I keep trying to convince reality-based activists and other concerned citizens that the greatest challenge we face has nothing to do with factual arguments about the wrongness of our system, but with propaganda.

When an entire society is subjected to a mind-numbing amount of carefully-calibrated propaganda designed to manipulate, subjugate, and enslave the citizenry, no amount of facts will be able to pierce through the fog of lies and misinformation.

In this diary, I'm going to engage in presenting facts that show that the United States of America is under the control of a proto-fascist ruling elite, but the purpose of me taking the time to show this is not only to present these facts, but to also emphasize the importance for social justice activists to engage in a relentless counter-propaganda campaign.

Fiction has become reality:



Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.

ALEC is fascistic corporatist cartel who has been able to infiltrate our entire system of government, both at the federal and at the states level. They mainly operate behind the scenes, but they are responsible for pushing thousands of laws and ordinances specifically-designed to weaken human rights, workers rights, and environmental protections so the citizenry can be manipulated, exploited, and enslaved, and the environment can be ravaged in the name of profit.

Some of the key players behind ALEC are people like the Koch brothers. In the latest news about the NSA, one person of interest is U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson.



U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, who signed an order requiring Verizon to give the National Security Agency telephone records for tens of millions of American customers, attended an expense-paid judicial seminar sponsored by a libertarian think tank that featured lectures from a vocal proponent of executive branch powers. - "Secret court judge attended expenses-paid terrorism seminar"

From 2005 to 2009, FREE received a total of $430,000 in general operating support from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, of which billionaire businessman Charles Koch is a director.

Thousands of people formerly employed by the government, and still approved to deal with classified information, now do essentially the same work for private companies.



The Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive.



The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.

“The national security apparatus has been more and more privatized and turned over to contractors,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that studies federal government contracting. “This is something the public is largely unaware of, how more than a million private contractors are cleared to handle highly sensitive matters.”

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. * An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. * Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

And guess who funds the organization that paid for this seminar:In the New York Times article " Leaker’s Employer Is Paid to Maintain Government Secrets ," published on June 9th, it is reported the following:In the report " Top Secret America ," published in 2010, The Washington Post reveals the magnitude of the surveillance state:It shows a huge web of surveillance and police state security framework.

All this put together results in what the voice of our times, Chris Hedges calls a corporate global mafia:



Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power. - Chris Hedges / "Rise Up or Die"



Bottom line: This is a fascist infrastructure designed to enslave you. It's time to rise up