www.NewDemocracyWorld.org

Beware of Dennis Kucinich, Robert Reich, Bill Moyers and their Like

by John Spritzler

November 19, 2012

Dennis Kucinich, Robert Reich, Bill Moyers, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olberman: what to these famous left/liberals have in common? Five things.

#1: They are well known to many Americans because of their past or current positions in corporate-controlled mass media or the federal government.

#2: They exercise great influence on the thinking of Americans who want our nation to be much more equal and democratic and less militarily offensive than it is.

#3: They tell their followers that the problems we face can all be solved by working within the electoral system to elect Democrats or Third Party candidates so that Republicans don't call the shots.

#4: They may bemoan the problems that bother their followers, but they never challenge the Big Lies that keep people in the dark about why we have those problems in the first place.

  • They don't expose the Big Lie about the United States supposedly being a democracy. They don't tell the truth: that it is a dictatorship of the rich, in which key government policies are made by exclusive elite organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Economic Development, and not by politicians, not even the President.
  • They don't expose the Big Lie about the United States supposedly having a "national interest" that all Americans, rich and poor alike, share in common. They don't tell the truth: that the phrase "national interest" is what the Billionaire Class uses in public discourse to refer to their own selfish interests, which are usually in direct conflict with the interests of most Americans.
  • They may lament that we don't have a single-payer health care system, and they may blame the "special interest" health insurance and Big Pharma industry, but they never explain that it is the ruling class, the entire corporate elite of all the industries, with backing from both the Democrats and Republicans, who oppose single-payer health care. They never explain that the entire ruling class opposes single-payer health care in order to lower the expectations in life of ordinary Americans and to make us feel insecure so that we will not rise up against the authorities the way Americans did in the social upheavals of the 1960s when they had rising expectations and greater economic security than ever before.
  • They may object to standardized testing of our children in the public schools, but they tell us the problem is a failure by our leaders to understand how best to teach children; they never explain that standardized testing was never about improving education; it was about making sure that many of America's working class children would learn the lesson that they were not smart enough or studious enough to even deserve a good-paying job, and to learn that their misfortunes in life are not the fault of the dictatorship of the rich but their own shortcomings.
  • They may object to the growing economic inequality in the United States, but they tell us it's caused by the Republican Party winning elections; they don't explain that the Democratic Party politicians are as much to blame as the others; they don't talk about how Robert Reich as Secretary of Labor screwed the American working class* with his buddy, Bill Clinton, who imposed NAFTA (with the resulting loss of good-paying jobs) and who tore up the social safety net, "ending welfare as we know it."
  • They perpetuate the Big Lie that the purpose of the wars that the U.S. government wages is to defeat an enemy that truly threatens the safety and welfare of ordinary Americans. They never tell the truth: that the government wages these wars for the benefit only of the Billionaire Class; that these wars are Orwellian wars of social control designed to frighten Americans into obeying our rulers who claim to be protecting us from the "real enemy"; that these wars are a pretext for enriching the owners of the weapons industry; and that the "enemy" is, for our rulers, a useful enemy that our rulers go to great lengths to invent. Thus, they never explain that the reason Arabs/Muslims don't like Israel and sometimes attack it violently is not because they are anti-Semites who hate democracy-loving Jews and Americans, but because Israel is based on ethnic cleansing of non-Jews to keep its population at least 80% Jewish so that its status as a Jewish state, a state of "the Jewish people" and not a state of all its citizens, can be asserted without the whole world seeing that it is a rejection of the principle of democracy. And they (Kucinich etc.) never explain that the reason the U.S. government supports Israel is because its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians foments exactly what the Orwellian war of social control, known as the "War on Terror," needs: angry and sometimes violent Palestinians. The phony War on Terror needs them in order to have credibility. It needs people who, because of their anger and violence, can be portrayed by the American mass media as hateful irrational terrorists out to kill us "because of our freedoms." And it needs a Bill Moyers (as discussed more here) to persuade good people to get on the War on Terror bandwagon.
  • They don't expose the Big Lie about 9/11 being supposedly orchestrated by 19 Muslims controlled by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan; they don't tell the truth: that it was an inside job, a "new Pearl Harbor," intended to whip up blind support for the War on Terror.

#5: They never say that the problem is a dictatorship of the rich, and therefore that the solution is a revolution to win genuine democracy and a more equal society than the rich will ever allow.

These left/liberals are what, in Britain, they would call the "loyal opposition." They are loyal to the ruling class of the United States, or at least to all of the Big Lies that the ruling class uses to stay in power. This is why they all adopt the vocabulary that obscures the fact that a dictatorship of the rich rules the U.S. undemocratically and deliberately causes the problems we face. This is why Kucinich et al never explain that, for the rich, these problems are not problems but solutions--solutions to the problem of how to control the American public and prevent them from making society more equal and democratic, which we would do if left alone and not somehow controlled.

Thus these left/liberals always refer to the U.S. government, even when condemning something it does, as "We" instead of "They." They want us to believe that all Americans, rich and poor alike, are just one big family with the same "national interest." They want us to believe the myth that as wrongheaded and mistaken as we may believe they are, the people running the show are, after all, part of the great American family, the big "We." They don't want Americans to start thinking in terms of "we" versus "they." They don't want us to grasp that we can only solve our problems by making a revolution against the Billionaire Class, against THEM, not against US. As long as we refer to THEM as WE, we will be mentally unable to make a revolution, and unable therefore to solve the problems THEY cause. This is why Dennis Kucinich, in an op-ed about Obama's targeted assassinations in which he doesn't condemn them but merely says "we can all agree that Congress must fully exercise its oversight powers to ensure that the program is being conducted in accordance with the law," asserts the Big Lie about our "national interest" with a straight face, declaring that "All US government officials, including the president, want to ensure the safety of the United States." You can't get more loyal than that!

The chief purpose of the loyal opposition is to get us to use "we" instead of "they" to refer to our ruling class and its government. The loyal opposition wants us to believe that real change can come from voting. They want us to not even think about building a revolutionary movement. The reason the loyal opposition engages in "opposition" is to make us pay attention to them and be influenced by them. The reason the loyal opposition has such an easy time getting featured in the corporate-controlled mass media is because the Billionaire Class knows how very important it is for the loyal opposition to succeed in its mission of controlling Americans who want a more equal and democratic and less militarily aggressive society. The question is, are we going to let them get away with it? If you say no, then please start Thinking about Revolution [online at www.NewDemocracyWorld.org/thinking.pdf ].

----------------------

* Robert Reich was Labor Secretary during the truly heroic rank-and-file-led strikes at the E.A. Staley corn milling company and the Caterpillar Company and the Bridgestone Company (rubber) in 1995. The strikes were sabotabged by the national union leaders and attacked by the companies' management. The workers received no help from the Labor Department, and Reich had the gall to pontificate that the negotiations (which resulted in defeat for the workers) could, as the NYT reported, "spur an incipient trend of labor-management collaboration, with both sides seeing something to gain from an employer's success." This is how Reich told the workers to collaborate with their class enemy as if they shared the same fundamental values and interests, the "national interest" Big Lie.