I see my AI stuff doesn’t interest people. I am so obsessed with it because, in my opinion, it will completely change the world in a few years before 2030. So here is a little about the real world we live in, the neocolonialism that is hidden from people by education and media.
4:12
“That whole architecture allowed corporations to really go international. The other part of this story, which is really opposite to the thesis, and I think understanding where we are today, is that after the Second World War, formal empires were collapsing at a quick clip, particularly in the 50s and 60s. The people who had been in power for centuries, the imperial powers and their financial sectors, were scared. They were thinking, how are we going to maintain our control of the world where we don’t have a formal empire, where we can’t position garrisons of troops in a foreign place that can just take out a leader if we don’t like them, if they start nationalizing our assets, or whatever it was. There was quite a lot of conscious policymaking at that time to try and create—and this sounds like tin foil hat stuff, but it’s all there in black and white in the archives of places like the World Bank, the IMF, and other places—a supranational system whereby they could bypass rebellious peoples, newly liberated countries, and liberation movements in the developing world.
So they set about that task. In the book, it opens with what is called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement System (ISDS), and that is the first project that we started at the Center for Investigation. The ISDS is a shadow legal system whereby multinational corporations can sue states for enacting policies they don’t like, which infringe on their so-called “investor rights.” It happens all over the world. This system is enshrined in free trade agreements, which are a bit of a misnomer because “free trade agreement” makes you think it’s all about mutual lowering of tariffs. However, embedded in these trade agreements are huge amounts of legal mechanisms whereby corporations can enforce their will on the countries that are part of that agreement. One of these is the ISDS system. NAFTA has ISDS provisions in it, and so do plenty of other free trade agreements. When the EU makes a trade agreement with a country in sub-Saharan Africa, it has ISDS in it. There are also bilateral investment treaties (BITs), and they’re all over the world, creating an investment regime that both countries have to abide by. ISDS is enshrined in nearly all of those and is enforced.
For example, in the case of a corporation that wants to use a BIT, you can create a shell company in a country that has a BIT with the country you want to sue and sue them that way. That happens all the time. There is a whole web of treaties and agreements which enshrine this ISDS system. Effectively, away from all the acronyms and boring stuff, it means that corporations can sue some of the poorest countries in the world for huge amounts of money, often billions of dollars, for enacting policies like not allowing the company an environmental permit to dig for gold. One case we looked at was in El Salvador; another was in Egypt, where a French water company sued the Egyptian government for raising the minimum wage. Anything that a corporation doesn’t like that a government does, they can potentially sue for.
You would think that this is a massive attack on democracy, and it is. The cases are heard at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which is part of the World Bank. ICSID is the main venue where these cases are heard, and it’s a kangaroo court because these decisions are made by three arbitrators: one appointed by the company, one appointed by the government, and one agreed on by both. These arbitrators have no threshold for legal history or professional attainment, but many come from U.S. administrations, such as the Bush and Clinton administrations. The decisions are highly secretive, and many documents are inaccessible.
The major issue is not just the cases heard at ICSID; it’s the regulatory chill and policymaking chill. With this huge infrastructure in place, multinationals can sue you, impacting your thinking when devising policies in your country. This was seen in Guatemala, where internal deliberations about whether to grant an environmental permit to a multinational mining company were more focused on the risk of being sued rather than the impact on their people. They eventually granted the permit, and this happens all over the world. This chill is by design, as corporations want an insurance mechanism to get their profits and policies above the heads of national governments.”
All this is well known for a long time, but “Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach,” which I posted about in:
Why none really knows how the world really works, so how McCarthyism never ended.
It was all well known, but it was also suppressed. I was a long-time fan of Chomsky. I still agree with some of his works, but he was controlled by the opposition. “Inventing Reality” by Michael Parenti was written in 1986, while “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” was co-written by Chomsky in 1988. Then why does everyone know Chomsky but not Parenti? Was his book so much better or something? NO! Because Parenti wrote “Inventing Reality,” which could have made Parenti famous and heard around the world, they allowed “Manufacturing Consent” to spread and promoted Chomsky instead of Parenti. Why? Because Parenti acknowledged so-called conspiracy theories while Chomsky thought Oswald killed JFK and 9/11 was not an inside job, unlike Parenti who knows JFK and 9/11 stories are all BULSHIT!!! That’s why everyone knows Chomsky but not Michael Parenti.
Here you have Parenti a long time ago saying how the real world looks in an entertaining way. He speaks about the same thing as Matt Kennard.
10:04
“Americans have been taught that empires and imperialism are something that other countries do. When I was in the sixth grade, my teacher said to us, ‘The United States is the only advanced country that does not have colonies. We do not have colonies.’ We looked at this big map, and there would be these box inserts all around the sides: Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. I’m really dating myself; these were not independent, nor were they states yet. In fact, Puerto Rico is still governed by the US. So, we’d say to her, ‘Miss Myers, what are these blocks here? Aren’t those our colonies?’ She said, ‘The United States does not have colonies. It has territories or possessions.’
That’s the magic of words. You wish away or define away all sorts of brutal histories and realities by just using a different word. You have the administration today in Washington saying that the Geneva Convention does not apply to the people who are being held in captivity under very bad conditions at Guantanamo by the United States because they’re not prisoners of war; they’re enemy combatants. But you know, an enemy combatant incarcerated by your military—that’s the definition of a prisoner of war. That’s what a prisoner of war is. You get the enemy’s combatants and you make prisoners out of them. It’s interesting how terms are now just being used to wish away things and situations, and this has happened with empire as with any of these other deceptions.
The denial of empire in the US was made easier by the rather early innovation of what’s called neo-imperialism or neo-colonialism. Imperialism is the thing that empires do. So, all those years when the Communists were saying the US is a capitalist imperialist nation, we’d say, ‘Oh, a lot of commie rhetoric.’ Turns out, it’s true. We are. We go out and control—not we, they—the people who run this country go out and control other places. Much of that control, with the American Empire in the very early stage, was neo-colonial or neo-imperialist. Neo-imperialism was practiced, for instance, with Cuba in 1905. After controlling Cuba for about seven years, directly occupying it with US troops, the Americans turned around to the Cubans and said, ‘Look, we stole you fair and square from the Spanish in a war which the Spaniards didn’t even want to fight. They were willing to negotiate and leave Cuba and all, but we really didn’t want them to leave because then we’d have no excuse to invade you, invade the Philippines and take that from Spain, invade Puerto Rico, invade Guam, and annex the Hawaii Islands—all these things that we did. So, we stole you fair and square, but it doesn’t look so good. We, being a republic and a democracy, doesn’t look so good to have a colony…’
So, they said, ‘We’re going to give you your independence, and you’re going to have your own flag. It’s going to be red, white, and blue, but you get only one star because you’re just a little island. You’ll have your own money; you won’t have to use US dollars. You can use pesos or whatever you want. You can put your own leaders on your money; you don’t have to have George Washington. We’ll flex on this. You can have your Guard to see the Alejo will take care to make sure that people
stay in line and crack heads, and if they can’t do it that well, we have a little clause here in this treaty which says the US Marines can come in any time to clean house on you. So, you’re independent; enjoy. Go out there and enjoy.’
What you do is you give them the husk of independence, the shell of it, and you just take the substance of it. That’s what neo-imperialism’s like now.”
And this is the real world we live in. People are afraid of the Orwellian world while we already live in it.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’
In 1984, Huxley added, ‘people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.’”
― Neil Postman, *Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business*
They were both right at the same time.
Information about the real world is out there but hidden; you just need to look for it, but people are preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy, and Huxley was right.
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past, most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were ‘solemn and rare,’ there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances, though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing, we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment – from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television, and the cinema. In ‘Brave New World,’ non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly ‘not of this world.’ Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx’s phrase ‘the opium of the people’ and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”
― Aldous Huxley, *Brave New World Revisited*