A Prison For Your Mind

There is a line from the movie The Matrix that has resonated with millions of viewers – for a very good reason. The allegory reminds us of our own predicament – in a world where the truth is hard to come by. Laurence Fishburne delivers the line of his career when he says, as the character Morpheus:

“... it's everywhere. It's all around us. Even now, in this very room.

You can see it when you look out your window, when you turn on your television, feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.

The world that has been pulled over our eyes,

to blind us from the truth;

that we are all slaves...

like everyone else, born into bondage, born into a prison you can't even smell, taste, or touch...

a prison for your mind.”

Two authors have recently published books that explain “how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

and

Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

Naomi Klein points out how “around the world, in Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos; exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image... Raking in billions out of the tsunami, plundering Russia, exploiting Iraq - this is the chilling tale of how a few are making a killing ... while more are getting killed. ”

For a Democracy Now! interview of Naomi Klein click here.

Jeremy Scahill points out how a private contractor, Blackwater, has assembled not only the most powerful mercenary army (that is essentially above the law), but also a privatized CIA. “called Total Intelligence Solutions... In fact, it’s run by three former very senior US intelligence officials... Those three men are joined by people from the Defense Intelligence Agency, from the FBI and others, and they’ve built this, what they call a “global fusion center” ... which is modeled after the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center ... they’re marketing what they say in their literature are CIA-type services ... to Fortune 1000 corporations and foreign governments, and the United States government, as well... services that were once the realm of sovereign governments are now on the open market for bidding... now available for private hire.”

For a Democracy Now! interview of Jeremy Scahill click here.