• About
  • Documentary Films
  • Index
  • Nota bene
  • Protect and Serve
  • Readings

Lumpenproletariat

~ free speech

Lumpenproletariat

Tag Archives: Dr. Peter Phillips

Covert Action Magazine | Beware of the Hawk: What to Expect from the Biden Administration on Foreign Policy

09 Mon Nov 2020

Posted by ztnh in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Covert Action Magazine, Dr. Peter Phillips, Joseph "Joe" Robinette Biden Jr. (b. 1942)

LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Dr. Peter Phillips just shared this publicly on his Facebook page. This looks like an excellent article. Let’s read and learn more. And don’t forget to click on the in-text link articles and read those, too! Happy reading, yawl. Let’s get this.

Messina

***

COVERT ACTION MAGAZINE—[8 NOV 2020] Millions of people around the world breathed a sigh of relief with the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. election and victory of the Biden-Harris ticket.

Joe Biden’s victory speech exuded a feeling of optimism in its call for a new era of bipartisanship and decency in politics.

However, it is unlikely that decency will prevail in the realm of foreign policy.

According to a profile in The Atlantic Magazine, Biden prides himself on his close interpersonal relations with world leaders, which enables the advancement of mutual foreign policy goals.

However, if the leader is unsavory, then these interpersonal relations become problematic.

—snip—

Learn more at COVERT ACTION MAGAZINE.

***

[9 NOV 2020]

[Last modified on 9 NOV 2020 at 06:43 PST]

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

Dr. Peter Phillips – “Wealth Concentration Drives a New Global Imperialism”

11 Sun Oct 2020

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Totalitarianism, Anti-War, Globalisation, Political Economy, Sociology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dr. Peter Phillips, global power elite

20201011_124505.jpg

LUMPENPROLETARIAT—The article below was shared publicly today by Dr. Peter Phillips via Facebook, a free essay on today’s US/NATO-led global imperialism and totalitarian nightmare led by a mostly-American global power elite investor class, perhaps, the ruling class.

If you haven’t already, check out Dr. Peter Phillip’s epic book, Giants: The Global Power Elite (2018), which goes into great detail about today’s global power elite, who really run the world.  About Giants, Dr. Noam Chomsky wrote:

Who exactly are the masters?  This remarkable inquiry lifts the veil, providing detailed and often shocking revelations about the astonishing concentration of private wealth and corporate power.

Dr. Noam Chomsky, linguist, political scientist, activist, humanist, philosopher, one of the most cited scholars alive

Messina

***

Wealth Concentration Drives a New Global Imperialism

  • By Peter Phillips

Regime changes in Iraq and Libya, Syria’s war, Venezuela’s crisis, sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Russia, and North Korea are reflections of a new global imperialism imposed by a core of capitalist nations in support of trillions of dollars of concentrated investment wealth. This new world order of mass capital has become a totalitarian empire of inequality and repression.

The global 1%, comprised of over 36-million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, employ their excess capital with investment management firms like BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase. The top seventeen of these trillion-dollar investment management firms controlled $41.1 trillion dollars in 2017. These firms are all directly invested in each other and managed by only 199 people who decide how and where global capital will be invested. Their biggest problem is they have more capital than there are safe investment opportunities, which leads to risky speculative investments, increased war spending, privatization of the public domain, and pressures to open new capital investment opportunities through political regime changes.

Power elites in support of capital investment are collectively embedded in a system of mandatory growth. Failure for capital to achieve continuing expansion leads to economic stagnation, which can result in depression, bank failures, currency collapses, and mass unemployment. Capitalism is an economic system that inevitably adjusts itself via contractions, recessions, and depressions. Power elites are entrapped in a web of enforced growth that requires ongoing global management and the formation of new and ever expanding capital investment opportunities. This forced expansion becomes a worldwide manifest destiny that seeks total capital domination in all regions of the earth and beyond.

Sixty percent of the core 199 global power elite managers are from the US, with people from twenty capitalist nations rounding out the balance. These power elite managers and associated one percenters take active part in global policy groups and governments. They serve as advisors to the IMF, World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Bank of Settlements, Federal Reserve Board, G-7 and the G-20. Most attend the World Economic Forum. Global power elites engage actively on private international policy councils such as the Council of Thirty, Trilateral Commission, and the Atlantic Council. Many of the US global elites are members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Business Roundtable in the US. The most important issue for these power elites is protecting capital investment, insuring debt collection, and building opportunities for further returns.

The global power elite are aware of their existence as a numerical minority in the vast sea of impoverished humanity. Roughly 80% of the world’s population lives on less than ten dollars a day and half live on less than three dollars a day. Concentrated global capital becomes the binding institutional alignment that brings transnational capitalists into a centralized global imperialism facilitated by world economic/trade institutions and protected by the US/NATO military empire. This concentration of wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation have reached levels that threaten humanity’s future.

The idea of independent self-ruling nation-states has long been held sacrosanct in traditional liberal capitalist economies. However, globalization has placed a new set of demands on capitalism that requires transnational mechanisms to support continued capital growth that is increasingly beyond the boundaries of individual states. The financial crisis of 2008 was an acknowledgement of the global system of capital under threat. These threats encourage the abandonment of nation-state rights altogether and the formation of a global imperialism that reflects new world order requirements for protecting transnational capital.

Institutions within capitalist countries including government ministries, defense forces, intelligence agencies, judiciary, universities and representative bodies, recognize to varying degrees that the overriding demands of transnational capital spill beyond the boundaries of nation-states. The resulting worldwide reach motivates a new form of global imperialism that is evident by coalitions of core capitalist nations engaged in past and present regime change efforts via sanctions, covert actions, co-options, and war with non-cooperating nations—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Russia.

The attempted coup in Venezuela shows the alignment of transnational capital-supporting states in recognizing the elite forces that oppose Maduro’s socialist presidency. A new global imperialism is at work here, whereby Venezuela’s sovereignty is openly undermined by a capital imperial world order that seeks not just control of Venezuela’s oil, but a full opportunity for widespread investments through a new regime.

The widespread corporate media negation of the democratically elected president of Venezuela demonstrates that these media are owned and controlled by ideologists for the global power elite. Corporate media today is highly concentrated and fully international. Their primary goal is the promotion of product sales and pro-capitalist propaganda through the psychological control of human desires, emotions, beliefs, fears, and values. Corporate media does this by manipulating feelings and cognitions of human beings worldwide, and by promoting entertainment as a distraction to global inequality.

Recognizing global imperialism as a manifestation of concentrated wealth, managed by a few hundred people, is of utmost importance for democratic humanitarian activists. We must stand on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and challenge global imperialism and its fascist governments, media propaganda, and empire armies.


Peter Phillips is a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University. Giants: The Global Power Elite, 2018, is his 18th book from Seven Stories Press. He teaches courses in Political Sociology, Sociology of Power, Sociology of Media, Sociology of Conspiracies and Investigative Sociology. He served as director of Project Censored from 1996 to 2010 and as president of Media Freedom Foundation from 2003 to 2017.

***

[11 OCT 2020]

[Last modified on 11 OCT 2020 at 13:53 PDT]

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

“Played by the Mighty Wurlitzer: The Press, the CIA, and the Subversion of Truth” (2016) by Professor Brian Covert

13 Fri Jan 2017

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Fascism, Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Totalitarianism, Free Speech, Neoliberalism, Political Science, Sociology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

critical media literacy, Dr. Peter Phillips, KPFA, Mickey Huff M.A., neoliberalism, Nicholas "Nick" Schou, Pacifica Radio Network, Professor, Professor Brian Covert, Project Censored, transcript

ProjectCensoredLUMPENPROLETARIAT—On this week’s edition of free speech radio’s Project Censored, co-hosts Mickey Huff and Dr. Peter Phillips presented an hour-long interview with Professor Brian Covert.  Brian Covert is the author of “Played by the Mighty Wurlitzer: The Press, the CIA, and the Subversion of Truth“, which is the sixth chapter within Censored 2017, which is the latest addition to Project Censored’s annual book highlighting the year’s most censored or underreported news and information. [1]  Professor Brian Covert gives you a fresh perspective on the CIA’s role in undermining democracy.  Listen (and/or download) here. [2]

Messina

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Project Censored.]

censored-2017-cover-749x1024PROJECT CENSORED—[13 JAN 2017]  [The Collision sports show stepped on Project Censored’s 1pm time-frame]  (c. 1:04)  [station identification announcements by unidentified speaker]  (c. 1:19)

[Project Censored theme music: “We Want” by Junkyard Empire]  (c. 1:45)

MICKEY HUFF:  “Welcome to the Project Censored show on Pacifica Radio.  I’m Mickey Huff with Peter Phillips.

“On today’s programme, we look at the CIA and the media in the United States.  We’ll be joined by journalist, author, and Professor Brian Covert, longtime contributor to Project Censored.  We’ll be looking at [the] recent chapter, that he did called “Played by the Mighty Wurlitzer: The Press, the CIA, and the Subversion of Truth“.  We’ll also talk more about the CIA and media history in the U.S.  Please stay with us.  (c. 2:20)

[theme music continues]

“Welcome back to the Project Censored show on Pacifica Radio.  I’m Mickey Huff with Peter Phillips.  On today’s programme, “Played by the Mighty Wurlitzer: The Press, the CIA, and the Subversion of Truth.  For the hour, we’ll be joined by journalist, author, and professor Brian Covert, a longtime contributor to Project Censored.  We’ll be discussing his latest chapter on the CIA and media history in Censored 2017.  Before we do that, however, here is Peter to introduce our guest to you.”  (c. 2:54)

DR. PETER PHILLIPS:  “Brian Covert is an independent journalist and an author based in Japan.  He has worked for United Press International […] news service in Japan, as a staff reporter for the English-language daily newspapers in Japan, a contributor to Japanese and overseas newspapers and magazines.  He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Communications at Doshisha University in Kyoto.

“Welcome, Brian.”

PROF. BRIAN COVERT:  “Good afternoon, Peter.  Good afternoon, Mickey.”

DR. PETER PHILLPS:  “You have a chapter in our book called “Played by the Mighty Wurlitzer: The Press, the CIA, and the Subversion of Truth.  What do you mean by the mighty Wurlitzer?” (c. 3:32)

PROF. BRIAN COVERT:  “Well, The Mighty Wurlitzer is the nickname, which the CIA, itself, gave to this propaganda machine within the agency back in the 1940s onward, in which it would foster relationships with reporters and news companies and put a message out there.  They’re much like the Wurlitzer organ was used in silent movie days to kind of play the background soundtrack of what was going on the screen, the press was used as a kind of mighty Wurlitzer to get the CIA’s message out, or the U.S. government’s message out about what was happening in the world in the form of favourable news stories and various forms of propaganda.  The Wurlitzer was, literally, the CIA’s in-house propaganda machine.  But that’s the nickname they gave it.” (c. 4:13)

MICKEY HUFF:  “And, Brian Covert, welcome back to the Project Censored show.  We’ve had you on before for your stellar reporting on [the] Fukushima [Daiichi nuclear disaster].  You’ve also published, of course, with us over the years—Mandela, the work on Mandela, that mentions, of course, the CIA happenings in South Africa.

“You’ve also done research with us on whistleblowers—Gary Webb and the CIA.

“And, again, here you are, returning in Censored 2017 with another entire chapter on the CIA and the media.  And let’s kind of go back and look at some of this history because you do this quite deftly in a chapter.  Naturally, there have been certain books, that have tackled this.  Not long ago, we had Nick Schou on the programme—his book Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood, along with David Talbot and Hot Books—definitely some overlap there. [3]  But you go through and look at some different connections, and some pretty specific historical connections.

“So, could we go through and talk a little bit about the history of what you found, you know, researching this because this was a very fascinating research project for you.”  (c. 5:20)

PROF. BRIAN COVERT:  “Yeah.  Well, actually, the project started when I was working on the Gary Webb ‘Dark Alliance’ piece for Censored 2016.

[snip]   ”

[additional notes/transcription pending]

[THIS TRANSCRIPT IS CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION. PLEASE CHECK BACK SOON FOR AN UPDATED DRAFT]

[SNIP]  (c. 59:59)

Learn more at PROJECT CENSORED.  [Also see ProjectCensored.org]

***

[1]  About Censored 2017‘s chapter six, entitled “Played by the Mighty Wurlitzer: The Press, the CIA, and the Subversion of Truth” (quoted in the Introduction for Censored 2017 written by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff):

In Chapter 6, “Played by the Mighty Wurlitzer: The Press, the CIA, and the Subversion of Truth,” veteran Project contributor Brian Covert focuses on the history and role of one of America’s most secretive institutions and its influence over the news media.  In other words, it isn’t just corporate owners and advertisers who have an interest in shaping public opinion for profit via the press; the so-called Deep State, or secret government departments and agencies, also aided in the engineering of opinion in support of US Cold War and anticommunism policies.  Readers familiar with the history of CIA propaganda efforts may recall “Operation Mockingbird”, but Covert’s research reveals that this may have only been a minor project.  He focuses more specifically on the network of CIA assets in the media that could play the press, and thus the public, like a Mighty Wurlitzer.  Covert argues that the CIA cast a long shadow over America’s so-called free press, and in newsrooms around the world.  Despite the declared cessation of various CIA programs, or their specific names, the history uncovered by Covert provides vital context for developing a deeper understanding of the relationships between major news media outlets and government agencies, as well as a more sophisticated  framework with which to critique media control, censorship, and propaganda in the present.

About Professor Brian Covert (quoted in Censored 2015):

Brian Covert is an independent journalist and author based in western Japan.  He has worked for the United Press International news service in Japan, as a staff reporter for English-language daily newspapers in Japan, and as a contributor to Japanese and overseas newspapers and magazines.  He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Communications at Doshisha University in Japan.

[2]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Project Censored, this one-hour broadcast co-hosted by host Mickey Huff and Dr. Peter Phillips, Friday, 13 JAN 2017, 13:00 PST.

[3]  About Skyhorse Publishing‘s investigative imprint Hotbooks:

In 2015 we launched our newest imprint Hot Books, offering important newsworthy books curated by editor and bestselling author David Talbot.

***

[15 JAN 2017]

[Last modified at 06:46 PST on 18 JAN 2017]

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
%d bloggers like this: