Post 607 - May 10, 2024

It’s not every day that you see a headline like “RFK Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain.” If it was in the New York Post, it would be ignorable, but this was in the New York Times. These days, the gap between the two publications’ trustworthiness is possibly not as wide as it once was, but still. There it was emblazoned across a page of newsprint in the old familiar font. Do we trust it, or do we question it?

The overwhelming amount of disinformation circulating through our society and posing as fact may be the thing that ultimately does us in. As time goes on, we are ever more losing our ability to tell fact from fiction.

Over the last four hundred years we have witnessed the birth and adolescent stages of corporations. Sometime relatively recently, it feels to me like maybe it was under Ronald Reagan’s administration, that global corporate entities seem to have graduated from college and become full-fledged adults.

In 1868, the United States ratified the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was primarily designed to protect the rights of the formerly enslaved population. Under it, it was codified into law that no state can deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process. In addition to that, no state can deny any individual within its jurisdiction equal protection under the law.

Thanks to several Supreme Court cases, and a rather convoluted concept called corporate personhood, those rights were expanded to include corporations. In essence, the United States government began affording the same rights to corporate entities that we, the people, have under the law.

The appealing thing about the first corporations, which were the British and Dutch East India Companies, was that for the first time, anybody be they princes or paupers could invest their monies into a venture and expect to get a return. The investors remained anonymous. Rather than putting all your eggs into the shaky basket of one sea voyage, you, instead, could back the whole umbrella company. The two East India Companies sent out many ships over the course of a year. Some returned laded with riches, and some ran aground and sank losing everything. The investors got a return of the average profits from all those different ventures. You couldn’t make a killing that way, but you also wouldn’t lose your shirt. Once you owned some shares you could then turn around and sell them to whomever you chose.

Whether the original founders of these entities realized it or not, as non-humans, corporations were not bound by the same rules of morality and civility that individual people were. People are driven to make more people. That is our biological imperative. Corporations, on the other hand, are immortal. They don’t need to make babies. The sole aim of corporations is to make a profit. Those two imperatives don’t always align.

From the time they were created, human beings have tried to regulate these new corporate beings. Under Ronald Regan’s administration, however, the dismantling of those regulatory practices began in earnest. It has continued to this day. Monopoly-busting seems now, very much, a thing of the past. Under our last president, everything that could possibly be unfettered was set free. Forget the threat of AI, our present-day society is already being run by corporations who have figured out how to control us with remarkable efficiency.

One of the things that corporate entities do best is protect themselves. A great weapon in the fight to do that is them being able to control the narrative.

There are pitifully few news outlets left in the world that are not owned by a collection of multi-hyphenate corporate entities. Some of our news is just outright fabrication and some has been skewed in such a way as to make it seem like something it isn’t. None of it is accidental. Newspaper owners have always had the ability to control the narrative. In some cases, they could keep the corporations in check. Now, they are the corporations.

As aware of that as I am, I can’t help but let disparate news items lodge into my thinking without thoroughly investigating them. I’ll admit that I haven’t been paying very close attention to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s White House run. Without any real research on my part, I’ve dismissed him as an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist. The truth is, I have very little information about him.

In 1980, John Anderson ran for President as an independent candidate. He got 6.6% of the popular vote. Most of those votes came from people like me who were disillusioned with the two choices on offer – Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. As my father told me at the time, all my vote for Anderson would do would be to siphon off votes from Carter and ensure that Reagan and the Republicans would win.

As it happened, Reagan won 50.8% of the popular vote and Carter got 41.0%. The election was considered a landslide for Reagan because he got 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s 49. Anderson didn’t get any. If Anderson hadn’t been in the race would anything have changed? I tend to doubt it. The country was too disillusioned by Carter’s seeming lack of forward forceful drive. I thought John Anderson would be a better choice. Instead, we got Reagan.

Fast forward to this election, and RFK, Jr.  Michael and I were at a dinner the other night where a politically minded friend of ours spoke out very forcibly in favor of Kennedy’s candidacy. We had to admit that we had only listened to the sound bites and never to him speaking at length without being edited.

Then, all at once, a day or two ago, headlines everywhere started blaring out that a worm had hatched inside Robert F. Kennedy’s brain, burrowed in, and eaten part of it before dying. The loss of brain matter had left him with some cognitive loss and impairment.

This was not new news. This is something that Kennedy, himself, testified to during a divorce trial over a decade ago. It was news then, but why is it suddenly news again, now?

The first thing that the conspiracy theorist in me comes up with is that RFK, Jr. was becoming enough of an impediment to this upcoming election that the corporate powers-that-be with stakes in this election’s results, wanted him out of the way. The New York Times dug in and found the deposition of his divorce trial and they were the first to report it.

The New York Times, while ostensibly controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, is a publicly traded corporation. Its majority shareholders are all huge financial conglomerates. None of them is a “let’s just wait and see what happens” kind of company.

It is thought by many of the people around me that the rash of pro-Palestinian student protests happening in universities around the country are being manipulated in some way by outside forces. The Russians, the Chinese, various Arabic nations, nobody knows for sure but the fact that somebody might be behind it all from outside our borders is pretty much generally accepted.

A Chinese company called ByteDance owns the popular app, TikTok. TikTok is a continual source of information for the younger generation. There are no informational checks and balances on TikTok, anyone can post almost anything they like. Anyone and anyTHING can post anything they like.

The United States government is worried that the Chinese government can access American user data through the TikTok site. President Biden has just signed legislation that gives ByteDance a year to divest itself from the app or else it will be banned in this country. ByteDance is, in turn, suing the US. The case will likely land in front of our national Supreme Court.

The United States Supreme Court is currently controlled by a Republican-appointed majority.  Clarence Thomas was put on the bench during George Bush, Sr’s time in office. John Roberts and Samuel Alito were put there during George Bush, Jr.’s administration. Our last Republican president placed three Justices on the bench: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

The Republican party, certainly since Reagan, has advocated for a reduction in governmental oversight regarding corporate activities. That, unsurprisingly, has made the party extremely beloved by the gigantic entities that now control much of our country’s commerce. The more impediments the Republicans take away, the bigger these companies get, the bigger they get, the more control they have over us.

Corporations operate internationally, not just nationally. They are looking for ways to expand globally. National borders don’t matter that much except for the fact that they need to maneuver around individual sovereign state’s laws to do business. The potential fall of Democracy won’t be all that problematic for a gigantic financial entity so long as whatever comes next doesn’t affect the market.

The Republicans and their corporate backers stood behind our former President because he did everything he could to remove as many obstacles as possible from their paths he could. Putin, in Russia, is ruling as an Oligarch and not a leader for the people. Our former President loves him. Our former president’s aspirations were to do the same thing. Our former President’s aspirations are to do the same thing again.

Democracy doesn’t matter to a corporation. The only things that matter to them are profits and the ability to expand. Environmental issues, of which Kennedy is a strong proponent, are a hindrance. Free speech is a hindrance. A decline in population is a hindrance.

Are we really getting our information filtered down to us via the Russians, the Chinese, and other international influencers? Some of it, obviously, but how much of it?  Who can we trust?

Yesterday, I walked past a small pro-Palestinian demonstration in front of Baruch College. Many of the people chanting were wearing Keffiyeh head scarves. One guy was waving a Palestinian flag. I stood there for a moment and wondered who they were. Were all of them students? Were any of the Palestinians? Were some of them outsiders? Were some of them plants? Where had they gotten their information and their seemingly unshakable convictions?

I looked into their eyes, in some cases that’s all I could see, and I couldn’t tell.

Follow the money. Never has that been truer than it is now. Money is behind it all. Perhaps it always has been, but in the past, it’s hidden itself a bit better.

The main appeal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to disenfranchised voters, it seems to me, was the fact that he is more than a decade younger than the two front runners and in full possession of his faculties.

If you’d never really heard of him before or were just aware of him in passing, you certainly know who he is now. He’s the guy whose brain has been eaten away by worms. That he may be completely fine now and recovered from that is utterly immaterial. Few people are going to dive in any deeper than the shocking headlines.

I don’t see how he survives this, politically. Whoever was assigned to get him out of the way, did a brutally clean and thorough job of it. I don’t see how Kennedy’s campaign can reasonably continue.

Conspiracy theories usually spring up when we haven’t been fed the full story. We might not always be able to identify the truth, but we human beings have an unfailingly good sense of when something’s being held back.

Kate Middleton’s absence is a perfect example. A few months ago, everybody had a theory about where she was and what had happened to her. After a few torturous weeks, we finally got enough information from the Palace, so we let it go. It wasn’t as if anybody knew anything, we had just been fed enough information about it all that we were able to accept it and move on.

Prince William just mentioned her a few hours ago. I happened to catch the headline and realized that I had completely forgotten about the whole thing. His simple, “She’s fine, thanks” when asked about her, made me start thinking about her all over again. Where is she? How is she? Weren’t we supposed to start seeing her again after Easter?

I find myself getting suspicious all over again.