Category Archives: Law

On the Criminal Referral of Comey, Clinton et al: Will the Constitution Hold and the Media Continue to Suppress the Story?

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Ray McGovern reports on a major development in the Russia-gate story that has been ignored by corporate media: a criminal referral to the DOJ against Hillary Clinton, James Comey and others, exposing yet again how established media suppresses news it doesn’t like–about as egregious an example of unethical journalism as there is. 

By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

Wednesday’s criminal referral by 11 House Republicans of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as several former and serving top FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials is a giant step toward a Constitutional crisis.

Named in the referral to the DOJ for possible violations of federal law are: Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey; former Attorney General Loretta Lynch; former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe; FBI Agent Peter Strzok; FBI Counsel Lisa Page; and those DOJ and FBI personnel “connected to” work on the “Steele Dossier,” including former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente.

With no attention from corporate media, the referral was sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah John Huber.  Sessions appointed Huber months ago to assist DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz.  By most accounts, Horowitz is doing a thoroughly professional job.  As IG, however, Horowitz lacks the authority to prosecute; he needs a U.S. Attorney for that.  And this has to be disturbing to the alleged perps.

This is no law-school case-study exercise, no arcane disputation over the fine points of this or that law. Rather, as we say in the inner-city, “It has now hit the fan.”  Criminal referrals can lead to serious jail time.  Granted, the upper-crust luminaries criminally “referred” enjoy very powerful support.  And that will come especially from the mainstream media, which will find it hard to retool and switch from Russia-gate to the much more delicate and much less welcome “FBI-gate.”

As of this writing, a full day has gone by since the letter/referral was reported, with total silence so far from The New York Times and The Washington Post and other big media as they grapple with how to spin this major development. News of the criminal referral also slipped by Amy Goodman’s non-mainstream DemocracyNow!, as well as many alternative websites.

The 11 House members chose to include the following egalitarian observation in the first paragraph of the letter conveying the criminal referral: “Because we believe that those in positions of high authority should be treated the same as every other American, we want to be sure that the potential violations of law outlined below are vetted appropriately.” If this uncommon attitude is allowed to prevail at DOJ, it would, in effect, revoke the de facto “David Petraeus exemption” for the be-riboned, be-medaled, and well-heeled.

Stonewalling

Meanwhile, the patience of the chairmen of House committees investigating abuses at DOJ and the FBI is wearing thin at the slow-rolling they are encountering in response to requests for key documents from the FBI.  This in-your-face intransigence is all the more odd, since several committee members have already had access to the documents in question, and are hardly likely to forget the content of those they know about.  (Moreover, there seems to be a good chance that a patriotic whistleblower or two will tip them off to key documents being withheld.)

The DOJ IG, whose purview includes the FBI, has been cooperative in responding to committee requests for information, but those requests can hardly include documents of which the committees are unaware.

Putting aside his partisan motivations, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) was unusually blunt two months ago in warning of legal consequences for officials who misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and his associates. Nunes’s words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of those with lots to hide: “If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial,” he said.”The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created.”

Whether the House will succeed in overcoming the resistance of those criminally referred and their many accomplices and will prove able to exercise its Constitutional prerogative of oversight is, of course, another matter — a matter that matters.

And Nothing Matters More Than the Media

The media will be key to whether this Constitutional issue is resolved.  Largely because of Trump’s own well earned reputation for lying, most Americans are susceptible to slanted headlines like this recent one — “Trump escalates attacks on FBI …” — from an article in The Washington Post, commiserating with the treatment accorded fired-before-retired prevaricator McCabe and the FBI he (dis)served.

Nor is the Post above issuing transparently clever warnings — like this one in a lead article on March 17: “Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. ‘This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI’s going to win,’ said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. ‘You can’t fight the FBI. They’re going to torch him.’” [sic]

Mind-Boggling Criminal Activity

What motivated the characters now criminally “referred” is clear enough from a wide variety of sources, including the text messages exchange between Strzok and Page.  Many, however, have been unable to understand how these law enforcement officials thought they could get away with taking such major liberties with the law.

None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, “opposition research,” or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison.  The activities were hardly considered high-risk, because candidate Clinton was sure to win.

But she lost.

Comey himself gives this away in the embarrassingly puerile book he has been hawking, “A Higher Loyalty” — which amounts to a pre-emptive move motivated mostly by loyalty-to-self, in order to obtain a Stay-Out-of-Jail card.  Hat tip to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone for a key observation, in his recent article, “James Comey, the Would-Be J. Edgar Hoover,” about what Taibbi deems the book’s most damning passage, where Comey discusses his decision to make public the re-opening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Comey admits, “It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the re-started investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the polls.”

The key point is not Comey’s tortured reasoning, but rather that Clinton was “sure to be the next president.”  This would, of course, confer automatic immunity on those now criminally referred to the Department of Justice.  Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men — even very tall men.  One wag claimed that the “Higher” in “A Higher Loyalty” refers simply to the very tall body that houses an outsized ego.

I think it can be said that readers of Consortiumnews.com may be unusually well equipped to understand the anatomy of FBI-gate as well as Russia-gate.  Listed below chronologically are several links that might be viewed as a kind of “whiteboard” to refresh memories.  You may wish to refer them to any friends who may still be confused.

2017

Russia-gate’s Mythical ‘Heroes’ June 6, 2017

The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate Oct. 29, 2017

The Foundering Russia-gate ‘Scandal’ Dec. 13, 2017 

What Did Hillary Clinton Know? Dec. 25, 2017

2018

The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate Jan. 11, 2018

Will Congress Face Down the Deep State? Jan. 30, 2018

Nunes Memo Reports Crimes at Top of FBI and DOJ Feb. 2, 2018

‘This is Nuts’: Liberals Launch ‘Largest Mobilization in History’ in Defense of Russiagate Probe Feb. 9, 2018

Nunes: FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial Feb. 19, 2018

‘Progressive’ Journalists Jump the Shark on Russia-gate March 7, 2018

Intel Committee Rejects Basic Underpinning of Russiagate March 14, 2018

McCabe: A War on (or in) the FBI? March 18, 2018

Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared March 19, 2018

 

Freedom Rider: Russiagate and the surveillance duopoly

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Intrepid Report

Republican and Democratic Party dueling over Russiagate provides us with a teachable moment. It should teach us to disrespect and discredit the law enforcement system as it exists in this country. We must oppose the surveillance state altogether and we should not be tricked by duopoly theatrics into thinking that either of the evil twins are acting in our interests.

Local cops plant drugs and weapons in order to arrest and convict anyone they want. They kill an average of three people every single day. Cash bail keeps the poor in jail not because they are necessarily dangerous, but because they are poor. Those are just some facts in the litany of oppression used by law enforcement against mostly poor, black people. But there is another order of wrong doing that engulfs the whole world.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) created a system which determines when the federal government may spy on anyone suspected of acting on behalf of a foreign agent. FISA set up a rubber stamp kangaroo court with only a handful of warrants being rejected in the forty year history of this law.

FISA authority was used to keep Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page under surveillance in 2016. Republicans claim that the warrant was granted as a result of the Christopher Steele opposition research dossier that was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. No one knows if this assertion is true, but the fight over declassifying the memo predictably turned into political theater. Republicans said the memo would end the suspicion of Trump collusion with the Russian government and Democrats asserted that the system would fall apart if the memo was ever declassified and released.

If Republicans are correct the FISA warrant was problematic and the case for collusion is tainted. Democrats now make the case for declassifying their own memo and continuing the foolish spectacle of irrelevance. Despite the drama, both assertions are beside the point. The larger and more important issue is that the American justice system is decidedly unjust.

Prosecutors are among the worst criminals in this country. From small towns to federal courthouses they wield power that few can circumvent. Rich people need not worry because they exist in a bubble with laws of their own making. Public officials bow down to them and happily violate statutes in order to keep them happy. It is all rotten and the case for and against Trump is an opportunity to discuss how few rights we have and how the system is rigged against all but the apex predators at the top of the food chain.

Instead of making the case for tearing up this monstrosity, otherwise intelligent people are pointing fingers and choosing one disreputable side over the other. Every Republican voted to extend the FISA program. They were joined by Democrats like Congressman Adam Schiff, who leads the case for collusion, and who has made a name for himself by stoking the Russiagate fire. Schiff cried the loudest against releasing the Republican memo and claimed that declassification would pose a threat to the nation. When he had the chance to do something for the judicial system he joined with the people he allegedly opposes and supported continuing the FISA travesty. Our individual rights are obviously of little concern to Schiff. Then again he is a former prosecutor so little can be expected of him in this regard.

Russiagate is a sinkhole of political confusion and that is precisely why it was created. It began with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a lackluster effort meant to continue the neo-liberal agenda, make war, and do little else. She had nothing to offer voters and hung her hat on making Trump look like “Putin’s puppet.” Had she done a minimal effort there would have been no need for pay offs to British spies or whipped up Russophobia. The entire Democratic Party was complicit in the debacle and they welcomed a tale of collusion in order to deflect the blame they so richly deserved.

The sorry spectacle continues as Republicans are equally determined to keep Trump in office and make their dreams of kleptocracy and diminished governmental authority a reality. Democrats are looking to explain away a string of electoral failures and maintain the illusion of being the inclusive party when they are merely shadows of the hard right Republicans.

Let all the memos be released. There should be no sanctity bestowed upon government secrets. They are a ruse meant to cover up for worldwide gangsterism. Defending the FBI, CIA, NSA or any of the other “intelligence community” agencies is to be a dupe of the highest order. Police in Baltimore and other cities may plant drugs and weapons on suspects, but the mega-killers lie about weapons in entire nations and cause death and suffering on a mass scale.

Sooner or later Russiagate will play out. Whatever the result, this country will still be the one that locks up more of its people than any other. It will still be a threat to world peace. When the wheels of injustice grind on, only fools will have chosen between the two corrupt parties.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Gaius Publius: Defining Neoliberalism

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By Yves Smith

Source: Naked Capitalism

For years I’ve been using the term “neoliberalism” (or sometimes neo-liberalism*) and I’m always uncomfortable, since it sounds so academic. So I usually add one-phrase definitions and move on. For example, this from a recent piece on Puerto Rico:

If neoliberalism is the belief that the proper role of government is to enrich the rich — in Democratic circles they call it “wealth creation” to hide the recipients; Republicans are much more blatant — then the “shock doctrine” is its action plan.

That’s sounds pretty blunt, but it’s a true statement, even among academics. See this great interview (start at about 6:15) with Professor Philip Miroski of the University of Notre Dame on how modern neoliberals have come to see the role of government in society. It’s weedy but excellent.

I want to offer our readers a better description of neoliberalism though, yet not get into too many weeds. So consider these excerpts from a longer Guardian essay by the British writer George Monbiot. (My thanks to Naked Capitalism commenter nonclassical for the link and the idea for this piece.)

Neoliberalism — The Invisible Water the West Is Swimming In

We’ll start with Monbiot’s brief intro, just to set the scope of the problem:

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Ask people to define “neoliberalism,” even if they’ve heard of it, and almost no one can. Yet the comparison of our governing ideology to that of the Soviet Union’s is a good one — like “communism,” or the Soviet Union’s version of it, neoliberalism defines and controls almost everything our government does, no matter which party is in office.

The Birth of Neoliberalism

What is neoliberalism and where did it come from? Monbiot writes:

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

Neoliberalism is an explicit reaction to Franklin Roosevelt and the welfare state, which by a quirk of history was called “liberalism” at the time, even though, in the nineteenth century, “liberalism” had roughly the same meaning that “neoliberalism” has today. In other words, “FDR liberalism” is in many ways the opposite of classical “liberalism,” which meant “liberty (freedom) from government,” and a quirk of history has confused these terms.

Back to Monbiot and Hayek:

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international” [a term modeled on “the Communist International]: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Note the mention of Milton Friedman above. Neoliberalism is a bipartisan ideology, not just a Clintonist-Obamist one.

Democrats, Republicans and Neoliberalism

As Monbiot explains, for a while neoliberalism “lost its name” and was more or less a fringe ideology in a world still dominated by the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian economics. When neoliberalism later came back strong in the Republican Party, it wasn’t called “neoliberalism” but “Milton Friedman free market conservativism,” or something similar.

Only when Bill Clinton and his Democratic Party allies adopted it in the 1980s did the term “neoliberal” re-emerge in public discourse.

[I]n the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. [emphasis added]

Note the role of Jimmy Carter and start of deregulation in the late 1970s. For that reason, many consider Jimmy Carter to be the “proto-neoliberal,” both for the nation and the Democratic Party.

Neoliberalism — “Just Deserts” for Predators and Prey

What makes “neoliberalism” or “free market conservatism” such a radical — and destructive — ideology? It reduces all human activity to economic competition. It creates and glorifies, in other words, a world of predators and prey, a world like the one we live in as today:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

In a world where competition is right and good, a world in which the “market” is the defining metaphor for human activity, all social ties are broken, the individual is an atom left to survive as an individual only, the strongest relentlessly consume the weakest — and that’s as it should be. (It’s easy to imagine how the apex predators of our social order would be attracted to this, and insist on it with force.

Thus the bipartisan world we live in today. Under a neoliberal regime, everyone gets what they deserve. Big fish deserve their meal. Little fish deserve their death. And government sets the table for the feast.

The Role of Government in a Neoliberal World

Since for neoliberals, the “market” is the source of all that is good in human interaction, non-interference in “the market” is rule one for government.

Over time that has changed, however, as winners have grown more successful and their control of government more absolute. The proper role of government in today’s neoliberal regime is not merely to allow the market to operate for the benefit of wealth-holders; it’s to make sure the market operates for the benefit of wealth-holders.

In other words, the role of government is to intervene in the market on behalf of wealth-holders, or, as I put it more colloquially, to proactively enrich the rich. The interview with Professor Mirowski, as I noted above, makes that same point, but from an academic standpoint.

From this it should be also clear that until we free ourselves of rule by neoliberals and the pain and misery they create, we’ll always be victims to the predatory giants — the very very wealthy and the corporations they use as power-extenders — those, in other words, who want merely to own everything else in the world.

This means we need to free ourselves from neoliberals in both parties, not just the ones in current seats of power. But that idea seems to have been excised from most discussions these days. Fair warning though. If the Age of Trump ends with the Restoration of Mainstream Democrats, we’ll have won almost nothing at all.

____________

* I sometimes spell “neo-liberalism” with the hyphen to suggest the following connection: Neo-liberalism is “new liberalism,” and has the same relationship to FDR liberalism as New Labour has to Labour — the two are exactly opposite.

Saturday Matinee: Kim Dotcom – Caught in the Web

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The larger-than-life story of Kim Dotcom, the “most wanted man online”, is extraordinary enough, but the battle between Dotcom and the US Government and entertainment industry, being fought in New Zealand, is one that goes to the heart of ownership, privacy and piracy in the digital age. Three years in the making, this independent film chronicles a spectacular moment in global online history, dubbed the ‘largest copyright case’ ever and the truth about what happened.

Watch the full film here.

Censorship in the Digital Age

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By Jason Hirthler

Source: CounterPunch

The grand experiment with western democracy, badly listing thanks to broadsides from profiteering oligarchs, may finally run ashore on the rocks of thought crime. In the uneven Steven Spielberg project Minority Report, starring excitable scientologist Tom Cruise, Cruise plays a futuristic policeman who investigates pre-crimes and stops them before they happen. The police owe their ability to see the criminal plots developing to characters called pre-cognitives, or pre-cogs, kind of autistic prophets who see the future and lie sleeping in sterile pools of water inside the police department. Of course, it turns out that precogs can pre-visualize different futures, a hastily hidden flaw that threatens to jeopardize the profits of the pre-crime project. Here is the crux of the story: thought control is driven by a profit motive at bottom. As it turns out, just like real life.

Now, the British government has decided to prosecute pre-crime but has done away with the clunky plot device of the pre-cogs, opting rather to rely on a hazy sense of higher probability to justify surveilling, nabbing, convicting, and imprisoning British citizens. The crime? Looking at radical content on the Internet. What is considered radical will naturally be defined by the state police who will doubtless be personally incentivized by pre-crime quotas, and institutionally shaped to criminalize trains of thought that threaten to destabilize a criminal status quo. You know, the unregulated monopoly capitalist regime that cuts wages, costs, and all other forms of overhead with psychopathic glee. Even a Grenfell Towers disaster is regarded more as a question of how to remove the story from public consciousness than rectify its wrongs.

The Triple Evils

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously, or infamously, depending on whether you are a penthouse mandarin or garden-variety prole, linked the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. These evils are as yet unaddressed in our society, as we are daily shown on the media mouthpieces of imperial capitalism. Wars must be waged. Victims of social injustice must be incarcerated. Society itself must be made poor to ensure higher profits.

Yet there is another set of evils that are primarily used to mask the original trifecta outlined by King. In fact, the connection between propaganda, surveillance, and censorship is clear and inseparable. Take as your initial premise that imperial capitalists want to control the world. Not an unjustified claim. As an imperial capitalist, you are part of a privileged minority whose objective is to further exploit the disenfranchised whose only recourse is the resources you are pillaging. War, be it with bombs or sanctions or special forces or proxies, is immensely profitable to the capitalists. Arms makers make money. Chemical companies make money. Energy companies make money. Media companies make money. Presidents not only make money, they also make history. But the workers, the poor, and the downtrodden pay the price. That’s why they won’t be happy to hear of your plans. Therefore, they must be lied to, lied to so convincingly and comprehensively that they accept, without a second thought, the plans you have laid out before them.

This convincing requires three decisive actions: propaganda, surveillance, and censorship. The first is the official lie you craft to convince them to believe you. The second is the dragnet of digital observation by which you assess whether or not they do believe you. The third is the coercive methods by which you punish those that don’t believe you (justified by the imperial tale you first wove).

The official interpretation of reality is already in place: western civilization is beset on all sides by maniacs that want to take away our freedoms. The surveillance is already in place through programs like the Five Eyes alliance and ECHELON, PRISM, Boundless Informant, FISA, Stellar Wind, and many others. What remains is to tighten the noose of censorship around the neck of our open western societies.

Idiots Abroad

To that end, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd recently announced that citizens that view too much extremist material online could face up to 15 years in jail. Rudd related,

“I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law.”

This flaxen cipher of totalitarian control opened by tabulating some 67,000 tweets by ISIS, along with 44,000 links to ISIS propaganda, had been generated in the last year. Already, Section 58 of the Terrorist Act 2000 criminalized the possession of information that might be useful to a terrorist. But this is not enough for 10 Downing Street. Rudd is taking that law of possession and expanding it into a law of perception. It is now enough to simply watch extremist content. You needn’t download it, distribute it, or otherwise act on it. You need only see it more than once. At that point, by Rudd’s surely flawlessly calculated probabilities, you have become an existential threat to the state, or rather, to national security. You are more likely to commit acts of terror than those who have not seen the extremist content. Pre-crime without the pre-cogs.

But Rudd’s was another step in a long line of encroachments peddled by fascist-minded western governments. Theresa May, the reviled Thatcherite epigone, wants to play a paternal role in preventing citizens from even having the chance to view extremist content. The Tory manifesto tells us, “Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet. We disagree.” Britain plans, quite proudly it seems, to become the “global leader” in the regulation of the Internet. Just before these announcements were made, Britain had passed the Investigatory Powers Act, which lets the government sweep up user browsing histories. So the surveillance data authorities would use to implement Rudd’s plan is already there. Want to read that eloquent jeremiad against the Tories? Sorry, that was just labeled hate speech. Want to visit your favorite leftist forum? Apologies, mate, but that was deemed a “safe space” for extremist speech and shut down. Want to watch some attractive young people copulate? No problem. Just submit a request to your local minister outlining your precise reasons for wanting access to such nominally proscribed content. Otherwise, forget it.

The Germans aren’t far behind. The so-called Network Enforcement Act is said to create a framework for managing Internet activity, particularly in social media. The act is part of the country’s fake fight against fake news and hate speech, or rather its quite real fight against progressive, leftist, or communist thought and expression. This law demands, on pain of a fifty million euro penalty, that companies with two million or more web visitors must, on receipt of complaint, remove “unlawful content” from their sites. Facebook has opened a new data center in Germany to deal with removal requests, sure to be flooding in from the Bundestag. As the World Socialist Web Sitemakes clear, if your fake news promotes war (Iraq 2003), mischaracterizes coup d’états (Ukraine 2014), or spreads anti-immigrant hysteria (Cologne 2015), then you’ve got nothing to fear. Of course, it falls to the government itself to decide what is and what isn’t extremist content, no doubt a comforting thought for myriad Der Spiegel loyalists. And, of course, the erstwhile European Commission, destroyer of Greece and perpetrator of other ills, has published guidelines to help member states remove “illegal” content. Even the Russians have joined in, promoting legislation designed to curtail digital freedoms.

Stateside Schlemiels

None of this would be news to Barack Obama, whose own legacy of crumpled writs of habeas corpus, worthless privacy platitudes, and high-altitude wetwork, sits like a canker on the body politic. On his way out the door, through the turnstile of public weal into private gain, he provided the deep state with millions of dollars when he added the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which consecrates black budgets, cost overruns, price gouging, and all other manner of insecurity practiced by the Pentagon and its parasitic defense contractor community. The CDPA, if that’s how it will eventually be known, will effectively pay people to generate officially sanctioned narratives. The U.S. government is fighting fact by calling it propaganda and then producing its own propaganda and calling it fact.

Thanks in part to pressure from Congressional Senate Intelligence Committee that, and the indefatigable efforts of Democrats Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, major brands have been hopping on the clanging tumbrel of Russiagate, as it wheels unsteadily through the digital space, collecting the corpses of freethinkers. Facebook is now blocking “fake news” from its ads. YouTube has begun to fetter content producers with a more restrictive ad network and murky review policies. Google has tweaked its algorithm to keep “fake news” from surfacing high in Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPS. What precisely constitutes fake news is evidently up to the Zuckerbergs and Schmidts of the world. For Google, it has decidedly meant suppressing progressive and left-wing content, as plummeting traffic numbers have indicated. Of course, it won’t mean suppressing the fake news produced by the CIA or Mi5 or the standard state-fluffing smorgasbord of lies, deceits and hit jobs offered up by the so-called mainstream media.

The always sharp Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report writes that the FBI has created a fresh construct to deal with African-American unrest, called, “Black Identity Extremism,” already truncated into another mind-murdering acronym, BIE. (As though an acronym adds just the note of tenability required to pass off a fatuity on a mal-educated populace.) Foreign Policy, in an otherwise surprisingly liberal-minded story, suggests the construct risks reviving the racism the agency has worked so hard to overcome. Ford drily notes the overlooked matter of J. Edgar Hoover targeting blacks since the 1920s, not to mention COINTELPRO and attacks on the Black Panthers. Regardless, in the eyes of the FBI, blacks angry about police abuses, persistent economic inequalities, and the New Jim Crow, are little more than “identity extremists,” a danger to national security, notably the security of the white plutocracy which it serves.

(Fore) Closing Thoughts

Remember that much of this apparatus of thought control has been applied beneath the banner of the fake Russia hacking story. That story, created by the Clinton camp to distract from the DNC email revelations provided by WikiLeaks, at first blamed Russia for hacking into “our democracy”, then suggested Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to swing the election, and then emphasized that Russia had launched an “influence campaign” designed to swing the election, with the focus subtly shifting from hacking to collusion to influence. At each turn, the evidence proves paltry, the claims absurd, and the virtue signaling nauseating. The bar is being progressively lowered until it meets a threshold of credibility by which the Senate Intel Committee can prosecute Donald Trump or justify some sort of punitive measures against Russia.

The story is so transparently false, from the technical detail to the geopolitical motive, that it is only sustained by the permanent—or deep state—elements of the foreign policy community that need a means by which to control and direct the Trump administration. Russia collusion served as an ideal pretext to force Trump away from campaign-trail odes to conciliation and toward a continuation of the hostile foreign policies glibly enabled and advanced by Barack Obama. The comedy of it all is that Facebook found ‘incriminating’ ads that amounted to less than one percent of the Facebook total ad buys. Congress would like to ban RT, which has ratings that are 0.3 percent of Judge Judy’s. And the infamous hack has been shown to be a leak. What are we left with? A grandiose deceit based on a need to sustain a brutal ideology of oppression, austerity, and war.

But this is how the imperialists do it. They organize globally to oppress locally. That’s why they’ve been rightly rebranded as ‘the globalists’. The workers always trail behind, left to cope with recently discovered alliances of institutional powers collaborating to fence in the prospects for economic equality, social justice, and the fair distribution of a nation’s wealth. We find ourselves beneath the a pregnant cloud of metastasizing repression, conceived and constructed beneath our own gaze. In his recent novel Purity, one of author Jonathan Franzen’s characters, a famous East German exile and whistleblower extraordinaire (a more charismatic Assange), finds himself a global celebrity, the subject of countless interviews wherein,

“…he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of.”

Whether it is too late for a world of working class people and the ubiquitous poor to opt out of the globalized imperium dreamed up by our post-war planners, is hard to say. But if you think there’s still time, be extremely careful, since the pre-crime police are nearly omnipresent, and they might overhear you quoting Marx or see you scrawling ideas about redistribution on the walls of some abandoned underpass. Just imagine some future advertisement for the pre-crime program, a glistening LCD ad floating between skyscrapers, a smiling family at play, a nation secure, and an omniscient narrator softly reminding you, “Don’t forget—it’s the thought that counts.”

The Informant Cometh

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

When you consider all the shadowy creatures scuttling around the backstage interstices of the Deep State, it’s a little wondrous that someone like this hasn’t stepped into the light before. Apparently now, a person whose name will soon be plastered across the pixel-verse, has been given clearance by the Justice Department to come forth and sing to the various house and senate committees about a fishy deal involving Russia and the Clinton dynasty.

The broad outlines of Uranium-Gate are already loaded like a platter of nachos grandes with piquant tidbits of suspicious detail. The informant worked for a DC Swamp lobbying firm that was hired by Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian government-owned company Rosatom, to grease the skids for a deal to buy a Canadian company, Uranium One, which had substantial mining operations in the USA. According to The Hill website, the deal put about 20 percent of US uranium into the hands of the Russian company.

The informant recognized evidence of criminal behavior in the dealings he witnessed and voluntarily went to the FBI with it. The Hill report goes on:

     His work helped the Justice Department secure convictions against Russia’s top commercial nuclear executive in the United States, a Russian financier in New Jersey, and the head of a U.S. uranium trucking company in what prosecutors said was a long-running racketeering scheme involving bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering.

Those charges, based on evidence gathered in 2009, were not taken to court until 2014. And that was supposed to be the end of it.

Now, it also happens that the deal for Tenex to buy Uranium One had to be approved by nine federal agencies and signed off on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which she did shortly after her husband Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow sponsored by a Russian bank. The Clinton Foundation also received millions of dollars in “charitable” donations from parties with an interest in the Tenex / Uranium One deal. It happened, too, that the CEO of Uranium One at the time of the Tenex sale, Frank Guistra, was one of eleven board members of the Clinton Foundation.

The informant remained undercover for the FBI for five years. None of the Clinton involvement was included in the previously mentioned federal bribery and racketeering prosecutions. Meanwhile, the informant had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the Obama Justice Department, only just lifted last week.

As of this morning, the story is absent from The New York Times, formerly the nation’s newspaper of record. The FBI’s credibility is at stake in this case. Robert Mueller, who was Director of the agency during the Tenex /Uranium One deal, with all its Clintonian-Russian undertones is in the peculiar position now as special prosecutor for the Russian election “meddling” alleged to involve President Trump. Whatever that investigation has turned up is not known publicly yet, but the massive leaking from government employees that turned the story into roughly 80 percent of mainstream legacy news coverage the past year, has ceased — either because Mueller has imposed Draconian restraints on his own staff, or because there is nothing there.

The FBI has a lot to answer for in overlooking the Clinton connection to the Uranium One deal. The informant, soon to be attached to a name and a face, is coming in from the cold, to the warm, wainscoted chambers of the house and senate committees. I wonder if Mr. Trump, or his lawyers, will find grounds to attempt to dismiss Special Prosecutor Mueller, given what looks like Mueller’s compromised position vis-à-vis Trump’s election opponent, HRC. It’s hard to not see this thing going a long way — at the same time that financial markets and geopolitical matters are heading south. Keep your hats on.

Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights

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By Denis Rancourt

Source: Dissident Voice

SUMMARY: Societies of social animals, including humans, are dominance hierarchies. Civil rights are codified in law to protect mechanisms of essential counter measures against excessive exploitation of the hierarchy by elite classes, which destabilizes the entire society. Systemic pathology arises when elite classes can change the regulatory codes themselves, including civil rights protections, with impunity. Laws that quash civil rights are pathological in that they impede the system-repair mechanisms that are: free expression, free association, class opposition, and negotiated structural adjustments (otherwise known as democracy). Present anti-speech laws are extreme examples of pathological laws, the application of which is a measure of the degree of totalitarianism in the society. The history of the USA of recent decades is an eminent illustration of the concepts.

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The USA meltdown has been decades in the making and is the collateral result of an elite predation that has degraded structural elements needed for a healthy and resilient nation.

The aftermath is “too much regulation at the bottom, not enough at the top”: a pathological legislative and institutional structure in which elite interests have too much freedom to challenge and exploit democratic nation states, whereas middle, working and professional class actors, including small and medium-size private business, are economically, ideologically and politically constrained and suppressed to an excessive degree.

It has been a class war in which the predatory classes have barricaded themselves while inflicting humiliating defeat and loss of power, purpose and identity on the lower-stratum classes, which are incited to fight among themselves within the confines of new rules and the guarded illusion that these rules are an actuation of natural order.

In this way, personal and community motivation and inventiveness are sapped. The very motor of a vibrant modern society is jammed and the entire system becomes a system of debt-ransom extraction and management of globalized exploitation for the benefit of a secluded elite.

In this emergent system of excessive class exploitation, civil rights that protect critics and organizers become a threat against the exploiters rather than needed protections of personal and community emancipation that sustains economic production and innovation.

Allow me to explain, starting from fundamental considerations.

Arguably, the most fundamental statement that a social scientist can make is that humans interact by both violent and non-violent means, both individually and as groups, to establish and maintain societal dominance hierarchies. Call it by any name (tribalism, capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism…) humans always establish, maintain and grow dominance hierarchies, using whatever technology of the day.

The political end-point concept of “anarchy” is the theoretical absence of dominance hierarchy, which has never been ideally achieved and which is evidently unstable against growth of and replacement by dominance hierarchy. The reality of social animals is dominance hierarchy, which spontaneously adapts itself to environmental conditions and to the population size, while integrating accumulated knowledge and technological advances.

Within a dominance hierarchy (within a society), the essential counter against destabilizing excesses of dominance is push-back from individuals and groups — engendered by the individual desire for life, freedom and local influence — which acts in every stratum of the hierarchy.

In historically recent human societies, essential push-back is formalized with written laws that protect the individual against dominance encroachments that would be so severe that they would threaten hierarchical stability by increasing the potential for rebellion. These laws were at times deemed to be God-given and are now referred to as “civil rights”. They include both: (1) protections of the individual and of the nuclear and extended family against arbitrary attacks by the state or by rogue elements, and (2) protections for the individual and groups to seek redress and express grievances.

All laws are evolving codes to organise, stabilize and enforce an ever changing (often growing and complexifying) dominance hierarchy. “Good” laws find a “balance” between the graded benefits of hierarchy and the stratified oppressions against individuals and groups, a balance which stabilizes the whole system against deterioration (“injustice”), complete overhaul (“revolution”), or extinction (“downfall”).

Predictably, the codes themselves are often “hacked” by upper-strata groups that are overly ambitious in seeking additional relative advantages. The hacking upper-strata groups will recklessly change the laws for their own advantage in ways that materially threaten overall stability. This produces “pathological” laws that destabilize the overall hierarchy by driving society towards an intolerable degree of totalitarianism.

A now recognized on-going example is the decades-long elite attack, by taxation and global-finance reforms, against the USA middle class, which has prematurely destabilized the USA-centered global empire and its domestic internal society. The blowback from and defences against the USA’s practice of aggressive global dominance has also contributed, where the latter practice is similarly enabled by hacked foreign-policy and global governance laws.

When law-makers themselves can be bought by selfish elites self-segregated from the broad or domestic society, it is a recipe for disaster. In the USA and Canada law-enactment errors are multiplying, and there are no substantial Senatorial safeguards. Law-makers are formed or trained into compliance by career-enabling elites, rather than informed, principled and concerned about public service. Political parties are systematically controlled and constrained by the highest hierarchical echelons, which control the economy and the media.

When the backbone structure of the dominance hierarchy is thus degraded, as with the present crisis of the middle class, there is an impulse for both societal groups and lawmakers to become frantic and for the barricaded elite to exploit and ride out the storm rather than participate in repair. Every new manifestation of rebellion is interpreted as a fire to be extinguished rather than as necessary pushback needing to be allowed to play out. Decades of built-up fuel in the underbrush and extended drought are conditions for a devastating inferno but our “representatives” are successfully goaded into superficially addressing every new spark and violently suppressing every outbreak rather than dealing with the fundamentals.

Over decades, a complete restructuring of the relation between the state and the economy has been engineered, which, in its oppressive excesses, has led to the present crisis. The assault was accompanied by massive propaganda campaigns regarding the security benefits of government control and the welfare benefits of corporate rule. For example, predatory corporate take-over “investment” in public-service infrastructure is now presented as a good thing that should be actively sought using public funds.

The restructuring included: rolling back taxation of the wealthy while maintaining taxation of the middle and working classes, reducing or eliminating corporate taxation, increasing capital mobility, allowing investment flight, allowing infiltration of government-oversight and regulatory agencies (especially in the finance sector), gutting corporate regulatory agencies while transferring to self-regulatory models, unprecedented ideological control of professional workers in the public service (teachers, police, scientists, public servants, judges…), unrestrained lobby and think-tank influence, and unprecedented limitations (regulatory burdens) imposed on small and medium-size private businesses.

Top-level elite desires and machinations have become embedded into the very institutional structure of the economy and of the “deep state” more than ever previously. This is the result of decadal erosion of democracy and continuous increase of integration of government itself into the hierarchical power structure. The global-scale project is enabled by owned military, surveillance, communication, transportation and resource-extraction technologies; and surveillance and projection-of-power capabilities are unprecedented in history.

The resulting decadal overhaul of Western nations — in the march towards USA-centered globalism and the neutralization of Western middle and professional classes — has built-in deleterious structural features, as follows.

Mega corporations and financiers and their deep-state partners have not only militarily and covertly occupied the exploitable globe, they have also installed predation against the Western middle classes and Western public infrastructures. They have gutted mass education and maintained only elite schools for their managers and engineers. And they have gutted the Western middle and professional class mind and ethos and replaced these with canned concepts devoid of emancipating political thrust. More importantly, the educational and societal-maintenance institutions themselves have been transformed by removing professional independence and responsibility and replacing them with ideological obedience and observance of dictated think-tank-produced mantras.

The consequential suicidal pathology of the system’s operational code is twofold.

First, the new freedom and power of the USA-centered mega entities are used to eviscerate the very nation state whose structure evolved to optimally stabilize the nation-based dominance hierarchy. Even the world structures of international relations are hijacked and eviscerated to a higher degree.

Second, the middle and professional classes palpably lose many of the benefits accrued from accepting hierarchical domination, including loss of influence, and consequently suffer a crisis of identity, meaning and outlook… driven by real economic threat (loss or degradation of job and home).

Macro-economic data reveal the decadal transformation since 1980 but do not explain its source or describe its cultural, psychological and class impact. The data are generally cast as the result of an accident that can be fixed by more of the same from one of the two front parties.1

In the real circumstances of the worsening middle-class crisis, it is natural that grievances are aired and solutions are sought to recover lost status. But at the same time, advocacy and the potential for an organized response are threats to the top-layer elites and embedded deep-state managers who have intentionally driven the system towards greater hierarchical control and increased upper-stratum gain.

That is why the system reacts by removing civil rights and sabotaging any technology or application venture that would enable communication and free association.

Whereas expression and grass-roots political response would repair the edifice, the needed remedy is aggressively quashed by those at the top who judge that the crisis is not one that can truly threaten them, is one that will dissipate with time or can be fixed synthetically, and that the distributed spontaneous solution is unacceptably risky in its potential to expose them.

There results the paradox that the system delays self-repair, builds up the pressure for repair, and creates worsening societal conditions rather than allow the proven natural remedy: free expression, free association, class opposition (based on the actual grievances rather than surrogates), and negotiated structural adjustments.

The pathology of the system in rejecting self-repair can be understood as follows.

Dominance hierarchies are both stable and evolutionarily advantageous only if effective balancing forces against creeping or runaway totalitarianism are admitted. A dominance hierarchy is doomed when its highest codes allow an elite class to have disproportionate power, including the power to modify the highest codes without restraint. In particular, in a society in which the state — controlled by an elite class — effectively has a technological monopoly on lethal force, the balancing mechanism of free expression, free association, and real influence — otherwise known as “democracy” — must be allowed.

It follows that any code that prevents free expression and free association is itself pathological. If all expression and all association are allowed, then the optimal conditions for self-repair are realized and a stable and resilient hierarchical structure will result. Since it is grounded in free expression and free association, then it will be optimally just. Justice is a thus self-organized and maintained hierarchy, not elite-given “equity” within a totalitarian matrix.

For free expression and free association to be meaningful many necessary conditions are implied: access to information, actual institutional transparency, access to the travel and communication infrastructures, absence of imposed barriers to association, absence of controls over personal choices, real opportunity for decent economic conditions that allow significant democratic participation, and the very novel concept of uniform application of just laws… Any rule that in-effect bars a necessary condition is also itself pathological.

I end this essay with a consideration of the special features that make anti-expression laws pathological, in the above sense of preventing self-repair of the societal dominance hierarchy.

The anti-speech laws, whether cast as “hate speech” criminal code provisions, or civil defamation law, or civility “codes of conduct” on campuses, have been manipulatively introduced by the elite because the elite are those most threatened by free speech and free association.

Speech is the means by which individuals use non-violent persuasion to acquire influence in society. It is the means that enables politics. In the USA, where citizens have a beneficial right even to bear arms for any required overthrow of the government2,3, freedom of expression was meant to be absolute, in that the USA constitution does not have a “balancing” clause as is common in other Western jurisdictions.4

Laws that enforce punishment for individual speech allegedly “causing” negative personal reactions in society at large are antithetical to democracy, and are immeasurably harmful to human emancipation and personal development. The above-mentioned examples are such anti-speech laws, notably including defamation law.5 They enforce punishments against individual speech that is alleged to “cause” an emotional or persuasive effect in others, which is deemed an unacceptable effect that must be targeted for elimination by state intervention against the presumed “cause”.

The said “emotional or persuasive effect” alleged to arise from the spoken words, in different laws, includes:

  • being induced to feel “hate” (anger, hostility, animosity) against a group in society
  • being induced to have a negative overall opinion about a specific person
  • being induced to adopt an ideology or political stance deemed impermissible (“hateful”)
  • being induced to commit suicide
  • being induced to participate in actuating a genocide
  • being induced to commit crimes of physical aggression or property damage

The underlying principle of these laws is that the person speaking words carries a punishable liability for what those words might induce in unspecified others, irrespective whether any actual physical crime occurs and irrespective of whether the words determinatively “cause” an actual physical crime. To be clear, under these laws, a judge arbitrarily (without needing evidence beyond the impugned words themselves and their method of delivery) decides whether the words induce deemed undesirable thoughts, opinions and attitudes in unspecified persons at large. Nothing else is required to establish liability or guilt, and by design it is impossible to disprove the charge, nor is an attempt to disprove admitted in court.

No matter how it may be masked with legalese or scholarly rationalization, this is precisely the nature of the anti-speech codes that are: “hate speech” criminal code provisions, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-historical-revisionism laws, anti-obscenity laws, the common law of civil defamation, and campus codes of conduct. One could add any “norms of expressive conduct” law.

For example, in defamation law, the impugned words are presumed to “cause” a low opinion of the plaintiff in the minds of unspecified others at large. In legalese: “general damage to reputation is presumed”. No causation proof is required of the claimant. Intent to harm is irrelevant (malice is presumed). No actual damage (loss of job, etc.) need be established. The words themselves as perceived by the judge are sufficient evidence. The judge must only opine, not on the intended meaning of the words, but on the meaning of the words in the mind of an imaginary listener. Such is civil defamation law, and there is no legal limit on the quantum of damages or the duration of gag orders that may be ordered under penalty of jail.5

These anti-speech laws, of course, are distinguished from laws that address harassment and intimidation of a specific target person (actual victim) or that address chain-of-command orders to commit crimes. They are also distinguished from the tort (law) of injurious falsehood, which “consists of the malicious publication of a falsehood concerning the plaintiff that leads other persons to act in a manner that causes actual loss, damage, or expense to the plaintiff,” irrespective of any effect on “reputation”.6

Thus, the anti-expression laws are eminently pathological from a systemic perspective. They directly impede repair of the dominance hierarchy, without providing any systemic benefit. They achieve this by suppressing the individual impulse to influence by communication, which is the elemental foundation of democracy.

As such, a study of the development of and pervasive use of anti-speech laws informs us both of the intensity of harmful elite efforts to protect illegitimate advantages and of the degree of totalitarianism in society. The present USA (civil) war on “hate expression” and its condoning by large swaths of society is a measure of a high degree of totalitarianism and a concomitant high degree of manipulation of public sentiment. It is an indicator of fundamental internal instability of the kind that accompanies the collapse of an empire.

  1. “Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart”, by David Leonhardt, The New York Times, 2017-08-07. [↩]
  2. “Negroes with Guns”, by Robert F. Williams, 1962 (Martino Publishing, CT, 2013). [↩]
  3. “How Nonviolence Protects the State”, by Peter Gelderloos, 2007 (South End Press). [↩]
  4. “Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 2016-11-15. [↩]
  5. “Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, by Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2016-02-01. (And published in Dissident Voice: Part-1, Part-2). [↩] [↩]
  6. “Injurious Falsehood”, mcconchie law corporation (legal encyclopedia), accessed on 2017-09-06. [↩]

Our Protected, Predatory Oligarchy: Dirty Secrets, Dirty Lies

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

If you want to understand why the status quo is unraveling, start by examining the feudal structure of our society, politics and economy.

The revelations coming to light about Hollywood Oligarch Harvey Weinstein perfectly capture the true nature of our status quo: a rotten-to-the-core, predatory, exploitive oligarchy of dirty secrets and dirty lies protected by an army of self-serving sycophants, servile toadies on the make and well-paid legal mercenaries. Predators aren’t an aberration of the Establishment; they are the perfection of the Establishment, which protects abusive, exploitive predator-oligarchs lest the feudal injustices of life in America be revealed for all to see.

The predators reckon their aristocratic status in Hollywood/D.C. grants them a feudal-era droit du seigneur (rights of the lord) to take whatever gratifications they desire from any female who has the grave misfortune to enter their malefic orbit.

Anyone who protests or makes efforts to go public is threatened by the oligarch’s thugs and discredited/smeared by the oligarch’s take-no-prisoners legal mercenaries. (Recall the Clintons’ Crisis Management Team tasked with crushing any Bimbo Eruptions, i.e. any eruptions of the truth about Bill’s well-known-to-insiders predation of the peasantry.)

The dirty secret is that the oh-so-hypocritical power elites of Hollywood and Washington D.C. circle the wagons to protect One of Their Own from being unmasked. The first weapons of choice in this defense are (as noted above) threats from thugs, discrediting the exploited via the oligarchy’s paid goons and lackeys in the mainstream media and dirty lies about what a great and good fellow the oligarch predator is. The last line of defense is a hefty bribe to silence any peasant still standing after the oligarchs’ onslaught of threats, smears and lies.

Should the worst happen and some sliver of the truth emerge despite the best efforts of the thugs, corporate media, legal mercenaries and PR handlers, then the playbook follows the script of any well-managed Communist dictatorship: the oligarch predator is thrown to the wolves to protect the oligarchs’ systemic predation and exploitation of the peasantry/debt-serfs.

Just as in a one-party Communist dictatorship, an occasional sacrificial offering is made to support the propaganda that the predators are outliers rather than the only possible output of a predatory, exploitive feudal status quo comprised of a small elite of super-wealthy and powerful oligarchs at the top and all the powerless debt-serfs at the bottom who must do their bidding in bed, in the boardroom, in the corridors of political power, and in the private quarters of their yachts and island hideaways.

Media reports suggest that the real reason Mr. Weinstein has been fired is not his alleged conduct over the past 27 years but his loss of the golden touch in generating movie-magic loot for the oh-so-liberal and politically correct Hollywood gang that was pleased to protect Mr. Weinstein when he was busy enriching them.

What’s truly noteworthy here is not the sordid allegations and history of payoffs–it’s the 27 years of intense protection the Hollywood/ media /D.C. status quo provided, despite hundreds of insiders knowing the truth. Just as hundreds of insiders with top secret clearance knew about the contents of the Pentagon Papers, and thus knew the Vietnam War was little more than an accumulation of official lies designed to protect the self-serving elites at the top of the power pyramid, only one analyst had the courage to risk his career and liberty to release the truth to the American public: Daniel Ellsberg.

Why are we not surprised that Hollywood, the corporate media and Washington D.C. lack even one courageous insider?

If you want to understand why the status quo is unraveling, start by examining the feudal structure of our society, politics and economy, and the endemic corruption, predation and exploitation of the privileged oligarchs at the top.

Then count the armies of self-serving sycophants, toadies, lackeys, hacks, apologists, flunkies, careerists and legal-team mercenaries who toil ceaselessly to protect their oligarch overlords from exposure.

Open your eyes, America: there are two systems of “justice”: one for the wealthy and powerful oligarchs, and an overcrowded gulag of serfs forced to plea-bargain in the other. If John Q. Public had done the deeds Mr. Weinstein is alleged to have done, Mr. Public would have long been in prison.

As Orwell observed about a totalitarian oligarchy, some are more equal than others.