Date: Saturday, 11 February 2023
https://theduran.com/even-alternative-media-in-the-west-pump-the-regimes-ideology/
Even ‘Alternative Media’ in The West Pump The Regime’s Ideology
Here is why ‘alternative media’ aren’t the answer: Most of them have the same false ideology as the mainstream media do, and are ultimately pumping the billionaires’ lies about ‘the free market’ and about why things are getting worse and worse every decade in America, and in the entire U.S.-and-allied world.
One of the best ‘alternative media’ is Zero Hedge; and on February 8th they published a very truthful headline, “The Powers That Be Are Lying to Americans About the Economy”, but an unfortunately miscomprehending, false, analysis as to why that statement is the case — why it is true — in America. So: the lying ideology — the ideology that all billionaires pump to the masses — which is virtually the same in all media (regardless whether liberal or conservative), will be described here:
The regime’s ideology in domestic affairs is commonly called “neoliberalism” (or “libertarianism” in America — or simply “let the free market not the government rule”) and in international affairs it is commonly called “neoconservatism” (previously known as “imperialism” but now pertaining to the only empire that remains, which is American imperialism), and so it is (as pertaining both intranationally and internationally) neoliberalism-neoconservatism: it was called “fascism” until the end of World War Two when the world’s billionaires needed to rename their ideology (neoliberalism-neoconservatism or imperialistic fascism) because, militarily, imperialistic fascists — especially Hitler — had been defeated by the Soviet Union, which the world’s billionaires wanted to conquer and could not conquer it — could not have any hope ultimately to CONTROL it — unless their own ideology got renamed so as to fool the masses in their own countries to think we lived in “the free world,” which the billionaires actually have controlled in The West after WW II; and, so, The West is a manipulated world that is manipulated by the super-rich themselves, by them collectively, as being today’s aristocracy — the individuals who control the mega-corporations. Mussolini called it “corporationism” and said it’s the same thing as fascism. He was correct about that.
On 18 February 2017, Jeff Guo, who soon was to leave the billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, headlined there “Americans have been lying to themselves about the economy for way too long”, and discussed the now-famous January 2017 economic study, “Intergenerational Mobility and Support for Redistribution”, whose “Abstract” or summary states:
Using newly collected cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect preferences for redistribution in five countries: France, Italy, Sweden, U.K., and U.S. Americans are more optimistic than Europeans about intergenerational mobility, and too optimistic relative to actual mobility. … Left-wing respondents are more pessimistic about intergenerational mobility, their preferences for redistribution are correlated with their mobility perceptions, and they respond to pessimistic information by increasing support for redistribution. None of these apply to right-wing [and that includes all fascistic] respondents, possibly because of their extremely negative views of government.
The study assumed (which all billionaires would wish the public to assume) that “extremely negative views of government” could not exist much on the political “Left” because “leftists” favor “big government” but “rightists” favor “small government” — as-if fascists don’t favor increasing the military and the police and the surveillance-state, and as-if supporters of democracy (leftists or progressives) do support increasing those. Without such implicit underlying conceptual falsehoods, that academic paper might not have even been published at all.
Anyway: that paper, nonetheless, did include much that was actually disproving neoliberalism, such as:
Our key findings are as follows. Americans are more optimistic than Europeans about intergenerational mobility, and they are too optimistic relative to actual mobility in the U.S., especially about the probability of a child from a family in the bottom quintile making it to the top quintile – the probability that most embodies the “American dream.” We show that, paradoxically, optimism is particularly high in U.S. states where actual mobility is particularly low. Europeans are not only more pessimistic, they are also too pessimistic relative to the true degree of mobility, and have particularly gloomy views about the probability of staying stuck in the bottom quintile or making it to the middle class. Both Americans and Europeans believe that hard work increases the chances of making it out of poverty and to the middle class, but few believe that individual effort can make a large difference for making it to the very top, or that hard work can completely make up for a poor family background.
While many respondents agree that the government can not be trusted and disagree about the optimal level of government intervention, they still think the government a priori has the tools to reduce unequal opportunities, and that unequal opportunities are a serious problem. Views on mobility are significantly correlated with policy preferences across all countries: more pessimistic respondents tend to favor more generous redistributive policies and higher levels of government involvement. The correlation is consistently stronger for direct “equality of opportunity” policies (e.g., public education or health spending) than for equality of outcome policies (e.g., progressive taxation or safety net policies).
Our experimental treatment has a large and significant first stage effect on mobility perceptions, making them more pessimistic. This increased pessimism persists one week later during a follow-up3 survey. The treatment effects on policies are consistent with the correlations found, i.e., respondents who become more pessimistic following the treatment are more likely to support redistribution, especially through equality of opportunity policies.
There is a very strong political polarization in the views on mobility, fairness, policies, and government more generally. Left-leaning individuals are more pessimistic about social mobility and the fairness of the economic system, and are more likely to think that chances of making it are low even if one works very hard. This polarization appears especially strong in the U.S., but is significant in all countries.2
It is striking that, within left-wing respondents, those who are more pessimistic about the level of intergenerational mobility support more aggressive government intervention and more redistribution, while those who are more pessimistic among right-wing respondents do not.3 [I.e.: conservatives think that the poor deserve to be poor; so, the government should’t waste money on them.]
Our findings indicate that, even if one could make people agree on the actual degree of social mobility, there would be no consensus on what to do about it. Indeed, left-wing respondents who are treated significantly shift their policy preferences in the expected direction of supporting more redistribution. On the other hand, although right-wing respondents exhibit an even stronger first stage effect on their perceptions of mobility, there is barely any effect at all on their support for redistribution. The treatment is either “preaching to the choir” or “preaching to the deaf.” Leftwing respondents who were already convinced that low social mobility was a problem continue to believe in policy intervention to correct it, and the treatment further increases their support. They stand in contrast to right-wing respondents who do not favor extensive government intervention, who believe that the government does not have the tools or capacity to correct this problem, or even that excessive government is the source of the problem.4
All of their findings pertained only to neoliberalism/libertarianism: proving it to be false, and proving it to be acceptable only on the basis of faith, not susceptible to the conservative person’s modifying one’s view on the basis of empirical evidence that’s inconsistent with it. Like virtually all economists, the authors of this study had no interest in the actual international — or imperialism-versus-anti-imperialism — question. For all that neoconservatism mattered to them, they could just as well have been for it as against it; mainstream economists don’t care about that question. They could comfortably be fascist-imperialists (neoconservatives). The billionaires hire economists; and, so, an economist who stands against them (which ANY anti-imperialist will) won’t get very far.
On 1 November 2018, Joseph Stiglitz, a liberal economist and former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank, headlined “The American Economy Is Rigged”, and proved it. To conservative economists, the response to that might as well be “So what?” But he documented “So, a lot!” He documented that America is, essentially, a neoliberal/libertatian country; that:
Since the mid-1970s the rules of the economic game have been rewritten, both globally and nationally, in ways that advantage the rich and disadvantage the rest. And they have been rewritten further in this perverse direction in the U.S. than in other developed countries — even though the rules in the U.S. were already less favorable to workers.
He was describing fascism, as being headquartered in the U.S. However, his training as an economist was less important to his concerns about that (imperialism) than political science is; so, he was practising mainly outside his field in order to discuss economic inequality. And yet, even he, a liberal economist, couldn’t discuss imperialism, which is the root of all of these problems.
This is how marginalized progressives are, in a world that is so overwhelmingly neoliberal-neoconservative: dominated by the billionaires’ ideology, the ideology of ‘free market’ imperialism. And even in ‘alternative media’, that is what dominates, both on the left and on the right. It’s monotonous, because all billionaires (liberal ones, as well as conservative ones) are like that.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
