A Good Year to Bury Bad News

 

Image  © Sliwa Insights

 

What are we to make of this damned world? A world where the power of the corporate lobby holds sway over governments, democratic process and human lives. A world where, despite a common threat to the entirety of humanity - for once not of its own making - those self-serving parasites can still freely help themselves to whatever spoils they can lay their hands on whilst relying on their politically connected allies to assist in their plunder and simultaneously deny basic human rights to the rest of us.

A world where a lie, repeated large and often enough supplants truth itself. A world where we imagine we have the freedom to hold and exercise democratic rights, and all the while those supposed rights are being subverted by the informatic machinations of the data-munching gurus of the corporate right. A world where the vast majority of it's free press sits at the right hand of the corporate establishment, its existence merely to serve and foster a sense that all is well with the world as long as the super-wealthy are safe with their billions, while the hoi polloi live in the increasingly vain hope of somehow emulating and joining them in even a tiny way by winning the bloody lottery.

Why is it that some societies can at least get things partly right, think Scandinavia for instance; whereas the established seats of 'democracy' have become increasingly autocratic in the service of the ultra-rich and their corporate buddies? What is increasingly clear is that the bias against the left is no longer simply an ideological nicety, an anodyne partisanship agreeing to disagree philosophically in the debating halls of academe. Venal self-interest has always inhabited the darker recesses that lurk behind the glossy veneer of politics, but there seems now to be a concerted, covert effort involving most of the mainstream media and aided by the unwitting collusion of members of the parliamentary Labour party itself, to dissemble, dilute and disrupt the largest party of opposition at a time when the government is so obviously flailing around rudderless and failing abjectly to deal with the one issue it so badly needs, for all our sakes, to get a grip of.

I now hear today that even more of our money is heading towards the outsourcing giant Serco from the coffers that we are so often told are empty when it comes to 'ordinary people's' needs. As I've said many times before, we need to follow the bloody money: someone, maybe all of them in the Cabinet, has to be taking a rake-off, however well disguised and funnelled through shell companies, offshore accounts and dodgy brokerages, from all of this. There's no way the billionaire-run and government-backed press is going to rock the boat on that and  coverage of certain key issues has definitely been backgrounded to the point of invisibility in recent weeks, letting the government stumble on its merry way, uncontested.

The only way forward is the dissemination of the facts by the kind of journalism now widely derided as 'radical'; a word so badly abused and bastardised by the right and the media in general that it has lost its original and true meaning to the general public. I refer to my very old copy of Chamber's Etymological Dictionary: 'Radical: adj... Pertaining to the radix, root, or origin; reaching to the principles: implanted by nature; not derived, etc...' and further: '...in politics, ultra-liberal, democratic.'

Democratic; in our twisted world, anyone who seeks the fundamental, the root, the radix; is branded an extremist and someone not of the mainstream of society; whereas in truth, real extremism lies in the foetid backwaters of our politics and the wider economy; disguised as propriety and protected by the cronyism of class and connection. We really do need to disseminate widely, unvarnished and without bias, some genuine truth before it really is too late to go back.