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When Edward Bernays (the nephew of Sigmund Freud) wrote his famous 1928 book, Propaganda, he titled the first chapter of the book “Organizing Chaos”. The quotes below are taken directly from that chapter.

What was strikingly obvious to me in reading the book is that Bernays – in the year before the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 - wasn’t making any effort to sugar-coat the fact that he actually believes that propaganda is an essential and desirable fact of modern life.

(Propaganda, by the way, is the way the ruling classes get the working classes to march off to war and how the billionaire CEOs of the multinational Big Pharma, Big Medicine corporations (and Bill Gates, the CDC, the WHO, etc, etc) gets parents to willingly over-vaccinate their vulnerable, immune-compromised infants with vaccines that have never been subjected to FDA-approved, double-blind clinical trials to establish safety or efficacy, especially long-term!)

I suspect that every corrupt crony capitalist that was responsible for the soon-to-occur 1929 Stock Market Crash and subsequent Great Depression heartily agreed with him in 1928.

Did you know that the U.S. government has done something odd with your tax dollars? The ones you get so furious and indignant about when they’re used to feed anybody who’s hungry? It has given over 280 billion of those dollars to the government of Israel (not counting classified hush-hush super-secret amounts).

Israel is not a poor country. It is certainly not the poorest in the world. Why is it the top recipient of “aid.”

It isn’t. Its military is. Most of those billions of dollars are for weapons, and most of those weapons have to be bought from U.S. weapons dealers — you know, the ones crammed into close quarters risking the spread of a deadly disease because their jobs have been deemed “essential.”

The long U.S. tradition of providing equal time to the opposition party after a president’s yearly State of the Union (SOTU) address must now apply to Trump’s daily COVID-19 “briefings.”

These chaotic, embarrassing, deeply disturbing displays of presidential dishonesty and incompetence define Trump’s “state of the pandemic” addresses.

They demand a regular immediate rebuttal.  Sign the petition here"

 https://sign.moveon.org/petitions/dems-must-demand-equal-time-to-follow-trump-s-press-briefings

Some networks have considered suspending their coverage entirely. Others have simply switched away in the midst of Trump’s broadcasts.

But that’s a major dereliction of duty. The American people and the world must witness the Trump catastrophe in its fullest reality.

Over the past few weeks, I have emailed out a number of very powerful pieces that were written by very respected journalists and researchers. (See the list of three of them at the end of this piece.)

Following this flurry of postings, I received the following complaint about the length of the emailings (all of them were about the COVID-19 issue) from a fellow anti-war, anti-tyranny activist. It went something like this:

“Gary there's too much to read, with all the other stuff I feel I need to keep up with.  I wish I had more time.  But, quickly reading over the piece, the 1% figure caught my attention.  If it was likely I'd die once in every 100 times I went somewhere with the car, I'd feel that was too high of a risk to take. The coronavirus seems to fall into that 1% category, if not higher.”   

My answer went something like this:

Dear Mr. Katstra,

First of all, thanks for your terrific work on the greatest team ever which I think we are all safe in assuming would have repeated last year’s championship this year if the season hadn’t been shut down. Maybe I’m biased. The point is I’m a fan and an alumnus who found very disturbing an article titled “Virginia’s Austin Katstra lays the foundation for a career in counterterrorism.”

"The vet in the mirror may be wounded in the soul—and it is your duty to carry this one last vet for help."

This is not an easy reach—into the soul of the loneliest man or woman on Earth, which is the definition of everyone who is on the brink of committing suicide. For decades, Roland Van Deusen has been reaching out to a particularly endangered subgroup of such people: abandoned veterans, left with nothing but their own traumatic memories, their shame and guilt.

The words above are from a two-minute video that is suddenly, in this time of lockdown, his only means of reaching out to vets. A counselor and psychiatric social worker as well as a Vietnam-era Navy veteran, Van Deusen has been working with vets and supporting veterans’ groups for years, telling the lost they are not alone . . . that the moral injuries of war can be healed.

The nation’s, and the world’s, moral injuries are still present and hidden, silently continuing to destroy people’s will to live. 

The Lieutenant Governor of Texas is happy to sacrifice the lives of old people for “the economy.” A Congressman from Indiana doesn’t discriminate; he’s willing to let anybody lose their life to maintain what he calls their “way of life.” How they can have a way of life without a life becomes clear when he explains that by “way of life” he means the economy. The President of the United States is afraid that the cure of isolating ourselves is worse than the disease, even though the latter is deadly for some who get it.

Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, the author of “How Fascism Works” assessed him in a video. “It might seem like an exaggeration to call Trump a fascist,” Yale professor Jason Stanley said. “I mean, he’s not calling for a genocide or imprisoning his own people without due process. But . . . if you use history and philosophy as a guide, it’s easy to see parallels between Trump’s words and those of the most reviled fascists in history. That scares me, and it should scare you too.”

Drawing on his decade of studying fascist propaganda, Stanley concluded: “If you’re not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we’re all in trouble.”

We don't want to go back to the way it was. Normal was devouring the planet, devouring all of us. 

COVID-19 has changed the world, but the world apparently wants to go back to the way it was. We should find that intolerable. Out of this pandemic crisis, this is our opportunity to create a better world. Corporate capitalism itself should be the target under attack.  

COVID-19 has taken our attention off of climate change. Changes were happening in the oil market when COVID struck. With so many fewer cars and airplanes in use, the price of oil has plummeted. Let's keep our level of usage what it is today as we transition to renewable energy. Let the oil companies be the victims of the pandemic. We all want to get back to work, but we don't need to continue our dependence on fossil fuels. Some things do not need to come back. Business travel is now proven to be unnecessary. It is now time to move to green energy.