Fear

While listening to the latest episode of Dan Carlin's Common Sense audiocast about it being a good thing that governments fearing their own people it struck me that the example he uses about the King beating caught on tape, LAPD acquittals sparking the LA riots is a US domestic one, it also applies to the US governments relationship with other countries too. I urge you to go listen to Dan Carlin yourself to hear his take on it in depth.

The idea is that governments see you as a non-entity unless you fall into one of either categories, either someone who can give them sufficient funds to keep them entrenched, or someone who has enough power or influence to unseat them. If you don't fit into either category, they don't care what you think or how you feel. Approval ratings for the US Senate / Congress is at an all time low? They don't care. They have enough levers in place to ensure that you're impotent in creating any real change. The only people they fear are those who fund them deciding to withdraw their support or backing another option. The spice must flow.

All governments around the world are made up of politicians who are having their campaigns funded, and policies written by special interest groups, lobbyists, corporate bodies etc. In one sense government is a collection of corporate interests; the "national interest" is actually "the corporate interests of those who fund the politicians". It's US-PLC, UK-PLC, France-PLC, Germany-PLC etc disguised as something working in the interests of the people who pay the taxes and elect who they are fooled into believing is the lesser of the evils on the menu.

If you can't pay enough to be listened to, and you can't be enough of a threat to be listened to, you're ignored. Irrelevant. Look at how US corporations alongside various departments of the US government behave globally. The DHS seizing domain names of websites after being lobbied by the MPAA and RIAA without due process. Writing ACTA in secret knowing the plan is to force it upon every government around the world as a fait acomplit, where the people have been kept out at every stage with NO way to make it even remotely balanced or fair. Bullying companies and governments into hounding and cutting off Wikileaks and anyone who dares support it.

Bullying countries to vote for whatever the US wants at the UN, to claim "unanimous". Look at Bush and Blair's "coalition of the willing" as a perfect example. Most of the world disagreed with the legality of invading Iraq, yet a who's who of countries who were corrupt enough and poor enough could be bought off to join the list, the only two major names on the list are the two warmonger governments; the US and UK. The role the small countries play in the UN is on how they can be bought, bullied or bribed into voting in the interests of the rich countries, where they have a vote. Those small countries with no vote, are therefore no threat to the plans, their concerns are therefore ignored.

When the US government say "your produce will have an extra import duty to enter the US market", and that's your countries sole export, and the US is your countries sole market, the potential devastation is very apparent. They then say "I don't have to make these import duty decisions, it's just the stroke of a pen, if you vote the way we want it need not happen." Flipped the other way round and the impact on the US is a small percentage of a rounding error to the rich. You're financially impotent.

Everywhere you look you see either the corporations directly bullying governments into changing laws allowing them to continue to screw the people, or doing it indirectly through lobbyists or politicians. The people and their rights are irrelevant because the people are largely impotent to affect change, and can't or won't pay enough into the accounts of those who should be acting in the interests of the people. They put a lot of resources into ensuring that the various cartels and their crimes go un-investigated, and those who seek to derail it, are criminalised and smeared.

Wikileaks has given us an avalanche of proof, which has always been there before for those who dig deep enough outside the mainstream news sources to find it, that corporation spokespeople, politicians etc lie for a living. Their goal is to pull the wool over peoples eyes and present a different view of events than what's really going on. Their mortgages and bonuses are dependent on them being convincing enough to fool people for long enough.

When all the signs are that the ruling party are about to be trounced in the upcoming election, they always state "we're confident we're going to win", because stating the truth may in part bring it about. When a scandal breaks involving a politician being corrupt, unfaithful etc it could almost be a computer generated script kicking in where the first step is always to deny and hope it goes away, which always changes when proof is published showing the denial to be lies. At which point the new story is concocted and put out, only to have that shown to be lies too; rinse and repeat until you can get enough uncritical supporters drown out the accusations with other smears until it goes away, or they have to resign.

When companies get accused of some product or service causing uproar for some reason, like changing terms to throttle a service previously unmolested, they always claim "a tiny minority of people have an issue". When companies are being hammered in the market because they simply can't compete, they still write reports for shareholders to explain that "things have never been better, you're investment in us is well chosen" etc.

It's all lies. We're not talking about the odd throwaway line in the heat of the moment here, we're talking about a system which intelligent and trusted individuals set out to deceive us as a matter of course for their own personal aims. They also seek to deceive and manipulate others such as the EU to expand their own influence and profits at our expense.

It's the same with lawsuits and extortion rackets. Why do the huge corporations choose to sue (extort) the little guys? They can't fight back, that's why. Even if the accusation is false, they can't fight back. Oracle alleges Google's Android OS infringes on it's Java patents so who do they go after? Google? No, that'd be expensive and risky because Google can fight back.

They all have some things in common. They do it because they can. They do it because they know you can't do a damn thing about it. They do it because it furthers their own bank accounts. We are irrelevant.