Nothing is something after all!

To paraphrase the late I.F. Stone, all an informed citizen has to remember is two words: governments lie, which is why the state prefers its citizens uninformed and distracted. This is the mission of our 24/7 cable news channels.

And since the United States Government is now a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, and since Goldman is a corporation, it follows that all corporations lie, as well, a fact well established by the glowing 1Q financial reports issued by our zombie banks.

Lies, cover-ups, smoke and mirrors, deception and prevarications are necessary because the corporate state is engaged in extractive revenue generation, which involves the siphoning off of both private and public funds so they can be put to work creating wealth without producing anything.

For this operation to run smoothly, two requirements must be met: the public must be convinced that nothing is something, and that the free market must be destroyed.

Making something of nothing is easy. You simply take nothing and repeat over and over again that it’s something, even though it’s nothing. But because the aforementioned 24/7 news channels repeat this resounding truth over and over again, the public begins to see nothing as something, even though it’s still nothing. This, then, how we maintain our prosperity.

A fart is simply the aftermath of eating too many burritos. Therefore, the focus should be on the burritos. But the corporate state, in its wisdom, prefers to ignore the burritos and focus only on the fart and to pretend that the odor is perfume.

Fastidiousness is the midwife of oppression, and it is our obsession with this fastidiousness that has made the destruction of the marketplace possible. Our citizens value predictability over the messy spontaneity of freedom. Why should they tolerate the shrill hawking and shilling of the bazaar when they can be numbed by the dull thud of the electronic image dancing across their collective brain. (This is why a the market and business are mutually exclusive. A market is made up of small, social institutions, while business congeals into a concentrated oligarch of wealth and power.)

It is a comfort to them to know that the Big Mac they scarf in Vienna will be exactly the same as one scarfed down in Leonardo, NJ.

The numbed mind must be believe that tomorrow will be a carbon copy of today, and that happiness is to be found in the mindlessness of repetition creeping on from day to day. They believe because the experts say it’s so, even though expertise in little more that a habituation so deeply ingrained that our experts are blind to its destructiveness.

But who cares as long as nothing is something.

--Belacqua Jones