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Campaign Finance — Another Layer

By now, anyone with a scintilla of public spirit knows the names of Adelson, the Koch Brothers, Mercer, and the mammoth corporations from Wall Street, the banks, the oil companies, big Pharma, big agriculture, and the like. If you are of the older generation, as I am, you remember when you and those who thought like you clucked over the millions that were being spent in political campaigns. How quickly the change in a single letter signified our movement to campaigns of millions. Now it’s billions. 

 

Trumparade of 2018 Stupidest Idea Since Philadelphia Liberty Loan Parade of 1918

It’s hard not to focus on the fact that Trump has picked the 100th anniversary of the first Armistice Day celebration for his weaponry parade (more on that below). But there was another parade a month and a half before the armistice that cries out for comparison because of its remarkable stupidity. I’m thinking of the Liberty Loan Parade in Philadelphia:

This was a parade to squeeze more money out of people to pay for war, to celebrate patrioti-nationali-militarism, and to reject fake news. I’ll explain that last one.

World War I brought us a number of wonderful gifts: professional propaganda, alcohol prohibition, World War II “The Sequel!,” and “Spanish” influenza. But one reason that this disease epidemic was called “Spanish” was that Spain was not at war, so Spanish media outlets were allowed to report that thousands of people were dying of a horrible disease. In nations at war, such a report would have been unacceptably un-cheerful — and therefore illegal. Few editors wanted to risk jail time to report on the flu in Woodrow Wilson’s brave new world. The flu was fake news.

The Global Elite is Insane Revisited

In 2014 I wrote an article titled ‘The Global Elite is Insane’. I want to elaborate what I explained in the earlier article so that people have a clearer sense of what we are up against in our struggle to create a world of peace, justice and ecological sustainability.

 

Of course, as I explained previously, it is not just the global elite that is insane. All those individuals – politicians, businesspeople, academics, corporate media editors and journalists, judges and lawyers, bureaucrats…. – who serve the elite, including by not exposing and resisting it, are also insane. And it is important to understand this if we are to develop and implement effective strategies to resist elite violence, exploitation and destruction but also avert the now-imminent human extinction driven by their insane desire for endless personal privilege, corporate profit and political control whatever the cost to Earth’s biosphere and lifeforms (human and non-human alike).

 

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