'Right to be forgotten' is just latest of West's delusions
What sort of ludicrous European Court is it that could rule in favor of a 'cloak-and-dagger' scrubbing out of inconvenient facts called the ‘right to be forgotten’?
Especially when it looks like being mostly those that court the services of ‘reputation managers’ or dabble in 'super injunctions' that will be claiming that right? Their decision proves only one thing, that these jellyfish judges have taken up Western broadcasting’s call-to-arms in the crusade to stupefy the masses.
This week the European Court’s ‘right to forget’ has been rolled out by Google and, despite the poke-in-the-eye this represents to the West's hundreds of millions of searching public who have come to trust it, Google’s response has been as spineless as the judges.
It is only because Google represents a virtual monopoly in the world of web searching and advertising that they can so shrug off insulting their customers. Treating us, rather like the broadcasters do, as a sea of inconsequential information hungry cattle to be milked and sold to marketing firms for our search terms and to be mollified with Google cartoons like eight-year-olds.
Yes you can still get the old service at Google.com, but that's not the point. By failing to create a fuss about this Kafkaesque and Orwellian ‘right to be forgotten’, Google is hoping we haven’t noticed they are removing from searches the very dirt we need on abusers of wealth and power, the bread and butter of a healthy democracy. The very links that help us make the world a better place, Google is censoring.
This latest attempt to airbrush embarrassing episodes from their online histories, with Google's connivance, is not the first great delusion the Western power elite have entered into since the turn of the century, nor will it be the last.
We have seen delusion piled on delusion as elite institutions such as universities, political parties and the mainstream media have colluded in a series of monstrous lies which have served the wicked purpose of disengaging hundreds of millions of Americans and Europeans from the democratic systems they thought they lived under because the perpetuation of these lies by a combination of wicked and deluded ‘opinion formers’
Delusion I: The War on Terror
Revolutionary London poet 'Mr. Social Control' probably put it as well as anyone in the world, describing George W Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ announced after the 9/11 attacks in September 2001 in his ‘War Against Abstract Nouns’ (2002). Despite crying out to be heard neither his witty ditty, nor Ani DiFranco’s razor sharp 'Self Evident' got any kind of mainstream media airing. Neither did the hard prosaic facts such as insider ‘put option’ stock trades placed on United & American Airlines' shares just prior to the 9/11 attacks, being traced to CIA Executive Director Buzzy Krongard.
Then there was the strange resignation for being stopped from investigating Osama Bin Laden and subsequent death of FBI Deputy Director John O’Neill, or hard evidence of steel-cutting thermite explosives inside the Twin Towers, more evidence pointing to the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center. Not to mention the non-appearance of the US Air Force that day or the spontaneous collapse of WTC Building 7, which was not hit by any plane.
The catastrophic result of the 9/11 delusion has ushered in a world where NATO occupations last indefinitely. Just like the sentiment expressed by the Campaign for Accountability of American Bases (CAAB) at this week's Fourth of July 'Independence from America Day' here at USAF Menwith Hill in Britain. Like an unwelcome guest, US forces are quick to arrive, but slow to leave.
These US led wars of regime change by fair means or foul last too long as well, longer than World Wars I and II combined. Consulting the United Nations has been reduced to an ‘optional extra’ and domestically across the west police have been increasingly militarized.
Just as Hitler set fire to the Reichstag in 1933 to use it as an excuse to clamp down on his political opponents, at the time the communists and trades unionists, so ruthless elements within the Western military elites have used the horrific events of September 11, 2001, as an excuse to build an empire all over the world, not forgetting to dismantle domestic civil liberties to boot.
Delusion II: The 2008 bank bailout
The cost to the British taxpayer of the 2008 bailout, when the City of London pointed a gun at then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown's head and said “give us 850 billion pounds (US$1.5 trillion) or the British banking system gets it.” Brown could simply have called their bluff and said no, allowing fraud and market forces to do their worst and the banks to collapse if they really were about to. But no, he decided on the bailout, in the knowledge that the Treasury 'strong arm' now owning and controlling those banks would bring them to heel.
What poor Gordon, it seems, didn’t realize was that the City had so thoroughly infiltrated the Treasury as to doom to failure any of Brown’s post-bailout attempts to get the two biggest government owned banks, RBS and Lloyds, to serve the nation rather than themselves. Quite a scam the money men pulled there eh? What else might they be capable of?
Apart from tiny countries like Cyprus and Iceland, national governments have almost entirely failed to use their stakes in bailed out banks to make them serve the public. To get them to issue debt-free money for example or to lend on reasonable terms to small- and medium-sized enterprises.
Instead of banking fulfilling its proper role as a utility, facilitating trade and enterprise, it has become a private oligopoly and has consolidated its role as the hub of Western political power, centered around the little known 'Central Bankers' Central Bank, the Bank For International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. The bank that funded Hitler and about which Adam Lebor has recently described in his ‘Tower of Basel’ (2013).
So the bailout ended up being a magnificent power-play by the likes of Goldman Sachs and other vultures of Wall Street and The City. In London they distracted and diverted the mainstream media from even addressing the difficult questions millions were facing across the Western world with straw arguments. Instead of putting bankers and their auditors on trial for fraud, theft and false accounting, to the rescue came the 2009 MPs expenses ‘crisis’, a confected series of stories which centered around the criminal theft of a hard drive from the office of the speaker of the House of Commons which was passed to retired SAS Major John Wick.
The scandal created a national outcry against the only group of people who could defend the people from the criminal banking maniacs, MPs. The MPs had been told in 2008 to claim as much extra in expenses as they could because it would be politically impossible to increase their salaries that year. How very convenient. Expenses of stooges such as Tony Blair were miraculously ‘lost’ indicating to anyone with eyes to see that this entire affair was an elite stitch up.
Biting economic bullet
It has been so much easier for our politicians to go along with the lie of an ‘economic recovery’ bubble than to spill the beans about all this printed ‘QE’ money just artificially 'puffing up' the figures. Neither do they like to mention the inexorable rise in the national debt, now around 1.3 trillion pounds ($2.23 trillion) which will clearly never stop growing let alone be paid off. Certainly QE is helping stocks, shares and asset prices as well as keeping the pension funds happy but at some time in the future those valuations will have to come down to earth, most likely with a bang. And a crash.
When they do you can be sure the power elite financiers will make a killing buying up distressed assets which are being sold off cheap but there will also be the sort of turmoil that goes with any collapse in confidence. The financial services industry sells confidence but when the bubble bursts and that confidence breaks it will smash across the real economy like a tsunami.
Imagine the 2001 Argentinian financial crisis but on a transcontinental scale. Savings wiped out for hundreds of millions of people. Millions made jobless overnight. Suddenly everything we ever thought we knew we could rely on, the very life blood of a capitalist society, collapses. What takes over rather quickly is the need to secure water, food and shelter for us and our families. Without money for these basics societies quickly atomize into a fight, even amongst neighbors, for physical control of territory and provisions. Out come the handguns, then the AK47s and inevitable invoking of the most draconian government powers in martial law.
It’s times like this that anarchists and other romantics might get the chance to show what they're made of but for the rest of us policies and priorities to avoid this law of the urban jungle must center around responsible state intervention and planning but it's difficult to see any government across the West that would be up to the job. Their plan of action to turn things round quickly should mean nationalization, arresting auditors and bankers, spending debt-free money from central banks directly into the economy, a guaranteed citizen’s income for everyone, exchange controls to stop predatory capital flight for starters but how many would be up to the job?
Money that serves rather than rules should simply be a means to facilitate exchange, and there's something unwholesome about how we've become so utterly dependent on it. We all seem to have lost sight of the fact that it would be relatively simple to give every family in every land enough of the earth to live on, work on and grow some food and keep a few chickens on without having to pay anybody anything for the privilege of doing so.
But what would that do to GDP? Perhaps the quest for ever greater GDP is just killing us and the planet and it has to go, the sooner the better? In that case a crash might be the opportunity for a 'great reset'. What in the Old Testament they used to call the Jubilee? Sharing out the land again to everyone, yes everyone.
Delusion III: Democracy
The principle is a good one and it comes from the Greek: 'The People Rule'. But looking back over the last 40 years of British political leaders the last democratic British Prime Minister was Sir Harold Wilson who held the top job in the 1960s and 1970s. Priorities under his watch included things that mattered to the struggling poor like setting the maximum price for bread, at around two shillings. He did rather well building masses of council houses too and managed to get just about every man in the country a full-time job.
Wilson was so successful in creating a fair and just nation that he was persecuted into resignation in April 1976 by dark forces around the powerful wartime royal, Lord Mountbatten. Her Majesty's Security Service, MI5, launched a newspaper smear campaign too against Wilson codenamed 'Clockwork Orange'. This right-wing conspiracy, with more than a whiff of fascism, was dramatized in the 1982 TV series 'A Very British Coup' and subsequently documented both in David Leigh's 1988 book, 'The Wilson Plot', then Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay's 'Smear! Wilson and the Secret State' (1992).
Since James Callaghan, who took over after Wilson, every single British Prime Minister, with the possible exception of Blair's successor Gordon Brown, has been a sorry creature of the establishment, a puppy dog of the power elite of royalty and the City of London. This elite sees the rest of the country - the middle and lower classes - either as useful dupes or simply slave labor. Since Wilson every major political party has been steered or otherwise controlled, with the London media playing the decisive role in anointing rising stars in each party and character assassinating or otherwise eliminating politicians that don't 'toe the line'.
The City 'bluebloods' don't need to worry too much either nowadays about ordinary party members having much of a real say in party policies because their annual conferences have become, for the most part, embarrassing stage managed theatrical productions. So whichever faction of the parallel government's might be running the country these days, it’s a million miles from democracy.
Lancing the boil at Scotland Yard
For all but the most ignorant it was one of those ‘what planet are you on’ moments in January this year when Britain’s Education Secretary Michael Gove described the First World War, which began a century ago this week, as 'Plainly a just war'. But this latest delusion, the desire to scrub embarrassing episodes from internet archives will, if it is allowed to stand, destroy the most valuable role the internet plays, in, through the press and the judiciary, holding the rich and powerful to account. No society can survive for long with criminals at the top.
But we won't remove them until Scotland Yard start bashing down bankers' doors in the middle of the night and dragging them out of their aberration of impunity and into court arresting blueblood City banksters. Every day they baulk London and Britain diminishes.
In December 1997, then-Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Condon told the Home Affairs Select Committee that there were between 100 and 250 corrupt detectives in Scotland Yard. So says Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn's 2004 book 'Untouchables: Dirty Cops, Bent Justice and Racism in Scotland Yard'. Last week the Independent newspaper's investigations reporter, Tom Harper, quoted a police source: “I am afraid there is a cancer at the heart of Scotland Yard that has never, ever been dealt with.”
An event this week typifies all that is wrong with today's plutocratic Britain and that was the annual fundraising dinner for the Conservative party which was held at London's Hurlingham Club. The secret guest list is reported to have a total wealth exceeding 11 billion pounds and on the night to have raised at least last year's estimated total of 5 million quid.
It is this money that buys laws in today's Britain, buys immunity from prosecution, erases embarrassing articles from internet searches and buys a place amongst the power elite, close by megabucks heaven, above Britain's bullet-proof glass ceiling. But as they have stepped outside the law the foundations of their society has started rotting, the ivory tower these self-serving Roman gods have built for themselves is already starting to fall.
£850bn: official cost of the bank bailout
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.