Venezuela and the Rest of Us.

The corporate media are well… corporate. With corporate interests now firmly in charge of our political systems, the mass media, research & technology and production, we are completely overtaken by the worldview of neoliberalism. It is so pervasive and so successful that most people don’t even realise how colonised we are, psychologically and otherwise, by neoliberalist philosophy and way of life.

To keep us all nice, quiet and subservient we are offered a better lifestyle than people of our social class enjoyed in previous generations, and more affordable consumer goods. People’s wages are kept at just the manageable level so that they can continue to consume. Have you ever wondered what kind of a sane society measures its economic health by how much people consume? It is outright insane especially when this excess consumption pollutes our planet and destroys ours and everything else’s habitat.

To nip in the bud any ideas about socialism and equality, anyone who opens their mouth on this either never gets coverage all and remains in the margins of society. Or if they do, they are portrayed as crackpots, dangerous or just harmless delusional hippies… We are shown the worst extremes of what was socialism, but rather party dictatorship in Eastern Europe, as an example of how socialism ‘does not work’. But we never had socialism in the first place…

We live in a poisonous world socially and physically and we need to overthrow these powers that rule it. I think we need to take back our world and think about the principles we want to life by. Is economic ‘growth’ what we really need? How about making sure that *everyone*, *everywhere* has what they need, good quality, decent places to live, safety at home and beyond, good nourishing food, clean water, free essentials like energy, transport and good quality (non-corporate!) healthcare, respect and dignity and an opportunity to develop to their full potential, all in the context of a healthy physical environment?

While ordinary people just carry on surviving the best way they know how, believing that those ‘smart people up there know what they are doing’, while ordinary people shamelessly worship monarchy and the money elite, they are easily controlled. I am personally sick of it. Things don’t have to change over night. Revolutions don’t work. After revolutions are over, things usually turn back to what they were before, or worse. Revolutions can and often do become institutionalised. We need a revolution that moves slowly but surely towards a new model of being. We already have good seeds of such a revolution from the sustainable energy movement, environmentalism and many other movements that are currently relegated to the margins of society. In the margins is where the future of humanity really lies and what is in the margins needs to be brought to the centre. But while the mainstream is firmly controlled by neoliberalist values and interest, it does everything possible to keep all of those movements weak and ineffectual. The move to criminalise environmental groups has already started. We have already had witch hunts against ‘communists’ intended really as a deterrent — and it worked. How far are we going to let this go?

In a few dystopian sci-fi stories I have read over the years, the prediction is that when the corporate elite finishes destroying this planet it will abandon it and send itself to some other planet that they can begin consuming. I am not saying this is going to happen any time soon, but the idea is that anyone who is part of this elite only cares about themselves. They’ll consume until there is nothing else and then move on without any concern for the suffering of the majority. Neoliberalism is the law of the jungle — survival of the most brutal — dressed up to be something advanced and modern and even rational… But it is about survival, nothing more, not about concern for everyone and everyone’s need to fulfil their potential, not about concern for other species and our impact on them. Mother nature is messing with us and we are letting her to do this to us by allowing the most brutal and uncaring among us to run everything for everyone.

“Given that de Zayas is the first UN special rapporteur to report on Venezuela in more than two decades, one might expect the media to regard his findings as an important part of the Venezuela narrative, but his name does not appear in a single article ever published in the Post; the Times has mentioned him once, but not in relation to Venezuela.”

What Corporate Media Aren’t Telling You About Venezuela