by Kevin Barrett 6/30/2009
Douglas Rushkoff got the idea for his new book Life, Inc., after he was mugged in his own neighborhood – twice. The first time, it was a real-world mugging in the streets. Then when he wrote about it on-line, he suffered a second, virtual mugging by angry neighbors afraid his report would hurt their property values. Rushkoff had a flash of insight: His neighbors were acting like corporations, not human beings. How did the corporatocracy get this far in its quest to possess the human soul? he wondered. Out of that question grew Life, Inc., a brave and brilliant book that places the central banking currency-creation scam at the root of the social, economic and spiritual problems endemic to today’s rotten corporatocracy…but also examines our own complicity in the multiplicity of choices that keep corporate fascism afloat.
When Rushkoff came on my “Fair and Balanced” talk radio show, I was hoping he wouldn’t verbally mug me. After all, his article “Conspiracy of Dunces” is one of the most unpleasant attacks on 9/11 truth to be found anywhere in cyberspace.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.
Rushkoff brought up the topic himself. He pointed out that what was once soft corporate fascism “has gotten darker and more personal now. When I got mugged next to my apartment in Brooklyn and posted online where it had happened, I got angry emails from people who thought I was going to be hurting their property values.”
“It sounded like some of them were going to come over and mug you,” I said.
“Exactly, it was like an on-line mugging. And I felt like what you felt like after you started talking about 9/11, and sharing your view of what happened, and the facts you had been able to gather, and people are coming at you like you’re an enemy of the state, when actually what you are is an enemy to a myth.” He added that in his view, who exactly did what and how on 9/11 is less the issue than “our inability to confront the centralizing top-down fake myth about who we are as Americans and what our role is in the world.” (In my view, of course, 9/11 truth is perfectly tailored to explode that “top-down fake myth.”)
During the last ten minutes of the show, Rushkoff and I discussed the 9/11 truth movement. I explained that in my view the evidence for the alternative view of 9/11 is clear and overwhelming, making this issue an immensely powerful lever for the kind of social change we both want to see. Rushkoff seems to have become far more open-minded toward the alternative view of the facts than he was in 2007, arguing that “until we’re doing grand juries of those folks, I don’t think we’re going to get the witnesses to come forward who would have had to have been involved in the things we’re talking about. The complexity of the crime makes it almost impossible to both engage in the mystery and engage in the prosecution at the same time.” And the best way to get grand juries indicting top current and former military and political officials, he suggested, is to go after them for other war crimes first. (9/11 truth-seeking lawyer William Pepper had said the same thing during his recent appearance on my show.)
Rushkoff has suggested that I join him on his radio show to discuss my new book, so stay tuned for round two…