{"id":309898,"date":"2025-12-15T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=309898"},"modified":"2025-12-14T00:50:58","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T00:50:58","slug":"dont-worry-be-happy-all-those-who-feared-a-capitalist-dystopian-future-got-it-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/12\/dont-worry-be-happy-all-those-who-feared-a-capitalist-dystopian-future-got-it-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Worry, Be Happy–All Those Who Feared a Capitalist Dystopian Future Got It Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

13 Dec 2025 – A world where corporations run the politicians, promote endless war and secretly manipulate public opinion through the media. Fortunately, these bleak visions never came to pass.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Try to imagine this utterly intolerable, dystopian future:<\/p>\n

1. We reach a point where the corporations have grown so large and so fabulously rich that politicians can no longer afford to upset them by legislating to curb their power. The corporations are simply too big to fail.<\/p>\n

2. In fact, politicians only pretend to be in charge of policy. Like other sectors of society, their services have effectively been bought by the corporations. Secretly, the politicians prioritise the interests of these corporations, and the billionaires who stand behind them, over the interests of the publics they are supposed to represent. Democracy serves as a facade behind which a kleptocratic class rules.<\/p>\n

3. The corporations use their power to advance legislation allowing them to concentrate their wealth even further. They monopolise huge chunks of the economy, like a parasite feeding off the blood of its host. When they disastrously mismanage these monopolies, as they do intermittently, they lean on the political class \u2013 their servants \u2013 to bail them out with public monies.<\/p>\n

4. The biggest profits are made from war, which is ever-present. The corporations use their politician-servants to manufacture enemies from which the public needs defending. This proves a great success. In a fear-driven society, the public is readier to tolerate austerity \u2013 the gradual dismantlement of public services, which the corporations can then take over and run as profit-generating enterprises.<\/p>\n

The public are persuaded that the flow of money out of their own pockets into corporate coffers \u2013 into expanding the war machine \u2013 is necessary for national security. The public\u2019s most cherished freedoms have to be sacrificed, they are told, to prevent society from growing weak and vulnerable. And the corporations vilify anyone who questions their power as an internal enemy, allied to the external enemy.<\/p>\n

5. This grand deception works only because the billionaires also control the media, which serves their interests. The media tolerate limited dissent to give the public the feeling that there is a full plurality of voices. But anyone who really dissents \u2013 who challenges corporate power \u2013 is denounced by these very same media outlets as a crank, a socialist, an antisemite or a terrorist. Few hear their actual arguments, either because these labels are enough to justify denying them a platform or because the media corporations use their control over the algorithmic basis of modern communications to make sure dissent is secretly corralled into social media dead-ends.<\/p>\n

6. As the rule of the corporations goes wrong ever more catastrophically \u2013 the resources needed for endless growth run out; the externalised costs of the corporations\u2019 rape of the planet create ever more toxic waste-products and disturb the fragile equilibrium of the climate \u2013 the media\u2019s role grows.<\/p>\n

Its task is to distract the public with an endless diet of smaller crises that can be blamed on \u201cenemies\u201d, nature or chance, but never on the corporations themselves. Public energies are invested in worrying about \u2013 and arguing over \u2013 the threat from Eurasia and Eastasia, the dangers of terrorism, the menace posed by immigrants, the narcotics epidemic, health emergencies, unexpected \u201cweather\u201d events, the AI apocalypse, the hazards of free speech, and so on.<\/p>\n

And while the public worries about these things, the corporations suck more money out of the economy, claiming it is needed to protect everyone from Eastasia today and Eurasia tomorrow. That new technologies must be developed to root out terrorism and to stop the boats. That a sophisticated war is being fought at home and abroad against the drugs barons. That a brave new world of medical breakthroughs is being engineered. That vital \u201cgreen\u201d technologies are being invested in and will save the day. That AI safeguards are being created. That more responsible ways to police speech are being devised.<\/p>\n

All of this is a dark vision of one potential future. Most likely, it will not come to pass. Our societies are too robust, our freedoms too secure, the corporations too contained for this bleak world ever to emerge.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of: <\/em>Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006); <\/em>Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008); and <\/em>Disappearing Palestine: Israel\u2019s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011 he was awarded the <\/em>Martha Gellhorn Special Prize<\/em><\/a> for Journalism. The same year, <\/em>Project Censored<\/em><\/a> voted one of Jonathan\u2019s reports, \u201cIsrael brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank\u201d, the ninth most important story censored in 2009-10.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 jonathan-cook.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Dec 2025 – A world where corporations run the politicians, promote endless war and secretly manipulate public opinion through the media. Fortunately, these bleak visions never came to pass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":309901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[232,542,3530],"class_list":["post-309898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-capitalism","tag-capitalism","tag-fascism","tag-military-capitalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309902,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309898\/revisions\/309902"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}