I’m OK – You’re OK.
Thomas A Harris’s seventies best-seller on ‘transactional analysis‘
And people say, “Brian, these are corporations. I thought you said they control everything. So, how is this being done to a corporation?” It’s very simple. It’s like a gang of ten criminals, all with their own resources to carry out their criminal activities. And nine of the ten decide to go across town and fight a rival gang. But one says, “No, I am not going to take my guns, knives and car across town to fight this.” So the other nine beat him up, take all he has and give it to someone who WILL fight the rival gang. That’s what just happened to NVIDEA’s Jensen Huang. They beat him up and took his stuff.
Brian Berletic (below, light edit)
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If you think corporate media accounts of the Nvidea saga, marrying as they do tales of marital infidelity in the boardroom to cartoonish evildoing by the sneaky Chinese, fail the sniff test then welcome to the club. And if you’re looking for explanations less insulting to your intelligence, I suggest you try Brian Berletic’s November 11 whistle stop; a sprightly twenty minutes and two seconds, calling at the following stations:
- Why on earth would US intelligence services announce in advance an investigation of said wrongdoing, thereby tipping off Mata Hari and her Beijing handlers to cover their tracks?
- How the Jensen Huang brouhaha affords further evidence of the wrecking game the US ruling class 1 is committed to, in AI as in energy, as part of a zero sum philosophy – “we win, you lose” – the polar opposite of Beijing’s win-win approach to global trade; in this case reflected by the latter’s pursuit of open AI architecture.
- A point I missed in the section of my last post but one dealing with how corporate media serve class rule in a fake democracy. I focused on the market discipline of the advertising model, with fleeting reference to media ownership patterns, but neglected more direct collusions, when it truly matters, of media with a deep state ultimately at the service of corporate power. 2 Brian does not.
- How this particular circus offers yet more refutation, if such were needed, of the thesis that Israel runs the USA …
- … and of the quaint notion that there’s honour among thieves.
I always enjoy and more importantly learn from Brian. He starts from the axiom that little if any of what dominates global news can be understood without reference to a US hegemon, more precisely its ruling elites, prepared to go to any lengths to preserve its supremacy. Alone this could make him tedious and reductive but what prevents this is his copious use of evidence – much of it of the horse’s mouth kind; not least those US think-tanks wherein it holds in-house conversations with remarkable candour – as he applies that lens to specific situations. Talking of balance I admire too the way he counsels against wishful thinking, and its mirror opposite of falling into the slough of despond, borne of understandable but unhelpful emotional reactions that steer us away from cold facts.
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More? Try this interview of the quietly understated geopolitical analyst and sinologist Einar Tangen – he packs fascinating nitty gritty into a perspective different but not antithetical to Brian’s – by an economist I’ve long been in love with …
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- On the question, of how class rule coexists unproblematically with universal suffrage, see my last post but one: How to dress class rule as democracy. I’m planning a follow up, What’s wrong with class rule anyway?
- See this Media Lens piece of ten years ago, on how the Guardian, after a knock on the door by MI5 following publication of the Snowden Files, was brought onboard to serve – all the more effectively for its progressive stances on matters important, yes, but not of non-negotiable centrality to ruling class interests – corporate power.