Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive

Well, it looks like the mass media has decided who will be the Democratic candidate for 2016.

Now wait a minute...

I saw what happened. The mass media has been endlessly talking about Hillary Clinton so much that most people don't even realize yet who else might be running.

...Disrupt.

So, did the powers-that-be pick Hillary Clinton? Things like this don't just happen. So, why?

(Personally, I like Hillary Clinton, and I think she should run for President.) But of the three most likely Democratic candidates, I suspect she would be the most like a Republican. Which may be why the mostly Republican oligarchy (who own the mass media) would rather promote her candidacy. However, there have also been two decades of bad press (ugly press actually) that has driven the right wing nuts to absolute hatred of Hillary Clinton. If Hillary Clinton were to be the Democratic candidate, we can be guaranteed Republican Clinton haters will show up in droves to vote against her. (Could this just all be part of a scheme to promote a Democrat the Republicans can beat?)

...Degrade.

But what about those other two potential candidates?

• What about Vice President Joe Biden? Well; he's an environmentalist. We even saw him on TV welcoming back the EPA employees after the fiscal shutdown. That was more of a brave act than we might think. We know from what happened to Vice President Al Gore (in the 2000 election) how much the oligarchy hates environmentalists. If Joe Biden were elected President, the environmental pillagers might have to pay more of the true costs of their actions. (And they might even lose some of those multi-billion dollar subsidies they paid off our elected representatives for.) Moreover, Biden supports unions. Big campaign contributors don't support unions. Let's face it, only people who actually work for a living and want a reasonable pay support unions. Joe Biden isn't the oligarchy's candidate. Who cares if he schooled Tea Party Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan in the 2012 debate. It even appears the oligarchy wants Democratic candidates who can't win arguments... But ultimately; they want someone they can control – you know – like Obama (who would have fast-tracked the Trans-Pacific Partnership "Treaty.")
• What about Senator Elizabeth Warren? Well; she has spoken words against the big banks. She has a sense of fairness. That can't be tolerated. (Please read sarcasm in that last line.) 
   

...Deny.

We all know that the mass media makes its money from advertising. We all know that the mass media makes tons of money on election advertising. So, why would they want to spoil the horse race? They're not. This is how they change the horses in the race. The mass media still has two years to promote dark horse candidates of the oligarchy's choosing. This is how they manipulate our democracy. Misdirection.

...Deceive.

By now, most of us have heard of Edward Snowden – the former NSA contractor employee who has informed us of what our tax dollars are really being spent on – spying on us, killing poor people on the other side of the planet (they claim to be terrorists), and manipulating us into giving them even more of our tax dollars. His most recent release of information includes NSA online tactics for psychologically manipulating Americans and people of the world.

In the NSA presentation, the focus of their Online Covert Operations was to; Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, and Deceive. They called it the 4 D's.

But, as I have hopefully pointed out; the 4 D's have been around on the mainstream media for quite some time already.

...And what has that cost us? Let's see... billions of dollars of our taxes get pillaged, hundreds of billions of our tax dollars get wasted on something other than for the public good, corruption is required of our elected representatives, monopolies abound (example: though Americans invented the Internet, we pay the highest rate on Earth for the worst service), our food is tainted, what's left our water is being privatized, and our air is being polluted to the point that our climate has doomed our economy – and all the so-called “job creators” want to offer us is sweat shop pay.

It has been said that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Compared to the cost we are now paying, that seems cheap.

It is to be expected that politically powerful people would want to control and monopolize the Internet like they control and windfall profit from the mass media. It is to be expected that someone would want to corrupt the free flow of information so that they can manipulate us, control us, and enslave us.

Bill Moyers wrote an excellent review of the “Deep State” – the members of the oligarchy and the secret operatives who actually run our nation.

“Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.”

This Deep State has been around for a long time – controlling the things they care about. President Eisenhower called it the military/industrial complex, but it's bigger than that. And while we, the citizens of the United States have to struggle for years to get anything done, the Deep State gets its way almost without debate.

• Americans don't get to vote on America's wars – and we appear now to be in endless wars.
• Americans don't get to vote on what defines a terrorist – and now Americans with an opinion are being treated like potential terrorists.
• American consumers drive the American economy – but American jobs have been exported by the millions over the past 30 years.
• It is American consumers' own money which companies ultimately use to pay for advertising on American mass media – to manipulate us Americans.
• American taxpayers' money is taken to pay for “our” government to spy on and manipulate us. 
  
  ...And this isn't something new: 

 
(1975)

Moreover, our civilian police have been slowly transformed into a para-military occupying force in many parts of the country. Let's face it; this is what proto-fascism looks like.

All the while, the taxpayer supported “vampire squid on the face of humanity” (the banksters) continue to pillage our savings, investments, economy, and environment. Financially, the big banks are doing quite well – at the expense of the rest of us. (Which leads to an obvious conclusion; we may be better off without them.)

It is almost obvious that this is not really an economic recovery. It's just another bubble. And when it too bursts, we will be poorer. And we will be angrier. And we will blame whomever is in political office – probably President Obama and the Democrats (which might actually be the oligarchy's plan.)

But it is the unelected “Deep State” that is driving these decisions that only benefit the super-greedy rich. And quite apparently, the Deep State is often more powerful than our Constitutional Government. Our elected representatives still have to take their required bribes (campaign contributions), fear the (oligarchy controlled) mass media, and have to struggle against the sell-out politicians who themselves are a part of the Deep State.

The reality is that our “democracy” is in many ways nothing more than a facade, a shell of system – who's insides have been eaten away. We still call it a democracy though, because that sort of keeps us from fighting for a real one.

Nationally, what we do have is a form of corporatocracy that allows us to vote on which Deep State candidate we want to rule us. And if we vote for someone else, they have ways of bringing him in line.

Occasionally however, one of our elected representatives speaks out. Senator Harry Reid has just recently made one of those statements when he outed the Koch Brothers for being “unAmerican.”

"It's too bad that they're trying to buy America, and it's time that the American people spoke out against this terrible dishonesty of these two brothers who are about as un-American as anyone I can imagine."

Senator Reid was right. The Koch Brothers may have been born in America, but they obviously don't believe in American ideals. From their efforts to “buy America,” we can see that the Koch Brothers don't believe in free trade, they don't believe in democracy, they don't believe in a well informed public, they don't believe in fairness, they don't believe in justice... but they do believe in money.

This reminds me of an old movie; Chinatown. In the movie the private detective asks the super-greedy rich old man what he can buy with all of that money. His reply was “the future.” If this is the case with the Koch Brothers and the Deep State; then they are buying the worst future we can imagine – a polluted and poor failing fascist state still reliant on diminishing resources on a planet with a collapsing environment.

What a waste.