There are liars, damned liars, governments....
.....and the obedient apparatchiks who pocket their bribes
During a huge-stadium, multi-ethnic sellout stand-up gig, the Last Great American George Carlin uttered an infamously accurate assessment of 21st Century Government:
“I have one golden rule with Governments, people….I don’t believe a fuckin’ word they say….not one fuckin’ word”.
Carlin died on 22nd June 2008. At the time, I was a fledgling blogger, and this bloke was (and remains) one of my all-time social commentary/comic heros.
Since his death almost twenty seven years ago, everything he predicted about the State’s capacity to lie to us has been not just confirmed.....it has expanded beyond even Carlin’s worst nightmares. Yet George’s observations in the early Naughties of this century were in fact based on studying the bizarrely sociopathic aims of CIA director William J Casey….who in 1981 blithely concluded:
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
In that context, think on this:
People across the World (myself included) saw the movie All the President’s Men as a fully justified castigation of Tricky-Dickie Nixon, with journos Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post as heroes who brought down a wannabe dictator. In reality, Bob Woodward was not a journalist at all: he was a naval intelligence officer whose brief was to smash Nixon’s credibility. Richard Nixon was an admirer of JFK, and thus a danger to the Secret State because he had a mission to bring Kennedy’s assassins to justice.
Things are only rarely as they seem.
The Covid19 caper is another case in point.
You can read the full article by Matt Ridley here at the Daily Telegraph site.
But this extract sums up Matt’s brilliant investigative analysis pretty well:
‘Although the world has largely moved on from Covid-19, a lot of trust was destroyed including – unfortunately and worryingly – in science itself. I can think of few things worse for progress than for the public to lose faith in science, which is why I’ve made it something of a personal mission to get to the bottom of the origin of Covid-19…...In only one city in the world were sarbecoviruses subject to gain-of-function experiments on a large scale involving human airway cells and humanised mice at inappropriate safety levels: Wuhan. At only one time in history was research to create novel sarbecoviruses with enhanced infectivity through furin cleavage under consideration: 2018 onwards.The surprising failure to find better evidence for a natural spillover, and the lack of transparency from the Chinese scientists, is therefore best explained by positing a laboratory accident involving a live virus experiment as the cause of the Covid pandemic and attempts to cover it up.’
In short, the Anthony Fauci nonsense about bats and seafood markets was all lies. And as for his own reason for being in Wuhan and consorting with senior Chinese military officers, the former CDC supremo changes his story more than most of us change our underwear.
But Ridley’s emphasis on science chimes with me at both an analytical and emotional level, because throughout the response to Covid19 as a “pandemic” in the UK, those in charge of containment – most notably the now disgraced Secretary of State for Health Mathew Hancock – claimed they were “following the science”.
This too was all lies: there was no science to follow, and the actions taken – lockdown, ineffective grades of facial mask, social distancing, closure of bars and pubsand so forth – were nothing more than controlling poppycock. All of the those policies have since been rubbished by real epidemiologists and virologists across the Globe.
They were also economically disastrous for Britain.
Hancock lied to Parliament and the media about both the safety and efficacy of mRNA drugs. Time after time, real science showed that mRNA jabbed citizens could ‘shed’ Covid infection onto those who wisely refused to be jabbed.
But during the entire stream of mendacity, Hancock became an adopted prodigal son at the World Economic Forum….then run byKlaus Schwab, and still an organisation peddling ultra-Right ‘Stakeholder capitalism' - using the familiar neoliberal theme of “You will have nothing, and you will be happy”.
Pure New World Order bunkum greed
Over the last few days, The Slog has been casting much-needed light on the dark corners of the Department of work and pensions. These exhaustive catalogues of further State lies can be studied here and here. The Slogpost you’re now reading looks at a hitherto ignored factor…..
The Role of ‘there-are-no-money-trees’ Theresa May in awarding Sir Peter Schofield absolute power at the Department of Work and pensions
During an interview with arch State Whitewasher Civil Service World [yet another self-serving inhouse Whitehall magazine for which we the citizenry pay] Schofield gave this account of himself,in 2018 as he walked along Downing Street on his way to meet the prime minister, Theresa May: she had asked to interview candidates for the role of permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions, and Schofield had made the shortlist:
“I was pinching myself, thinking: ‘Take this in because this is never going to happen again’,” Schofield recalls. “It was just me, her and her private secretary in her study – it was a pretty conventional interview. But then she asked me a question I wasn’t really expecting.
“She said, ‘I’ve looked at your CV, Peter, and you’ve been in the Treasury, you’re currently finance director general, you’re all about economics, money, finance, numbers. Why should you be the DWP permanent secretary because, for me, DWP is all about people?’”
Schofield claims he told the prime minister that his motivation for almost all the jobs he had done was the impact they had on people.
“So although in the Treasury I was doing things like saying no to transport projects, it was really about choosing how to invest people’s money in transport. Working on business policy was to create jobs for people. The housing role was about creating places for people to live. Even in the finance job in DWP, it was about providing the resources to enable people to feel supported”.
Civil Service World reported, ‘The answer must have reassured May because later that day cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood let Schofield know he had the job. With it came the chance to “play on the biggest canvas of all” and, with the help of over 80,000 colleagues, to have an impact on the lives of some 23 million customers.
Anyone with an ounce of human empathy would've rejected this latter-day Scrooge on the spot....
But not May. Let’s take a look at the hard-line-screw-the-plebs career of Theresa May.
‘Prime Minister Theresa May has refused to budge on the government’s stance on Waspi women, adding that the government has already put extra money in following the increase in women’s state pension age. Responding in Prime Ministers Questions yesterday, May said that the government had been “very clear” on the pension age changes, and argued that those with the most significant changes received “at least seven years’ notice”.
The issue relates to the 3.8 million women affected by the proposed increase of the state pension age from 60 to 66 and the way it was communicated to those affected.
May was responding to a question a question from Labour MP for Nottingham North, Alex Norris, who said: “There were 4,621 words in the Chancellor’s spring statement, but not a single mention of Waspi women. The Prime Minister came into office vowing to tackle burning injustices. Those women worked all their lives for their pension but had it taken from them without their knowledge. Does the Prime Minister really not think that that is a burning injustice?”
In response, May said: “The hon. Gentleman knows full well that, in relation to the Waspi women, this government did put extra money in. We have been very clear that no one will see their pension age change by more than 18 months relative to the Pensions Act 1995 timetable, and those with the most significant changes did receive at least seven years’ notice”.
It’s the usual amoral defence that runs like this: “If we give you notice that we are about to welch on our National Insurance promises from sixty years ago, then you must comply with our bad faith”.
No wonder that this awful woman thought Peter Schofield was the ideal person to run the broader Pensions Service.
THE BOTTOM LINE...
....whatever your homeland definition might be - American, British, European EU, Scandinavian, Russian, Chinese, Saudi Arabian, Iranian, Indian, Korean, Thai, Israeli, Palestinian or Australian - your Government lies to you all the time about everything.
And anyone who has a personally formed opinion that differs from your nearest media propaganda supplier will be harassed, hounded and muzzled unto death if necessary.
I speak from bitter experience.