Print this post.
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
Another invaluable Parenti lecture. Even in his winter years, he remains lucid and powerful. The left needs to produce more men like this.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Think!
^0The corporate media will never present you with this kind of information.
Nothing that contradicts the empire's lying narrative is allowed.
Support our citizens media. The only media you need.
Words from an Irish patriot—
3 comments
Listening to Parenti one is amazed how the US has sunk back into 19th century political ideologies and it is as if nothing has been advanced in social arrangements and ideas since then. Parenti mentioned Rome and the senate and the few who owned the Roman Empire and indeed one finds the same social pattern in the US. These Roman owners all reigned over a large ‘familia’, i.e. a corporate organizational system that supported the man or woman at the top. Each organization had adherents who depended on this structure for their livelihood and would do anything for it to survive. Just so the owners of the US enterprise have their huge corporate organizations to execute all their schemes to stay in power. One hardly can blame them as the spoils are enormous and human greed ever so undiminished. Thus, it is the structure of this society that means Capitalism and the benefits accrue to those who know how to play the game. It makes no difference (like in Rome) what kind of non-ethics one applies if the outcome is successful for those at the top. The whole of society knows this and applies the same non-principles in smaller format, fish rot from the head on down. For this to change as Parenti describes as social responsibility, the whole of the social structure needs to be rebuilt, and not as a constant attack against those who profit from it because removing them does nothing to change the character of such a society.
Functional volitionalism as Parenti describes, ascribes incidental personal events as cause for social responses, but for example to analyze recent war history as a conspiracy between Hitler and his capitalist enforcers avoids the question of the reason behind the international resistance against him. Because in fact his capitalist enforcers were of the same tribe as those who resisted him abroad (the US in particular). It is not necessary to discard conspiracy theories in order to understand that there are too many divergent forces in the world to be able to sustain consistent conspiracy theories. Competitors like in industry may try to cooperate to destroy an opposing manufacturer, but nowhere in history has conspiracy succeeded in being omnipresent and universal. Instead there were/are many conspiracies all of which expired easily once they competed against each other or were exposed for the impotent organizations they were/are. Rather as Naomi Klein has clearly explained the owners will make use of circumstances as they present themselves, such as the debacle of the horrid 9/11 attack to start wars against Iraq and onwards.
Parenti is wonderful. His sense of humor as sharp as his insights. Thank you for sharing these Parenti videos. Great stuff.