The War on Social Media is Being Stepped Up

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Jonathan Cook

A really social media, one where we can freely express ourselves and where we alone control the content, is the problem. It must be stopped at all costs.

First, it was “fake news”: the suggestion that social media is uniquely damaging to democracy, rather than the corporately owned media that feeds us constant lies, including the egregious deception that WMD existed in Iraq, and selects self-serving political priorities, such as that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is the biggest threat to the planet’s safety (Donald Trump and climate breakdown are far bigger threats right now).

The latest concern is “trolling”. The UK’s Electoral Commission wants to ban people from voting over bad online etiquette. How will “trolling” be defined? We don’t know yet, but you can be sure it won’t encompass someone like Tony Blair, who trolled some 40 million British voters, then ignored their views, to take us into an illegal war.

Behind the scenes, social media platforms are advanced on creating new algorithms that will increasingly hide dissenting sites from view for all but the most committed to finding them.

These are the first shots in a coming war for control of the internet. Don’t be fooled by arguments that fake news and trolls are to be found on social media. Of course, they are. That is the price one pays for democratic platforms. There will always be people who prefer abuse or mischief over rational discussion and good manners.

But the panic about fake news and trolling is not driven by a sudden concern about media deception and misinformation. That has always been with us. It is about who gets to decide what is real and fake, and who gets to be abusive. It is – and always has been – about power.

Once, not long ago, the only media choice you had was to select your source of propaganda: the Sun, Telegraph, Guardian, New York Times, USA Today, National Enquirer, BBC, CNN etc. If you read a paper and felt strongly enough, you could write a letter to the editor. The paper decided whether you would be one of a dozen people whose views got aired that day on the letters page. That was what “media” meant.

There were no websites, talk-backs, below the line commentaries, blogs, Facebook or Twitter. It was a one-way process. The corporate media told you what was happening, and you listened. There was a consensus only because it had been manufactured through omission.

Now that consensus is breaking down. Certainly, the freedom to speak and think has gone to our heads. It can lead us in all kinds of directions, good and bad, as we try to use these newly discovered muscles like a baby learning to crawl.

The corporate media, and the political class they serve, hate this development. We do not have long. We need to defy the evolutionary process, moving from toddlers to teenagers and adults in record time.

Do not mistake the political and media elite for doting parents, concerned with our welfare. They are not trying to help us get on feet and walk. They want us back in our cribs, gurgling and cooing.

Ken Burns’ Vietnam War: An Object Lesson in the Failures of the Objective Lens

Posted on October 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Reed Richardson

Source: FAIR

If journalism resigns itself to being a “first draft of history,” Ken Burns’ popular PBS documentaries, written by Lynn Novick, have increasingly aspired to—and achieved—a coveted status as popular historical canon. This has, in part, been accomplished by Burns’ choice of cozily American subject matter—jazz, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge—as well as the calming effect that time and distance provide when it comes to more difficult, inflammatory topics like the Civil War. His success is a rare, fraught feat.

But how would Burns’ earnest, middlebrow glosses on American history, forever panning slowly across sepia-tinted photos, treat a more contemporaneous, contentious event like the Vietnam War? The answer can be found in a 10-part, 18-hour opus that for the first time ventures outside Burns’ previous editorial and narrative comfort zones. The Cold War lead-up, decade-plus of intense air and ground combat, and subsequent years of national shame/guilt over the war affected the second half of our 20th century like nothing else.

Teasing out a coherent, honest through-line of such a momentous, highly charged topic is ambitious, to say the least, and Burns rises to the challenge in many ways. Most notable among them: a dedicated effort to include the voices and experiences of the Vietnamese who suffered and/or fought Americans, to create a much more complete, insightful portrait of the war. But in the striving to present all sides and simply lay out the facts for the viewer, Burns nonetheless pulls his punches when it comes to assigning blame and culpability for the disastrous war. As a result, he has produced a sometimes daring, sometimes schmaltzy, richly detailed yet ultimately flawed film about the tragedy and horrors that the United States brought upon itself and inflicted upon Southeast Asia.

As a Washington Post article (9/18/17) on all the behind-the-scenes detective work that went into the film makes clear, Burns and Novick did an incredible amount of research and original reporting. However, the narrative shortcomings of the documentary mirror many of the same journalistic sins one finds in the corporate media’s coverage of the far-off wars of today. Much like the mainstream press, Burns suffers from inherent biases about objectivity that affect his storytelling.

In an insightful New Yorker profile (9/4/17) of Burns by Ian Parker, one can see the tendrils of the filmmaker’s can’t-we-find-a-consensus editorial viewpoint that longs for inviolable truths sure to exist somewhere in between the ideological extremes:

Burns frequently—almost hourly—says, “Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time,” paraphrasing a remark made by Wynton Marsalis, in Jazz. Burns uses the line less to acknowledge historical uncertainty than to advertise inclusiveness: a desire to guide all but the most sectarian or jaded viewers through an obstacle course of their own biases. He is not disengaged from his material, but his sense of a subject, and his sense of an audience’s reaction to that subject, seem to be fused. He once said, “I want to bring everybody in.”

Later in that story, Burns betrays more of this tendency for false equivalence when he makes a prediction about the bifurcated political reaction his documentary would receive. Sounding very much like a put-upon, but archly centrist editorial page editor, he makes clear that he sees angering both the right and the left simultaneously as an occupational hazard, if not a proxy for having arrived closest to the truth:

After The Vietnam War, I’ll have to lie low. A lot of people will think I’m a Commie pinko, and a lot of people will think I’m a right-wing nutcase, and that’s sort of the way it goes.

While this suggests little capacity on the part of Burns to engage in past criticisms of his work—chief among them, his tendency to overindulge in hokey American splendor-ism—that’s not to say there aren’t stark departures from his oeuvre in The Vietnam War. In just the first few minutes of the first episode, “Deja Vu,” over a squawling original Trent Reznor score, Burns literally pushes the audience backwards by spooling iconic footage of the war—and protests of it—in reverse. It’s a disorienting, but shrewd gambit; a recognition of all the baggage the Vietnam War still carries in the American psyche.

Right after this jarring sequence, though, the old Burns reappears. We see languid, gauzy shots of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, overlaid with Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and former US senator and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland talking philosophically about the tragedy of suffering and surviving war. As presented, Cleland’s connection to the war is inexplicably vague—he’s only identified on-screen by his name and “Army”—and, though he is a triple amputee because of wounds suffered from a grenade blast in Vietnam, he is filmed only in close up, as if Burns still wants to ease his audience into the full violence wrought by the war. (Burns repeats this ambiguous decontextualization of his interview subjects throughout the documentary.) Then, the film’s narration, once again voiced by longtime actor Peter Coyote, offers up what journalism would call the “nut graf,” the defining leitmotif of the 17 hours and 55 minutes yet to come.

America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended 30 years later in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions made by five American presidents belonging to both political parties.

There is a lot to unpack in this short passage, but it is accurate in its summation of Burns’ narrative focus throughout his film: that is, long on personal perspectives and documentary evidence of the chronological evolution, but short on broader conclusions about American foreign policy, or any real condemnation of the indescribable cruelty and dishonesty among policymakers who orchestrated it. In one telling anecdote, Burns confided to the New Yorker that his team debated saying “ended in defeat” in this section, but nevertheless chose “failure” instead.

Likewise, the film’s “begun in good faith by decent people” line doesn’t merely land like a false note, it deafens like a discordant symphony. As Veterans for Peace pointed out, Burns’ own documentary refutes this claim. Nearly every episode in the film offers up myriad examples of our elected officials, the military, or CIA willfully lying to the public (or each other) about the US’s involvement in Vietnam, often for personal or political gain.

Nor can you overlook the passive construction of the language, which helps to strip agency from the war’s cheerleaders. Burns’ equivocations here represent stunning intellectual cop-outs, pure and simple, and throw doubt on all that follows.

Relevant to such a compromised take is how Burns and Novick get funding for their projects. Less than a quarter of their money is provided by government sources; the rest comes from charities and the private sector. So perhaps it’s foolish to believe any Ken Burns documentary—partly paid for by the likes of David Koch and Bank of America, among other sponsors—would offer up a polemicized indictment of US politicians and war policy.

By all accounts, Burns and Novick maintain full editorial independence, but their funding pipeline for future projects also greatly depends upon the continued generosity of those same nonprofit and corporate benefactors, who don’t ordinarily court highly controversial filmmakers. As a result of this ongoing relationship, there’s an unseen, but unmistakable gravitational pull that serves to keeps the pair from wandering too far afield from conventional wisdom. Just like Bank of America, in other words, Ken Burns has a brand to protect.

To stay safely within the bounds of convention, Burns and Novick spend a great deal of their time “in-country,” so to speak, on a simple, universal theme: War is hell. And their ability to convey the visceral fear and pathos of battle at the human level is remarkable and poignant: “In war, nobody wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won or lost,” says Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese soldier Burns interviews. (Bao is no random grunt—he is also the author of The Sorrow of War, a novel of a soldier’s anguish—but, again, Burns identifies him only as “North Vietnamese Army.”)

When paired with the blunt, chilling lessons that combat taught US Marine Karl Marlantes, the combination has a powerful effect. “One of the things I learned in the war is that we’re not the top species on the planet because we’re nice,” recounts Marlantes about a firefight from 1969. “People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff, and I’ll always argue that it’s just finishing school.”

Feeding this seething killing machine on the American side was a wide-open, virulent streak of racism, which Burns, to his credit, delves into (finally) in the fifth episode. (A Washington Post podcast interview with Burns—9/22/17—delves further into this aspect of the war.) Still, the film can never quite make the leap between the countless tragedies on the tactical level and strategic policies that enabled them and then quickly metastasized.

The most famous battlefield atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre, which was mostly covered up and pinned on one Lt. William Calley, again shows Burns putting his directorial thumb on the scale. Rather than call the massacre “murder,” as it was originally described by Novick, Burns switched the script to read that “the killing of civilians has happened in every war.” While true, this statement is so banal that it is meaningless, and serves to inoculate My Lai and all the other atrocities committed in the war of their conscience-shocking power. In effect, the film’s stance is normalizing war crimes. And Burns all but confesses to this in a bizarre admission to the New Yorker: “‘Killing’ was the better word, [Burns] said, ‘even though My Lai ismurder.’”

These distinctions without differences betray a corrupted objectivity, one that can’t really reckon with the fact that the wanton destruction and unceasing, lawless violence seen at My Lai was more the rule than the exception. Perpetrating atrocities was, in fact, standard operating procedure for entire units on the US and Vietnamese sides throughout the war, not merely the work of a few deranged individuals. One academic who studies democide (murder by government) conservatively estimates North Vietnam killed 216,000 non-combatants between 1954 and 1975. (The Vietnamese government had been silent about the film until this week, when it issued a boilerplate response. But Vietnamese citizens have been able to watch a version of the documentary with Vietnamese subtitles on PBS online.)

To cite but one specific example of this lawless killing by the US military, the “Tiger Force” recon platoon of the 1/327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, committed a “wave of terror” in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 1967. This bloodthirsty campaign was detailed in a 2003 series by the Toledo Blade (10/19/03). But for a more exhaustively comprehensive look at the tsunami of illegal killing by the US across the entire theater, you’re better off reading Nick Turse’s damning account: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. As an American Conservative (7/30/13) book review of Turse’s book makes clear:

The relentless violence against civilians was more than the activity of a few sociopaths: It was policy. This was a war fought along Fordist principles—Robert McNamara had gone to the Department of Defense straight from the helm of the auto giant—and the slaughter was industrial in scale. Victory over the Viet Cong was to be achieved by quantifiable “kill ratios,” to reach that elusive tipping point where the insurgency could no longer replenish its troops. This approach hard-wired incentives to secure a high “body count” down the chain of command, with the result that US soldiers often shot civilians dead to pad their tallies and thereby move up the ranks.

Turse sent copies of his book to Burns’ team, and it is listed as a source in the show’s online bibliography. But while episodes two and three of Burns’ series do take time to cite McNamara’s chilling preference for quantifying enemy deaths as success (i.e., the infamous “body counts”), the film still fails to connect all the dots as to how this high-level political and military mindset—also propelled by racism—set the conditions for consistent, everyday atrocities, versus mere military operations, by combat units. (Thomas Bass’s highly critical essay covering the entire 18-hour documentary—Mekong Review, 8–10/17—discusses this.)

Ironically, Burns and Novick’s compromised framing also echoes much of the jingoistic reporting of the war as it was happening, which the film does an admirable job of debunking. Most TV media coverage of the early years of ever-expanding war, Burns notes, was almost willfully obtuse, invoking World War II newsreels that portrayed the war in terms that were “enthusiastic, unquestioning, good guys fighting and defeating bad guys.” At one point, Burns features a Marine, Roger Harris, telling his mother in 1967 that “she shouldn’t believe what she sees in the newspaper, what she sees on television, because we’re losing the war.”

There were a few, notable exceptions, however. While Vietnam was still fighting French colonial rule, on-the-ground reporters like Seymour Topping, the local Associated Press correspondent in Saigon, were warning that Western imperialist intentions in the country were doomed to fail. In 1951, Topping said as much to a young congressmember from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who was visiting the nation for the first time.

Once the US began sending advisers, and then combat troops, in the early 1960s, Burns points to a handful of reporters—Neil Sheehan (who was an adviser to the documentary), the New York Times’ David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne of the AP—who dared to buck the party line. After spending time in the field, the film notes, they “were beginning to see that from the Vietnamese countryside, things looked very different than they did from the press offices in Washington or Saigon.”

But even intrepid reporters committed to telling the truth about the war were susceptible to creeping American bias. Sheehan, who had fought in Korea, acknowledges that he found riding along in US helicopters on an South Vietnamese Army air assault raid “absolutely thrilling.” Similarly, Joe Galloway, a UPI reporter who filed countless battlefield reports during the war, says in the film:

You can’t just be a neutral witness to something like war.… It’s not something you can stand back and be neutral and objective, and all of those things that we try to be as reporters, journalists and photographers. It doesn’t work that way.

Not coincidentally, when Galloway recounts a landmark 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley, where the Air Cavalry unit he was with faced a massive, frontal attack by the Viet Cong, he notably lapses into the first-person plural: “We had two things going for us. We had a great commander and great soldiers and we had air and artillery support out the yin-yang.” That Galloway later co-authored a New York Times bestselling book about the battle with its US commander, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, and was later awarded a Bronze Star by the US Army for helping rescue a wounded soldier during that battle, goes unmentioned by Burns.

It’s this blindspot—the failure to see that one is adopting the point of view of one’s subjects—that ultimately dooms the film’s potential. Which is a tragedy, since the US is currently failing to learn the the same painful, sunk-costs lessons of Vietnam with its bipartisan, Groundhog Day war policy in Afghanistan. As Drake University political science professor, David Skidmore, noted in his review of the film (Military Times, 9/17/17):

Now Trump has also reneged from previous pledges to disengage from Afghanistan…the histories of US military involvements in Vietnam and Afghanistan should serve as warnings to future presidents who might be tempted to again jump onto the treadmill of perpetual war.

Burns has said he wants his film to act at as “some sort of vaccination” to war, to “get you immune to the disunion that it has sponsored.” But by denying the role and agency of the people who lied us into the Vietnam War, and then kept lying to keep us from leaving, his film misdiagnoses the real problem.

Looking for an invading sickness or outside cause for the mayhem and destruction our country unleashed upon Vietnam, and itself, is a dodge. In the end, the answer to the fundamental question about the Vietnam War, “Why?,” cannot be found in any clinical or objective analysis—no matter how many hours of documentary footage you have—that stubbornly avoids placing blame where it is so richly due.

The social pathology of the Las Vegas Massacre

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

In yet another eruption of savage impersonal violence, at least 59 people were killed and 527 people wounded as an outdoor music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, attended by more than 20,000, was suddenly converted into a war zone.

The alleged gunman, Stephen Paddock, used multiple semi-automatic weapons that had been converted to fully automatic use, through an attachment known as a bump-stock device—available for a mere $40 per weapon—as he opened fire on the helpless crowd from his vantage point on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino. He took his own life after the rampage.

Paddock could lay down a field of fire on a military scale, nearly 100 rounds per minute. He was found in possession of about 20 weapons, many of them high-powered semi-automatics, along with additional ammunition. The first minutes of gunfire triggered a smoke alarm that allowed police to locate Paddock far more quickly than through a search of the huge 3,300-room hotel, a fact that suggests that the toll of death and injury could have been much higher.

The gunman’s motives are unknown, and his identity sheds little light on what drove him on this murderous course. Paddock was 64 years old, shared a comfortable home with his female companion, and was, according to some reports, financially well-off. One of his brothers described Paddock as a real estate multi-millionaire. He had a pilot’s license and owned two small planes. He had no known associations with any political or religious group.

There is a family history of mental illness—Paddock’s father, Richard Hoskins Paddock, was a bank robber and diagnosed as a psychopath. He was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List for nearly a decade. But Stephen Paddock had no contact with his father after he was seven years old, and there are no reports that he exhibited mental illness or received any treatment for it.

As in virtually all such shootings, the gunman knew none of the wounded and killed. They did not exist for him as individuals. Paddock saw the concert-goers packed below him in a parking lot not as fellow human beings, but as objects to be destroyed. The victims were the random targets of the uncontrolled and impersonal hatred of a gunman indifferent to their fate and the lifelong suffering that awaits their surviving family and friends.

Clearly, this was not the act of a normal person. Some form of mental illness, even if not previously diagnosed, must be involved in Paddock’s crime. But there is certainly a socially induced element in this terrible event. The frequency of these occurrences cannot be explained in purely individual and personal terms. The Las Vegas massacre is a peculiarly American crime, arising out of the social pathology of a deeply troubled society.

What is the social context of this latest episode of domestic mass killing? The United States has been at war more or less continuously for the past 27 years. The US government has treated tens of millions of people in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa as targets for extermination through bombs, bullets, and drone-fired missiles. These wars have penetrated deeply into American culture, celebrated endlessly in film, television, music and even sport.

Social relations within the United States, characterized by the growth of economic inequality on a scale that exceeds any previous era in American history, fuel a culture of indifference, and even outright contempt for human life.

One telling detail: on the day that the media was filled with reports about the worst mass shooting in American history, the stock market continued its relentless march upwards, with new records for the Dow-Jones Industrial Average and other indexes. Wall Street is celebrating in anticipation of the Trump administration pushing through the biggest tax cut for corporate America and the super-rich in history.

The damage inflicted on American society by constant war and deepening social inequality has found expression in an endless series of events like the mass shooting in Las Vegas. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the US accounts for 30 percent of the mass shootings. And the scale of such horrors is increasing: the four worst mass shootings, in terms of casualty toll, and six of the seven worst, have taken place since 2007.

Corporate media pundits and government officials are incapable of more than perfunctory expressions of shock and dismay over such atrocities, which recur with appalling frequency in the United States. Even uttering such rote statements seems to be too much to ask of President Trump, whose remarks Monday morning were both banal and palpably insincere. How can anyone take seriously a foul-mouthed misogynist and pathological liar as he begins a sentence with the words, “Scripture teaches us”?

As for his moronic statement that the killings in Las Vegas were “pure evil,” such a characterization explains nothing. It doesn’t even explain Trump himself, who gave a speech two weeks ago at the United Nations where he threatened to use nuclear weapons to incinerate the 27 million inhabitants of North Korea. Yet CNN, ever the sycophant, described his televised remarks on Las Vegas as “pitch perfect.”

Trump is to visit Las Vegas Wednesday, one day after an equally stage-managed and bogus display of compassion set for Puerto Rico. There he will view the devastation inflicted by Hurricane Maria, while pursuing his Twitter feud with local government officials who have dared to criticize the poorly executed federal response to the catastrophe.

During the 16 years since the 9/11 attacks, during which the US government has been supposedly engaged in a “war on terror,” an average of one American per year has been killed by a foreign terrorist. During the same period, at least 10,000 Americans have been killed every year by other Americans. Mass shootings like Virginia Tech, Newtown, Orlando and now Las Vegas have killed six times as many Americans as all the terrorist attacks in that period.

Further investigation into the circumstances of the Las Vegas tragedy is vital. But one conclusion can surely be drawn: what happened late Sunday night outside the Mandalay Bay hotel was a manifestation of a deep sickness in American society.

The Silencing of Dissent

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Hedges

Source: Information Clearing House

The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.”

No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda, but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.

The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party leadership, have decided to quash public debate. The tactic they are using is as old as the nation-state—smearing critics as traitors who are in the service of a hostile foreign power. Tens of thousands of people of conscience were blacklisted in this way during the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s. The current hyperbolic and relentless focus on Russia, embraced with gusto by “liberal” media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC, has unleashed what some have called a virulent “New McCarthyism.”

The corporate elites do not fear Russia. There is no publicly disclosed evidence that Russia swung the election to Donald Trump. Nor does Russia appear to be intent on a military confrontation with the United States. I am certain Russia tries to meddle in U.S. affairs to its advantage, as we do and did in Russia—including our clandestine bankrolling of Boris Yeltsin, whose successful 1996 campaign for re-election as president is estimated to have cost up to $2.5 billion, much of that money coming indirectly from the American government. In today’s media environment Russia is the foil. The corporate state is unnerved by the media outlets that give a voice to critics of corporate capitalism, the security and surveillance state and imperialism, including the network RT America.

My show on RT America, “On Contact,” like my columns at Truthdig, amplifies the voices of these dissidents—Tariq Ali, Kshama Sawant, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Medea Benjamin, Ajamu Baraka, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Margaret Flowers, Rania Khalek, Amira Hass, Miko Peled, Abby Martin, Glen Ford, Max Blumenthal, Pam Africa, Linh Dinh, Ben Norton, Eugene Puryear, Allan Nairn, Jill Stein, Kevin Zeese and others. These dissidents, if we had a functioning public broadcasting system or a commercial press free of corporate control, would be included in the mainstream discourse. They are not bought and paid for. They have integrity, courage and often brilliance. They are honest. For these reasons, in the eyes of the corporate state, they are very dangerous.

The first and deadliest salvo in the war on dissent came in 1971 when Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote and circulated a memo among business leaders called “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” It became the blueprint for the corporate coup d’état. Corporations, as Powell recommended in the document, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the assault, financing pro-business political candidates, mounting campaigns against the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the press and creating institutions such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Federalist Society and Accuracy in Academia. The memo argued that corporations had to fund sustained campaigns to marginalize or silence those who in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, and the intellectual and literary journals” were hostile to corporate interests.

Powell attacked Ralph Nader by name. Lobbyists flooded Washington and state capitals. Regulatory controls were abolished. Massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy were implemented, culminating in a de facto tax boycott. Trade barriers were lifted and the country’s manufacturing base was destroyed. Social programs were slashed and funds for infrastructure, from roads and bridges to public libraries and schools, were cut. Protections for workers were gutted. Wages declined or stagnated. The military budget, along with the organs of internal security, became ever more bloated. A de facto blacklist, especially in universities and the press, was used to discredit intellectuals, radicals and activists who decried the idea of the nation prostrating itself before the dictates of the marketplace and condemned the crimes of imperialism, some of the best known being Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Ward Churchill, Nader, Angela Davis and Edward Said. These critics were permitted to exist only on the margins of society, often outside of institutions, and many had trouble making a living.

The financial meltdown of 2008 not only devastated the global economy, it exposed the lies propagated by those advocating globalization. Among these lies: that salaries of workers would rise, democracy would spread across the globe, the tech industry would replace manufacturing as a source of worker income, the middle class would flourish, and global communities would prosper. After 2008 it became clear that the “free market” is a scam, a zombie ideology by which workers and communities are ravaged by predatory capitalists and assets are funneled upward into the hands of the global 1 percent. The endless wars, fought largely to enrich the arms industry and swell the power of the military, are futile and counterproductive to national interests. Deindustrialization and austerity programs have impoverished the working class and fatally damaged the economy.

The establishment politicians in the two leading parties, each in service to corporate power and responsible for the assault on civil liberties and impoverishment of the country, are no longer able to use identity politics and the culture wars to whip up support. This led in the last presidential campaign to an insurgency by Bernie Sanders, which the Democratic Party crushed, and the election of Donald Trump.

Barack Obama rode a wave of bipartisan resentment into office in 2008, then spent eight years betraying the public. Obama’s assault on civil liberties, including his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush. He accelerated the war on public education by privatizing schools, expanded the wars in the Middle East, including the use of militarized drone attacks, provided little meaningful environmental reform, ignored the plight of the working class, deported more undocumented people than any other president, imposed a corporate-sponsored health care program that was the brainchild of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and prohibited the Justice Department from prosecuting the bankers and financial firms that carried out derivatives scams and inflated the housing and real estate market, a condition that led to the 2008 financial meltdown. He epitomized, like Bill Clinton, the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Clinton, outdoing Obama’s later actions, gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the dismantling of the welfare system, the deregulation of the financial services industry and the huge expansion of mass incarceration. Clinton also oversaw deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission, a change that allowed a handful of corporations to buy up the airwaves.

The corporate state was in crisis at the end of the Obama presidency. It was widely hated. It became vulnerable to attacks by the critics it had pushed to the fringes. Most vulnerable was the Democratic Party establishment, which claims to defend the rights of working men and women and protect civil liberties. This is why the Democratic Party is so zealous in its efforts to discredit its critics as stooges for Moscow and to charge that Russian interference caused its election defeat.

In January there was a report on Russia by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The report devoted seven of its 25 pages to RT America and its influence on the presidential election. It claimed “Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton.” This might seem true if you did not watch my RT broadcasts, which relentlessly attacked Trump as well as Clinton, or watch Ed Schultz, who now has a program on RT after having been the host of an MSNBC commentary program. The report also attempted to present RT America as having a vast media footprint and influence it does not possess.

“In an effort to highlight the alleged ‘lack of democracy’ in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates,” the report read, correctly summing up themes on my show. “The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’ ”

It went on:

RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a ‘surveillance state’ and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use.

RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT’s hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and “corporate greed” will lead to US financial collapse.

Is the corporate state so obtuse it thinks the American public has not, on its own, reached these conclusions about the condition of the nation? Is this what it defines as “fake news”? But most important, isn’t this the truth that the courtiers in the mainstream press and public broadcasting, dependent on their funding from sources such as the Koch brothers, refuse to present? And isn’t it, in the end, the truth that frightens them the most? Abby Martin and Ben Norton ripped apart the mendacity of the report and the complicity of the corporate media in my “On Contact” show titled “Real purpose of intel report on Russian hacking with Abby Martin & Ben Norton.”

The blacklist published by the shadowy and anonymous site PropOrNot in November 2016 soon followed. The blacklist was composed of 199 sites PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, “reliably echo Russian propaganda.” More than half of those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the sites were major left-wing outlets including AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. The blacklist and the spurious accusations that these sites disseminated “fake news” on behalf of Russia were given prominent play in The Washington Post in a story headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during the election, experts say.” The reporter, Craig Timberg, wrote that the goal of the Russian propaganda effort, according to “independent researchers who have tracked the operation,” was “punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.” Last December, Truthdig columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote a good piece about PropOrNot, which to this day remains essentially a secret organization.

The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, also the founder and CEO of Amazon, has a $600 million contract with the CIA. Google, likewise, is deeply embedded within the security and surveillance state and aligned with the ruling elites. Amazon recently purged over 1,000 negative reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book, “What Happened.” The effect was that the book’s Amazon rating jumped from 2 1/2 stars to five stars. Do corporations such as Google and Amazon carry out such censorship on behalf of the U.S. government? Or is this censorship their independent contribution to protect the corporate state?

In the name of combating Russia-inspired “fake news,” Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by “evaluators,” that hunt for key words such as “U.S. military,” “inequality” and “socialism,” along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 “evaluators” to determine the “quality” and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites such as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt.

The World Socialist Web Site reported in July that its aggregate volume, or “impressions”—links displayed by Google in response to search requests—fell dramatically over a short period after the new algorithms were imposed. It also wrote that a number of sites “declared to be ‘fake news’ by the Washington Post’s discredited [PropOrNot] blacklist … had their global ranking fall. The average decline of the global reach of all of these sites is 25 percent. …”

Another article, “Google rigs searches to block access to World Socialist Web Site,” by the same website that month said:

During the month of May, Google searches including the word “war” produced 61,795 WSWS impressions. In July, WSWS impressions fell by approximately 90 percent, to 6,613.

Searches for the term “Korean war” produced 20,392 impressions in May. In July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions. Searches for “North Korea war” produced 4,626 impressions in May. In July, the result of the same search produced zero WSWS impressions. “India Pakistan war” produced 4,394 impressions in May. In July, the result, again, was zero. And “Nuclear war 2017” produced 2,319 impressions in May, and zero in July.

To cite some other searches: “WikiLeaks,” fell from 6,576 impressions to zero, “Julian Assange” fell from 3,701 impressions to zero, and “Laura Poitras” fell from 4,499 impressions to zero. A search for “Michael Hastings”—the reporter who died in 2013 under suspicious circumstances—produced 33,464 impressions in May, but only 5,227 impressions in July.

In addition to geopolitics, the WSWS regularly covers a broad range of social issues, many of which have seen precipitous drops in search results. Searches for “food stamps,” “Ford layoffs,” “Amazon warehouse,” and “secretary of education” all went down from more than 5,000 impressions in May to zero impressions in July.

The accusation that left-wing sites collude with Russia has made them theoretically subject, along with those who write for them, to the Espionage Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires Americans who work on behalf of a foreign party to register as foreign agents.

The latest salvo came last week. It is the most ominous. The Department of Justice called on RT America and its “associates”—which may mean people like me—to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents, meaning we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the intent. The government will not stop with RT. The FBI has been handed the authority to determine who is a “legitimate” journalist and who is not. It will use this authority to decimate the left.

This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and, eventually, violence.

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

The Morgan Freeman Psy-Op Proves How Desperate The ‘Deep State’ Has Become

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Andrew Korybko

Source: Sputnik International

Morgan Freeman’s latest publicly stunt permanently stained his legacy after the famous actor decided to join the fake news industry by passing off a blockbuster script as a true story.

Morgan Freeman declared in his latest two-minute video that “We have been attacked. We are at war”, but he’s wrong in saying that Americans have been victimized by Russia, but should have rather told the truth that they’re under attack by their own government. To channel Freeman, “Imagine this movie script”, albeit modified to reflect real-life events instead of conspiratorial ones:

A globalist power cabal made up of the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (the “deep state”), in conjunction with the Democratic Party, “Cultural Marxist” professors, the Mainstream Media, and Hollywood have attacked American democracy using non-stop infowar operations against their own fellow citizens to spread propaganda and false information aimed at convincing people that the Republican candidate and future President of the United States is really a Russian puppet.

A few years ago this might have sounded just as ridiculous as the narrative that Freeman read off in front of the cameras, but the difference is that this actually happened whereas his story still remains the realm of fiction. The conspiracy theory that Russia somehow swayed the 2016 election has no basis in reality, and it’s very condescending to the millions of average Americans in the Midwest who swayed the election for Trump to even infer that these patriotic citizens were under the influence of a foreign intelligence operation at the time.

Midwesterners didn’t tip the election for Trump because President Putin, the FSB, RT, or Sputnik told them to — which they didn’t — but because they had enough of the old order of business in the US and were desperately craving a change, any change, to improve the all-around deteriorating conditions that have come to define their lives. Trump promised law and order, jobs and strong borders, and a no-nonsense approach to American domestic politics, the complete opposite of Hillary’s platform and exactly what Midwesterners wanted to hear.

Even without the DNC leaks, many of those folks would never have countenanced voting for Hillary due to her husband’s toxic legacy and that of his party. Moreover, these voters didn’t need proof of Hillary and the Democrats’ corruption because they had suspected it all along, though the amplification of their crimes by the global media vindicated them for what The Establishment had falsely claimed for years was just another tinfoil hat “conspiracy theory”.

Now about actual conspiracy facts, many people could never have thought that their own government would turn against them and attack America’s sacred political system, its electoral democracy, through the incessant demonization of Donald Trump and the plethora of fake news that they disseminated about him. When Trump claimed that his campaign was under surveillance by the Obama Administration, he was dismissed as a crackpot, but it’s since emerged just the other day that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice did in fact authorize the spying of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

On top of that, the never-ending assertions that Trump is in cahoots with the Russian government or somehow under the nefarious influence of shadowy Kremlin agents are regularly debunked by listening to the President and his Administration constantly talk about “Russian aggression” and watching them use this pretext to make hostile moves against Moscow. These actions strongly refute the claims of a secret Trump-Russian connection and most Americans understand that, but the “deep state” and their cohorts in the “Cultural Marxist” corners of academia, the Mainstream Media, Hollywood, and the masked mob of “Antifa” rioters believe that the population is just too stupid to see this and could therefore be easily misled into believing their fake news narrative that Putin’s proxy is in control of the White House.

The whole point behind this massive infowar operation against the minds of the American public is to delegitimize Trump’s election in a last-ditch bid to give the Democrats a chance to win back Congress during next year’s midterm elections. It’s also designed to influence the President’s domestic and foreign policy decision making, and it actually has succeeded to a degree in that respect if one holds the view that Trump truly believed what he said on the campaign trail but was later pressured by the “deep state” to take a decidedly neo-conservative stance towards International Affairs after he entered into office. Regardless, what’s important to focus on in this context are the American people themselves, who largely dismiss the conspiratorial, never-proven, and constantly debunked accusations that Morgan Freeman shamelessly told the American public with a straight face.

There’s a popular saying that one shouldn’t “shoot the messenger”, but that doesn’t mean that the said messenger is above criticism. Morgan Freeman is a beloved household name who’s universally praised for his excellent acting skills and the unforgettable memories that he’s imbued his audiences with, but politics isn’t his element, and no matter how much the “Committee to Investigate Russia’ pleads that it’s “non-partisan”, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s open involvement in the project proves that it’s linked to the same anti-Trump “deep state” that’s been undermining American democracy for over the past two years. Morgan Freeman should have known better than to lend his acting talent to pretending that a movie script is a real-life story, and that’s why so many people are disappointed in him on a deep, personal level.

The irony of it all is that Morgan Freeman could have actually done a lot of good if he had the courage to say the truth. Instead of imploring Trump to sit down in front of the American people, elaborate on Hillary’s “Russia Did It!” conspiracy theory, and then “legitimize” it through a full-blown nationwide anti-Russian witch hunt stretching from the Office of the Presidency all the way down to the paupers in the inner city, he himself could have sat down in front of the American people just as he did in his two-minute psy-op video and calmly explain the actual real-life “deep state” conspiracy against Trump and the American people. He didn’t do that, so there’s no use in speculating about “coulda, shoulda, woulda”, but for the sake of cracking a smile and thinking about what might have been, it sure would have been powerful if he channeled his blockbuster script but adapted it to actual events by saying:

“My fellow Americans, during this past election, we came under attack by our own government. I’ve called on the patriotic members of Congress and our intelligence community to use every resource available to conduct a thorough investigation to determine exactly how this happened. Our citizens are demanding accountability. For 241 years our democracy has been imperfect but nevertheless something to aspire to, and we owe it to the brave people who have fought and died to protect this great nation and save democracy. And we owe it to our future generations to continue the fight.”

But then again, Hollywood by its very nature is fake and deceptive, so it might be too much to ever hope for an American movie icon to stand up and say those brave words that were imagined above, though that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have resonated with tens of millions of dyed-in-the-wool patriotic Americans who are sick and tired of the “deep state’s” manipulative mind games.

Morgan Freeman, David Frum, and the no-good non-profit (The Baffler)

Freedom Is Not Necessarily The Absence Of Tyranny

Posted on September 24, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market

Is it true that freedom is an overly idealized concept? Perhaps, but it is one of the few concepts worthy of idealization. It is so worthy, that it is worth dying for.

Since the dawn of recorded history human beings have fought and sacrificed to attain freedom. It is an inherent psychological construct. It is a principle that is rooted not only in the mind of man, but his spirit or soul. Scientists in the realm of the mind have struggled for generations to understand where it comes from — others have sought to dismiss it as a fanciful notion or societal construct. Nihilists claim it doesn’t really exist, while other people center their entire lives on the proliferation of it. The concept of freedom, love it or hate it, is central to all cultures and all civilizations. The most common dismissal of the idea of freedom that I have seen is the argument that none of us is really free because “tyranny exists”. Tyranny is a constant, therefore, in the view of the nihilists, freedom cannot exist. I believe this dim way of thinking stems from a misconception of what freedom is and where it comes from.

Freedom, first and foremost, begins in the mind, or the heart; whatever you are inclined to put more stock in. To think critically or to imagine wildly is indeed to be free. Tyranny, by extension, rises from the mire and muck in the physical world around us and ends in the mind and the heart. If one is free of mind, then one is never truly enslaved.

I have heard so many times the ignorant accusation that freedom requires action before consequence. That is to say, if you have suffered the consequences of a tyrannical system, then you have already failed to prevent your own enslavement. This is not how freedom functions. It has never worked this way.

There is no such thing as a world without the consequences of tyranny. Tyrants are everywhere, always. There are little tyrants in our everyday lives, and big tyrants that pull strings from behind the curtains and from the darker places. There are people reading this article right now that think they are liberty-minded, but act like tyrants towards those around them. There are people who think they are slaves when one simple choice or action could easily make them free. There are people who see private property as tyranny and seek to supplant it….with an even greater tyranny of entitlement and socialism. And, there are people who think freedom means freedom for them, but not for others. Each tyrant takes time to understand and remove from our lives. Some we simply need to walk away from; others need to be destroyed.

The point is, we are forever dealing with tyranny, and many of us are forever working to topple it. As long as we are able to pursue that goal, we are still free. The true slaves are those that have given up completely out of laziness or fear. Tyranny is always present, after all; why take a bath today when you are just going to end up soiled again tomorrow?

The idea that one can do nothing in the face of the machine is an old idea proven wrong time and time again, yet, it is also a very easy and comfortable lie to live in. Struggle is difficult. Sacrifice is foreboding and ugly. There are a million-and-one excuses and rationalizations as to why it is better to “accept fate” or circumstances. There is always another excuse that can be used to paper over cowardice.

Tyrants can, in fact, win and keep winning for the length of an epoch, exactly because of the logical fallacy that they cannot be resisted or be beaten. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy of nihilism that makes tyranny possible. Without it, tyrants inevitably fail and fall.

The great monster of our time that must be slayed is the monster of organized conspiracy. Past generations have confronted and defeated appendages of this monster, but they never beheaded it, and this is why our particular brand of tyranny persists. It is not enough for us to fight the tentacles of the beast anymore — it is the job of the freedom fighters of our era to stab at the brains of the wretched thing.

I am of course speaking of the banking cabal, the cult of financiers and elites that make up the globalist hierarchy. They pervade the halls of numerous institutions and think tanks, from the Federal Reserve and the Council on Foreign Relations to the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements. They sit in positions of great political influence and hold council (and some would say considerable sway) over world leaders. They write “theoretical” policies which are quickly adopted by governments and made into law. They are primary stockholders and owners of our mainstream media. Their slithering fingers are wrapped around academia and many scientific communities. They insinuate themselves into every foundation of thought, because thought is what they most wish to control.

They prefer to divide and conquer, to pit one group against another, or to give their ideological enemies enough rope to hang themselves with. If they can’t rule the psyche of a society or succeed in 4th generation warfare, they will fall back to the old standard of brute force. In fact, they might just do that anyway, because what tyrant doesn’t love instilling abject terror every once in a while?

And yet, these “elites” stand on a razor’s edge. Despite all their supposed power, despite all their wealth, despite the vast spiderwebs they weave, all of it can be turned to ash in an instant and they know it. Empires like this rely on anonymity, and they are anonymous no longer. The cabal is out in the open; they have to be.

To shift the world into true globalism and true centralization requires actions which can be masked from some people but not all people. They believe the intricate digital networks they have funded will buy them total information awareness, but these same networks also provide us with the tools to understand who they are and what they want. This double-edged sword of full spectrum data creates a Catch-22 timeline. The longer the globalists wait to implement the one world system they desire, the more time we have to educate millions of people. The faster they implement their one-world system, the more likely they are to make a mistake.

Time is running out. Time is working against them. Time is the master here, and the globalists are nothing but paper boats on a tidal wave.

This organized conspiracy increases its odds of success through psychological manipulation. There will come a time, perhaps sooner rather than later, when banking elites and their political allies can no longer stand outside the game unscathed. Risk is coming. So, they must encourage as much self-defeat in the minds of freedom champions as possible.

They will conjure crisis and catastrophe, they will conjure puppet enemy after puppet enemy, they will exploit useful idiots with collectivist views as cannon fodder, they will engineer conflicts between East and West. They will try to grind us down and break the legs of our resolve.

However, as long as there are people who know who the globalists are that are willing to hunt them down, the globalists cannot win. For what they desperately want is to stand out in the sun with criminal impunity, and without fear. They want to be untouchable. They want to be gods.

Real gods do not suffer consequences, and these people will suffer consequences.

The nihilists will cry, “When?! How?! Never!” But this is the nature of freedom. Freedom is in the fighting; winning is transitory. Tyranny can be subtle and it can be blunt, freedom is the same way. If you think because there is no shooting going on yet that a war is not happening, then you do not understand the nature of warfare.

Yes, it is possible that the fall of one globalist cabal might give rise to another, and another. But we are free to be there and to fight again. As long as we fight, we prevail. When we abandon the fight completely, that is when true slavery begins. Today, we fight using information versus propaganda, and we must be adept at this. We also must be adept at other forms of combat as the conflict escalates.

There will never be total absence of tyranny. The naysayers against the principle of freedom are delusional, or maybe they know such a standard is unattainable and this will make them forever “right.” When will the fight begin? It already has. It has been going on since time immemorial and we are merely here to continue it. This might seem like a task for Sisyphus – an endless circular nightmare. I look at it another way: We are a changing of the guard. We have inherited a responsibility beyond all responsibilities. In this age, we are the freedom fighters, and if we fail now then we pass an even more difficult horror on to some other generation down the line.

In my view this is unacceptable. The opportunity to end one longstanding tyranny is now. We must counter using information as long as is needed, and we must wake up as many people as possible, so when the time comes to storm the castle, the shared sacrifice is that much easier to bear. If you have taken up this fight in one form or another never let anyone tell you you are not free. Your ability to think and to act is concrete proof otherwise.

New York Times stokes anti-Russia campaign to promote Facebook, Twitter censorship

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Bill Van Auken

Source: WSWS.org

The New York Times has mounted a concerted campaign promoting a crackdown on political expression on social media on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of Russian government interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

In conjunction with a public statement by Facebook last Wednesday on political advertising allegedly originating in Russia, the Times published a sensationalist “investigative” report titled “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” an op-ed piece indicting Facebook for failing to exercise greater censorship of political content and an editorial Saturday touching on the same themes.

Facebook briefed members of both the Senate and House intelligence committees on its findings on September 6. It said it found $50,000 in spending on 2,200 “potentially politically related” ads “that might have originated in Russia” over a two-year period beginning in June 2015. It added that this included Facebook accounts and pages “with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort,” including “accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian.”

The vast majority of the ads, Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos added, “didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate,” but rather appeared to focus on amplifying “divisive social and political messages.”

The testimony was seized upon by Democratic politicians attempting to promote the theme of Russia meddling in the US elections in support of Trump. Representative Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the highly ambiguous Facebook findings “deeply disturbing and yet fully consistent with the unclassified assessment of the intelligence committee.”

The Times “investigation” was as weak in its substantiation of a Russian government operation to influence the 2016 presidential election as the Facebook report, but far more inflammatory.

It described an “unprecedented foreign intervention in American democracy” and a “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.”

It repeated the unproven allegations that Russia was responsible for the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails exposing the party leadership’s attempts to sabotage the presidential campaign of self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, while accusing Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik of having “battered” Hillary Clinton with a “fire hose of stories, true, false and in between.”

The story focuses, however, on the alleged Russian use of Facebook and Twitter, darkly accusing the two companies of failing to prevent themselves from “being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.”

The “evidence” uncovered by the Times consisted of linking “suspect” Facebook accounts, since taken down by the company, that posted material linking to a website, DCLeaks.com, that published hacked emails from billionaire financier and Democratic Party donor George Soros, a former NATO commander, and Democratic as well as Republican functionaries. With no substantiation, the newspaper claims that “United States intelligence concluded” that the site was a creation of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.

The article also accuses Russia of exploiting Twitter, using “hundreds of accounts” for “posting anti-Clinton messages and promoting leaked material.”

It further charges that the alleged Russian campaign employed “automated Twitter bots, which send out tweets according to built-in instruction.”

According to Twitter’s own estimate, there are some 48 million such bots on Twitter, and they accounted for fully 19 percent of all election-related tweets during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Times report acknowledges that it investigated Twitter accounts identified as “Kremlin trolls” to discover that there were real people behind them with no ties to the Russian government. It quoted one of them, Marilyn Justice, 66, from Nova Scotia, who told the newspaper she believed that “Hillary’s a warmonger” and that she was hostile to the anti-Russian bias in the Western media. Another so-called “troll” turned out to be a web producer in Zurich, who expressed sharp disagreement with Western narratives on the Ukraine and Syria.

The existence of such views, the Times concluded was “a victory for Russia’s information war—that admirers of the Kremlin spread what American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.”

The Times followed up its “investigation” with an op-ed piece accusing Facebook of having “contributed to, and profited from, the erosion of democratic norms in the United States” by having allowed the posting of “anti-Hillary ads precisely aimed at Facebook users whose demographic profiles implied a vulnerability to political propaganda.”

It went on to comment: “Unfortunately, the range of potential responses to this problem is limited. The First Amendment grants broad protections to publishers like Facebook.”

The Times editorial published Saturday questions whether “any federal agency is focused on” the alleged “problems” uncovered in the newspaper’s report: “foreign intervention through social media to feed partisan anger and suspicion in a polarized nation.”

There is a farcical element to the Times exposé. The idea that the spending of $50,000, vaguely linked to Russia, on Facebook ads over a two-year period undermined US elections in which total spending is estimated at roughly $7 billion is ludicrous.

Whatever actions may have been taken by the government of Vladimir Putin to promote the international interests of Russia’s ruling oligarchy, Moscow’s alleged Internet activities pale in comparison to the unrelenting campaigns mounted by US government agencies, from the CIA to the Pentagon and the National Endowment for Democracy, to rig foreign elections, engineer regime change operations and militarily destroy entire countries. As the former US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland proudly acknowledged, Washington sunk some $5 billion into promoting pro-Western regime change in Ukraine.

Even more preposterous is the attempt to attribute the sharp social tensions and intense political antagonisms that are ripping apart the seams of American society to Russian propaganda. Both are the product of the crisis of American capitalism, characterized above all by the uninterrupted growth of social inequality.

There is, however, a sinister and deadly serious content to the campaign by the Times editorial board, which functions as a reliable conduit for CIA propaganda. It has joined its long-running campaign around allegations of Russian interference in the US election with the demand for a crackdown on political expression on social media.

The two are inextricably linked. Underlying the Times campaign around Moscow’s supposed assault on the “integrity of American democracy” lies the political agenda of powerful factions within the US ruling establishment, which are demanding the continuation and intensification of the drive toward regime change in, and military confrontation with, Russia.

The preparations for war abroad are inevitably accompanied by the growth of censorship and political repression at home. The Times ’ criticisms of Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding, these corporations, along with Google, are collaborating closely with the US government and its intelligence agencies in the attempt to suppress freedom of speech and thought and censor anti-capitalist and anti-war reporting and opinion.

Under the phony banner of combating “fake news,” Google announced a change in its search algorithms last April that was clearly directed at slashing the readership of anti-war and left-wing websites, with the World Socialist Web Site being hit the hardest, losing more than two-thirds of its traffic from Google search results.

Facebook has followed suit, rolling out a similar announcement in June that it was updating its own News Feed algorithm aimed at “deprioritizing” posts viewed as “problematic” promoting “low quality content” “sensationalism” and “misinformation.”

The attempts by these multi-billion-dollar corporations to arrogate to the themselves the power of gatekeepers of the Internet, censoring content that conflicts with the interests of the American ruling oligarchy and its military-intelligence apparatus has aroused broad popular hostility. The WSWS has spearheaded the opposition to these attacks, with 3,500 people from more than 80 different countries signing it petition demanding that Google cease its censorship of the Internet.

New York Times Propagates Russia Hacking Conspiracy Theory

Posted on September 14, 2017 by Reid Mukai

The New York Times reports as fact that Russia hacked the 2016 US presidential election despite failing to present any evidence to support this claim.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: Foreign Policy Journal

In late 2002 and early 2003, those of us who were warning that the US government was lying, that there was no evidence that Iraq still possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), much less active WMD manufacturing programs, were frequently dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”.

Of course, in reality, it was the US mainstream media that was propagating the government’s unfounded conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had such weapons and, further, had a cooperative relationship with Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization held responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The New York Times served the government in its campaign of deception by spearheading the media’s dissemination of the lies out to the public, thus manufacturing Americans’ consent for this illegal war of aggression.

Spreading government propaganda is a function the Times never ceases to serve well — the lesson from its own reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, and from the mainstream media’s reporting in general, having been dutifully disregarded.

One of the latest government conspiracy theories the Times is helping to propagate, by serving effectively as the political establishment’s very own public relations firm, is the claim that the government of Russia was responsible for hacking into computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and email accounts of John Podesta, who was then chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In a report published September 1, 2017, the Times elaborated on this conspiracy theory under the headline “Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny”.

In it, the Times reports as fact that Russia was responsible not only for hacking the DNC and Podesta’s email account, but also for hacking directly into the US election system itself. All that’s old news, however, so the Times‘ new spin is that Russia’s efforts to hack state electoral systems were much more extensive than previously thought.

However, the Times presents not one shred of evidence to support the underlying claim that Russia hacked these systems, much less that this alleged hacking was much more widespread than previously reported.

To the scrutinous reader who is familiar with the propaganda techniques mainstream media use in order to manufacture consent for various government policies, the total lack of evidence is apparent. In fact, the Times actually acknowledges that there is no evidence to support the claim it is making in the headline. Yet, through obfuscation, use of deceptive language, and various other techniques, the Times leads the general reader to believe that its headline is true.

An examination of the article is useful to see just how the Times manages to lead readers to the conclusion the Russia hacking is a demonstrated fact when, in reality, it remains just another conspiracy theory originating from the government that the Times is all too happy to help propagate.

The Alleged Russian Hacking of US Electoral Systems

The first thing to note about this New York Times piece is its title. The headline makes two claims: 1) it’s a fact that Russia tried to hack the US election, and this fact has been known publicly for some time; and 2) the Times has new information showing not only that US election systems were hacked and that Russia was responsible, but also that Russia’s hacking efforts even more widespread than previously known.

The story begins with the case of Durham county, North Carolina, where, we learn, various irregularities occurred at polling stations on election day last November (bold emphasis added throughout):

Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.

Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state [North Carolina]. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.

“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

Note that the Times does not say that Ms. Greenhalgh “believed” or “had heard” that Russian hackers were responsible for earlier hacking VR Systems, but that she “knew” this was so. With this verb choice, the Times is asserting that this claim is a proven fact.

The purpose of this assertion is to establish credibility in the mind of the reader that its headline is true, that the evidence shows that Russian hacking efforts were more widespread than previously known. If it is a fact that Russia hacked US election systems, then it is not hard to believe that its hacking was more extensive than previously thought.

But what evidence does the Times present to support its assertion that this earlier Russian hacking of VR Systems occurred?

Well, to answer that question, let’s first look at how Ms. Greenhalgh “knew” that Russians had hacked VR Systems. Much further into the article, more than halfway through, the Times tells us:

As the problems mounted, The Charlotte Observer reported that Durham’s e-poll book vendor was Florida-based VR Systems, which Ms. Greenhalgh knew from a CNN report had been hacked earlier by Russians. “Chills went through my spine,” she recalled.

So there were irregularities at the Durham county polling stations, and Durham county used VR Systems for its polling system, which Ms. Greenhalgh “knew” Russians had hacked because she’d heard it on CNN.

Mid-article, however, the Times also quotes Ms. Greenhalgh acknowledging, with respect to the specific case of Durham county, “We still don’t know if Russian hackers did this.”

If we don’t know whether Russian hacking was responsible for the supposed irregularities in Durham county’s polling station, why is the Times using it as an example to support the claim made in its headline that this hacking was more extensive than previously thought? If there are cases where there is evidence, why not feature one of those, instead?

The answer is that no such evidence exists; the Times has no evidence to support that claim in its headline. In fact, it acknowledges this in several other places in the article. What the Times is trying to do is to build the case that we can safely assume that what happened in Durham county was a consequence of Russian hacking. After all, if Russia hacked VR Systems, that certainly could explain those election-day irregularities, right?

But how solid is the Times‘ premise that Russia hacked VR Systems in the first place?

The Times doesn’t attempt to support this premise solely with hearsay about something CNN reported. It exerts slightly greater effort to convince the reader. Nine paragraphs into the article, we read:

Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

Note here that the Times is once again acknowledging that it doesn’t actually have any evidence to support the claim that Russia hacked other companies in addition to VR Systems, which it is using to support the claim made in its headline that the Russian hacking was more widespread than previously thought. The Times is simply parroting government officials who’ve made this claim.

The Times‘ case crumbles even further the deeper one reads into the article. With respect to the Durham county irregularities, the Times next notes:

There are plenty of other reasons for such breakdowns — local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it. Despite the disruptions, a record number of votes were cast in Durham, following a pattern there of overwhelming support for Democratic presidential candidates, this time Hillary Clinton.

But months later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

So keep in mind as we proceed that the Times is here once again acknowledging that no evidence exists to support the suspicion that the Durham county irregularities were due to Russian hacking. Yet it attempts to lead readers to that conclusion by suggesting that Russians did hack states’ electoral systems:

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

Note that here the Times is attributing the claim that Russia hacked into states’ electoral systems to various sources. In its next paragraph, however, the Times does away with attribution and transforms this claiminto an ostensibly verified fact:

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times found.

Here we see that the Times is back to asserting as fact that the Russian hacking was more extensive than previously reported, even though it has admittedly not yet provided even a single piece of supporting evidence! How can it do that? Well, transparently, what is important to the Times is that its readers believe that its headline is true, not to actually demonstrate it. Whether it is actually true does not matter; it is just the belief that the Times is aiming to instill.

This is the nature of propaganda.

Turning to the premise, note that the Times is here claiming as fact that, one, US electoral systems were extensively hacked, and, two, Russia was responsible.

It continues:

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there.

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process.

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter.

Note here how the Times is explaining that the federal government has not really focused much on investigating US election systems irregularities even while continuing to assert as fact that there were Russian efforts to compromise those systems! Further:

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

In interviews, academic and private election security experts acknowledged the challenges of such diagnostics but argued that the effort is necessary. They warned about what could come, perhaps as soon as next year’s midterm elections, if the existing mix of outdated voting equipment, haphazard election-verification procedures and array of outside vendors is not improved to build an effective defense against Russian or other hackers.

So, again, the Times is acknowledging that the kind of forensic investigation that would be required to determine whether US election systems were hacked have not actually been conducted. How, therefore, can the Times report as fact not only that such hacking occurred, but that Russia was responsible?

It gets worse. The Times at this point in the article has already acknowledged that there could be perfectly benign explanations for what happened in Durham county. As we continue reading, we learn that the those supposedly alarming irregularities the Times opened the article with were not actually all that irregular (and hence not all that alarming). To the contrary:

Still, some of the incidents reported in North Carolina occur in every election, said Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on election administration.

“Election officials and advocates and reporters who were watching most closely came away saying this was an amazingly quiet election,” he said, playing down the notion of tampering.

The Times next quotes Ms. Greenhalgh’s admission that there’s no evidence hackers got into Durham county’s system (much less that Russia was responsible).

Keep in mind that the claim the government and media have been making is that Russia interfered in the US election to throw the vote to Donald Trump. Yet, in the case of Durham county, the result was that, as the Times informs, “Hillary Clinton won 78 percent of the 156,000 votes”. This is a strange outcome if we are to assume that Russia hacked the system to tamper with the election!

But the Times is not unskilled in the art of propaganda, so it has an explanation ready for us: Russia tried to hack the system there, but was just unsuccessful! It continues:

Details of the breach did not emerge until June, in a classified National Security Agency [NSA] report leaked to The Intercept, a national security news site. That report found that hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., had penetrated the company’s computer systems as early as August 2016, then sent “spear-phishing” emails from a fake VR Systems account to 122 state and local election jurisdictions. The emails sought to trick election officials into downloading malicious software to take over their computers.

The N.S.A. analysis did not say whether the hackers had sabotaged voter data. “It is unknown,” the agency concluded, whether Russian phishing “successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed.”

VR Systems’ chief operating officer, Ben Martin, said he did not believe Russian hackers were successful. He acknowledged that the vendor was a “juicy target,” given that its systems are used in battleground states including North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. But he said that the company blocked access from its systems to local databases, and employs security protocols to bar intruders and digital triggers that sound alerts if its software is manipulated.

Take note again of the Times choice of verb: the NSA report “found” that hackers working for Russian intelligence had penetrated VR Systems’ computer systems. Through this choice of verb, the Times is communicating that it is a verified fact that Russia hacked VR Systems. But is it? To answer that, let’s turn to the Times‘ source.

The Intercept reported on this alleged hack much earlier, on June 5, 2017. Unlike the Times, however, The Intercept provided the following important caveat:

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

To reiterate, the supposed evidence that exists proving that Russia hacked VR Systems is classified and still unknown to either the public or the media, including The Intercept and New York Times.

As The Intercept notes, the NSA report “states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document.”

But upon what actual evidence is that unequivocal statement based?

The Intercept, like the Times, proceeds to accept this unequivocal summary statement as fact despite its acknowledged lack of access to the evidence supposedly supporting this claim:

The NSA has now learned, however, that Russian government hackers, part of a team with a “cyber espionage mandate specifically directed at U.S. and foreign elections,” focused on parts of the system directly connected to the voter registration process, including a private sector manufacturer of devices that maintain and verify the voter rolls.

Here The Intercept is being as disingenuous with its readers as the Times. Note again the deceptive verb choice. The NSA had not actually “learned” that Russia tried to hack US electoral systems; it had rather assessed that this was so. As the manufactured “intelligence” about Iraq’s WMDs should have taught us, those are far from the same thing.

Conveniently, The Intercept provides a graphic image from the NSA report illustrating the point:

The key element of this chart to note is in the left column, where it identifies the “Operators” responsible sending Phishing emails — emails designed to trick the recipient into giving away login credentials for whatever system the hackers were trying to get into. Note that, according to the NSA, these “Operators” were “Probably within” the GRU.

“Probably”.

So, does the NSA know that the Russian government was responsible for these Phishing emails?

No.

The NSA is claiming this is so. But the supposed evidence it is basing this claim upon has not been shown to even exist.

Now, perhaps the NSA has solid reasoning to arrive at this conclusion. Perhaps it has solid, though not definitive, evidence to back this up.

But the New York Times ought to be properly informing its readers that the Russian hacking of VR Systems is an allegation. It ought to be including the caveat with this information that this is according to the government, but that it has not yet been proven. Moreover, the Times ought to be informing its readers that the evidence supposedly supporting this conclusion has not been made public, and, further, that nobody at the Times has been able to verify it even exists.

But continuing in its propaganda effort, the Times reminds us that, “In an assessment of Russian cyberattacks released in January, intelligence agencies said Kremlin spy services had been collecting information on election processes, technology and equipment in the United States since early 2014.”

But that was just another example of the government making a claim for which no evidence has actually been provided. Each of these claims simply builds upon those that preceded it. In the next manifestation, the New York Times‘ claim that Russia’s supposed hacking was even more extensive than previously known will likewise be presented as fact, and the acknowledgments about the lack of supporting evidence will be omitted, just as the Times omitted that important caveat from The Intercept.

Of course, to write and publish this kind of story requires extreme cognitive dissonance on the part of journalists and editors at the Times. This psychological phenomenon of holding two fundamentally contradictory beliefs at the same time is palpable throughout the piece. Once more, even while reporting its headlined claim as fact, the Times acknowledges that it has no evidence to support it:

Beginning in 2015, the American officials said, Russian hackers focused instead on other internet-accessible targets: computers at the Democratic National Committee, state and local voter databases, election websites, e-poll book vendors and other back-end election services.

Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied. Federal officials have been so tight-lipped that not even many election officials in the 21 states the hackers assaulted know whether their systems were compromised, in part because they have not been granted security clearances to examine the classified evidence.

Of course, nobody at the New York Times has seen that evidence, either, to be able to verify that it even exists.

The Times closes by noting that, unlike Ms. Greenhalgh, Durham county officials “have rejected any notion that an intruder sought to alter the election outcome.” Nevertheless, the county has turned over computers to the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement in order for the matter to be investigated.

Of course, the Times‘ purpose with this piece, rather than being to properly inform the public, is to lead readers into the belief that, regardless of whether it happened in Durham county, there were extensive efforts by the government of Russia to hack into state electoral systems.

Never mind that the Times presents not one shred of actual evidence to support either of the two claims it makes in its headline.

Conclusion

We can again recall how the media, including the New York Times, piled lie upon lie in order to manufacture consent for the US’s war of aggression against Iraq.

Here, again, the political establishment has an agenda. Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of seeking improved relations with Russia, a deescalation of tensions, and greater cooperation with Moscow. The so-called “Deep State” was upset by Hillary Clinton’s loss. In order for the national security state to retain the authoritarian powers it has assumed supposedly in order to keep Americans safe, it needs to convince Americans that they need protecting. Russia has been selected to serve as a useful “enemy” to that end.

Framing Russia as an enemy of the United States also serves the interests of the military/security complex and the goal of maintaining and expanding US hegemony across the globe. This narrative has been used, for example, to prevent Trump from deescalating in Syria and increasing cooperation with Russia there. Trump had indicated that he would shift US policy away from the Obama administration’s goal of seeking regime change in Syria and only focus on combating the so-called “Islamic State” (a.k.a., ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh). The national security state has maneuvered rather to ensure that relations between the US and Russia remain tense and that US policy remains effectively to prolong the violence.

Whatever the motives for the propaganda campaign, we can observe that this propaganda campaign is occurring. Members of the establishment media have not only failed to learn the relevant lesson from their reporting about Iraqi WMD, but refusing to do so almost seems a job prerequisite.

News consumers should not make the same mistake.

Scrutinize. Question. Think.

If we want the mainstream media to change its behavior and actually do its job of properly informing the public, then news consumers need to change their behavior. Ever news consumers knows the old adage that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspaper. Nevertheless, all too habitually, that is precisely what they do — just as the journalists and editors they are relying on for information all too habitually accept claims from government officials as fact.

It is supposed to be the job of news media to analyze information, assess the veracity of sources, question government claims, and reveal the truth. Yet the establishment media not only fail to do so, but actively serve to propagate conspiracy theories originating from the government, and thus to manufacture consent for various government policies and the private agendas of the politically and financially powerful.

In light of how the mainstream media serve this function, it is critical for the consumers to develop the analytic skills necessary to determine the truth for themselves and be able to identify state propaganda when they see it.

Hopefully, this exercise has provided some useful insights into how to do just that.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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