Category Archives: Geopolitics

Coronavirus – Buying a Single Version of the Truth

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By Iain Davis

Source: UK Column

The UK Column recently reported a £320 million media buy-in contract awarded to OMD Group, the brief for which was redacted from the publicly available information on the UK government’s Contract Finder website. This represents just 20% of the £1.6 billion in media buy-in contracts the government has awarded to Omnicom since 2018.

Headquartered in Manhattan New York, Omnicom is a global media, marketing and corporate communications holding company. It is currently considered the second largest advertising agency in the world, eclipsed only by WPP.

Omnicom is an advertising giant which specialises in public relations, lobbying, communications strategy, and the planning and purchasing of targeted advertising space. It builds comprehensive media campaigns for its extensive client list. Omnicom heads a North American-based network of prominent advertising and public relations agencies with a world wide collective reach.

Omnicom has been awarded a number of sizeable contracts by the UK government. These have included a December 2018 advertising campaign contract for the Cabinet Office, worth up to £184 million, a £119 million October 2020 media buy-in contract with a £230 million extension clause, and a £112 million media contract for the Ministry of Defence.

According to the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), media buying enables the government to:

buy media channels (for example, advertising space, partnerships, events and sponsorship) regionally, nationally and internationally across off and online channels.

Omnicom is the single supplier for these public relations campaigns and their UK OMD Group operations are run by Manning Gottlieb OMD (MG-OMD).

Manning Gottlieb OMD was dissolved in 2011 and struck off the companies register. It isn’t entirely clear, therefore, what the current legal status of MG-OMD is. Their website appears to be their only visible presence and it does not clarify their status. However the CCS has stated that MG-OMD is a division of OMD Group Ltd.

The CCS claim there are a number of advantages to be gained by having one US multinational corporation overseeing the UK government’s entire communication strategy, including robust pricing, neutrality and transparency. Putting aside Omnicom’s obvious monopoly, as mentioned above, when the UK Column looked at the client brief for the recent £320 million media buy-in, it was entirely redacted. We might question the CCS notion of transparency.

Who is the dominant partner in this arrangement?

Media buying is the process of acquiring space on media platforms (online and offline) to get a PR message out. In this case the UK government is the client and MG-OMD (Omnicom) is the sole supplier, often referred to as the Agent.

The supplier (Agent) is largely responsible for conducting market research and devising campaigns that will delver best value to the client. They are given a brief and then advise the client how they can achieve the client’s PR objectives.

As we have stated, it is not possible to examine the brief for the most recent contract. But the brief is available for the £112 million MoD contract. It raises some concerns.

Omnicom will agree the key performance indicators by which the efficacy of their campaigns are measured; they will evaluate and measure campaign performance and will be proactive and innovative; the Agent has the expertise to advise how to deliver all aspects of the service and it is MG-OMD (Omnicom) who deploy resources, implement the plan and collect and store the data generated by their PR campaigns on the client’s (MoD’s) behalf.

It seems that Omnicom, in the guise of MG-OMD, not only agrees what constitutes campaign efficacy, they plan, resource and operate the UK government’s communications strategy. It is not unreasonable to suggest that Omnicom is leading this process.

In 2018 the UK government awarded a four year £800 million contract to Omnicom’s OMD Group for media buy-ins. The CCS stated that the purpose of the contract was to:

Provide the best possible outcomes for communication campaigns … The successful media buying agency … will work in partnership … to deliver … fully integrated campaigns for government.

This contract is set to expire in May 2022.

Omnicom were running government PR campaigns when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a global Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

In an effort to maintain transparency, the signatories to the contract have been redacted as have the pricing criteria, Omnicom protected confidential commercial information and much of the Framework Agreement. However, the contract brief stated:

The Government Communication Plan is updated annually and CCS shall ensure that the Agency is notified when the plan is updated … The Agency will (if required) co-operate and work with agencies on any of the other Crown Commercial Service agreements. This includes other Framework Agencies … provision of specific single services and products including media planning and Campaign Solutions … The Agency shall manage and deliver fully integrated campaigns, either by delivering services in-house or through Sub-Contracts.

Omnicom was in place, ready and able to adapt to the UK government’s communication plans as they emerged.

Providing a “single version of the truth”

Omnicom was awarded the contract on 21st May 2018. On the 9th June (less than three weeks later), then UK Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the G7 had agreed to her Rapid Response Mechanism. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, the US and the EU agreed that they would assert a common narrative.

Omnicom responded almost immediately.

In early 2019 they launched their Learn Fast & Act Fast communications strategy. This was perfect for the Rapid Response Mechanism needs of their clients.

As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, Omnicom was able to help the UK government to “navigate the road to a new normal.” They said they had deepened their “rapid response capabilities” which enabled their client, the UK government, to make “more informed decisions while providing a single version of the truth.”

With operations in all of the G7 countries, and in both Russia and China, where they are discovering new opportunities for growth, Omnicom is well placed to deliver fully integrated campaigns. Whenever a rapid response is required to assert the common G7 narrative, Omnicom will provide the approved single version of the truth.

In September 2019, three months after the Rapid Response Mechanism announcement, the BBC convened the Trusted News Summit. To aid transparency, then BBC Director General Tony Hall said that the meeting was held behind closed doors. The BBC effectively formed a global media cartel with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, the Financial Times, First Draft, Google, The Hindu, The Wall Street Journal, AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada, Microsoft, Reuters and Twitter.

Less than two weeks after the WHO declared the global pandemic, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group in Emergencies (SAGE) issued some key advice. They outlined how our behaviour could be changed to ensure it was in line with the single version of the truth.

SPI-B (SAGE’s behaviour change experts) stated:

Guidance now needs to be reformulated to be behaviourally specific … A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened. The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging … Messaging needs to emphasise and explain the duty to protect others … Consideration should be given to use of social disapproval.

SPI-B recommended that the UK government should:

  1. Use the media (MSM) to increase sense of personal threat.
  2. Use the media (MSM) to increase sense of responsibility to others.
  3. Use social disapproval for failure to comply.

A free, plural and independent media could not be “used” to terrorise the population in this fashion. Only a controlled propaganda machine could possibly be instructed to do so. The Trusted News cartel was available. Omnicom, in the form of MG-OMD, was tasked with using it to do the hard hitting.

In doing so Omnicom has been supporting the mainstream media to stay afloat by pumping millions into their failed business models. The taxpayer funded government buy-ins directly finance the UK’s so called independent mainstream media. Like the banks, it seems they are too big to fail, and so once again the tax payer is being forced to bail them out.

OmniGOV = Fusion Doctrine

MG-OMD has given their propaganda operation the Orwellian sounding name of OmniGOV. They say they are very proud of it and recognise their responsibility as the “the single cross-HM Government agency partner.”

OmniGov were behind the snappy slogans used to change our behaviour throughout the pandemic. Phrases like “flatten the curve”, “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives” and “rule of six” all rely on a psychological mechanism called the rule of three. The £119 million Omnicom contract to modify our behaviour was in discussion long before the WHO made their pandemic declaration.

The hard hitting media campaigns designed to strike fear into the public imagination were OmniGOV public relations strategies. The now notorious “look into my eyes” campaign being another OmniGOV campaign.

“Look into my eyes” was pure propaganda. The UK government was the client and they wanted to increase the sense of personal threat and use social disapproval to compel compliance. OmniGOV created a campaign which presented a low mortality disease as some sort of plague. Covid-19 risks primarily affect older people and mortality distribution is indistinguishable from normal mortality.

OmniGOV ignored scientific and statistical evidence and presented a population scale threat that did not exist. They claimed, without evidence, that lockdowns, mask wearing and social distancing could stop the spread of a viral respiratory illness. They misled the public and suggested that following the rules would save lives.

The insinuation was clearly that those who did not obey were guilty of killing people and that their behaviour was wrong. While appearing to advocate social conscience and shared community responsibility the product was baseless fear and social division — as requested by OmniGov’s client.

OmniGOV are also proud of the other projects that have been engaged with during the pandemic. For example, they have been working with the NHS and Snapchat to encouraging young people to think differently about donating their organs, introducing them to the concept of body-tracking Augmented Reality.

A Green New Deal

If we ignore the obvious risk of having a single US corporation in apparent control of the UK government’s communication strategy, and if we set aside concerns about the vast sums we have paid them to propagandise us, some may still feel, given the claimed seriousness of Covid-19, that there is nothing to be concerned about and OmniGOV has acted in good faith.

But for that to be the case, they also have to overlook that the OmniGov led response to Covid-19 is transitioning us into a new global financial and economic model which, at the most senior level, Omnicom has being trying to engineer for years.

Omnicom is not a disinterested third party merely seeking to meet their contractual obligations. They have a significant conflict of interest. The post-Covid-19 recovery they are helping to define is in their interest, not ours.

The Chairman and CEO of Omnicom is John D. Wren. His personal Omnicom bio reads:

Mr. Wren was part of the team that created Omnicom Group in 1986. Mr. Wren is a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum and is active in a number of philanthropic endeavors.

In 2012, Wren was a contributor and co-author of the World Economic Forum’s publication More with Less: Scaling Sustainable Consumption and Resource Efficiency. The report stated:

The need for rapid action to shift towards a resource-efficient economy is high … change is now urgently required at scale and greater pace than current initiatives, policies or strategies are likely to achieve … Business can catalyse scale through transforming interactions with citizens.. and playing an active role in shaping the policies and investments that define the rules of the game … The right rules of the game can catalyse citizen behaviour … and create new markets … The private sector needs to be involved in most phases of policy-making … such collaboration should be forged as a productive adjunct to more traditional inter-governmental arrangements.

Omnicom is undoubtedly delighted that the public private partnership they have forged with the UK, and many other governments, has allowed them to help define the rules of the game. Certainly they have been busy catalysing citizen behaviour and seem to be fully involved in most phases of policy making.

In 2020 the WEF’s International Business Council (IBC), with Wren as a member, released their Measuring Stakeholder Capitalism report.

Speaking about the need to shape the recovery, they noted that the global pandemic was a fantastic opportunity. They wrote:

We must mobilize all constituencies of our global society to work together and seize this historic opportunity … The principles of stakeholder capitalism, championed by the World Economic Forum … have never been so important. In 2017, the IBC spearheaded a commitment from more than 140 CEOs to align their corporate values and strategies with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) … The IBC has been leading the way in this initiative to deliver on the promise of stakeholder capitalism.

With the UK contingent of the Trusted News cartel being supported by OmniGOV, tax-avoidant members like Google can look forward to some tax payer subsidised profits. They will be free, alongside Omnicom, to spread the single version of the truth in line with the G7’s wishes.

This is stakeholder capitalism in operation. It has nothing to do with us; we merely pay for it. Nor will we be allowed to object or even question the asserted common narrative.

Dissent will not be tolerated

The UK Digital Secretary, Oliver Dowden, recently convened a meeting of G7 technology ministers who signed a ministerial declaration on “Internet safety principles.” The declaration was based upon the UK’s Online Harms white paper and, as such, there is no specific definition of “harm.” It simply means whatever the G7, the Trusted News cartel and other stakeholders like Omnicom want it to mean.

The G7 commit to “work together towards a trusted, values-driven digital ecosystem.” They declare:

Our collective recovery from COVID-19 must be rooted in a desire to build back better. Leaders … signed a declaration containing a series of shared principles on how to tackle the global challenge of online safety, including that online firms should have systems and processes in place to reduce illegal and harmful activity.

As the UK government is contractually obliged to update Omnicom on their communications strategy, and seeing as OmniGOV are their sole media campaign managers, the 2020/2021 strategy must have been agreed with Omnicom.

Given Omnicom’s long-standing commitment to creating sustainable market opportunities, they presumably welcome the fact that it is entirely based upon the rule of three with the “Build Back Better” slogan at its heart.

Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office Julie Lopez MP announced that control of government information campaigns will be centralised further. We can only speculate which stakeholder partner will win the 2022 contract bid.

In the meantime, practically everything we are told about Covid-19 and the allegedly inescapable global economic and monetary transformation forced upon us, will be fed to us by the Trusted News cartel, guided and financed by OmniGOV. Omnicom and their stakeholder partners have a bright future.

Western Outrage Over Belarus Force Landing Plane… How Dare You Copy Us!

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(Photo by Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP)

Washington runs its global air piracy with the full, silent complicity of European governments. If the Europeans expressed opposition to that global piracy then they might just have a bit of moral authority to comment on the Belarus incident.

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

There were volcanic eruptions of outrage and condemnation from American and European states after Belarus forced a commercial airliner to land in order to arrest a wanted opposition activist.

Western media headlines were dominated with expressions of “shock” and fury over what was labeled a “hijacking”, “air piracy” and an “act of state terrorism”.

European leaders who were meeting at a summit on Monday called for renewed sanctions on Belarus. U.S. President Joe Biden is being urged to raise the air incident with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin owing to Moscow’s friendly relations with Belarus, a former Soviet republic.

The Western reaction is hysterical and hypocritical. Admittedly, what took place in Belarusian airspace was irregular and possibly illegal. But the United States and European allies are in no position to sermonize about “hijacking” and “state terrorism”.

The Ryanair flight from Athens was heading for the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on Sunday. As it transited Belarusian airspace, the pilots were ordered by air traffic control to divert to Minsk. A suspected onboard bomb was cited. But that seems to have been a ploy. No device was found, and the plane departed from Minsk arriving in Vilnius six hours later.

It was opposition activist Roman Protasevich whom the Belarusian authorities wanted. He was taken off the plane in Minsk and into detention along with a female companion. Protasevich (26) has been a key player in organizing anti-government protests in Belarus since a disputed election in August 2020 which saw President Alexander Lukashenko re-elected. The Belarusian authorities claim that their country is being subjected to a “color revolution” orchestrated by the United States and European allies.

Protasevich was living in exile in Lithuania and Poland before the street protests took off. He set up an opposition media channel that has fomented demonstrations and has been accused of spreading false information damaging the Belarusian authorities. The U.S. government-funded propaganda service Radio Free Europe is associated with the Belarusian protests and several of its figures are based in the Baltic states and Poland which Minsk accuses of foreign interference in its internal affairs.

Belarus had requested those European states to hand over exile opposition figures on the basis of international arrest warrants. The exiles like Protasevich have been charged with inciting violence and could face lengthy jail sentences.

The refusal by European states to respond to Belarusian arrest warrants was no doubt what prompted Minsk to take the controversial step of forcing the airliner to land.

What should be really shocking, however, is the blatant double standards being applied by Western states. Belarus is vilified as the “last dictatorship in Europe” and the airline incident is described as an “unprecedented” violation of international aviation.

How short is the memory of the Americans and Europeans. In July 2013, the private jet of Bolivian President Evo Morales was hijacked by European states on the orders of Washington. Morales was flying back from an energy conference in Russia when France, Italy, Spain and Portugal suddenly closed off their airspace. The Americans suspected that the NSA/CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden was onboard Morales’ plane. The pilot was forced to land in Vienna where Austrian security agents searched the jet. Of course, Snowden was not on it and Morales was eventually allowed to continue his journey after several hours’ delay.

South American nations condemned the act of “state terrorism” and the violation of Bolivia’s sovereignty. It was a flagrant act of banditry perpetrated by the United States and its European minions. Then French President Francois Hollande offered a pathetic apology subsequently.

Another breach of aviation regulations that was met with silence from Washington and Europe was the forced landing of a Belarusian airliner in October 2016 by Ukraine. The plane had taken off from Kiev but was ordered to return under threat of fighter jets being scrambled. Onboard was Armenian journalist Armen Martirosyan who worked for Russian media critical of the Kiev regime. The journalist was briefly detained in Kiev before being allowed to travel on to Minsk. Somehow the American and European backers of the Ukrainian regime did not find that incident worthy of “outrage” and headlines screaming with condemnation.

If we are genuinely interested in condemning air piracy then the European governments should be far more concerned by the systematic abuse of their airspace by the American CIA and its “extraordinary rendition” program. Countless “terrorist suspects” unlawfully kidnapped by American military forces operating illegally all over the world have been transited covertly through European airports on their way to Guantanamo Bay or some black site for torture.

Washington runs its global air piracy with the full, silent complicity of European governments. Now perhaps if the Europeans expressed opposition to that global piracy then they might just have a bit of moral authority to comment on the Belarus incident. But the Europeans are craven in their support for American aviation hijacking and violations. So their selective protestations are null and void.

Saturday Matinee: Killing Gaza

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Killing Gaza: Dan Cohen & Max Blumenthal’s documentary shows life under Israel’s bombs and siege

Filmed behind the walls of the Gaza Strip in the middle of Israel’s 2014 military assault, Killing Gaza presents a harrowing vision of siege and highlights a dispossessed people’s undying will to resist

By Max Blumenthal

Source: The Grayzone

In Killing Gaza, independent journalists Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen documented Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza and its devastating aftermath.

Yet this film is much more than a documentary about Palestinian resilience and suffering. It is a chilling visual document of war crimes committed by the Israeli military, featuring direct testimony and evidence from the survivors.

James North of Mondoweiss wrote, “If documentary films like ‘Killing Gaza’ appeared regularly on American television, public opinion would start turning against Israel overnight. The film, just released by Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal, is inspiring and sickening.”

Israel, the Big Lie

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Smoke rises following Israeli airstrikes on a building in Gaza City, Thursday, May 13, 2021. Weary Palestinians are somberly marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, as Hamas and Israel traded more rockets and airstrikes and Jewish-Arab violence raged across Israel. [AP Photo/Hatem Moussa]

Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.  Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. 

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror.  And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.  Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.  

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” 

This is the truth.  Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.  Saudi Arabia, a country that  produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.  

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges.  The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions. 

Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people.  From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land.  The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.  Israel is not defending the rule of law.  Israel is not a democracy.  It is an apartheid state. 

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves. 

The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.  

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country.  The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.  Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.  

The investment by Israel and its backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East.  These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.   

The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel.  This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites. 

Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous.  It is not only bad for the Jews.  It is bad for everyone.  It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes.  Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other.  They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence.  The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence.  These extremists are ideological twins.  

This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society.  It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security.  Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States.  It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.” 

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims.  This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military. 

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States.  The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies.  The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society.  We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down.  It will be devastating for the Palestinians.  It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.    

America’s Worthless Values

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The disproportionate deaths among Palestinians speak of a one-sided slaughter. Over 200 have been killed – almost a quarter of them children – during the past week of violence.

It’s a sickening pattern that is seen every time there is an eruption of conflict.

The horrific death toll will likely escalate as Israeli leaders ignore international appeals for a truce, vowing to continue airstrikes “as long as necessary”. The Israelis call it “mowing the grass”. How abominable and twisted is this modern-day Warsaw Ghetto scenario.

Meanwhile, the number of Israelis killed from Palestinian rockets stands at 10, including two children. A 20-fold difference in casualties reflects an outrageous use of indiscriminate and excessive lethal force by the Israelis.

At yet for the third time in the past week, the Biden administration has vetoed international efforts at the United Nations Security Council to call a ceasefire. This is while whole families are being obliterated in airstrikes carried out by hundreds of Israeli fighter jets bombing homes with tonnes of explosives in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

Both President Joe Biden and his top diplomat Antony Blinken refuse to condemn Israel’s slaughter, repeating their mealy-mouthed support for Israel’s “right to self-defense”. What’s so right about killing children in their beds? Or relentless airstrikes preventing even rescue teams from retrieving bodies from under rubble? Or bombing a media tower housing international news services? The latter apparent war crime appears to have been carried out to prevent media from reporting on other war crimes.

America stands isolated in its shameless support for Israeli crimes. The Biden administration in particular is busted over its rank hypocrisy and virtue-signaling.

Since coming to office four months ago, President Biden and his team have waxed lyrical about “rules-based international order” and “democratic values”. They talk about the world being in a historic struggle between “democracy and autocracy” with the Americans being the presumed virtuous ones, of course. Biden and Blinken lecture Russia and China about human rights.

The nebulous virtue-signaling and rhetoric about values are always in the abstract and are laid on with heaps of media propaganda. For example, we’re supposed to believe China is committing genocide against its Uighur Muslim population. No evidence is provided and the so-called American information is really disinformation sourced from dodgy ideological think thanks, as documented by independent journalists at the commendable Grayzone.

Yet, by contrast, here we have a real-life situation in which the U.S.-supplied Israeli military is inflicting an onslaught against Muslims (and Christians) crowded together in the open-air concentration camp known as Gaza. And the Americans are busted for the abject frauds they are.

One phone call from Biden telling Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu that Washington is going to cut off its annual $3.8 billion aid would put an end to the blitzkrieg. But that’s not going to happen because Biden and Blinken are ardently pro-Israel. But not just Biden and Blinken. Washington’s imperial power projection in the Middle East relies on Israel. The Israelis can thus do whatever they like knowing that American administrations will turn a blind eye to crimes of illegal occupation and ongoing eviction of Palestinians from their homeland.

After Israeli warplanes bombed the media tower in Gaza at the weekend, Antony Blinken spoke with an executive of the AP agency which was among those news services attacked. Blinken offered  “his unwavering support for independent journalists and media organizations around the world and noted the indispensability of their reporting in conflict zones.”

How’s that for cynical virtue-signaling and empty values? Unwavering support for journalism? Just like Blinken’s “unwavering support for Israel’s right to self-defense”?

On Monday, while the carnage and dead bodies in Gaza are mounting, the Biden administration issued a statement marking the “International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia”. The State Department said, “the United States has endeavored to reaffirm the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons.” It added, “Everyone deserves to live in dignity.”

Everyone? How about Palestinians?

Later this week, Antony Blinken is to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for their first face-to-face meeting during the Arctic Council summit. No doubt, the conceited American will try to lecture Lavrov about “rules-based order” and Western “values”. No doubt, too, the seasoned Russian diplomat will give Boy Blinken a bit of schooling, and should tell him to go stick his worthless values on the warheads Israeli fighter jets are unleashing on Palestinian homes.

Anthony Fauci “has no clue and no authority to lecture on what is good for India”

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Dissident Voice

In light of the current COVID-related situation in India, Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US adviser on COVID, has called for India to implement a hard lockdown and for the mass roll-out of vaccines.

However, Fauci has no clue and no authority to lecture on what is good for India.

That is the view of journalist Ratna Chakraborty. Writing on the Empire Diaries website, she argues that the US is a rich nation, prints the world’s reserve currency, has robust financial coverage for the jobless and its population is spread out.

On the other hand, India is finance-strained, has a brittle economy that lives on the brink of disaster, does not have any financial coverage for the jobless, is densely populated and its people mostly live in congested clusters.

Given the government’s incompetence and the callousness demonstrated towards poorer sections of Indian society the first time around, Chakraborty says any new lockdown would again result in disaster. She adds that nothing has been learnt, with no attempt to upgrade the healthcare set-up nationwide.

It is worth recalling what renowned academic and activist Noam Chomsky said about India’s first lockdown.

During an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! back in May 2020, Chomsky said:

… you can almost describe it as genocidal. Modi gave, I think, a four-hour warning before a total lockdown. That’s (affected) over a billion people. Some of them have nowhere to go.

He added:

People in the informal economy, which is a huge number of people, are just cast out. Go walk back to your village, which may be a thousand miles away. Die on the roadside. This is a huge catastrophe in the making…

During the first lockdown in India, rural affairs commentator P Sainath painted a dreary picture of the impacts, not least the desperate plight of migrant workers, a shortage of cash to buy food and a potential shortage of food as farmers were unable to complete their harvests.

Sainath also reported the views of Dr. Sundararaman, a former executive director of the National Health Systems Resources Centre, who argued that there was a desperate need to:

identify and act on the reverse migrations problem and the loss of livelihoods. Failing that, deaths from diseases that have long tormented mostly poor Indians could outstrip those brought about by the corona virus.

Regardless of the destructive impact of the first lockdown in India and the questionable efficacy of lockdowns in terms of what they are supposed to achieve, another one would further push hundreds of millions towards poverty and hunger. It would merely fuel and accelerate the impoverishment caused by the first lockdown.

A new report prepared by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University (APU) has highlighted how employment and income had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels even by late 2020.

The report, ‘State of Working India 2021 – One year of Covid-19’ highlights how almost half of formal salaried workers moved into the informal sector and that 230 million people fell below the national minimum wage poverty line.

Even before COVID, India was experiencing its longest economic slowdown since 1991 with weak employment generation, uneven development and a largely informal economy. A recent article by the Research Unit for Political Economy highlights the structural weaknesses of the economy and the often desperate plight of ordinary people.

The study also found that there was a loss in monthly earnings for all types of workers: 13% for casual workers, 18% for the self-employed, 17% for those with temporary salaries, 5% for the permanent salaried and 17% overall.

The poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%. The study noted the implications for debt traps.

Six months later, it was also noted that food intake was still at lockdown levels for 20% of vulnerable households.

How bad is COVID?

Given this impact, before listening to prominent individuals with apparent conflicts of interest related to vaccine roll-outs (see the editorial in the British Medical Journal ‘Covid-19, Politicisation, Corruption, and Suppression of Science’), the current COVID-related situation in India must be contextualised. The sensationalism needs to be put to one side.

According to Yohan Tengra, a Mumbai-based political analyst and healthcare specialist, the true number of infection rates can only be known by testing symptomatic people who have tested positive with either a virus culture test or PCR test that uses 24 cycles or less.

The PCR test has been used as the gold standard for COVID cases around the world. But it has been sharply criticised for being inaccurate, inappropriate, for using cycles in excess of 40 (thereby inflating the numbers) and for producing ‘false positives’.

It seems that even the Swedish Ministry of Health now thinks that it is not fit for purpose:

The PCR technology used in tests to detect viruses cannot distinguish between viruses capable of infecting cells and viruses that have been neutralised by the immune system and therefore these tests cannot be used to determine whether someone is contagious or not. RNA from viruses can often be detected for weeks (sometimes months) after the illness but does not mean that you are still contagious.

We also need to be reminded what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated about the PCR in December 2020. It is especially important to focus on PCR testing because these tests are the entire basis for restrictions and lockdowns (and vaccination); even when deaths were within normal annual ranges, ‘case’ levels were high and restrictions and ‘tiered lockdowns’ were still being imposed in places like the UK.

The following extract can be found on page 39 of the report from the CDC 2010-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel:

Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms. This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.

Perfectly healthy people are being tested and small often insignificant fragments of flu, common cold or some other virus can be detected. People are then labelled as a COVID ‘case’.

But that is not all. In their recent article ‘The Nuremberg Doctors Trial and Modern Medicine’s Panic Promotion of the FDA’s Experimental and Unapproved COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines’, Dr Gary G Kohls and Professor Michel Chossudovsky state that – with regard to the so-called ‘emergency use authorization’ (EUA) of COVID-19 vaccines – it is now established and confirmed by the WHO (January 20, 2021) that the entire data base pertaining to tabulation of confirmed positive cases (RT-PCR test) (since early February 2020 in 193 member states of the UN) is invalid.

The two authors note that this flawed methodology cannot be used to confirm the existence of an emergency situation. EUA criterion is therefore not only invalid but illegal.

Furthermore, there is currently decent scientific evidence to indicate asymptomatic transmission may not be significant.

According to Tengra, the case numbers being reported in India are mainly asymptomatic cases. The directors of the All India Institute of Medical Science and the India Council of Medical Research both say that there are many more asymptomatic cases this time than in the so-called ‘first wave’.

As these ‘cases’ comprise most of India’s case numbers, we should therefore be questioning the data as well as the PCR tests being used to detect the virus.

Tengra says the case fatality rate for COVID-19 in India was over 3% last year but has now dropped to below 1.5%. The infection fatality rate is even lower, with serosurvey results showing them to be between 0.05% to 0.1%.

As has occurred in many other countries, Tengra notes the way that death certificate guidelines are structured in India makes it easy for someone to be labelled as a COVID death just based on a positive PCR test or general symptoms. It is therefore often difficult to say who has died from the virus and who has been misdiagnosed.

We should also bear in mind that respiratory diseases like TB and respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis leading to pneumonia are major killers in India. These conditions are severely aggravated by air pollution and often require oxygen which can be in short supply during air pollution crises in places like Delhi at this time of the year.

Therefore, the current harrowing scenes we see in the media might not necessarily be due to the lethality of the virus but by the numbers who are ending up in hospital.

Vaccines

If the pandemic narrative has been constructed on the house of (statistical) cards outlined thus far, then we should be questioning the need for a mass vaccination campaign, which could actually lead to aggravating the current situation.

This is not lost on Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, a virologist who has held positions at several vaccine companies, carrying out vaccine research and development. He has also been involved with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and has worked with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). Not an ‘anti-vaxxer’ in any sense of the term.

He offers insight into why it is quite possible that mass vaccine rollouts will actually lead to very disturbing levels of deaths directly related to COVID-19. Far from reducing the numbers and facilitating immunity, he anticipates ‘vaccine assisted immune escape’.

Vanden Bossche warns that mass infection prevention and mass vaccination with Covid-19 vaccines in the midst of the pandemic can only breed highly infectious variants. He offers a truly worrying scenario. Of course, not everyone might agree with his analysis but it is certainly a cause for concern.

There is also the entire issue regarding the necessity, efficacy and safety of the vaccines now being rolled out. The group ‘Doctors for COVID Ethics’ has recently raised serious doubts in all of these areas (its concerns have been published on the UK-based OffGuardian website).

In finishing, there are two questions we should ask.

Can we have confidence in science and evidence-based health and social policy where COVID-19 is concerned? And can we just assume – as governments and the media imply we should – that Anthony Fauci and the pharmaceutical corporations have ordinary people’s interests at heart?

In response to the first question, not much. In response to the second, certain interests have been riding and fuelling a wave of sensationalism and duplicity throughout.

Israel to Invade Gaza — Again?

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.com

Hostile to peace, stability and the rule of law, militantly racist/fantasy democracy Israel is an apartheid police state.

Waging preemptive war on Palestinians without declaring it — again — state terror is its favorite tactic against defenseless civilians.

What’s been going on since mid-April — especially since terror-bombing of Gaza began days earlier — threatens the lives, well-being and rights of millions of long-suffering Palestinians. 

According to the Times of Israel, the IDF will present a Gaza ground invasion plan for the Netanyahu regime to consider on Thursday.

Israeli forces are mobilized along Gaza’s border for invasion if ordered, no go-ahead given so far.

If initiated, it’ll be the fourth Israeli full-scale ground war of aggression on Gaza since December 2008.

Civilian casualties are already mounting in the Strip in defiance of international law.

The Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention) states:

Article 25: “The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.”

Article 26: “The officer in command of an attacking force must, before commencing a bombardment, except in cases of assault, do all in his power to warn the authorities.”

Article 27: “In sieges and bombardments, all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.” 

Fourth Geneva prohibits violence against civilians in times of war. Collective punishment is banned.

According to Article 33, “(n)o protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” 

“Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

In 1938, a unanimously adopted League of Nations resolution — the UN’s precursor — prohibited the “bombardment of cities, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings not in the immediate neighborhood of the operations of land forces.”

The 1945 Nuremberg Principles prohibit “crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” 

Included are “inhumane acts committed against any civilian populations, before or during the war.”  

Indiscriminate killing and “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity” are absolutely prohibited.

In 1968, a UN General Assembly Resolution on Human Rights prohibited launching of attacks against civilian populations. 

Terror-bombing Gaza by Israel — now and earlier — resembles Nazi Germany’s aerial terror against Guernica, Spain in April 1937.

Nazi Wehrmacht warplanes destroyed the city, massacred over 1,600 people, injuring hundreds more.

According to air commander Herman Goring at the time, the attack was an “opportunity to test under fire whether (munitions) had been adequately developed.”

An aftermath eyewitness said “(t)he only things left standing were a church and a sacred tree, the symbol of the Basque people.”

“There hadn’t been a single anti-aircraft gun in the town. It (was) mainly a fire raid.”

“A sight that haunted me for weeks was the charred bodies of several women and children huddled together in what had been the cellar of a house.”

Civilian sites were fair game. Guernica had no military significance. 

It was prelude for how both sides operated viciously throughout WW II on a much larger scale.

In his book titled “The Good War: An Oral History of World War II,” the late Studs Terkel explained the “warped…view of how we look at things today (seeing them) in terms of war,” adding:

This “twisted memory…encourages (people) to be willing, almost eager, to use military force” as a way to solve problems — what Terkel called “lunatic” actions.

Examples are endless pre-during-and-post-WW II.

Gazans are again enduring the barbarity of preemptive Israeli terror-bombing, notably against civilians in harm’s way.

Is an end of it near or does the Netanyahu regime have much more mass slaughter and destruction in mind — for political reasons as a way to try holding onto to power?

For time immemorial, long-suffering Palestinians have been victimized by Israeli viciousness because the world community largely looks the other way — while feigning concern for their lives, welfare and rights.

Silicon Valley Algorithm Manipulation Is The Only Thing Keeping Mainstream Media Alive

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that the plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.

But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the same.

So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?

The answer is algorithm manipulation.

Last month a very informative interview saw the CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.

At the World Economic Forum’s 2021, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative sources”.

“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found when it comes to music or humor or something funny,” Wojcicki said. “But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we really need to take a different approach.”

Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a category labeled “borderline content” which it algorithmically de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are interested in that topic:

“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera. And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in terms of handling all these different content types.”

Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has been grouped in the “borderline” category because his views and new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a thousand.

“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,” Kulinski says. “People are coming here to escape that and you’re gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and Fox News.”

It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the oligarchic empire to the CEO of a neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In 2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims, reporting that “Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.” In 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only censors right wing content.

Google, for the record, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA. It pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has been a military-intelligence contractor from the beginning.

Then you’ve got Facebook, where a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if its “fact checkers” like The Atlantic Council deem a page or domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide. Meanwhile left and antiwar voices, including myself, have been complaining for years that Twitter artificially throttles their follower count.

If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley megacorporations, the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which manufacture consent for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.