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Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Ringing in a New Year of War

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By Tom Engelhardt

Source: TomDispatch.com

On December 9th, the Washington Post covered Donald Trump’s offhand, if long expected, announcement of the ousting of retired Marine General John Kelly from an embattled White House. Its report focused on the chief of staff’s “rocky tenure” there with a nod to his many merits, among them that he “often talked the president out of his worst impulses.” Buried deep in the piece, though, was a single line that caught my eye (and possibly that of no one else on this planet): “Kelly told others that among his biggest accomplishments was keeping the president from making rash military moves, such as removing troops from sensitive zones.”

It was admittedly neither a direct quote, nor attributed to anyone, nor elaborated on in the rest of the piece. So that’s all we know, not whether Kelly took particular pride in stopping the president from removing American troops from, say, Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or for that matter Niger. But however passing and non-specific that line may have been, it seemed to catch something striking about these last two years, a time when those in the mainstream opposition to the president have come to love so many of the retired generals and former heads of outfits like the National Security Agency and the CIA, and have turned them into the equivalent of security blankets for the rest of us. They were the men (because they were all men) intent on talking Donald Trump out of “his worst impulses” and so, in the phrase of the era, they were the “adults in the room.”

Thanks to the wars and other shenanigans that those “adults” had already been so deeply involved in and the money — more than $5 trillion of it — squandered on them, they were also the men who helped generate the dissatisfaction that gave Donald Trump his opening in the first place. And now, having been part of the problem, they are in full chorus condemnation of Donald Trump’s most recent solution: to withdraw American troops from Syria (and soon evidently from Afghanistan as well).  We — that is, the country whose actions were crucial in creating ISIS in the first place — are now the only “bulwark” against its return.  That goes without saying, of course, among Republicans, Democrats, the national security elite, America’s generals, and that last “adult” in the room, Secretary of Defense James Mattis — or at least it did until, days ago, he resigned in protest.  And as U.S. Army major and TomDispatch regular Danny Sjursen suggests in his year-ending piece, as that one Washington Post line about Kelly indicates, they worked awfully hard to ensure that President Trump wouldn’t withdraw from any part of the mess they made. With that thought in mind and withdrawals about to be under way on an increasingly grim planet, Happy New Year! Tom

The World According to the “Adults in the Room”
A Year of Forever War in Review
By Danny Sjursen

Leave it to liberals to pin their hopes on the oddest things. In particular, they seemed to find post-Trump solace in the strange combination of the two-year-old Mueller investigation and the good judgment of certain Trump appointees, the proverbial “adults in the room.” Remember that crew? It once included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO, and a trio of active and retired generals — so much for civilian control of the military — including Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Until his sudden resignation, Mattis was (just barely) the last man standing. Still, for all these months, many Americans had counted on them to all but save the nation from an unpredictable president. They were the ones supposedly responsible for helming (or perhaps hemming in) the wayward ship of state when it came to foreign and national security policy.

Too bad it was all such a fantasy. As Donald Trump wraps up his second year in the Oval Office, despite sudden moves in Syria and Afghanistan, the United States remains entrenched in a set of military interventions across significant parts of the world. Worse yet, what those adults guided the president toward was yet more bombing, the establishment of yet more bases, and the funding of yet more oversized Pentagon budgets. And here was the truly odd thing: every time The Donald tweeted negatively about any of those wars or uttered an offhand remark in opposition to the warfare state or the Pentagon budget, that triumvirate of generals and good old Rex went to work steering him back onto the well-worn track of Bush-Obama-style forever wars.

All the while, a populace obsessed and distracted by the president’s camera-grabbing persona seemed hardly to notice that this country continued to exist in a state of perpetual war. And here’s the most curious part of all: Trump wasn’t actually elected on an interventionist military platform. Sure, he threw the hawkish wing of his Republican base a few bones: bringing back waterboarding as well as even “worse” forms of torture, bombing “the shit” out of ISIS, and filling Guantánamo with “some bad dudes.” Still, with foreign policy an undercard issue in a domestically focused campaign to “Make America Great Again,” most Trump supporters seemed to have little stomach for endless war in the Greater Middle East — and The Donald knew it.

Common Sense on the Campaign Trail

Despite his coarse language and dubious policy positions, candidate Trump did seem to promise something new in foreign policy. To his credit, he called the 2003 Iraq War the “single worst decision ever made” (even if his own shifting position on that invasion was well-documented). He repeatedly tweeted his virulent opposition to continuing the war in Afghanistan and regularly urged President Obama to stay out of Syria. And to the horror of newly minted Cold War liberals, he even suggested a détente with Russia.

Like so much else in his campaign, none of this was from the standard 2016 bullet-point repertoire of seasoned politicians. Sure, Donald Trump lacked the requisite knowledge and ideological coherence usually considered mandatory for serious candidates, but from time to time he did — let’s admit it — offer some tidbits of fresh thinking on foreign policy. However blasphemous that may sound, on certain international issues the guy had a point compared to Hillary, the hawk.

During his presidency, traces of his earthy commonsense still showed up from time to time. In August 2017, for instance, when announcing yet another escalation in the Afghan War, he felt obliged to admit that his original instinct had been to “pull out” of it, adding that he still sympathized with Americans who were “weary of war.”  He sounded like a man anything but confident of his chosen course of action — or at least the one chosen for him by those “adults” of his. Then, last week, he surprised the whole business-as-usual Washington establishment by announcing an imminent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria.  Whether he reverses himself, as he’s been apt to do, remains unknown, but here was at least a flash of his campaign-style anti-interventionism.

How, then, to explain the way a seemingly confident candidate had morphed into a hesitant president — until his recent set of decisions to pull troops out of parts of the Greater Middle East — at least on matters of war and peace? Why those nearly two years of bowing to the long-stale foreign policy thinking that had infused the Bush-Obama years, the very thing he had been theoretically running against?

Well, pin it on those adults in the room, especially the three generals. As mid-level and senior officers, they had, after all, cut their teeth on the war on terror. It and it alone defined their careers, their lives, and so their thinking. Long before Donald Trump came along, they and their peer commanders had already been taken hostage by the interventionist military playbook that went with that war and came to define the thinking of their generation. That was how you had to think, in fact, if you wanted to rise in the ranks.

The adults weren’t, for the most part, political partisans. Then again, neither was the militarist playbook they were following. Both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush had been selling exactly the same snake oil in 2016. Only Trump — and to some extent Bernie Sanders — had offered a genuine alternative. Nevertheless, the Trump administration sustained that same policy of forever war for almost two full years and the grown-ups in the room were the ones who made it so. Exhibit A was the Greater Middle East.

The Same Old Playbook

While George W. Bush favored a “go-big” option of regime change, massive military occupation, and armed nation-building, Barack Obama preferred expanded drone strikes, increased military advisory missions, and — in the case of Libya — a bit of light regime-changing. In Trump’s first two years in office, the U.S. military seemed to merge aspects of the losing strategies of both of those presidents.

If Trump’s gut instinct was to skip future “dumb” Iraq-style wars, “pull out” of Afghanistan, and avoid regional conflict with Russia, his grown-up advisers pushed him in exactly the opposite direction. They chose instead what might be called the more strategy: more bombing, more troops, more drone strikes, more defense spending, more advisors, more everything. And if a war seemed to be failing anyway, the answer came straight from that very playbook, as in Afghanistan in 2017: a “surge” and the need for yet more time. As a result, America’s longest-ever war grew longer still with no end faintly in sight.

Given such thinking, it’s odd to recall that those adults in the room were, once upon a time, reputed to be outside-the-box thinkers. Secretary Mattis was initially hailed as such an avid reader and devoted student of military history that he was dubbed the “warrior monk.” H.R. McMaster was similarly hailed for having written a book critical of U.S. strategy in Vietnam (though wrong in its conclusions). Both Democrats and Republicans in Washington were similarly convinced that if anyone could bring order to the Trump administration, it would be the ever-responsible John Kelly.

Let’s review, then, the advice that these innovators offered the president in his first two years in office and the results in the Greater Middle East, starting with that presidential urge to pull out of Iraq. You won’t be surprised to learn that U.S. troops are still ensconced there in an ongoing fight against what’s suddenly a growing ISIS insurgency (now that its “caliphate” is no more). Nor has Washington taken any meaningful steps to bolster the legitimacy of the Shia-dominated Baghdad government, which portends an indefinite Sunni-based insurgency of some sort (or sorts) and a possible Kurdish secession.

In Syria, rather than downsize the U.S. military mission in the interest of Trump’s stated wish for détente with Russia and his urge to get the troops out “like very soon,” his administration had more than stayed put. It essentially chose to go with an indefinite American occupation of eastern Syria, including up to 4,000 mainly Special Operations forces backing predominantly Kurdish rebels there. In fact, only recently Mattis and other “senior national security officials” reportedly tried unsuccessfully to talk the president out of his recent tweeted proclamation to end the American role in Syria and withdraw those troops from the country as, it seems, is now happening. In this, he clearly wants to avoid the ongoing risk of war with both Russia and NATO ally Turkey, not to speak of Iran. The Turks continue to threaten to invade the northern Syrian region controlled by those U.S.-backed Kurds, while Russian forces had, alarmingly, exchanged fire with U.S. troops more than once along the Euphrates River buffer zone. The Syrian mission was all risk and no reward, but the adults in the room continued to work feverishly to convince the president that to pull out might create a new “safe haven” not just for ISIS but also for the Iranians.

In Afghanistan, whatever Trump’s “instinct” may have been, after many meetings with his “cabinet and generals,” or what he called his “experts,” the president decided on a new escalation, a mini-surge in that then 17-year-old war. To that end, he delegated yet more decision-making to the very generals who were so unsuccessful in previous years and they proceeded to order the dropping of a record number of bombs, including the first-ever use of the largest non-nuclear ordnance in the Air Force arsenal, the so-called Mother of all Bombs. The results were the very opposite of reassuring. Indeed, the U.S. and its Afghan allies may be headed for actual military defeat, as the Taliban controls or contests more districts than ever, while Afghan government casualties have become, in the phrase of an American general, “unsustainable.”

Now, in a rebuke to those very experts and adults, the president will apparently remove half the U.S. troops in Afghanistan. After so many years of fruitless war, this sensible decision raised immediate alarm among the hawks in Congress and in the rest of the Washington national security establishment.  That decision, plus pulling the plug on the Syrian operation, apparently proved to be a red line for the last adult left standing and Jim Mattis promptly resigned in protest.  For the outgoing secretary of defense, it seems that complicity in Saudi war crimes in Yemen and the murder of Washington Post columnist and Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi were passing events.  Trump’s willingness to try to end the American role in two failing, dubiously legal quagmires, however, proved to be the general’s breaking point.

Elsewhere, the Trump team has moved ever closer to a regime-change policy in Iran, especially after the replacement of Tillerson and McMaster by the particularly Iranophobic duo of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton as secretary of state and national security advisor. Still, don’t blame any looming Iran disaster on them. Washington had unilaterally pulled out of the Obama-negotiated nuclear deal with that country well before they arrived on the scene. While the grown-ups might not have been quite as amenable to war with Iran as Bolton and Pompeo, they couldn’t countenance détente for even a second.

And, of course, all those adults in the room supported U.S. complicity in the Saudi-led terror bombing and starvation of Yemen, the poorest Arab country. They also favored sustained ties with Saudi Arabia and its increasingly brutal crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Indeed, despite the recent murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist and Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi in that country’s embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, and the Senate’s increasing disenchantment with the war in Yemen, Mattis remained a vocal supporter of the Saudis. Just before the Senate recently voted to pull U.S. military assistance for the Saudi war, he joined Pompeo in urging that chamber not to abandon Riyadh. In addition, key senators called Mattis’s testimony “misleading” because he “downplayed” the Saudi crown prince’s role in the murder, ignoring the conclusion of the CIA that the prince was indeed “complicit” in it.

So when it comes to outside-the-box thinking about the Greater Middle East almost two years into the president’s first term, the U.S. remains ensconced in a series of distinctly inside-the-box and unwinnable wars across the region.  Trump, however, now appears ready to change course, at least in Syria and Afghanistan, perhaps out of frustration with the ever-so-conventional mess the adults left him in.

A Militarized Planet

Elsewhere, matters are hardly more encouraging. At a global level, the grown-ups have neither tempered the president’s more bizarre policies nor offered a humbler, more modest military approach themselves. The result, as the country enters 2019, is an increasingly militarized planet. Mattis’s own National Defense Strategy (NDS), released in January 2018, represents a blatant giveaway to the domestic arms industry, envisioning as it does a world eternally on the brink of Great Power war.

On that planet of the adults, the U.S. must now prepare for threats across every square inch of the globe. Far from the military de-escalation hinted at by candidate Trump (and suggested again in a recent tweet of his), Mattis’s “2-2-1 policy” has the Pentagon ramping up for potential fights with two “big” adversaries (China and Russia), two “medium” opponents (Iran and North Korea), and one “sustained” challenge (conflicts and terrorism across the Greater Middle East). Few have asked whether such a strategy is faintly sustainable, even with a military budget that dwarfs that of any other power on the planet.

In fact, the implementation of that NDS vision is clearly leading to a new arms race and a burgeoning Cold War 2.0. Washington is already engaged in a spiraling trade war with Beijing and has announced plans to pull out of a key Cold War nuclear treaty with Russia, while developing a new group of treaty-busting intermediate range nuclear missiles itself. In addition, at the insistence of his military advisers, the president has agreed to back an Obama-era “modernization” program for the U.S. nuclear arsenal now estimated to cost at least $1.6 trillion over the next three decades.

So much for a Republican insistence on balanced budgets and decreased deficits. Furthermore, climate-change denial remains the name of the game in the Trump administration and, in this singular case, the adults in the room could do nothing about it. Despite earlier Pentagon reports that concluded man-made climate change presents a national security threat to the country, the Trump administration has ignored such claims. It has even insisted upon substituting the term “extreme weather” for “climate change” in current defense reports. Here, the grown-ups do indeed know better — the military has long been focused on the dangers of climate change — but have dismally failed to temper the president’s anti-science policies.

So, as 2018 comes to a close, thanks to the worldview of those grown-ups and the pliability of Trump’s own ideology (except when it comes to climate change), Washington’s empire of bases, its never-ending war on terror, and its blank-check spending on the military-industrial complex were more firmly entrenched than ever.  It will fall to the president — if indeed he proves to be serious when it comes to a course change — to begin the long work of (modestly) undoing a planet of war.

The Last Adult?

Looking toward 2019 in a world on edge, here are a couple of thoughts on our future. Expect that Robert Mueller’s future report will find many things to focus on, including plenty of collusion with women, but — whatever the Russians did and whatever the desires of those around candidate Trump may have been — no actual collusion of substance with Moscow in election 2016. That will undoubtedly break the hearts of liberals everywhere and ensure — despite the best efforts of a new Democratic House — a full Trump term (or two!). Furthermore, whatever “blue-wave” Democrats do domestically, they are unlikely to present a coherent, alternative foreign-policy vision. Instead, prepare to watch them cede that territory (as always) to Trump and the Republicans. Meanwhile, at least until 2021, they will continue to lament the absence of those “adults in the room” and their supposed ability to preserve a respectable foreign policy, which, of course, would have meant war all the way to the bank.

Maybe it’s time to start thinking of those adults as the tools (and often enough the future employees) of a military-industrial-congressional complex that feeds Americans ample servings of endless war, year after year, decade after decade. In truth, in this century presidents change but the failing policies haven’t.

Call it the deep state, the swamp, or whatever you like, but bottom line: during Trump’s first two years in office, there wasn’t, until now, any serious rethinking of American foreign and military policy, not in terms of peaceableness anyway. Trump’s original adults in the room set the table for endless war. Their replacements clearly intended to devour plentiful helpings of the same dishes. Make no mistake, if it were up to those adults, the United States would be ringing in this New Year with yet another copious serving of militarism.  It still may.

I must admit that I find myself in a lonely spot as 2018 ends. I’ve been serving in the U.S. Army during this period, while dissenting from prevailing foreign policy. After spending 18 years in uniform, including tours of duty in both the Afghan and the Iraq wars, and observing a slew of retired generals and policymakers who oversaw those very wars champion yet more (failed) conventional thinking, forgive me for wondering, from time to time, if I weren’t the last true adult in the room.

Send the Mad Dog to the Corporate Kennel

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By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

Outgoing Defense Secretary Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis was famous for quipping, “It’s fun to shoot some people.” It remains a supreme irony that Mattis was widely considered the only “adult in the room” in the Trump administration. Compared to whom? John Bolton, the rabid neocon serving as national security adviser? That would be the epitome of “condemning with faint praise.”

With his ramrod-straight image, not to mention his warrior/scholar reputation extolled in the media, Mattis was able to disguise the reality that he was, as Col. Andrew Bacevich put it on Democracy Now! this morning, “totally unimaginative.” Meaning that Mattis was simply incapable of acknowledging the self-destructive, mindless nature of U.S. “endless war” in the Middle East, which candidate-Trump had correctly called “stupid.” In his resignation letter, Mattis also peddled the usual cant about the indispensable nation’s aggression being good for the world.

Mattis was an obstacle to Trump’s desire to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan (and remains in position to spike Trump’s orders). Granted, the abrupt way Trump announced his apparently one-man decision was equally stupid. But withdrawal of ground troops is supremely sane, and Mattis was and is a large problem. And, for good or ill, Trump — not Mattis — was elected president.

Marine Wisdom

Historically, Marines are the last place to turn for sound advice. Marine Gen. Smedley Butler (1881-1940), twice winner of the Medal of Honor, was brutally candid about this, after he paused long enough to realize, and write, “War is a Racket”:

“I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. …”

Shortly after another Marine general, former CENTCOM commander Anthony Zinni, retired, he stood by silently as he personally watched then-Vice President Dick Cheney give his most important speech ever (on August 26, 2002). Cheney blatantly lied about Iraq’s (non-existent) WMD, in order to grease the skids for the war of aggression against Iraq. Zinni had kept his clearances and was “back on contract.” He was well read-in on Iraq, and knew immediately that Cheney was lying.

A few years later, Zinni admitted that he decided that his lips would be sealed. Far be it for a Marine to play skunk at the picnic.  And, after all, he was being honored that day at the same Veterans of Foreign Wars convention where Cheney spoke.  As seems clear now, Zinni was also lusting after the lucrative spoils of war given to erstwhile generals who offer themselves for membership on the corporate Boards of the arms makers/merchants that profiteer on war.

(For an earlier critique of senior Marines, see: “Attacking Syria: Thumbing Noses at Constitution and Law.” )

Marine officer, now Sen. Pat Roberts, R, Kansas, merits “dishonorable mention” in this connection. He never rose to general, but did become Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at an auspicious time for Cheney and Bush. Roberts kowtowed, like a “good Marine,” to their crass deceit, when a dollop of honesty on his part could have prevented the 2003 attack on Iraq and the killing, maiming, destruction, and chaos that continues to this day.  Roberts knew all about the fraudulent intelligence, and covered it up — together with other lies — for as long as he remained Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman

Scott Ritter on Pat Roberts

Roberts’s unconscionable dereliction of duty enraged one honest Marine, Maj. Scott Ritter, who believes “Semper Fi” includes an obligation to tell the truth on matters of war and peace.  Ritter, former UN chief weapons inspector for Iraq, who in April  wrote in April 2005 “Semper Fraud, Senator Roberts,” based partly on his own experience with that complicit Marine.

Needless to say, higher ranking, more malleable Marines aped Zinni in impersonating Uncle Remus’s Tar Baby — not saying nuttin’.

It is conceivable that yet another sharply-saluting Marine, departing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, may be tapped by Trump to take Mattis’s job. If that happens, it will add to President Trump’s bizarre penchant for picking advisers hell bent on frustrating the objectives he espoused when he was running for office, some of which — it is becoming quite clear — he genuinely wants to achieve.

Trump ought to unleash Mattis now, and make sure Mattis keeps his distance from the Pentagon and the Military-Industrial Complex, before he is asked to lead an insurrection against a highly vulnerable president — as Gen. Smedley Butler was asked to do back in the day. Butler said no.

Washington’s Russiagate Conspiracy Theory on Life Support

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By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

The latest bid to keep Washington’s desperate Russiagate conspiracy theory alive has energized distilled segments of the public still convinced of Moscow’s global omniscience and its role in manipulating and undermining virtually every aspect of their daily lives.

But recent “revelations” are simply the same accusations made against a Russian-based click-bait farm, repackaged and respun.

The Washington Post’s article, “New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation’s scale and sweep,” would in fact present no new report. Instead, it would present repackaged narratives involving “Russia’s disinformation campaign around the 2016 election.” 

The Washington Post would claim:

The report, obtained by The Washington Post before its official release Monday, is the first to study the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), its chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), its ranking Democrat. The bipartisan panel also released a second independent report studying the 2016 election Monday. Lawmakers said the findings “do not necessarily represent the views” of the panel or its members.

The two reports were put out by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and New Knowledge. No information is provided by the Washington Post as to what either of these organizations are, who runs them, or who funds them.

Both reports rehash allegations claiming the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) conducted an extensive influence campaign through social media during the 2016 US elections.

The total amount of money spent on such operations amounted to approximately $100,000 in Facebook ads. To put this amount in context, the very same Washington Post would report in April 2017 that the total amount spent on the 2016 elections amounted to $6.5 billion – in other words – the amount allegedly spent on Facebook ads by IRA was about 0.001% of total US campaign spending.

Both reports cited by the Washington Post and presented to US Congress did not dispute this. Instead, they attempted to claim the impact of IRA’s activities far exceeded this $100,000 in ads.

The New Knowledge report would claim:

The Instagram and Facebook engagement statistics belie the claim that this was a small operation — it was far more than only $100,000 of Facebook ads, as originally asserted by Facebook executives,” the New Knowledge white paper said. “The ad engagements were a minor factor in a much broader, organically driven influence operation. 

And to unskeptical, untrained eyes, the figures presented by both Oxford and New Knowledge tabulating millions of views, shares, and likes do appear to “belie the claim that this was a small operation.”

Context is King 

But organically driven influence simply means whatever was posted by IRA was picked up by ordinary people and spread by them, not IRA. And while the numbers presented by Oxford and New Knowledge may seem impressive, how do they compare to the “scale and sweep” of the 2016 candidates’ efforts on Facebook?

Since neither group of “researches” bothered to provide this important context, it is fortunate that the Western media itself has, albeit deeply buried in older articles.

It stands to reason that the $81 million US President Donald Trump and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spent on Facebook – according to TechCrunch – also translated into “organically driven influence.”

In fact, a 2017 Washington Post op-ed titled, “Why Russia’s Facebook ad campaign wasn’t such a success,” would explain:

…the Russian content was just a tiny share of the 33 trillion posts Americans saw in their Facebook news feeds between 2015 and 2017. Any success the ads had in terms of reach seems attributable largely to the sheer doggedness of the effort, with 80,000 Facebook posts in total. Facebook reported that a quarter of the ads were never seen by anyone. And — with the average Facebook user sifting through 220 news-feed posts a day — many of the rest were simply glanced at, scrolled past and forgotten. 

With $81 million spent on Facebook by the Trump and Clinton campaigns, mostly to mobilize core supporters to donate and volunteer, a low-six-figure buy is unlikely to have tipped the election.

In proper context, whatever IRA’s $100,000 bought them, Trump and Clinton’s $81 million bought them much more of.

So what is Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and why is it publishing a 47-page report (.pdf) claiming, “Russia’s IRA launched an extended attack on the United States by using computational propaganda to misinform and polarize US voters,” when freely available facts reported on by the Western media itself proves exactly the opposite?

And what is New Knowledge and why is it publishing a 101-page report (.pdf) claiming $100,000 in Facebook ads constitutes a, “long-running and broad influence operation” when the Washington Post itself has featured experts depicting it as anything but?

Who is Keeping Russiagate on Life Support? 

Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project is funded by the US National Science Foundation and the European Research Council as well as by Oxford University itself.

The fact that the former two sponsors are supposedly dedicated to funding scientific pursuits yet are funding the Project’s role in buttressing Western propaganda – specifically that aimed at Russia and China – is particularly troubling.

New Knowledge is more interesting still. It poses as a business claiming to provide the service of, “protecting brands from social media disinformation attacks.” It explains further on its “Our Company” page that:

New Knowledge is a team of national security, digital media and machine learning experts with decades of experience who are dedicated to defending public discourse and providing brands with disinformation protection.

New Knowledge claims it provides clients with a “dashboard” to track and alert them to “disinformation attacks” on their brands. It is difficult to believe anyone would pay New Knowledge for their “services” when most companies already have marketing teams more than capable of minding their brand.

Further down on the same page is New Knowledge’s “Leadership Team.”

It includes CEO Jonathon Morgan who boasts of contributing to corporate-financier funded Brookings Institution – a pro-war policy think tank. He also claims to have served as a “Special Advisor to the State Department.”

There is also COO Ryan Fox, who claims he spent 15 years at the National Security Agency (NSA) focusing on signals intelligence and before that as an analyst for the US Army.

Renee DiResta –  New Knowledge’s director of research – also claims to have worked as an adviser to the US State Department as well as for Congress and other state and federal government institutions regarding “the spread of disinformation and propaganda.”

Both the Oxford operation and New Knowledge intentionally omitted context from their lengthy reports to deliberately portray a minuscule click-bait operation as a threat to American national security. If the $100,000 spent by IRA on Facebook ads was compared side-by-side to the gargantuan sums spent by Trump and Clinton during the 2016 campaign – and that fraction of 1% properly presented to the public – the Russiagate conspiracy theory would drop dead instantly.

No genuine researcher would have committed to reports of up to 100 pages long and failed to put IRA’s impact into proper context and provided a sense of proportion within the 2016 elections IRA supposedly attempted to influence.

But an Oxford-based team funded by the US government might. So might New Knowledge – lined by “advisers” to the US State Department and former employees of the NSA.

It is ironic that amid supposed efforts to expose Russia’s attempts to target the American public with propaganda, it is Oxford, New Knowledge, and the US Congress itself which requested and approved of deliberate propaganda – aimed at targeting the American public to keep the Russiagate conspiracy alive.

Why?

Because Russiagate serves as a central pillar in cultivating hatred across the West against Russia – serving as a pretext for continued expansion of NATO along Russia’s borders, creating leverage against Moscow regarding US wars of aggression across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and the undermining of Russia’s position in global energy markets.

There hasn’t been a conflict of confrontation the US has elected to pursue that hasn’t included crude, baseless propaganda aimed at manipulating the American public. Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” Now Russia has “Facebook ads of mass persuasion.”

 

Update:

Facebook suspends account for “New Knowledge” CEO Jonathan Morgan

 

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And So This Is Christmas

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By David Swanson

Source: Let’s Try Democracy

Christmas Day. Very late on this day and into the morning of the 26th in 1776, George Washington led a surprise night crossing of the Delaware River and bloody pre-dawn attack on unarmed hung-over-from-Christmas troops still in their underwear — a founding act of violence for the new nation to proudly remember as the progenitor of either the crimes of its “special” forces all over the globe or of peace on earth, I can never recall which.

A more useful memory is certainly that of the 1914 Christmas truce, which was actually more than one truce that year and in the subsequent years of the Great War. This is a true story of people not just managing to speak to each other but actually becoming friends with not just people they had a disagreement with but people who a moment before and for a longtime running had been trying to murder them. It’s a story of war enemies figuring out that the actual enemy is not any people but war itself. And they did it on Christmas. Maybe we can do something good on Christmas too.

Better still is the memory of Jesus, whether fictional character or real man, stripped of all the magical powers, but understood as an innovative and courageous nonviolent activist, or — if you prefer — engager in active nonviolence. In the account Terrence Rynne gives in Choosing Peace: The Catholic Church Returns to Gospel Nonviolence, edited by Marie Dennis, Jesus lived in a violent time and place, the people around him full of rage at the Roman occupiers and their proxy tyrants. (Maybe I should just say a violent time, as the place is still violent and full of rage at distant occupiers and their proxy tyrants.) Jesus predicted catastrophe if the violence was escalated, and he was not heeded, and he was proved right. But his unheeded advice has often been put to use and can still be put to use.

If an occupying soldier smacks you, you can calmly and courageously and lovingly look him in the eye and offer your other cheek. If he takes your coat, you can expose his cruelty by offering your shirt too. If he forces you to carry his pack for a mile, you can make him see your humanity by offering to carry it a second mile. Those of us in the heart of the empire can block distant operations and ask that only the person who has never done anything wrong fire the first missile. We can confront fictional humanitarian justifications with the principled clarity of Jesus who preferred to be killed rather than condone the use of violence against the Romans. We can reject the morality that places politeness above saving the world from climate chaos or nuclear war, with the righteous loving anger of a nonviolent activist overturning the tables of the oligarchs.

A still better memory, though we don’t quite have it and need to create it, is the memory of the cultures displaced by the war-mad Western culture that adopted Christianity and turned it into a powerful argument for both war and sloppy thinking through just war theory. I’m reading right now a book called Kayanerenko:Wa The Great Law of Peace by Kayanesenh Paul Williams, about the law of peace created among the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca who became collectively the Haudenosaunee. There is as much to be learned from cultures that did not invent imperialism as from those that invented both it and ways to resist it.

There is the possibility of something being done for peace. President Donald Trump claims he will remove all U.S. troops from Syria. There is very little correlation between what he says and what he does, but if he does this, we need to be prepared to thank him, to celebrate such an action, and to insist that bombing cease as well, and that actual humanitarian aid and unarmed peace workers replace the military force, and that weapons sales and gifts to the region be ended. Trump needs to be shocked by the support for this act from unexpected places.

The U.S. Congress is making a lot of noise about possibly for the very first time using the 1973 War Powers Resolution to end a war, the war on Yemen. We need to make sure this happens and then celebrate it, while insisting that the law be complied with, that all loopholes in it be closed, and that weapons sales and gifts to the region be ended. Similar talk is beginning about also ending the war on Afghanistan. Our responsibility there is the same.

If any of these wars can be ended, we need to rapidly build on that success to end more wars, and more wars, and the funding of the preparations for wars. The United Nations says that $11 billion per year could end the lack of clean drinking water globally. The United States is building a single ugly boat for $13 billion that has no defensive purpose but is likely to start wars. It’s time to change course.

Three years ago, the Pope said this to the U.S. Congress which stood and cheered for it:

“Being at the service of dialogue and peace also means being truly determined to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world. Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”

If anyone else had said that — I mean anyone else at all — he or she would have been denounced and mocked by members of Congress and by the corporate communications system in the United States. The Pope was cheered instead (and then ignored rather than heeded) not because he has established himself as a moral leader. It’s not that he hasn’t, so much as that we just don’t have those in U.S. corporate media; it isn’t done. The Pope was cheered and tolerated because he is understood to be speaking as a moral leader and is widely believed to be associated in some way with magical powers.

This makes the project that so many great Catholic peace activists are engaged in of trying to move the Catholic Church toward a complete rejection of war very valuable. It also makes it valuable for us all to use Christmas as an occasion to urge the consideration of morality in the question of war or peace, and to demand an end to weapons dealing and death dealing, base building and occupying, killing and maiming and destroying, and threatening fire and fury, in every corner of the world.

The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia

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By C. J. Hopkins

Source: Dissident Voice

As my regular readers will probably recall, according to my personal, pseudo-Chinese zodiac, 2017 was “The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken.” This year, having given it considerable thought, and having consulted the I Ching, and assorted other oracles, I’m designating 2018 “The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia.”

Not that 2017 wasn’t already paranoid. It was. It was completely paranoid, and otherwise clinically batshit crazy. But 2018 has been batshit crazier. It started out with the Internet companies that control the flow of information that most of us now perceive as “reality” launching an all-out War on Dissent, purportedly to protect the public from “divisive” and “confusing” content, and other forms of Russian “influencing.”

Twitter started sending out scary emails warning customers that there was “reason to believe” that they had “followed,” “retweeted,” or “liked the content of” accounts “connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization.” Facebook launched its own Ministry of Truth, manned by “a dedicated counter-terrorism team” of “former intelligence and law-enforcement officials” (also known as The Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial propaganda wing). Google stepped up its covert deranking of insufficiently Russia-hating and other “non-authoritative” websites.

This Orwellian corporate censorship campaign was enthusiastically welcomed by liberals and other Russia-and-Trump-obsessives, who by this time were already completely convinced that secret Russian Facebook agents were conspiring to transform the Western masses into zombified, Russia-loving neo-Nazis by means of some sort of irresistible Putin-Nazi hypno-technology that would melt their brains to oatmeal the second they clicked on one of those dancing cat GIFs.

But the paranoia was just getting started. By the Spring, professional Putin-Naziologists were issuing warnings explaining that anyone using words like “globalist,” “globalism,” or “global capitalism” was an anti-Semite. There was no such thing as “globalism,” they told us. “Globalist” was just Nazi codespeak for “JEW!” Moreover, anyone criticizing “the media,” or mentioning “banks,” “Wall Street,” or “Hollywood,” or, God help you, making fun of “George Soros,” was clearly a Russia-loving, Sieg-heiling Nazi.

Meanwhile, in London, Blairites were busy combing through six year-old Facebook posts in an effort to prove that Jeremy Corbyn had transformed the British Labour Party into his personal Putin-Nazi death cult. The Guardianpublished over one hundred articles smearing Corbyn as an anti-Semite and “linking” Labour to anti-Semitism. The BBC jacked up the Russia paranoia, doctoring Corbyn’s hat on TV to make it appear more insidiously Slavic. Owen Jones sprang to Corbyn’s defense, explaining that, yes, the Labour Party was a disgusting hive of anti-Semites, but they were doing their utmost to root out the Nazis, ban all criticism of the IDF, and reverse the mass exodus of Jews from London.

All this was happening in the wake of the notorious Novichok Porridge and Perfume Attacks, allegedly perpetrated by two totally incompetent, pot-smoking, prostitute-banging “assassins” that Putin personally dispatched to Salisbury to miserably fail to take out their target and then waltz around getting photographed by every CCTV camera in Great Britain. According to the corporate media, Putin tried to cover the crimes of these Jason Bourne-like GRU assassins by ordering his network of Putin-Nazi Twitter bots to flood the Internet with disinformation. Sky News captured and mercilessly interrogated one of these alleged “Twitter bots,” who it turned out was just a feisty British pensioner by the name of Ian, or at least that’s what Putin wants us to believe!

Back in America, millions of liberals and other Russia-and-Trump-obsessives were awaiting the Putin-Nazi Apocalypse, which despite the predictions of Resistance pundits had still, by the Summer, failed to materialize. The corporate media were speculating that Putin’s latest “secret scheme” was for Trump to destroy the Atlantic alliance by arriving late for the G7 meeting. Or maybe Putin’s secret scheme was to order Trump to sadistically lock up a bunch of migrants in metal cages, exactly as Obama had done before him … but these were special Nazi cages! And Trump was separating mothers and children, which, as General Michael Hayden reminded us, was more or less exactly the same as Auschwitz! Paul Krugman had apparently lost it, and was running around the offices of The New York Times shrieking that “America as we know it is finished!” Soros had been smuggled back into Europe to single-handedly thwart the Putin-Nazi plot to “dominate the West,” which he planned to do by canceling the Brexit (which Putin had obviously orchestrated) and overthrowing the elected government of Italy (which, according to Soros, was a Putin-Nazi front).

As if that wasn’t paranoia-inducing enough, suddenly, Trump flew off to Helisnki to personally meet with the Devil Himself. The neoliberal establishment went totally apeshit. A columnist for The New York Times predicted that Trump, Putin, Le Pen, the AfD, and other such Nazis were secretly forming something called “the Alliance of Authoritarian and Reactionary States,” and intended to disband the European Union, and NATO, and impose international martial law and start ethnically cleansing the West of migrants. That, or Trump and Putin were simply using the summit as cover to attend some Nazi-equestrian homosexual orgy, which The Times took pains to illustrate by creating a little animated film depicting Trump and Putin as lovers. In any event, Jonathan Chait was certain that Trump had been a “Russian intelligence asset” since at least as early as 1987, and was going to Helsinki to “meet his handler.”

In the wake of the summit, the neoliberal Resistance, like some multi-headed mythical creature in the throes of acute amphetamine psychosis, started spastically jabbering about “treason” and “traitors,” and more or less demanding that Trump be tried, and taken out and shot on the White House lawn. A frenzy of neo-McCarthyism followed. Liberals started accusing people of being “traitorous agents of Trump and Moscow,” and openly calling for a CIA coup, because we were “facing a national security emergency!” A devastating Russian cyber-attack was due to begin at any moment. National Intelligence Director Dan Coats personally assured the Associated Press that the little “Imminent Russia Attack” lights he had on his desk were “blinking red.”

Into this maelstrom of monomania boldly slunk the Charlottesville Nazis, who had resolved to reenact their infamous national white supremacist tikki torch conclave right across the street from the White House this year. The Resistance and Antifa had been promoting this event as the long anticipated Putin-Nazi uprising, and Kristallnacht II, and other such nonsense, so it was a bit of a letdown when only twenty or thirty rather timid Nazis turned up. It felt like maybe the Great Nazi Panic of 2018 was finally over.

But no, of course, it wasn’t over. The Nazis had just gone underground. Weeks later, right there on national television, a Jewish-Mexican-American Nazi was spotted transmitting secret Nazi hand signals to her Nazi co-conspirators. One of them, a U.S. Coast Guard member, then relayed the secret Nazi signal to … well, it wasn’t entirely clear, perhaps the Underground Putin-Nazi Navy, which was steaming toward the Florida coast hidden in the eye of Hurricane Florence.

By the Autumn, with the midterm elections fast approaching, the Putin-Nazi terrorists finally struck. It soon became clear that those secret hand signs were just parts of a much larger Trumpian conspiracy to “embolden” a couple of totally psychotic wackos to unleash their hatred on the public. Wacko Number One accomplished this by mailing a series of non-exploding explosive devices to various prominent members of the neoliberal Resistance. Wacko Number Two stormed into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered a lot of people. While the corporate media were unable to prove that Trump, Putin, or possibly Jeremy Corbyn, had personally “emboldened” these wackos, clearly, they had been “emboldened” by somebody, and thus were definitely domestic Putin-Nazi “terrorists,” and not just mentally disturbed individuals … like all the other mentally-disturbed individuals who go around murdering people all the time.

In November, at last, the tide began to turn. Despite the relentless “chaos campaign to undermine faith in American democracy” that the Russian bots and Nazis were waging, the Democrats managed to win back the House and rescue America from “the brink of fascism.” Apparently, the War on Dissent was working, because the millions of Black people that the Russians had brainwashed into not voting for Clinton in 2016 with those Jesus-doesn’t-like-masturbation memes had all miraculously been deprogrammed.

Liberals celebrated by singing hymns to Special Prosecutor Robert Muellerand compiling lists of people to subpoena to testify before congressional committees in what will someday be known as “the Hitlergate Hearings.” The New York Times even published a “roadmap” that Mueller and his team can follow to “send incriminating evidence directly to Congress,” thus protecting this “evidence” from the Justice Department, which is totally infested with Russians and Nazis!

But it’s not quite time for liberals to break out the vuvuzelas and Trump effigies yet … or to let up on the paranoia. The Putin-Nazi menace is still out there! The Internet is still literally crawling with all sorts of deviant, division sowing content! And now the Russian bots have brainwashed the French into staging these unruly Yellow Vest protests, and the Putin-Nazis have “weaponized” humor, and the economy, and religion, and Brexit, and Wikileaks, and pretty much everything else you can imagine. So this is no time to switch off the television, and log off the Internet, and start thinking critically … or to forget for one moment that THE NAZIS ARE COMING, and that A DEVASTATING RUSSIAN ATTACK IS IMMINENT!

So here’s wishing my Russia-and-Trump-obsessed readers a merry, teeth-clenching, anus-puckering Christmas and a somewhat mentally-healthier New Year! Me, I’m looking forward to discovering how batshit crazy things can get … I have a feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org Read other articles by C. J..

Endless War Has Been Normalized And Everyone Is Crazy

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Since I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump’s planned military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. I’m having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying.

Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria and the operations they’ve been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he’s bringing the troops home, and now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an unaccountable US military occupation he didn’t like, is now suddenly cheerleading for congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out.

“I would urge my colleagues in the Senate and the House, call people from the administration and explain this policy,” Graham recently told reporters on Capitol Hill. “This is the role of the Congress, to make administrations explain their policy, not in a tweet, but before Congress answering questions.”

“It is imperative Congress hold hearings on withdrawal decision in Syria — and potentially Afghanistan — to understand implications to our national security,” Graham tweeted today.

In an even marginally sane world, the fact that a nation’s armed forces are engaged in daily military violence would be cause for shock and alarm, and pulling those forces out of that situation would be viewed as a return to normalcy. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite. In an even marginally sane world, congressional oversight would be required to send the US military to invade countries and commit acts of war, because that act, not withdrawing them, is what’s abnormal. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite.

A hypothetical space alien observing our civilization for the first time would conclude that we are insane, and that hypothetical space alien would be absolutely correct. Have some Reese’s Pieces, hypothetical space alien.

It is absolutely bat shit crazy that we feel normal about the most powerful military force in the history of civilization running around the world invading and occupying and bombing and killing, yet are made to feel weird about the possibility of any part of that ending. It is absolutely bat shit crazy that endless war is normalized while the possibility of peace and respecting national sovereignty to any extent is aggressively abnormalized. In a sane world the exact opposite would be true, but in our world this self-evident fact has been obscured. In a sane world anyone who tried to convince you that war is normal would be rejected and shunned, but in our world those people make six million dollars a year reading from a teleprompter on MSNBC.

How did this happen to us? How did we get so crazy and confused?

I sometimes hear the analogy of sleepwalking used; people are sleepwalking through life, so they believe the things the TV tells them to believe, and this turns them into a bunch of mindless zombies marching to the beat of CIA/CNN narratives and consenting to unlimited military bloodbaths around the world. I don’t think this is necessarily a useful way of thinking about our situation and our fellow citizens. I think a much more useful way of looking at our plight is to retrace our steps and think about how everyone got to where they’re at as individuals.

We come into this world screaming and clueless, and it doesn’t generally get much better from there. We look around and we see a bunch of grownups moving confidently around us, and they sure look like they know what’s going on. So we listen real attentively to what they’re telling us about our world and how it works, not realizing that they’re just repeating the same things grownups told them when they were little, and not realizing that if any of those grownups were really honest with themselves they’re just moving learned concepts around inside a headspace that’s just as clueless about life’s big questions as the day it was born.

And that’s just early childhood. Once you move out of that and start learning about politics, philosophy, religion etc as you get bigger, you run into a whole bunch of clever faces who’ve figured out how to use your cluelessness about life to their advantage. You stumble toward adulthood without knowing what’s going on, and then confident-sounding people show up and say “Oh hey I know what’s going on. Follow me.” And before you know it you’re donating ten percent of your income to some church, addicted to drugs, in an abusive relationship, building your life around ideas from old books which were promoted by dead kings to the advantage of the powerful, or getting your information about the world from Fox News.

For most people life is like stumbling around in a dark room you have no idea how you got into, without even knowing what you’re looking for. Then as you’re reaching around in the darkness your hand is grasped by someone else’s hand, and it says in a confident-sounding voice, “I know where to go. Come with me.” The owner of the other hand doesn’t know any more about the room than you do really, they just know how to feign confidence. And it just so happens that most of those hands in the darkness are actually leading you in the service of the powerful.

That’s all mainstream narratives are: hands reaching out in the darkness of a confusing world, speaking in confident-sounding voices and guiding you in a direction which benefits the powerful. The largest voices belong to the rich and the powerful, which means those are the hands you’re most likely to encounter when stumbling around in the darkness. You go to school which is designed to indoctrinate you into mainstream narratives, you consume media which is designed to do the same, and most people find themselves led from hand to hand in this way all the way to the grave.

That’s really all everyone’s doing here, reaching out in the darkness of a confusing world and trying to find our way to the truth. It’s messy as hell and there are so many confident-sounding voices calling out to us giving us false directions about where to go, and lots of people get lost to the grabbing hands of power-serving narratives. But the more of us who learn to see through the dominant narratives and discover the underlying truths, the more hands there are to guide others away from the interests of the powerful and toward a sane society. A society in which people abhor war and embrace peace, in which people collaborate with each other and their environment, in which people overcome the challenges facing our species and create a beautiful world together.

People aren’t sleepwalking, they are being duped. Duped into insanity in a confusing, abrasive world where it’s hard enough just to get your legs underneath you and figure out which way’s up, let alone come to a conscious truth-based understanding of what’s really going on in the world. But the people doing the duping are having a hard time holding onto everyone’s hand, and their grip is slipping. We’ll find our way out of this dark room yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Truth Is What We Hide, Self-Serving Cover Stories Are What We Sell

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion.

We can summarize the current era in one sentence: truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell. Jean-Claude Juncker’s famous quote captures the essence of the era: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”

And when does it become serious? When the hidden facts of the matter might be revealed to the general public. Given the regularity of vast troves of well-hidden data being made public by whistleblowers and white-hat hackers, it’s basically serious all the time now, and hence the official default everywhere is: truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell.

The self-serving cover stories always tout the nobility of the elite issuing the PR: we in the Federal Reserve saved civilization by saving the Too Big To Fail Banks (barf); we in the corporate media do investigative reporting without bias (barf); we in central government only lie to protect you from unpleasant realities–it’s for your own good (barf); we in the NSA, CIA and FBI only lie because it’s our job to lie, and so on.

Three recent essays speak to the degradation of data and factual records in favor of self-serving cover stories and corrosive political correctness.

Why we stopped trusting elites (The Guardian)

“It’s not just that isolated individuals are unmasked as corrupt or self-interested (something that is as old as politics), but that the establishment itself starts to appear deceitful and dubious. The distinctive scandals of the 21st century are a combination of some very basic and timeless moral failings (greed and dishonesty) with technologies of exposure that expose malpractice on an unprecedented scale, and with far more dramatic results.

Perhaps the most important feature of all these revelations was that they were definitely scandals, and not merely failures: they involved deliberate efforts to defraud or mislead. Several involved sustained cover-ups, delaying the moment of truth for as long as possible.

(The selective coverage) “generated a sense of a media class who were adept at exposing others, but equally expert at concealing the truth of their own behaviours.

Several of the defining scandals of the past decade have been on a scale so vast that they exceed any individual’s responsibility. The Edward Snowden revelations of 2013, the Panama Papers leak of 2015 and the HSBC files (revealing organised tax evasion) all involved the release of tens of thousands or even millions of documents. Paper-based bureaucracies never faced threats to their legitimacy on this scale.”

From the Late Founder and Editor Robert Parry of the Consortium for Independent Journalism (via John S.P.)

When I was a young reporter, I was taught that there were almost always two sides to a story and often more. I was expected to seek out those alternative views, not dismiss them or pretend they didn’t exist. I also realized that finding the truth often required digging beneath the surface and not just picking up the convenient explanation sitting out in the open.

But the major Western news outlets began to see journalism differently. It became their strange duty to shut down questioning of the Official Story, even when the Official Story had major holes and made little sense, even when the evidence went in a different direction and serious analysts were disputing the groupthink.

Looking back over the past two decades, I wish I could say that the media trend that we detected in the mid-1990s had been reversed. But, if anything, it’s grown worse. The major Western news outlets now conflate the discrete difficulties from made-up “fake news” and baseless “conspiracy theories” with responsible dissenting analyses. All get thrown into the same pot and subjected to disdain and ridicule.

In academia, censorship and conformity have become the norm (Globe and Mail)

In truth, facts today are deemed controversial if they deviate from accepted narratives, and professors must self-censor out of fear of being condemned and losing their jobs.

Based on conversations I’ve had with colleagues still working in academia and from what I can tell about recent cases of censorship, the antagonism is primarily from left-leaning colleagues attacking other liberals.

These instances are indicative of a larger, worrisome trend – instead of debating contentious ideas, those in opposition to them throw words ending in “-phobic” around, shutting the conversation down and pretending they don’t exist.

For those who say ideas that denigrate members of society shouldn’t be entertained, silencing the debate doesn’t make hateful beliefs go away. In many cases, it isn’t controversial findings that pose a threat; the threat comes from the possibility that others will use these facts to justify discrimination. But it’s important that we distinguish between an idea and the researcher putting forth that idea, and the potential for bad behaviour.

With academics avoiding entire areas of research as a result, knowledge currently being produced is constrained, replaced by beliefs that are pleasant-sounding but biased, or downright nonsensical. The recent “grievance studies” investigation, led by academics Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, laid bare how bad the problem has become. The trio managed to get seven fake papers (but oh-so politically correct and hence “good to go”–CHS) accepted in high-ranking humanities journals.

In a consumerist-based culture accustomed to 24/7 selling of one self-serving story or another, the fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion. I’ve noticed a new twist on self-serving propaganda: an alternative opinion isn’t debated, it’s debunked, as if questioning the official narrative is by definition a “conspiracy theory” that can be “debunked” by repeating the official self-serving cover story enough times.

 

Of related interest:

Global Crisis: the Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka (July 25, 2012)

Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet? (July 25, 2012)

Orwell and Kafka Do America (March 24, 2015)

The Ghosts of 1968 (February 14, 2018)

 

The Evidence Pours In: Poverty Is Getting Much Worse In America

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By Paul Buchheit

Source: Occupy.com

A White House report recently proclaimed that the “War on Poverty is largely over and a success.” United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley said it was “ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America.”

Well-positioned Americans must talk like this, of course, because admitting the debilitating state of poverty in America might provoke feelings of guilt for 35 years of oppressive economic policies. Wealthier people need to take an honest look at the facts. They need to face reality as it sadly exists in America today.

1 in 7 Americans is Part of the World’s Poorest 10%

According to the Credit Suisse 2018 Global Wealth Databook, 34 million American adults are among the world’s poorest 10%. How is that possible? In a word, debt. In more excruciating words: stifling, misery-inducing, deadly amounts of debt for the poorest Americans. And it goes beyond dollars to the “deaths of despair” caused by the stresses of inferior health care coverage, stagnating incomes, and out-of-control inequality.

Numerous sources report on the rising debt for the poor half of America, especially for the lowest income group, and largely because of health care and education costs. Since 2008 consumer debt has risen almost 50 percent. The percentage of families with more debt than savings is higher now than at any time since 1962.

It could be argued that Scandinavian countries face the same degrees of debt as Americans. But far less of the debt is for health and education costs. And the Scandinavian safety net is renowned for its generous provisions for all citizens.

Half of us Are in or Near Poverty

$1 in expenses twenty years ago is now $1.25. $1 in earnings twenty years ago is now still $1.

More and more Americans are facing financial difficulty. Estimates of adults living from paycheck to paycheck range from half to 60 percent to 78 percent. Any sign of a recession would be devastating for most of us.

It’s estimated that a typical U.S. household needs about $60,000 annually to meet all expenses. That’s only manageable if two adults are working full-time for $15 per hour. Beyond that, little cushion exists. No American adult in the bottom 40% has more than $31,124 in total wealth, including house and car and savings (Table 3-4).

Booming Economy, Low Unemployment, and Other Deceptions

While 1 in 7 Americans is part of the world’s poorest 10%, nearly 3 in 7 Americans are part of the world’s richest 10%. The economy is booming for THEM. Yet the Wall Street Journal has the arrogance to claim that “Americans traditionally left behind…are reaping the benefits..”

How about the “jobs for everyone” fantasy? The official unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) itself, is based on employees “who did any work for pay or profit during the survey reference week.” The BLS workforce includes contingent and alternative employment arrangements that make up about 10% of the workforce. It includes part-time workers (even one hour a week!), who make up about 16% of the workforce. And, inexplicably, it fails to count as unemployed those who have given up looking for work – 4% more Americans than in the year 2000.

Many of today’s ‘gig’ jobs don’t pay a living wage, and most have no retirement or health benefits, no job security, no government regulations backing them, and usually a longer work day, with many people putting in 10- to 12-hour days for $13 per hour or less. According to a New York Times report, “41.7 million laborers – nearly a third of the American work force – earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.”

Safety Net Failures

While it’s true that the U.S. spends a greater percentage of its GDP on social safety net programs than developing countries, Americans generally have to face much higher costs for housing, heating, transportation, child care, and other basic expenses.

Beyond this, there are significant shortcomings in American social protections, as pointed out by the UN. These include the “shockingly high number of children living in poverty” and the “reliance on criminalization to conceal the underlying poverty problem.” Furthermore, with the call for work requirements comes the realization that the job market for the poorest Americans is “extraordinarily limited.”

Poverty: Not Just a Number

Poverty is living without health care, and choosing the life-threatening alternative of opioid painkillers. Poverty is the stress of overwhelming debt; the steady decline of jobs that pay enough to support a family; the inability to afford a move to a desired neighborhood; the deadening impact of inequality on physical and mental well-being.

The United Nations describes America as a nation near the bottom of the developed world in safety net support and economic mobility, with its citizens living “shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies,” with the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, the world’s highest incarceration rate, and the highest obesity levels.

Low-income Americans are often surrounded by food deserts, with insufficient access to clean water and sanitation, and with the pollution levels of third-world countries. The poorest among us are even susceptible – unbelievably – to rare tropical diseases and once-eradicated scourges like hookworm.

The extreme levels of American poverty and inequality are ripping apart once-interdependent communities with mental health and homelessness problems, and with a surge in drug and alcohol and suicide“deaths of despair.”

Part of the definition of poverty is “the state of being inferior in quality.” As one of the most unequal nations in the entire world, America is also, in many ways, one of the most poverty-stricken.