For very long time I hadn’t read a so such clear and exact description of our reality as people living in our current society under the current government and system. I am so thrilled to share it with our readers. The Illusion of Freedom, authored by Chris Hedges, is definitely a powerful article that every political conscientious person who likes to challenge the status quo and to contemplate new ideas and visions for humanity that everyone must read. FIRST OF A 2-PART SERIES.

The Illusion of Freedom

by Chris Hedges

The seizure of political and economic power by corporations is unassailable. Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws? Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures? Who is in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of Homeland Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? The Department of Labor? The Federal Reserve? The mass media? Our systems of entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who determines our trade and environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on the public while enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax boycott by Wall Street? Who criminalizes dissent?

A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at Trump campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount effective resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally around the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class and the liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not matter. We have surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do not count within the political process.

This truth, emotionally difficult to accept, violates our conception of ourselves as a free, democratic people. It shatters our vision of ourselves as a nation embodying superior virtues and endowed with the responsibility to serve as a beacon of light to the world. It takes from us the “right” to impose our fictitious virtues on others by violence. It forces us into a new political radicalism. This truth reveals, incontrovertibly, that if real change is to be achieved, if our voices are to be heard, corporate systems of power have to be destroyed. This realization engenders an existential and political crisis. The inability to confront this crisis, to accept this truth, leaves us appealing to centers of power that will never respond and ensures we are crippled by self-delusion.

The longer fantasy is substituted for reality, the faster we sleepwalk toward oblivion. There is no guarantee we will wake up. Magical thinking has gripped societies in the past. Those civilizations believed that fate, history, superior virtues or a divine force guaranteed their eternal triumph. As they collapsed, they constructed repressive dystopias. They imposed censorship and forced the unreal to be accepted as real. Those who did not conform were disappeared linguistically and then literally.

The vast disconnect between the official narrative of reality and reality itself creates an Alice-in-Wonderland experience.
Propaganda is so pervasive, and truth is so rarely heard, that people do not trust their own senses. We are currently being assaulted by political campaigning that resembles the constant crusading by fascists and communists in past totalitarian societies. This campaigning, devoid of substance and subservient to the mirage of a free society, is anti-politics.

No vote we cast will alter the configurations of the corporate state. The wars will go on. Our national resources will continue to be diverted to militarism. The corporate fleecing of the country will get worse. Poor people of color will still be gunned down by militarized police in our streets. The eradication of our civil liberties will accelerate. The economic misery inflicted on over half the population will expand. Our environment will be ruthlessly exploited by fossil fuel and animal agriculture corporations and we will careen toward ecological collapse. We are “free” only as long as we play our assigned parts. Once we call out power for what it is, once we assert our rights and resist, the chimera of freedom will vanish. The iron fist of the most sophisticated security and surveillance apparatus in human history will assert itself with a terrifying fury.

The powerful web of interlocking corporate entities is beyond our control. Our priorities are not corporate priorities. The corporate state, whose sole aim is exploitation and imperial expansion for increased profit, sinks money into research and development of weapons and state surveillance systems while it starves technologies that address global warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in defense money but cannot find funds for environmental studies. Our bridges, roads and levees are crumbling from neglect. Our schools are overcrowded, decaying and being transformed into for-profit vocational centers. Our elderly and poor are abandoned and impoverished. Young men and women are crippled by unemployment or underemployment and debt peonage. Our for-profit health care drives the sick into bankruptcy. Our wages are being suppressed and the power of government to regulate corporations is dramatically diminished by a triad of new trade agreements—the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement. Government utilities and services, with the implementation of the Trade in Services Agreement, will see whole departments and services, from education to the Postal Service, dismantled and privatized. Our manufacturing jobs, sent overseas, are not coming back. And a corporate media ignores the decay to perpetuate the fiction of a functioning democracy, a reviving economy and a glorious empire. IT WILL CONTINUE NEXT WEEK.

by Philip Wegmann
The Daily Signal

Biological sex will no longer determine restroom accessibility in thousands of federally operated facilities across the country.
A new regulation from the Obama administration allows individuals to use whatever bathroom they decide is consistent with their gender identity when visiting or working at properties managed by the General Services Administration, the government agency responsible for managing federal workspaces.

The new bathroom mandate was added to the Federal Register Thursday, a GSA spokesman said, “clarifying that the nondiscrimination requirement includes gender identity as a prohibited basis of discrimination.”

The regulation promises to bring sweeping change. It applies to the approximately 9,200 properties managed by the GSA nationwide, an expansive federal list that includes post offices, courthouses, research laboratories, and administrative offices that house agencies like the Social Security Administration.

The regulation affects “all kinds of Americans,” GSA spokesman Ashley Nash-Hahn told BuzzFeed News, who first reported the story. “We wanted to make clear that a person can use facilities that match their gender identity, and we think that’s a good thing.”
Kaeley Triller, a single mother and social conservative community organizer, warned that the new transgender bathroom policy “isn’t safe and won’t end well for Team XY.”

A survivor of sexual abuse, said that the regulation is “reminiscent of exceptionally unpleasant circumstances … it’s about men taking what they want by force without regard to the people it hurts.”

The GSA regulation governs more than just restrooms though. A bulletin circulated to government agency heads explains that the regulation dictates access to “restroom facilities and related areas,” like locker rooms and showers.

Employers are also prohibited, the bulletin states, from asking for proof that an individual has undergone “surgery or any other medical procedure” before allowing them access to the facilities of their choice.

The new regulation comes as part of President Barack Obama’s legacy push to extend nondiscrimination laws and civil rights protections to members of the LGBT community.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Justice have already ruled that prohibitions on sex-based discrimination also encompass gender identity. And in May, the Department of Education instructed public schools across the country to allow transgender students to use whatever bathroom matches their gender identity.   

The administration’s education directive immediately triggered a legal challenge. Two dozen states have filed suit, accusing the Obama administration of overreach.

The administration’s combined LGBT effort has accelerated the contrast between Democrats and Republicans in this area. The GOP platform opposes “wrongly redefining” sex discrimination to include sexual orientation as a plot “to impose a social and cultural revolution upon the American people.”

Congress has been away from the District of Columbia on August recess, and the Republican response to the administration’s transgender guidelines has been sporadic.

One Republican who did respond to the news, Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina, blasted the regulation as overly emotional.
“We should base our laws on facts, not on feelings,” Walker told The Daily Signal. “When you legislate based on feelings you can create unintended consequences of placing others in potentially harmful situations.”

Social conservative groups, like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council, agreed and were quick to decry the new regulation as “a political power play.”

“They want to dictate on the national level what every school and government facility must do,” said Matt Sharp, ADF legal counsel, “rather than let them find local, individualized solutions that fit their population, values, and the needs of the people using those facilities.”

Social conservatives complain that the new regulation comes at the cost of the privacy rights of women and children. They argue that there’s nothing to stop predators from abusing transgender bathrooms to prey on their victims.

Liberal groups, like the Human Rights Campaign, have praised the regulation as a step toward ensuring equality for all transgender people.

“Every person should be able to access government programs, facilities, and services without fear of discrimination,” Jay Brown, Human Rights Campaign’s communications director, who is openly transgender, said in a statement.

Without access to restrooms of their choice in government buildings, Brown argued, “it becomes much harder for [transgender Americans] to serve on juries, go to a VA hospital for care, or submit necessary documentation at a Social Security office.”
The new regulation will cover nearly all of the 1 million federal civilian workers employed at GSA-managed facilities. That’s a disparate impact considering that recent studies show that just 0.6 percent of the adult population in the United States identifies as transgender.

“It’s really social engineering when many people of faith, people of modesty, and people who have safety concerns are being ignored,” said Roger Severino, director of the Devos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.
Severino predicted that the new regulation would spark litigation and blowback against the administration.

“There’s a good chance you will see lawsuits brought against this regulation and the more that are filed, the sooner the administration will get the message,” Severino said.