"Elites Get The Benz"
Dishing the dirt on Internet tools, insider scams,
military hegemony and plenty more...
by Bill Bonner
"Government officials wanted Amazon to remove from its online catalog books containing “misinformation” regarding the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines, meaning anything questioning the government’s pro-vaccine propaganda."
~ Ron Paul
"We begin with this report from the American Conservative… “Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?” asks an Atlantic headline. The numbers are deadly. The grimmest news was from the Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper outside the East Coast. The paper announced it was cutting 115 people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom. In June of last year, the Times dropped 74 people. Some 2,900 newspapers have closed or merged since 2005.
Sports Illustrated is in trouble. The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, NPR, Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed, among others, have shed hundreds of journalists over the past year. (The author of the Atlantic article himself was a layoff from the Post.) Job losses among print, digital, and broadcast-news organizations grew by nearly 50 percent during 2023. Why so much downsizing in the mainstream media? It is possible that consumers don’t really want to pay for propaganda?
Hand in Glove: It is obvious that the media, the US firepower industry, and the government work closely together. All are arms of America’s Establishment – rich, well-educated, and powerful…with elites who have grown distant from ‘The People’ they were meant to serve. No conspiracy theory is necessary to explain it; their interests…and the interests of ‘the masses’… simply diverge. People with power tend to want more power. And as Eisenhower observed in 1961, pretty soon, they exert an ‘unwarranted influence’ over public policy to get it.
The rich are different. They have more money. More power. More influence. Can you blame them for wanting to control the government…and use it to their own advantage? Elites, already on top, typically aim to protect themselves by blocking innovation and competition. They control both political parties, for example; they don’t want any others butting in. But the rest of the population is better off in an open, dynamic society where they can go about their business without the costs and constraints imposed by the feds. This divergence explains much of America’s excess spending, its cancerous debt, and its lust for foreign wars. They are all obvious ways in which the insiders transfer more wealth and power to themselves. Less obvious is our subject for today: the extent to which the country has already become, in effect, a military dictatorship.
That, at any rate, is the charge leveled by Mr. Mike Benz. He is not saying anything we haven’t said. But he has taken it a step further. The US is not just in danger of being taken over by some form of insider rule; the federal government already has been captured. It is an explosive assertion; if true, it upsets hundreds of years’ worth of progress, in which fighting men were meant to serve civilized authorities, not the other way around.
Internet Tools: And he may be right. The deciders are selected, more or less, not by the voters, but by the political parties, the media and the firepower industry. They decide when we go to war and with whom, how much the feds spend…and, indirectly, where they get it.
One way they control the idea-flow, says Benz, Director of the Foundation for On-Line Freedom, is by using the latest internet tools. Benz: "Google is a great example of this. Google began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford PhDs, and they got their funding as part of a joint CIA NSA program to chart how “birds of a feather flock together online” through search engine aggregation. And then one year later they launched Google and then became a military contractor. From there it was one hop and one skip until Google was fully part of the Deep State program. At first, this was widely seen as helping independence movements – such as the famous Arab Spring – liberate their countries from dictatorial or backward leaders.
Overseas, the CIA and other US intel agencies had been rigging elections and pulling strings for a long time. Benz recalls George Keenan, then head of the CIA, explaining: “…listen, it's a mean old world out there. We at the CIA just rigged the Italian election [of 1948]. We had to do it because if the Communist won, maybe there'd never be another election in Italy again, but it's really effective, guys. We need a department of dirty tricks to be able to do this around the world. And this is essentially a new social contract we're constructing with the American people because this is not the way we've conducted diplomacy before…”
The Biggest Danger: But after the surprise election of Donald Trump, the insiders began to see that it wasn’t only Italian voters who couldn’t be trusted. Benz…"Russiagate died in July, 2019 when Robert Mueller basically choked on the stand for three hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing. After two and a half years of investigation…they took all of this censorship architecture, spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it's actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself."
Get it? The threat is not just that foreign elections may not go the way the elites want. Domestic elections might go awry too. The biggest danger to ordinary Americans is a debt crisis – followed by defaults, depression and inflation. But the biggest danger to the powers-that-be is a sudden cut-off in the flow of deficit-financed spending…easy money…stock market gains…cushy jobs…contracts…directorships…and other government boondoggles.
Suppose, for example, that a ‘peace candidate’ were elected president? Suppose he used his office to make a logical and compelling case for America First, proposing to stay out of other peoples’ wars? And suppose he cut spending in the one and only area where substantial savings are readily available – the ‘discretionary’ budget for maintaining the US empire? It would be easy to save $500 billion with no loss in security for the homeland; the US would still be spending 6 times as much on ‘defense’ as Russia. A few other cuts to the empire budget and the federal deficit would be eliminated completely!
But what would the toady press say? How would the elites defend themselves? How much longer would this reformer live? More to come…"
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