Category Archives: media

Saturday Matinee: The Veto

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THE VETO: Film exposing CNN, Al Jazeera, Channel 4 and the western media propaganda war against Syria

By Vanessa Beeley

Source: 21st Century Wire

I met journalist and friend Rafiq Lutf and cameraman Abdul-Mun’aim Arnous in January 2018 and I was honoured when Rafiq asked me to work with him on his film project, The Veto.

As Dr Shaaban said to me in August 2016, “Western propaganda is paid for in Syrian blood”. This is true. The horrifying bloodshed and loss of life in Syria could never have happened without the colonial media manufacturing consent for another illegal war against a Sovereign nation.

The Veto tracks the evolution of the propaganda campaign waged by Western media against Syria. From Baba Amr in Homs 2011/2012 until the modern day “propaganda construct” – the NATO-member-state funded White Helmets. It honours Russia and China’s vetoes that have consistently defended Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the UN.

George Orwell said “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” Western media has been tasked with writing the history of the Syrian conflict to serve the aggressors in the US Coalition of terrorism.

As Dr Shaaban also told me:

“The US alliance and its media are focusing on our history, material history, cultural history, identity, our army. Any power that keeps you as an entire state, or any statesman that represents strength or unity will be demonized and destroyed.”

The Veto exposes the criminal intentions of Western media and it archives the progression of the propaganda war waged by the West against Syria. Syrians are writing the history of the Syrian conflict because Syria and her allies have courageously resisted the Imperialist machine.

As Rafiq has said so eloquently “we are the Veto” and we must use it against the Industrial Media Complex in the West. Syria’s history belongs to the Syrians and Syria’s final victory must ensure that Western media is never again given the power to destroy a nation, divide its people and promote international terrorism both military and economic. Watch the film: 

Who knows? Who cares? If the Media Claim 50 Countries Reject Venezuela’s Elected President and Repeat It Enough It Must Be True

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Wno’s the president of Venezuela? The elected Nicolas Maduro or the self-proclaimed unelected Juan Guaido?

By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening

American media still refer to Juan Guaidó, America’s hand-picked “legitimate leader” or “legitimate president” of Venezuela, as having an “administration.”

The truth is that his “administration” — consisting of advisors and other opposition leaders — are all either arrested and being held by the government, hiding, seeking asylum in various foreign embassies (Spanish, Italian, Brazilian and Argentinian) in the capital of Caracas, or have fled to other countries like Brazil and Colombia.

Guaidó, apparently a government of one, has so far avoided arrest probably because the elected Venezuelan President Maduro doesn’t want to give the US an excuse to try and rescue him, or to launch military actions of some kind against Venezuela as the White House keeps threatening to do.

Clearly, in calling for US military intervention, Guaidó has both demonstrated almost his total lack of backing among the masses of Venezuelan people, as well as his desperation, given Latin American’s visceral resentment of US interventions in their country, all of which have been designed to put autocrats or even military juntas in power, and many of which have openly overthrown popularly elected governments, as in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.

None of this gets reported in the US. Only recently has the New York Times, always a reliable backer of US imperial policy in Latin America, at least hinted at the possibility that the reason Maduro remains president and that Guaidó’s efforts to oust him are failing  so abysmally could be that the Venezuelan people want him to stay president, and do not want a US-backed coup or a US military intervention to replace him.

At this point the huffing and puffing coming from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and especially from the White House National Security Advisor and chief militarist blowhard John Bolton, are looking pretty pathetic, with Bolton trying to sow dissension and distrust by hinting that Maduro “better not trust” his own generals’ loyalty, and by offering rewards to those generals willing to abandon Maduro.

It is an indication of the United States’s declining power and influence in Latin America that few outside the US with its insular mass media believe that the US would or even could successfully invade Venezuela and impose a government on that country of 32 million (a number that keeps declining as the upper middle class and rich flee).

If anything, US sabotage and threats and US backing for a government of the wealthy are probably galvanizing support for Maduro. While people in the US, if they are paying any attention at all to events in Venezuela, may believe that Maduro is a corrupt thug, people in Venezuela itself, and in most of Latin America know full well that the main problems in that oil-rich country have to do with the collapse in oil prices since the heady days of Hugo Chavez when it was going for $100 a barrel, to American efforts to block Venezuela from exporting its oil now, and to freeze or even seize Venezuelan assets and oil receipts from the oil it does manage to export, and to other forms of economic warfare engaged in by the United States. As in Cuba, this kind of strategy by the US only works to build support for the country’s existing government.

At some point Guaidó is going to go. He will either be written off by the US media — his main backer — or will be arrested. Probably the latter will follow the former since once he’s recognized as an impotent charlatan, his arrest will not make him a martyr for the opposition. Already he has lost what public support he had as Venezuela’s wealthy abandon the country for Florida. As well, the “50 countries” that we in the US keep hearing about which supposedly back Guaidó as Venezuela’s “legitimate leader” are realizing that they were hoodwinked by the US. The are now mostly calling for a calmer response to the crisis in Venezuela, and are refusing to buy into US military threats against the Maduro government. Meanwhile nobody in the US media mentions that over 140 countries in the world support Maduro as the leader of Venezuela. 

In truth it’s impossible to find that list of “more than 50 countries” backing a self-proclaimed and unelected Guaidó as Venezuela’s president. The closest I could come by running google searches was a map produced by Bloomberg News listing 13 countries besides the US as supporting Guaidó. These included Canada, the UK, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. That is 13 plus the United States. Listed as supporting Maduro as elected President are Russia, China, Turkey, Bolivia, and Cuba, though I believe Bloomberg neglected to mention Nicaragua, a strong Maduro backer, which would make it six. All of Africa and much of Asia was left as “no opinion,” though in fact that means they are continuing to recognize the current Maduro government. 

For a time, most of the countries of Europe were lining up behind Guaidó, particularly after Germany announced that it was recognizing him as the new interim leader of Venezuela in late January, and after it ousted the country’s ambassador, but then by late March Germany was having second thoughts, and rejected the person sent there by Guaidó to assume the position of Venezuelan ambassador. At this point, except for the UK, the countries of Europe, along with Mexico and Uruguay, are simply calling for a dialogue and a negotiated solution to the Venezuela political crisis, and in addition to opposing any talk of military action or a coup, are seeking nothing more than a new election (which Maduro would probably win, given the alternative of the return of a government of the rich). The Europeans are no longer really backing Guaidó.

The reporters who continue to refer to “more than 50 countries” calling for Maduro’s ouster all must be using the same wrong or outdated news clip or some exaggerated and dated State Department press release.  (I asked the State Department for an updated list today but so far none has been forthcoming, though it would appear such a list shouldn’t take long to compile given how short it must be.)

Social Media and the Society of the Spectacle

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By Kenn Orphan

Source: CounterPunch

“The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.”

― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

― Edward Bernays, Propaganda

“We think we’re searching Google; Google is actually searching us. We think that these companies have privacy policies; those policies are actually surveillance policies. We’re told that if we have nothing to hide, then we have nothing to fear. The fact is, what they don’t tell us and what we are forgetting, that if you have nothing to hide, then you are nothing, because everything about us that makes us our unique identities, that gives us our individual spirit, our personality, our sense of freedom of will, freedom of action, our sense of our right to our own futures, that’s what comes from within. Those are our inner resources. That’s our private realm. And it’s intended to be private for a reason, because that is how it grows and flourishes and turns us into people who assert moral autonomy—an essential element of a flourishing, democratic society.”

― Shoshana Zuboff, author of Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization 

“Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”

― Edward Snowden

Recently I was rereading some of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. I was reminded of how essential this work by the late French Marxist philosopher is to today’s age of social media. Debord’s understanding of how the forces of capital shape our collective experiences and thoughts speaks to our time where algorithms dominate the trajectory of the psyche against a craven backdrop of what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin has described as “inverted totalitarianism.”

Every day we are bombarded with the imagery of empire and capital. It is relentless. Our minds have become both a marketplace and a commodity to be traded. And it is a lucrative industry with Facebook and Google as prime examples. Their data collection and surveillance typify a conjoining of the state and capitalist economy; and they have carved out insidious new spaces in the human brain to coerce self-imposed censorship and conformity to the prevailing consumerist global order.

This social conditioning is a process which requires mass compliance. The infamous propagandist for industry and vaunted “father of public relations” Edward Bernays understood that. It takes time to manipulate the multilayered strata of the human psyche, especially in regard to large populations of people. But history is replete with tragic examples of its successful implementation by powerful interests. Today those interests lie squarely with capital and empire; but the effects are the same, distraction, censorship, alienation, coerced, compliance with the norms of the status quo and the numbing of the critical mind.

Debord said, “Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.” This profound observation is even more important today. The state, via mass media, informs us of the villains and phantoms they believe we should fear. Other, far more destructive, deadly and oppressive threats such as the continued proliferation of nuclear arms, catastrophic climate change, collapse of ecosystems, dangers to public health from industrial pollutants, vastly unequal, racist and brutal economic and legal systems, militarism or plutocratic tyranny can then be relegated as non-issues, or at least lesser ones.

Most people on the planet will not suffer or die from a terrorist attack, but they are very likely to be severely affected by the other issues mentioned above. Imagery on portable screens that virtually everyone in the West and around the world has access to communicates messages that may speak to some of these dire or existential problems, but they do so in an abstract manner that divorces the observer from the subject.

As Debord observed, this kind of culture of spectacle informs our personal relationships as well. Whether one is “present” on social media or not has become a sort of litmus test of ones presence in life itself. “Likes” or emojis have replaced and truncated language to such an extent that now older forms of communication are often looked at with novelty, suspicion, or even disgust. What’s more is that emojis in social media, particularly Facebook, have been employed all too often as tools of ridicule or even harassment of weak or vulnerable people. But what is perhaps the most striking about the current social media age is its repetitive narrative of self-aggrandizement. One so repetitive and hypnotic that it almost appears invisible. The “selfie” and “status update” are examples of the unending drive of social media to create a false sense of self to present to the world. Of course this self must conform and be well adjusted to consumerist society in one form or another lest it be tagged for “mental health issues,” subversive thought or behavior, or simply be rendered unnoticed or unimportant by society in general.

Indeed, I am certain Debord would be horrified at the age of social media. At no other time in human history has there been a greater confluence of authoritarian dominance or social control implemented in such an intimate and ubiquitous manner. Unlike Debord’s time, social media provides a new medium to not only socially condition the masses but for the corporate state to gather what was once private information about those masses via their personally owned devices and apps.

That it masquerades as a form of democracy is equally disturbing, especially since at its core it represents the policing of thought and dampening of dissent. He wrote as if penning a prophecy: “The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.””

This spectacle reigns supreme in today’s social media culture. It is essential to its formulation and operating guidelines. Under such a paradigm history must be sterilized of analysis and ultimately atomized into unrelated instances to make an eternal present, divorced from any transformative potential. Therefore corporations and industries which have long records of polluting the environment or lying to the public about the safety of their products can continue to expand and even be celebrated by the corporate owned media. Religious institutions with long histories of abuse, patriarchy and repression can maintain their status as trusted institutions. The military can repeat the lie over and over that it is noble despite a history drenched in the blood of well documented atrocities and ongoing crimes. The United States and many other nations can keep calling themselves democracies despite quite obvious facts that strongly refute that designation. The mere notion of revolution then is made to be farcical or even dangerous. After all, how could revolution ever be seen as necessary within a democracy?

Social media does not necessarily signal the death of democratic freedom, but in its current form and under the aegis of capital it is certainly a nail in its coffin. This is because under such circumstances it is incapable of being anything other than a means for capital accumulation for the corporate state and a platform for its narrative, and it will do this through ever more invasive, censorial and repressive means. As Edward Snowden pointed out, people are less free when they feel that they are being observed. This is especially so when the observer is the state. Several studies have indicated that there is a sharp decline in certain online searches among the general public following any indication that government agencies are logging those searches, even if those citizens have not committed any crime. And the chilling effect is not unfounded. One incident involved an innocent couple who were visited by counter-terrorism police after searching Google for pressure cookers and backpacks. Since the internet has become the world’s public library, the implications for democracy are as dire as they are clear.

Unplugging from any of this isn’t easy, nor is it necessarily virtuous, but there are ways to divest from its social control personally and collectively. There are also ways to use it which defy its dominant algorithms. Détournement, which merely means rerouting or hijacking in French, is one of those ways. This involves inverting the imagery or messages of capital and empire to illustrate and even amplify their mendacity. It has a long history of effective use in bending the dominant narrative to one which reflects reality.

All of this is not to say that technology or social media are inherently bad, but to recognize that much of it has become a vehicle for a rather pernicious authoritarianism. And its danger lies in the fallacy of its benign appearance. Whether it be Google maps or one of countless other “helpful” apps one uses on a daily basis, surveillance capital becomes a means of controlling behavior, transactions, choices, as well as determining which members of society present a threat to the order. In other words, conformity is strongly reinforced while any form of dissent is rendered dangerously subversive. But although the algorithmic maps to our collective psyche are being endlessly drawn by programmers and their corporate and state masters, we still have the agency to navigate these landscapes with our eyes open. And indeed, the best tool we possess will always be that critically informed dissent the powerful so fear the most.

People Who Publicly Fret About Assange Rape Allegations Are Lying

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

A few hours ago I stumbled across a tweet by Huffington Post UK editor Basia Cummings which made my blood boil. Actress and activist Pamela Anderson had just spoken to the press with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson about their visit with Assange at Belmarsh prison, decrying the WikiLeaks founder’s cruel treatment and unjust prosecution. Basia Cummings took this opportunity to call her social media followers in to make fun of Anderson’s clothing.

“Pamela Anderson arrives at Belmarsh to visit Julian Assange wearing… a bespoke cape/blanket referencing ‘Cromwell’ and free speech’. It’s a look,” Cummings said.

But what really got me were the comments the tweet elicited.

“Is it possible to unwank over someone?” asked one user.

“Pamela Anderson arrives at Belmarsh to visit Julian Assange to supply him with some material for his cell wank bank,” said another.

“Cum blanket,” said another.

“She banged Kid Rock. Enough said,” said another.

This is just a small sampling from a quick skim. There are many, many others. I won’t quote them all.

I found this so deeply illustrative of the way mainstream liberals throw every value they claim to stand for right in the garbage as soon as it becomes an obstacle to their petty partisan attacks. They all warned that Trump was campaigning on a platform of xenophobia, homophobia and demagoguery, but as soon as he was elected they began launching phony Russiagate attacks which themselves were rife with xenophobia, homophobia and demagoguery. Liberal pundits who rightly criticized Bush for his unforgivable invasion of Iraq now attack Trump for being insufficiently hawkish toward Russia and its allies. These mindless automatons don’t actually stand for anything beyond blind partisan loyalty.

In the same way that they will happily wipe their asses with any of their pretend values the second it becomes politically convenient to do so, mainstream liberals will also fabricate grave, solemn concerns about things they never actually cared about before as soon as it can be used as an angle of partisan attack.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf began her excellent 2010 essay titled “J’Accuse: Sweden, Britain, and Interpol Insult Rape Victims Worldwide” with the words, “How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden’s treatment of Julian Assange is a form of theater? Because I know what happens in rape accusations against men that don’t involve the embarrassing of powerful governments.” Wolf argued that “men are pretty much never treated the way Assange is being treated in the face of sex crime charges,” and she was absolutely correct.

As a survivor of multiple sexual assaults, I have found it unspeakably infuriating the way this same patriarchal imperialist system which has allowed rape culture to thrive throughout the entirety of its existence has suddenly become deeply, deeply concerned about plot hole-riddled and completely unproven allegations against a man who just so happens to have published humiliating truths about that very same imperialist system. This same warmongering power structure which has never given a shit about women beyond our ability to fly a stealth bomber and squeeze new recruits out of our vaginas suddenly has the full force of its propaganda machine whipping liberals into a hysteria about allegations of acts that aren’t even illegal in the nations those liberals live in. Acts that these liberals have never even thought about pushing to make laws against in their own governments.

Do you know how you can be absolutely certain that anyone you see on social media rending their garments about Assange’s Swedish allegations is completely full of shit? Because no matter how hard you search through their post history, you will never, ever find any similarly enthusiastic push to ban the actions that Assange is accused of in their own government. In their own land, where their own daughters and sons will be impacted. They focus solely on shaky allegations against a target of the CIA and the Pentagon which are alleged to have happened in Sweden, a nation with very different sexual consent laws than the nations of these English-speaking concern trolls.

Without conceding that any part of the unproven allegations against Assange are true, it’s important to note that the United States, from which many of these Assange haters express their grave concern about Assange’s Swedish accusations, has no laws whatsoever about non-consensual condom removal, and other western judicial systems are barely even beginning to touch on the subject. None of these nations convict men for initiating sex while the woman is half-asleep, as Assange’s rape allegation asserts, and virtually every woman you know has had sex initiated with her by a sexual partner while she was half-asleep. Yet none of the blue-checkmarked journalists you see calling Assange a “rapist” on social media have ever written any articles demanding that laws be passed in their own countries calling for women to receive legal protection from this.

The people pretending to care about these allegations do not care about rape, and they do not care about women. I recently had my Twitter privileges suspended by someone who called me a “rape apologist” for not automatically subscribing to the “believe all women” meme in the case of a known CIA target, and, when I informed him that I myself am a rape victim, this man called me a liar. I went off on him, and he reported me. This man has never cared about rape or women, and it’s entirely likely that he’s done things to women that push the same boundaries on sexual consent he’s accusing Assange of doing, or worse.

I suspect that goes the same for a lot of the concern trolling Assange-hating men I encounter online whose suddenly holier-than-thou position on initiating sex with a sleepy woman you’ve just been intimate with probably does not line up all that well with their own sexual past. I mean, let’s get real. I’m a woman, my friends are women, I’ve been in a lot of book clubs and mom’s groups and out on a lot of girl’s nights and I know that if you want to get a conversation really fired up, just mention how annoying it is when a bloke wakes you up prodding you with his dick. It’s relatable and a rich vein to mine anecdote-wise. This is a universal experience for a western woman, and yeah, I think it’s rapey and gross and I would love for it to stop, but don’t pretend you care about that now any more than you did before you realized it was a way you could smear Assange. Be real. If you weren’t campaigning for it to be outlawed in your own state or country before, you need to at least be making noises about it now first, and you know and I know that that simply isn’t happening.

In fact, as the years pass, it is becoming entirely possible that the publicity around the allegations against Assange will not change one thing about rape law in any of the western countries which pretend to be so outraged by it other than to be considered a useful hack for smearing a journalist for exposing the patriarchal imperialist system under which rape culture continues to thrive. It has been nine years; nothing has changed. I think we can safely say that after nine years and no change that this has never been an honest concern for the health and well-being of the women involved and for women in general, because if it was then those laws would be ubiquitous across western democracies. Yet again, the suffering of women will be used by the powerful to hide their crimes and entrench more deeply the suffering for the women who work tirelessly as human shields protecting their children from the effects of war and poverty in a predatory capitalist system which is incapable of valuing women’s work.

Of course we should want these things to be illegal. Of course it should be illegal to deliberately have unprotected penetration without consent. Of course it should be illegal to initiate sex without fully awake and enthusiastic consent. Of course we should all want to live in a world where everyone is protected from any sexual interaction happening without their permission. But these people are not interested in creating that world. These people are interested in supporting the same rapey power establishment which has no regard for the sovereignty of entire nations, much less the individual sovereignty of womens’ bodies. They pretend to be on the side of women, but they are actually on the side of the worst aspects of patriarchy, because they have formed an egoic identification with the political structures which are built upon those aspects. That’s what concern trolling is.

This is just one of the many ways in which authentic feminism, authentic advocacy for the real interests of real women, has been co-opted for the benefit of a depraved establishment which has never cared about women and never will. We see it in the way the mass media celebrates women ascending to leadership positions of the military-industrial complex and the National Guard, and the way the presidential candidacy of a woman who embodies all the sickest aspects of the patriarchy was billed as a path to victory for feminism. The healthy impulse to elevate a gender that had an enslaved status in our society since the dawn of civilization has been hijacked by perverse agendas, and it needs to be reclaimed.

Whenever you see anyone claiming to be deeply, deeply concerned about the Swedish allegations against Assange, ask them what they’ve been doing to fight for legal changes which protect women from the things Assange is accused of doing. Then watch them squirm.

For more info on the gaping plot holes in the “Assange is a rapist” smear, check out this section from my mega-article Debunking All The Assange Smears.

Understanding the American Dictatorship

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Washington’s Blog

The American dictatorship is by the aristocracy of the country’s 585 billionaires, and has been scientifically proven beyond any doubt, now, not only in the classic Gilens and Page study, which examined thousands of bills in Congress and their money-backers and their ultimate outcomes (passage or failure to pass), during the studied period, 1981-2002. But also another (though less rigorous) study suggests that this control of the U.S. Government by America’s billionaires is getting even worse. So, America is clearly a dictatorship, by America’s aristocracy.

This is not just one or the other of America’s two Parties — Democrats versus Republicans — representing only the super-rich. Both of the Parties do, but the Democratic Party represents liberal billionaires, while the Republican Party represents conservative billionaires. Each Party represents a different faction of the billionaires.

The conservative faction is well represented by Donald Trump, whose swash-buckling rhetoric — “I’d take the oil!” in Iraq, and in Syria, and in Venezuela, etc. — is more blatantly uncouth than Barack Obama’s more gentlemanly rhetoric, but not basically different than Obama’s even bloodier grabbing of Honduras, Ukraine, Libya, and Syria were. The prominent Obama-backer George Soros, however, was demanding that banks, backed up by taxpayers, should kick in an extra $50 billion to enable him and other billionaires to exploit that country successfully. (He said this while Ukraine was spending most of the money that it did have trying to conquer the people in the far-eastern part of the country who refused to accept Obama’s imposed ruler who replaced the democratically elected President for whom they had voted over 90%.) So, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are both neoconservative, or the old term for that was “imperialistic.” In such matters (international matters), the billionaires very much are unified, and their news-media also are. And they all do represent the billionaires — never the public.

One billionaire, the owner of the fake-progressive “The Intercept” news-site, was exposed recently for his grabbingness. The excellent and honest journalists Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal headlined at one of the few honest news-media, Mint Press, “Pierre Omidyar’s Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts”, and reported:

A select group of national news ‘stakeholders’ gathered at an undisclosed location for what was described as a “semi-secret” workshop somewhere in Canada on January 26. The meeting had been convened to determine how and to whom a ‘news industry bailout’ of $645 million in Canadian government subsidies to private and supposedly independent media outlets would be disbursed. … 

Jesse Brown, a Canadian journalist who participated in the meeting, complained that the first thing he noticed about it “was that one major public ‘stakeholder’ wasn’t represented: the public.” Inside what amounted to a smoke filled room that was off limits to most Canadian citizens, Ben Scott — a former Obama administration official who also served in Hillary Clinton’s State Department — presided over the discussions. Today, as the director of policy and advocacy for the Omidyar Network, Scott works for one of the most quietly influential billionaires. …

Pierre Omidyar, the ebay founder [is] best known for his sponsorship of The Intercept, a flashy progressive publication that possesses the classified documents exfiltrated by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Unlike rival Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt, Omidyar has mostly managed to keep his influential role in media below the radar. … Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN and liberal interventionist guru, has explicitly praised Omidyar as someone who is following in the footsteps of Soros.

While Samantha Power was Obama’s U.N. Representative, she joined with two other countries, Ukraine and Canada, to oppose a U.N. resolution condemning nazism and all forms of racism. (Only three nations opposed it at the U.N., and these were the three.) When Donald Trump became America’s President, his U.N. Representative, Nikki Haley, likewise was one of only three nations at the U.N. who opposed a similar resolution.

So, perhaps the only people in U.S. and Canada who don’t know that their Governments are among only three that march ideologically in today’s lockstep with the Axis powers that lost World War II, are those three nazi-supporting countries’ own citizens. What media will tell their citizens the truth about this? Who owns the major media, and who finances politicians’ careers there, in the three-or-so brazenly fascist and even pro-nazi countries — the three that vote shamelessly for it?

The extraordinarily fine Rubenstein-Blumenthal article continued:

While backing media outlets around the world that produce news and commentary, Omidyar supports a global cartel of self-styled fact-checking groups that determine which outlets are legitimate and which are “fake.” He has also thrown his money behind murky initiatives like the non-profit backing New Knowledge, the data firm that waged one of the most devious disinformation campaigns in any recent American election campaign; and he is a key backer of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), the outfit that holds the Panama Papers and oversees the strategic dissemination of that leaked trove of financial files to hand-picked journalists.

And this is only on the liberal side of the U.S. regime.

The present article is being submitted to all major and most of the smaller national news media throughout the U.S. and its allied countries. The sites that publish it will be the only national and international news-media worth subscribing to, because all the rest are simply censoring-out these basic truths — and are labeling as ‘fake news’ the few honest sites, such as the one you are reading now, the ones that publish such news.

The American dictatorship can’t be accurately understood by relying mainly upon the ‘news’ that the billionaires’ sites publish. That’s very sad, but it’s true. It’s bad news, but it is real news, and not (like the billionaires’ sites call it but actually they themselves are) “fake news” sites. Maybe they publish non-controversial news honestly, but that’s about all of the truth that their owners will allow.

The American dictatorship is increasingly becoming a lock-down against truth. No matter how ugly one might imagine it to be, it’s worse. No solution to this vast problem is being presented here, but the first step toward solving any problem is to understand accurately what that problem actually is, and how it actually functions. In the present case, it’s no malfunction. It’s not a mistake. It’s instead a plan. And it is very competently being imposed — by the billionaires’ agents, against the public. That’s how dictatorships normally are imposed, and that’s how they’re imposed here. Mussolini called it “corporationism.” The U.S. has become its center.

Assange and the Unforgivable Sin of Disemboweling Official Narratives

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The entire global status quo is on the cusp of the S-Curve decline phase.

There is really only one unforgivable sin in the political realm, and that’s destroying the official narrative by revealing the facts of the matter. This is why whistleblowers who make public the secret machinery of the elaborately artful lies underpinning all official narratives are hounded to the ends of the Earth.

Employees of state entities such as Ellsberg, Manning and Snowden are bound by vows of secrecy and threatened by the promise of severe punishment. Outsiders such as Assange are even further beyond the pale because they can’t be accused of being traitors, as they never took the vows of secrecy required by the Deep State.

The single most damaging revelation to all the elaborate lies that make up official narratives is the truth revealed in official emails, documents and conversations. This is why virtually every document and correspondence is now “classified,” so anyone releasing even a mundane scrap can be sentenced to rot in federal prison.

In a recent C-SPAN interview, author Nomi Prins explained the incredible difficulty of accessing papers in presidential libraries now due to virtually everything being classified. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applications must be filed, and researchers must wait years to gain access to routine correspondence that was freely available to all a decade or so ago.

Official paranoia has a 100% correlation with the amount of damage done to official narratives by any leaks of the facts of the matter. What are they so afraid of? Here’s the dynamic in play: the more fragile the narrative, the greater the dependence on half-truths and lies, the greater the official urgency to crush all whistleblowers and maintain a Stasi-like vigilance against any murmurs of dissent or doubt.

If the entire contraption wasn’t so vulnerable to exposure and so dependent on lies, why the infinite paranoia? This paranoia extends past the present system of lies into the past, as exposing the lies in decades past calls into question the official narratives of today.

Any doubt is extremely dangerous, as if even a single thread is pulled loose, the entire fabric of ginned-up statistics, false assurances, half-truths and outright lies unravels. Once the Pentagon Papers revealed the facts of the war in Vietnam, support for the official narrative collapsed essentially overnight.

In the immortal words of Jean-Claude Juncker, when it becomes serious you have to lie, and it’s now serious all the time.

The entire global status quo is on the cusp of the S-Curve decline phase. Hence the vulnerability to disruption of its official narratives and the panicky paranoia of its handlers.

 

Coup Attempt in Venezuela: What You’re Not Being Told

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By Derrick Broze

Source: The Conscious Resistance

As self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaidó attempted to stage a military coup in Venezuela, the country’s U.N. ambassador declared President Nicolas Maduro victorious and called the United States a “rogue nation.”

The turbulent situation that has been unfolding in Venezuela for the last few years reached new heights on Tuesday as opposition leader and self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guaidó attempted to wrangle power away from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in what many are calling an attempted coup. Early Tuesday morning, Guaidó gave a press conference declaring that he has the support of the Venezuelan people and military, and demanded that Maduro step down. Guaidó also called on Venezuelans to take to the streets and call for an end to Maduro’s reign as president.

During the day’s events, cameras caught armored vehicles, reportedly belonging to the Bolivian military, running into crowds of protesters. Human Rights Watch (HRW) tweeted that 25 peopled were detained and dozens were wounded. HRW also noted that Venezuelan authorities shut down two international television channels and censored one radio station. “The regime should know that it will be held accountable for these abuses,” tweeted José Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director of HRW’s America Division.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s U.N. ambassador Samuel Moncada held a press conference stating that President Maduro has “defeated” opposition leader Juan Guaidó and his supporters. Moncada stated “the country is right now in a situation of perfect normality.” Moncada criticized U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for not supporting Maduro’s government against Guaidó.

Moncada also attacked the United States for what he said was another example of their interventionist policies, singling out President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for their support of Guaidó. “This is one of the most strange and weird situations we are in now, which the superpower of the world is the main rogue state going around, without care, destroying countries, invading countries, and threatening with the use of force,” Moncada stated.

The Ambassador to the UN also noted that the United States’ use of sanctions amounts to an act of war and only hurts the Venezuelan people. “Sanctions kill, as simple as that. Sanctions are criminal sanctions, are weapons of mass destruction. You don’t see the smoke, but you see the effect, you see the deleterious effect of killing and suffering,” Moncada said. “The sanctions use banks sanction, sanctions use ships, sanctions use insurance companies, and financial blockades. They cannot just say that they are concerned about liberty or freedom or the children in Venezuela, and then exercise a ghastly, nasty policy of calculated cruelty. They are acting like torturers, it is a collective punishment.”

Indeed, the Washington D.C.-based Center for Economic Policy Research published a reportlast week which determined that U.S. sanctions against Venezuela were likely responsible for 40,000 deaths in 2017-2018.

The harsh reality is that Maduro is by no means a perfect leader and his support of censoring media, use of the military to suppress protests (whether engineered or authentic), his suppression of the opposition, and other despicable acts do need to be called out. However, Ambassador Moncada is also correct that the United States does act as an imperialist “rogue” nation, using force on any nation that does not follow the Western Imperialist agenda. Unfortunately, it seems that the Venezuelan people are caught between a leader who is unpopular in some circles and an even more unpopular self-proclaimed “Interim President” with multiple connections to the Western Empire.

Of course, if our readers are unaware of these connections, it is because the corporate media (CNN, WaPo, The Hill, and others) have been running non-stop coverage of why Guaidó should be accepted as the leader of Venezuela while ignoring any bit of evidence that the “uprising” might be less than genuine.

Despite the round the clock support of Guaidó, on April 13 the Grayzone exclusively reportedthat a who’s who of Trump advisors, right-wing Latin American officials, and Venezuelan opposition figures met to discuss “Assessing the Use of Military Force in Venezuela.” The meeting was hosted on April 10 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank. This meeting included current and former State Department, National Intelligence Council, and National Security Council officials, along with Admiral Kurt Tidd, who was until recently the commander of the US Naval Forces Southern Command, overseeing operations in Central and South America.

The truth is that the Western Empire has been attempting to use Guaidó to install a puppet government in Venezuela. There is also evidence that the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies have attempted to take advantage of electricity blackouts in order to dethrone Maduro. In addition, there are a number of corporations and special interests who stand to benefit from the overthrow of Maduro and the crowning of Guaidó.

Although the American media has failed to report any of the above conflicts, there are still some Americans who are standing against the Venezuelan coup. A group calling itself the Embassy Protection Collective was invited by Venezuela’s government to protect the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C. from illegal seizure by the U.S. government or opposition supporters. The group—which includes members of CODEPINK, Popular Resistance, the Answer Coalition, MintPress News and more—has been working to raise awareness on the attempts by the Western oligarchy to install another puppet government in Venezuela.

The reality of the situation in Venezuela is much more complicated than the likes of CNNwould have the American people believe. Only by dissecting the lies from the American media, the Maduro government, and the Guaidó contingent can we hope to get to the truth and support the people who really matter: The Venezuelan People.

Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and The Deepwater Horizon

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By Greg Palast

Source: GregPalast.com

Five years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.

Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office’s chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.

The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified ”“ and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s Deepwater Horizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.

Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.

To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas ”“ the same stuff used in laughing gas ”“ because it speeds up drying.

Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.

However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.

The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas ”“ and boom, you’re dead.

So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.

Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)

Britain’s Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)

And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.

The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan ”“ and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Chelsea Manning.

Manning could have saved their lives

Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.

Apparently BP refused to tell its own partners, Chevron and Exxon, why the lucrative Caspian oil flow had stopped. Chevron bitched to the office of the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. (George Bush’s cabinet member should not be confused with the 129,000-tonne oil tanker “Condoleezza Rice”, which Chevron named after their former board member.)

The US Ambassador in Baku got Chevron the answer: a blow-out of the nitrogen-laced cement cap on a giant Caspian Sea platform. The information was marked “SECRET”. Apparently loose lips about sinking ships would help neither Chevron nor the Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, the beneficiary of millions of dollars in payments of oil company baksheesh.

So what about Chelsea Manning?

Manning has been charged with “aiding the enemy” ”“ a crime punishable by death.

But Manning’s sole and only purpose was to get out the truth. It wasn’t Manning who wrote the cover-up memos, she merely wanted to get them to the victims: us.

And since when did the public become “the enemy”?

Had Manning’s memos come out just a few months earlier, the truth about BP’s deadly drilling methods would have been revealed, and there’s little doubt BP would have had to change its ways. Those eleven men could well have been alive today.

Did Manning know about this particular hush-hush cable about BP’s blow-out when she decided she had to become Paul Revere and warn the planet?

That’s unlikely, in the thousands of cables she had. But she’d seen enough evidence of murder and mendacity in other cables, so, as Manning, under oath, told a court, she tried to give it all to the New York Times to have knowledgeable reporters review the cables confidentially for life-saving information.

The New York Times immediately seized on this extraordinary opportunity”¦ to ignore Manning. The Times only ran it when the Guardian was going to scoop ”“ and embarrass ”“ the New York hacks.

Though there are limits. While reporter David Leigh put the story of BP’s prior blow-out on page one of the Guardian, neither the New York Times or any other major US news outlet ran the story of the blow-out and oil industry cover-up. No surprise there, though ”“ the most “prestigious” US news programme, PBS Newshour, was sponsored by”¦ Chevron Corporation.

Hanging their source while taking his applause

As a working journalist, and one whose head is likely to be in the foggy gun-sights of some jet jockey or a dictator’s goon squad, I have more than a little distaste for toffs like New York Times‘ former executive editor, columnist Bill Keller, who used Manning’s documents to cash in on a book deal and land star turns on television while simultaneously smearing his source Manning as, “troubled”, “emotionally fractured”, “vague”, “inchoate” and ”“ cover the children’s ears ”“ “gay”.

Furthermore, while preening about their revelations from the Manning documents, the Times had no problem with imprisoning their source. I do acknowledge that the Times and Keller did editorialise that a sentence of life imprisonment without parole would be “overkill”. How white of them.

When it was mentioned that Manning is no different from Daniel Ellsberg, the CIA operative who released the Pentagon Papers, Keller reassured that the Times also told Ellsberg he was “on his own” and did not object to their source being charged as a spy.

And the Times‘ much-lauded exposure of the My Lai massacre? My late good friend, the great investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour, who gave the story to Seymour Hersh, told me that he and Hersh had to effectively blackmail the Times into printing it.

Manning: aid to the enemy?

Times man Keller writes that Manning, by going to “anti-American” WikiLeaks, threatened the release of, “information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed”.

Really?

This is the same Bill Keller who admits that he knew his paper’s reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were completely false, but that he ”“ as editor ”“ covered up his paper’s knowledge their WDM stories were simply bogus. Those stories validated the Bush propaganda and helped tip the political balance to invade Iraq. Four-thousand US soldiers died. I guess the idea is that releasing information that kills troops is criminal, but that dis-information that kills troops is quite acceptable.

Maybe I’m just cranky because I wouldn’t have seen my own sources vanish and my film grabbed if the Times had only run the Manning facts about BP and Caspian when they had the chance.

Look, I’m only picking on the New York Times and PBS Newshour because they are the best in America, God help us.

What other lives could have been saved by the Manning revelations? Lots. Watch this space: I promise more aid to the enemies of the state ”“ which is YOU.

 

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Greg Palast investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon deaths for Channel 4 Television UK . Those dispatches are contained in his highly acclaimed book Vultures’ Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.