voices of wisdom, truth, and justice that are rarely or never heard on the corporate owned American mainstream media. Michael Parenti has certainly long been among them. May we all assume responsibility for choosing our teachers wisely, for seeking independent resources of information which are not beholden to large financial interests, and for embodying — in the words of Chris Hedges — a profound commitment to truth. Democracy, peace, justice, and a livable planet cannot exist or be sustained without an informed and awakened populace. — Molly
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The Worst Forms of Tyranny
The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as to not be perceived as tyranny.
Conventional opinions fit so comfortably into the dominant paradigm as to be seen not as opinions but as statements of fact, as 'the nature of things.' The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us.
Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.
Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on.
*****
The enormous gap between what the US leaders do in the world and what Americans think that their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.
The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.
The powers that be not only try to control events, but they try to control our memory and understanding of these events, which is part of controlling the events themselves.
Far from being reluctantly propelled into hostilities by popular war fever, leaders incite that fever in order to gather support for their war policies. Thereby do they attempt to distract the public from pressing domestic matters, serve the overseas interests of U.S. investors, justify gargantuan military budgets, and present themselves as great leaders.
The ruling elites know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy.
With unfailing consistency, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests.
With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader ... charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West." Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ... are swept along.
*****
The nation, like the church, has its visible symbols and insignia, its parchments engrossed with the revealed word, its dogmas, hymns, liturgy, holy day celebrations, its early Fathers, prophets and martyrs, its priesthood and its lay sodality, its myths of sacred genesis and apocalyptic crises, its world-saving mission and its missionaries.
America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history.
Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.
You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug... People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.
*****
No system in history has capitalism been more relentless in battering down than ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.
The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government.
The problem with capitalism is that it best rewards the worst part of us: the ruthless, competitive, conniving, opportunistic, acquisitive drives, giving little reward and often much punishment — or at least much handicap — to honesty, compassion, fair play, many forms of hard work, love of justice, and a concern for those in need.
In societies that worship money and success, the losers become objects of scorn. Those who work the hardest for the least are called lazy. Those forced to live in substandard housing are thought to be the authors of substandard lives. Those who do not finish high school or cannot afford to go to college are considered deficient or inept.
Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.
You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime, and that's not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of property.
The Italian neofascists were learning from the U.S. reactionaries how to achieve fascism's class goals within the confines of quasi-democratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jackbooted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; convince people that government is the enemy - especially its social service sector - while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute income upward.
*****
Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful, happy, prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who live in it.
It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.
Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.
As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.
All conservative ideologies justify existing inequities as the natural order of things, inevitable outcomes of human nature. If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies and other special considerations - at our expense? Their "naturally superior talents" include unprincipled and illegal subterfuge such as price-fixing, stock manipulation, insider training, fraud, tax evasion, the legal enforcement of unfair competition, ecological spoliation, harmful products and unsafe work conditions. One might expect naturally superior people not to act in such rapacious and venal ways. Differences in talent and capacity as might exist between individuals do not excuse the crimes and injustices that are endemic to the corporate business system.
Any history that deals with the efforts of the populace to defend itself from the abuses of wealth and tyranny is people's history . . . A people's history should be not only an account of popular struggle against oppression but an exposé of the anti-people's history that has prevailed among generations of mainstream historians. It should be a critical history about a people's oppressors, those who propagated an elitist ideology and a loathing of the common people that distorts the historical record down to this day.
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There’s only one thing that the ruling circles throughout history have ever wanted-all the wealth, the treasures, and the profitable returns; all the choice lands and forests and game and herds and harvests and mineral deposits and precious metals of the earth; all the productive facilities and gainful inventiveness and technologies; all the control positions of the state and other major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities; all the protections of the law and none of its constraints; all of the services and comforts and luxuries and advantages of civil society with none of the taxes and none of the costs. Every ruling class in history has wanted only this-all the rewards and none of the burdens.
If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors. (This is true of the paternal side of my family and my great-great grandfather, David Ward. — Molly)
One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor — backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.
The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.
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Global warming is already acting upon us with an accelerated feedback and compounded effect that may be irreversible! We do not have eons or centuries or many decades. Most of us alive today may not even have the luxury of saying 'Après moi, le déluge' because we will be around to experience it ourselves. And if you think it will be 'interesting' or 'exciting,' ask the tsunami survivors if that's how they felt. This time the plutocratic drive to 'accumulate, accumulate, accumulate' may take all of us down, once and forever.
I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.
If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.
Here at home and throughout the world people are fighting back against the forces of wealth, privilege, and militarism — some because they have no choice, others because they would choose no other course than the one that leads to peace and justice.
Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.
— Michael Parenti
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