The ‘Values,’ ‘Vision,’ and ‘Democracy’ of an Inauthentic Opposition

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Reid Mukai

Average Americans, whose economic survival is threatened, have no political party to represent them, including deceptive Democrats who claim to be their champions and blame others when their deception fails, says Paul Street.

By Paul Street

Never underestimate the capacity of the United States’ Inauthentic Opposition Party, the corporate Democrats, for self-congratulatory delusion and the externalization of blame.

Look, for example, at the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) recently filed 66-page lawsuit against Russia, WikiLeaks, and the 2016 Donald Trump campaign. The document accuses Russia of “mount[ing] a brazen attack on the American democracy,” “destabilize[ing] the U.S. political environment” on Trump’s (and Russia’s) behalf, and “interfering with our democracy….”

“The [RussiaGate] conspiracy,” the DNC Complaint says, “undermined and distorted the DNC’s ability to communicate the [Democratic] party’s values and vision to the American electorate” and “sowed discord within the Democratic Party at a time when party unity was essential…”

Yes, Russia, like numerous other nations living under the global shadow of the American Superpower, may well have tried to have some surreptitious say in 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Why wouldn’t the Kremlin have done that, given the very real and grave threats Washington and its Western NATO allies have posed for many years to post-Soviet-era Russian security and peace in Eastern Europe?)

Still, charging Russia with interfering with US-“American democracy” is like me accusing the Washington Capital’s star left winger Alex Ovechkin of interfering with my potential career as a National Hockey League player (I’m middle aged and can’t skate backwards). The U.S. doesn’t have a functioning democracy to undermine, as numerous careful studies (see this,this,this,this,this,this,this,this, and this) have shown.

We have, rather, a corporate and financial oligarchy, an open plutocracy. U.S.-Americans get to vote, yes, but the nation’s “unelected dictatorship of money” reigns nonetheless in the United States, where, as leading liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) find, “government policy…reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.”

Our Own Oligarchs

Russia and WikiLeaks “destabilized the U.S. political environment”? Gee, how about the 20 top oligarchic U.S. mega-donors who invested more than $500 million combined in disclosed campaign contributions (we can only guess at how much “dark,” that is undisclosed, money they gave) to candidates and political organizations in the 2016 election cycle? The 20 largest organizational donors also gave a total of more than $500 million. The foremost plutocratic election investors included hard right-wing billionaires like casino owner Sheldon Adelson ($83 million disclosed to Republicans and right-wing groups), hedge-fund manager Paul Singer ($26 million to Republicans and the right), hedge fund manager Robert Mercer ($26 million) and packaging mogul Richard Uihlein ($24 million).

How about the multi-billionaire Trump’s own real estate fortune, which combined with the remarkable free attention the corporate media oligopoly granted him to help catapult the orange-tinted fake-populist beast past his more traditional Republican primary opponents? And what about the savagely unequal distribution of wealth and income in Barack Obama’s America, so extreme in the wake of the Great Recession that Hillary’s primary campaign rival Bernie Sanders could credibly report that the top tenth of the upper U.S.1% possessed nearly as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90%? Such extreme disparity helped doom establishment, Wall Street- and Goldman Sachs-embroiled candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Mrs. Clinton in 2016. Russia and WikiLeaks did not create that deep, politically- and neoliberal-policy-generated socioeconomic imbalance.

Double Vision

And just what were the Democratic Party “values and vision” that Russia, Trump, and WikiLeaks supposedly prevented the DNC and the Clinton team from articulating in 2016? As the distinguished political scientist and money-politics expert Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen noted in an important study released three months ago, the Clinton campaign “emphasized candidate and personal issues and avoided policy discussions to a degree without precedent in any previous election for which measurements exist….it deliberately deemphasized issues in favor of concentrating on what the campaign regarded as [Donald] Trump’s obvious personal weaknesses as a candidate.” Strangely enough, the Twitter-addicted reality television star Trump had a lot more to say about policy than the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a wonkish Yale Law graduate.

The Democrats “values and vision” in 2016 amounted pretty much to the accurate but hardly inspiring or mass-mobilizing notion that Donald Trump was an awful person who was unqualified for the White House. Clinton ran almost completely on candidate character and quality. This was a blunder of historic proportions, given Clinton’s own highly problematic character brand. Any campaign needs a reasonably strong policy platform to stand on in case of candidate difficulties.

By Ferguson, Jorgenson, and Chen’s account, Hillary’s peculiar policy silence was about U.S. oligarchs’ campaign money. Thanks to candidate Trump’s bizarre nature and his declared isolationism and nationalism, Clinton achieved remarkable campaign finance success with normally Republican-affiliated capitalist sectors less disposed to abide the standard, progressive-sounding policy rhetoric of Democratic Party candidates than their more liberal counterparts.

One ironic but “fateful consequence” of her curious connection to conservative business interests was her “strategic silence about most important matters of public policy. … Misgivings of major contributors who worried that the Clinton campaign message lacked real attractions for ordinary Americans were rebuffed. The campaign,” Ferguson, Jorgenson, and Chen wrote, “sought to capitalize on the angst within business by vigorously courting the doubtful and undecideds there, not in the electorate.”

Other Clinton mistakes included failing to purchase television ads in Michigan, failing to set foot in Wisconsin after the Democratic National Convention, and getting caught telling wealthy New York City campaign donors that Trump’s white supporters were “a basket of” racist, sexist, nativist, and homophobic “deplorables.” This last misstep was a Freudian slip of the neoliberal variety. It reflected and advanced the corporate Democrats’ longstanding alienation of and from the nation’s rural and industrial and ex-industrial “heartland.”

Fake Progressives

As left historian Nancy Fraser noted after Trump was elected, the Democrats, since at least the Bill Clinton administration, had joined outwardly progressive forces like feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights to “financial capitalism.” This imparted liberal “charisma” and “gloss” to “policies that …devastated…what were once middle-class lives” by wiping out manufacturing, weakening unions, slashing wages, and increasing the “precarity of work.”

To make matters worse, Fraser rightly added, the “progressive neoliberal” blue-and digital-zone Democrats “compounded” the “injury of deindustrialization” with “the insult of progressive moralism,” which rips red-and analog-zone whites as culturally retrograde (recall candidate Obama’s problematic 2008 reflection on how rural and small-town whites “cling to religion and guns”) and yet privileged by the simple color of their skin.

Such insults from elite, uber-professional class neo-liberals like Obama (Harvard Law) and the Clintons (Yale Law) would sting less in the nation’s “flyover zones” if the those uttering them had not spent their sixteen years in the White House governing blatantly in accord with the wishes of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the leading multinational corporations. Like Bill Clinton’s two terms, the Obama years were richly consistent with Sheldon Wolin’s early 2008 description of the Democrats as an “inauthentic opposition” whose dutiful embrace of “centrist precepts” meant they would do nothing to “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards” or “significantly alter the direction of society.”

The fake-“progressive” Obama presidency opened with the expansion of Washington’s epic bailout of the very parasitic financial elites who recklessly sparked the Great Recession (this with no remotely concomitant expansion of federal assistance to the majority middle- and working-class victims), the abandonment of campaign pledges to restore workers’ right to organize (through the immediately forgotten Employee Free Choice Act), and the kicking of Single Payer health care advocates to the curb as Obama worked with the big drug and insurance syndicates to craft a corporatist, profit-friendly health insurance reform. Obama’s second term ended with him doggedly (if unsuccessfully) championing the arch-authoritarian global-corporatist Trans Pacific Partnership.

This Goldman Sachs and Citigroup-directed policy record was no small part of what demobilized the Democrats’ mass electoral base in ways that “destabilized the U.S. political environment” to the benefit of the reactionary populist Trump, whose Mercer family-backed proto-fascistic strategist and Svengali Steve Bannon was smartly attuned to the Democrats’ elitist class problem.

There was a major 2016 presidential candidate who ran with genuinely progressive “values and vision” – Bernie Sanders. The most remarkable finding in Ferguson, Jorgenson, and Chen’s study is that the self-declared “democratic socialist” Sanders came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic presidential nomination with no support from Big Business. The small-donor Sanders campaign was “without precedent in American politics not just since the New Deal, but across virtually the whole of American history … a major presidential candidate waging a strong, highly competitive campaign whose support from big business was essentially zero.”

Sanders was foiled by the big-money candidate Clinton’s advance control of the Democratic National Committee and convention delegates. Under a formal funding arrangement it worked up with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in late September of 2015, the depressing “lying neoliberal warmonger” Hillary’s campaign was granted advance control of all the DNC’s “strategic decisions.” The Democratic Party’s presidential caucuses and primaries were rigged against Sanders in ugly ways that provoked a different lawsuit last year – a class-action suit against the DNC on behalf of Sanders’ supporters. The complaint was dismissed by a federal judge who ruled on the side of DNC lawyers by agreeing that the DNC was within its rights to violate their party’s charter and bylaws by selecting its candidate in advance of the primaries.

How was that for the noble “values and vision” that “American democracy” inspires atop the not-so leftmost of the nation’s two major and electorally viable political parties?

Under Cover of Russia-gate

That’s what “sowed discord within the Democratic Party at a time when party unity was essential…” Russia didn’t do it. Neither did WikiLeaks or the Trump campaign. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party establishment – themselves funded by major U.S. oligarchs like San Francisco hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer– did that on their own.

Could Sanders – the most popular politician in the U.S. (something rarely reported in a “mainstream” corporate media that could barely cover his giant campaign rallies even as it obsessed over Trump’s every bizarre Tweet) – have defeated the orange-tinted beast in the general election? Perhaps, though much of the oligarchic funding Hillary got would have gone to Trump if “socialist” Bernie had been the Democratic nominee. It is unlikely that Sanders could have accomplished much as president in a nation long controlled by the capitalist oligarchy in numerous ways that go far beyond campaign finance alone.

Meanwhile, under the cover of RussiaGate, the still-dismal and dollar-drenched corporate-imperial Democrats seem content to continue tilting to the center-right, purging Sanders-style progressives from the party’s leadership and citing the party’s special election victories (Doug Jones and Conor Lamb) against deeply flawed and Trump-backed Republicans in two bright-red voting districts (the state of Alabama and a fading Pennsylvania canton) as proof that tepid neoliberal centrism is still (even after Hillary’s stunning defeat) the way to go.

Along the way, the Inauthentic Opposition’s candidate roster for the upcoming Congressional mid-term election is loaded with an extraordinary number of contenders with U.S. military and intelligence backgrounds, consistent with Congressional Democrats repeated votes to give massive military and surveillance-state funds and power to a president they consider (accurately enough) unbalanced and dangerous.

The trick, the neoliberal “CIA Democrats” think, is to run conservative, Wall Street-backed imperial and National Security State veterans who pretend (see Eric Draitser’s recent piece on “How Clintonites Are Manufacturing Faux Progressive Congressional Campaigns”) to be aligned with majority-progressive left-of-center policy sentiments and values. It’s still very much their party.

Whatever happens during the next biennial electoral extravaganza, “the crucial fact” remains, in Wolin’s words nine years ago, “that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf” in the United States – the self-declared homeland and headquarters of global democracy.

Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of seven books. His latest is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).

Mass Deception and the Prelude to World War

Posted on April 10, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Defend Democracy Press

In Libya, NATO bombed a path to Tripoli to help its proxy forces on the ground oust Gaddafi. Tens of thousands lost their lives and that country’s social fabric and infrastructure now lies in ruins. Gaddafi was murdered and his plans to assert African independence and undermine Western (not least French) hegemony on that continent have been rendered obsolete.

In Syria, the US, Turkey, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been helping to arm militants. The Daily Telegraph’s March 2013 article “US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’” reported that 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia had been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels. The New York Times March 2013 article “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With CIA Aid” stated that Arab governments and Turkey had sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters. This aid included more than 160 military cargo flights.

Sold under the notion of a spontaneous democratic uprising against a tyrannical political leader, Syria is little more than an illegal war for capital, empire and energy. The West and its allies have been instrumental in organising the war as elaborated by Tim Anderson in his book ‘The Dirty War on Syria’.

Over the last 15 years or so, politicians and the media have been manipulating popular sentiment to get an increasingly war-fatigued Western public to support ongoing wars under the notion of protecting civilians or a bogus ‘war on terror’. They spin a yarn about securing women’s rights or a war on terror in Afghanistan, removing despots from power in Iraq, Libya or Syria or protecting human life, while then going on to attack or help destabilise countries, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.

Emotive language designed to instill fear about potential terror attacks in Europe or myths about humanitarianism intervention are used as a pretext to wage imperialist wars in mineral-rich countries and geostrategically important regions.

Part of the battle for the public’s hearts and minds is to keep people confused. They must be convinced to regard these wars and conflicts as a disconnected array of events and not as the planned machinations of empire. The ongoing disinformation narrative about Russian aggression is part of the strategy. Ultimately, Russia (and China) is the real and increasingly imminent target: Moscow has stood in the way of the West’s plans in Syria and both Russia and China are undermining the role of the dollar in international trade, a lynchpin of US power.

The countries of the West are effectively heading for war with Russia but relatively few among the public seem to know or even care. Many are oblivious to the slaughter that has already been inflicted on populations with the help of their taxes and governments in far-away lands. With the reckless neoconservative warmonger John Bolton now part of the Trump administration, it seems we could be hurtling towards major war much faster than previously thought.

Most of the public remains blissfully ignorant of the psy-ops being directed at them through the corporate media. Given recent events in the UK and the ramping up of anti-Russia rhetoric, if ordinary members of the public think that Theresa May or Boris Johnson ultimately have their best interests at heart, they should think again. The major transnational corporations based on Wall Street and in the City of London are the ones setting Anglo-US policy agendas often via the Brookings Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, International Crisis Group, Chatham House, etc.

The owners of these companies, the capitalist class, have off-shored millions of jobs as well as their personal and company tax liabilities to boost their profits and have bankrupted economies. We see the results in terms of austerity, unemployment, powerlessness, privatization, deregulation, banker control of economies, corporate control of food and seeds, the stripping away of civil liberties, increased mass surveillance and wars to grab mineral resources and ensure US dollar hegemony. These are the interests the politicians serve.

It’s the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to this class, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements, which open the gates for plunder, or through coercion and militarism, which merely tear them down.

Whether it is the structural violence of neoliberal economic policies or actual military violence, the welfare of ordinary folk around the world does not enter the equation. In an imposed oil-thirsty, war-driven system of globalised capitalism and over-consumption that is wholly unnecessary and is stripping the planet bare, the bottom line is that ordinary folk – whether workers in the West, farmers in India or civilians displaced en masse in war zones like Syria – must be bent according to the will of Western capital.

We should not be fooled by made-for-media outpourings of morality about good and evil that are designed to create fear, outrage and support for more militarism and resource-grab wars. The shaping of public opinion is a multi-million-dollar industry.

Take for instance the mass harvesting of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica to shape the outcomes of the US election and the Brexit campaign. According to journalist Liam O’Hare, its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) has conducted ‘behavioural change’ programmes in over 60 countries and its clients have included the British Military of Defence, the US State Department and NATO. According to O’Hare, the use of the media to fool the public is one of SCL’s key selling points.

Among its activities in Europe have been campaigns targeting Russia. The company has “sweeping links” with Anglo-American political and military interests. In the UK, the interests of the governing Conservative Party and military-intelligence players are brought together via SCL: board members include “an array of Lords, Tory donors, ex-British army officers and defense contractors.”

O’Hare says it is clear is that all SCL’s activities have been inextricably linked to its Cambridge Analytica arm. He states:

“International deception and meddling is the name of the game for SCL. We finally have the most concrete evidence yet of shadowy actors using dirty tricks in order to rig elections. But these operators aren’t operating from Moscow… they are British, Eton educated, headquartered in the City of London and have close ties to Her Majesty’s government”

So, what are we to make of the current anti-Russia propaganda we witness regarding the nerve agent incident in Salisbury and the failure of the British government to provide evidence to demonstrate Russian culpability? The relentless accusations by Theresa May and Boris Johnson that have been parroted across the corporate media in the West indicate that the manipulation of public perception is everything and facts count for little. It is alarming given what is at stake – the escalation of conflict between the West and a major nuclear power.

Welcome to the world of mass deception à la Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels.

US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and have to be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.

Although the West’s political leaders are manipulating, subduing and distracting the public in true Lippmannesque style, they aren’t ‘saving’ anyone from anything: their reckless actions towards Russia could lead towards a war that could wipe out all life on the planet.

* Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

The New York Times takes on the social media “hordes”

Posted on April 6, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Andre Damon

Source: WSWS.org

Since late 2016, the New York Times, working together with the US intelligence agencies and the Democratic Party, has been engaged in a campaign to promote internet censorship in the guise of targeting “fake news” and “Russian propaganda.”

In waging this campaign, the Times’ motives are both political and pecuniary. Speaking for a ruling elite that sees the growth of social opposition on all sides and expects far worse, the Times has promoted censorship to remove opportunities for the working class to organize outside the framework of official politics.

In addition, the Times, for the most part a clearinghouse for staid and predigested state propaganda, is seeking to carve back market share it has lost to online publications that carry out genuine investigative journalism and oppose the lies peddled by the US government and media.

In recent months, this campaign has entered a new and malignant phase. Increasingly dropping the pretext of “Russian meddling,” the Times is now directly attacking its main target: the fact that the internet, and in particular social media, helps empower the population to access oppositional sources of news and have their voices heard in public.

Among the Times’ latest broadsides against freedom of expression is an article by its “State of the Art” columnist Farhad Manjoo headlined “For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.” The piece, supposedly written as a first-hand account of a journalist turning off social media and only reading the news from print newspapers, is—in an unusually literal sense—a piece of lying propaganda from beginning to end.

As the Columbia Journalism Review pointed out, during the period in which he supposedly stopped using social media, Manjoo managed to post on Twitter virtually every day. “Manjoo remained a daily, active Twitter user throughout the two months he claims to have gone cold turkey, tweeting many hundreds of times, perhaps more than 1,000,” the Review pointed out.

Manjoo’s blatant falsifying of his own social media use is hardly the most sinister aspect of his piece. However, it expresses something essential about the Times’ notion of “reporting”: its writers feel they can say anything and get away with it, so long as their claims conform to the dictates of the establishment and the intelligence agencies whose interests determine what is and what is not reported in the US media.

The columnist’s dishonesty about his own activities provides much needed context for his article as a whole, which is little more than a long-form denunciation of a reading public that feels compelled to obtain its news from sources not massaged by the CIA-vetted hacks at the New York Times. In the process, Manjoo gives his unqualified blessings to the pronouncements of his own publication and castigates anyone who would question them as a member of an ignorant “herd,” whose opinions ought to be suppressed.

During his pretended sojourn into the desert of print media, Manjoo said he learned to value having the news spoon-fed to him by “professionals,” without having to worry about whether what he was reading was true or false.

As he puts it, “It takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context… This was the surprise blessing of the newspaper. I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.”

He continues, “Now I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.”

Here, we assume, the reader is supposed to heave a sigh of relief. How soothing not to have to think for oneself! The author’s surrender of his critical faculties supposedly did wonders for his health and general well being. Not only did he become “less anxious,” but he had the time to “take up pottery” and “became a more attentive husband and father”! Wonderful! And so much more wonderful if he hadn’t actually made up the story about his abstinence from social media.

Manjoo’s condemnation of critical thinking aside, the real core of the piece is a scathing denunciation of the public, which he describes as a “herd” and a “crowd,” and which, moreover, is empowered to express its rotten opinions by the sinister power of social media.

“Avoid social [media],” he declares. “Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda.”

The statements posted by the “online hordes” are not “quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it,” Manjoo adds. “On social networks … People don’t just post stories—they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right.”

People are posting “their takes on stories!” The horror! Instead of just consuming the news as worked over by the Times, complete with big lies (“weapons of mass destruction”) and small ones (its technology columnist giving up Twitter for two months), social media allows users to critically examine the stories they read. In other words, the internet allows the public to bypass the monopoly of “professional” falsifiers and “gatekeepers” like Manjoo, Judith Miller, Thomas Friedman and the like.

The author’s only hope is that “the government” and “Facebook” will soon “fix” this problem. The clear implication is that once social media is “fixed,” the “herd,” “crowd,” and “hordes” will no longer be allowed to pollute cyberspace by questioning the pronouncements of the New York Times. Manjoo’s self-righteous pontifications, worthy of Polonius (if Polonius were also a liar), would be comical if they were not so ominous. Faced with a growing wave of social struggles, the ruling elite is preparing censorship on a massive scale. Having succeeded in dramatically reducing traffic to left-wing web sites, the technology giants and intelligence agencies are proceeding to the next phase: censoring all expressions of social opposition, in particular by the working class, on social media.

Spies, Lies and War Propaganda: The Making of Another Conspiracy Theory

Posted on March 23, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

What is insane is how Western governments and the mainstream media (MSM) is that they can tell you that they have the proof that their enemies committed an act of war, or how they interfere in the affairs of other countries but cannot release the evidence due to national security issues or they just outright know in their gut instincts that their enemies did whatever it is that they did, and then they expect us to believe them. While we in the alternative media can show you mountains of evidence including government documents, photos, quotes from world leaders, reports and analysis from respected journalists and researchers from all over the world who represent the facts, yet we are called conspiracy theorists by the same Western governments and the MSM.

Russia is now accused of poisoning another former Russian spy, this time it’s Sergei Skripal (the late Alexander Litvinenko was the last victim) and his daughter Yulia who was living in the Salisbury section of the UK with a military-grade nerve agent produced by..drum roll, please… Russia! How convenient, especially during a time when the U.S. and its allies accuse the Syrian government of launching chemical attacks on civilians, but in reality (which has been proven time and time again) it was the US-backed terrorists or who they call the “rebel forces” who launched the chemical attacks. It’s amazing how Western governments and the MSM constantly link their adversaries to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). For example, The New York Times published an article on February 27th titled ‘U.N. Links North Korea to Syria’s Chemical Weapons Program’ suggesting that North Korea shipped supplies to Syria to produce chemical weapons due to an investigation by United Nations:

North Korea has been shipping supplies to the Syrian government that could be used in the production of chemical weapons, United Nations experts contend.

The evidence of a North Korean connection comes as the United States and other countries have accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons on civilians, including recent attacks on civilians in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta using what appears to have been chlorine gas.

The supplies from North Korea include acid-resistant tiles, valves and thermometers, according to a report by United Nations investigators. North Korean missile technicians have also been spotted working at known chemical weapons and missile facilities inside Syria, according to the report, which was written by a panel of experts who looked at North Korea’s compliance with United Nations sanctions

O.K. So now North Korea is shipping supplies to help the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad to produce chemical weapons? What is interesting about the accusation is that The New York Times reviewed the report, but would not release it themselves. The authors and other members of the UN security council would also not comment on the report:

The possible chemical weapons components were part of at least 40 previously unreported shipments by North Korea to Syria between 2012 and 2017 of prohibited ballistic missile parts and materials that could be used for both military and civilian purposes, according to the report, which has not been publicly released but which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Neither the report’s authors nor members of the United Nations Security Council who have seen it would comment, and neither would the United States’ mission to the international agency. It is unclear when, or even whether, the report will be released

Of course they are not even sure if they would release the report to the public because it would most likely be criticized by the alternative media who would view it as a propaganda plot to demonize Kim Jung-Un. We can call The New York Times article for what it really is, and that is fake news. North Korea would not get involved in a Middle East conflict because it would not be in their interest, politically or economically. It would give the US and South Korean governments more reasons to threaten North Korea with a military strike if something like that was true, but it’s not. Kim Jung -Un does not have a relationship with ISIS and other terrorist groups who have been launching chemical attacks throughout Syria since the start of the conflict, the U.S. and its allies do. So it’s ludicrous accusation.

On March 12th, British Prime Minister Theresa May spoke at the House of Commons about the Skripal incident in Salisbury, UK:

It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as ‘Novichok’.

Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down; our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so; Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations; the Government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal

The case of Sergei Skripal is becoming another farfetched conspiracy theory just like the Alexander Litvinenko case. If you remember Alexander Litvinenko who allegedly drank a cup tea at a business meeting with two other Russians (who were charged with his murder) which contained a fatal dose of Polonium-210. The editorial director of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo wrote an article on the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko titled ‘The Craziest Conspiracy Theory of Them All: The British government’s report on the death of Alexander Litvinenko reads like a bad thriller’:

To those of us who grew up during the cold war years, it’s just like old times again: Russian plots to subvert the West and poison our precious bodily fluids are apparently everywhere. Speaking of poisoning plots: the latest Russkie conspiracy – and the most imaginative by far – was the alleged assassination by poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko , a former agent of the Russian intelligence services who fled to the West to become a professional anti-Russian propagandist and conspiracy theorist with a talent for the improbable. According to his fantastic worldview, the many terrorist attacks that have occurred in Russia have all been committed by … Vladimir Putin. Aside from championing the Chechen Islamo-terrorists who actually committed these crimes, Litvinenko’s stock-in-trade was an elaborate conspiracy theory in which he regularly accused Putin of blowing up Russian apartment buildings and murdering schoolchildren and then diverting attention from his own nefarious plots by blaming those lovable Chechens. Not very believable – unless one is predisposed to believe anything, so long as it casts discredit on those satanic Russians.

The conspiracy theory promulgated by the British government – and now memorialized in this official report – surpasses anything the deceased fantasist might have come up with. According to the Brits, Litvinenko was poisoned on British soil whilst imbibing a cup of tea spiked with a massive dose of radioactive polonium-210 – and, since Russia is a prime source of this rare substance, and since the Russians were supposedly out to get Litvinenko, the FSB – successor to the KGB – is named as the “probable” culprit.

Looking at the report, one has to conclude that they don’t make propaganda the way they used to: the certitude of, say, a J. Edgar Hoover or a Robert Welch has given way to the tepid ambiguity of Lord Robert Owen, the author of this report, whose verdict of “probably” merely underscores the paucity of what passes for evidence in this case

Raimondo made his case with a common-sense approach to the conspiracy theory:

To begin with, if the Russians wanted to off Litvinenko, why would they poison him with a substance that left a radioactive trail traceable from Germany to Heathrow airport – and, in the process, contaminating scores of hotel rooms, offices, planes, restaurants, and homes? Why not just put a bullet through his head? It makes no sense.

But then conspiracy theories don’t have to make sense: they just have to take certain assumptions all the way to their implausible conclusions. If one starts with the premise that Putin and the Russians are a Satanic force capable of anything, and incompetent to boot, then it’s all perfectly “logical” – in the Bizarro World, at any rate.

The idea that Litvinenko was a dangerous opponent of the Russian government who had to be killed because he posed a credible threat to the existence of the regime is laughable: practically no one inside Russia knew anything about him, and as for his crackpot “truther” theories about how Putin was behind every terrorist attack ever carried out within Russia’s borders – to assert that they had any credence outside of the Western media echo chamber is a joke. So there was no real motive for the FSB to assassinate him, just as there is none for the FBI to go after David Ray Griffin

To assassinate Litvinenko with a dose of radioactive polonium-210 in his cup of tea is an incredibly ridiculous allegation by both the British and American establishment. Another anti-Putin crusader is the Hudson Institute’s own senior fellow, David Satter who wrote ‘The Russian State of Murder Under Putin’ in 2016 and said:

It is now imperative not only for the West but for the future of Russia that the Litvinenko inquiry set a precedent for the objective international review of the cases of political terrorism in Russia. These include the bloody sieges at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater in 2002 and at a school in Beslan in 2004, the assassinations of journalists and opposition leaders and, above all, the deadly 1999 apartment bombings that helped bring Mr. Putin to power.

In the Litvinenko case, the alleged assassins, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, were accused by the British inquiry of slipping polonium-210 into Litvinenko’s tea. A radioactive trail was left all over London. Traces of polonium were found in Mr. Lugovoi’s hotel room, at a sushi restaurant where Litvinenko dined with the two men, and on the seat occupied by Mr. Lugovoi on a British Airlines flight from Moscow to London

Satter’s view concerning Putin’s killing machine apparatus that uses chemical weapons to silence its opposition is pure nonsense. There are many ways to murder an individual if they really wanted to, so why would they use ‘Novichok’ a nerve agent that can be traced back to Russia? Novichok was produced in the former Soviet Union and then in Russia until 1993.

So who would benefit from such an attack? Putin himself? not really, it would somehow benefit the Anglo-American establishment by continuing the demonization of the Russian government. Sergei Skripal, was a former Russian military intelligence colonel who was found guilty of passing state secrets to the U.K. and was sentenced to 13 years in prison back in 2006. If Putin really wanted Skripal dead, he would have had him executed while in custody. The Western powers including the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France want to maintain their “International Order” as Prime Minister May had mentioned in a statement she gave last Monday:

“The UK does not stand alone in confronting Russian aggression. In the last 24 hours I have spoken to President (Donald) Trump, Chancellor (Angela) Merkel and President (Emmanuel) Macron. We have agreed to cooperate closely in responding to this barbaric act and to co-ordinate our efforts to stand up for the rules based international order which Russia seeks to undermine”

So Who Could Have Possibly Poisoned Sergei Skripal and his Daughter?

On March 4th, 2018 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench by a shopping centre in Salisbury by a doctor and nurse who happened to be passing by (what are the chances that happening?). It was soon discovered by a medical staff at the Salisbury District Hospital that Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent. They both remain in critical condition. Three police officers investigating the scene were also hospitalized. The poison discovered on the Skripal family was apparently ‘Novichok.’ According to a New York Times report titled ‘In Poisoning of Sergei Skripal, Russian Ex-Spy, U.K. Sees Cold War Echoes’ basically says Russia is the culprit:

With its echoes of stranger-than-fiction plots from the Cold War and earlier episodes from the Putin era, the case threatens to worsen the already tense relations between the West and a Russian government that has annexed Crimea, destabilized eastern Ukraine and propped up the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, all while being accused of disrupting elections and sowing discord within Western democracies.

“This is a form of soft war that Russia is now waging against the West,” said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the British Parliament. British officials have accused the Kremlin of only one assassination on British soil in recent years, but the Russian government has been suspected of being behind numerous other mysterious deaths in Britain and elsewhere.

In Mr. Litvinenko’s case, the weapon is believed to have been a poisoned teapot later found to contain polonium 210, a radioactive isotope; his death was slow and agonizing

Russia along with several other nations are not following the globalist’s blueprint because they want their sovereignty respected and therefore it is seen by the West as a threat to its World Order. If the Russian agents did poison Sergei Skripal (which is obviously, a false accusation) with a deadly military-grade nerve agent that can spread throughout the Salisbury community and traced back to Russia, then they must be the most idiotic and most incompetent intelligence agency on planet earth. There is no evidence of the Russian government being involved in Mr. Skripal’s poisoning, in fact, it sounds like a false-flag attack by using Mr. Skripal to blame Russia. Any of the Western intelligence agencies including MI6 or the CIA could have obtained the nerve agent or something close to it in order to poison Skripal. It is also most likely that we would never find out who actually committed the crimes against Skripal and Litvinenko, but according to the West, its Russia. The Alexander Litvinenko story told by the British government and the MSM (in this case, BBC News) is like a bad thriller and so does the Sergei Skripal case. Both cases will most likely make it to the big screen in the future since many of films produced by Hollywood is based on propaganda against America’s enemies including Russia (many Hollywood films, especially since the Cold War usually portray Russia as the enemy) and recently, North Korea made it to the big screen with the 2013 film, ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ about a North Korean terrorist organization who takes over the White House (yes, another really bad thriller). Rest assured, the Sergey Skripal case as well as the murder of Alexander Litvinenko will most likely make its way to the big screen someday.

The UK government along with its Western partners are spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories, but the MSM will cover their lies and deceit and tell you that it is the alternative media who needs to be censored because we are the ones who are spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. The American and the British governments accused Saddam Hussein of having “weapons of mass destruction” which as we all know, was not only a lie, but a lie that destroyed Iraq. Sooner or later, the facts of the Sergei Skripal case will show the world who are the liars and the conspiracy theorists really are, and once again, the Anglo-American establishment and its MSM representatives would lose even more credibility. In my opinion, they lost all of their credibility a very long time ago.

If You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Various readers, fans, blog commenters, Facebook trolls, and auditors twanged on me all last week about my continuing interest in the RussiaRussiaRussia hysteria, though there is no particular consensus of complaint among them — except for a general “shut up, already” motif. For the record, I’m far more interested in the hysteria itself than the Russia-meddled-in the-election case, which I consider to be hardly any case at all beyond 13 Russian Facebook trolls.

The hysteria, on the other hand, ought to be a matter of grave concern, because it appears more and more to have been engineered by America’s own intel community, its handmaidens in the Dept of Justice, and the twilight’s last gleamings of the Obama White House, and now it has shoved this country in the direction of war at a time when civilian authority over the US military looks sketchy at best. This country faces manifold other problems that are certain to reduce the national standard of living and disrupt the operations of an excessively complex and dishonest economy, and the last thing America needs is a national war-dance over trumped-up grievances with Russia.

The RussiaRussiaRussia narrative has unspooled since Christmas and is blowing back badly through the FBI, now with the firing (for cause) of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe hours short of his official retirement (and inches from the golden ring of his pension). He was axed on the recommendation of his own colleagues in the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, and they may have been influenced by the as-yet-unreleased report of the FBI Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, due out shortly.

The record of misbehavior and “collusion” between the highest ranks of the FBI, the Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign, several top political law firms, and a shady cast of international blackmail peddlars is a six-lane Beltway-scale evidence trail compared to the muddy mule track of Trump “collusion” with Russia. It will be amazing if a big wad of criminal cases are not dealt out of it, even as The New York Times sticks its fingers in its ears and goes, “La-la-la-la-la….”

It now appears that Mr. McCabe’s statements post-firing tend to incriminate his former boss, FBI Director James Comey — who is about to embark, embarrassingly perhaps, on a tour for his self-exculpating book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.

A great aura of sanctimony surrounds the FBI these days. Even the news pundits seem to have forgotten the long, twisted reign of J. Edgar Hoover (1924 – 1972), a dangerous rogue who excelled at political blackmail. And why, these days, would any sane American take pronouncements from the CIA and NSA at face value? What seems to have gone on in the RussiaRussiaRussia matter is that various parts of the executive branch in the last months under Mr. Obama gave each other tacit permission, wink-wink, to do anything necessary to stuff HRC into the White House and, failing that, to derail her opponent, the Golden Golem of Greatness.

The obvious lesson in all this huggermugger is that the ends don’t justify the means. I suspect there are basically two routes through this mess. One is that the misdeeds of FBI officers, Department of Justice lawyers, and Intel agency executives get adjudicated by normal means, namely, grand juries and courts. That would have the salutary effect of cleansing government agencies and shoring up what’s left of their credibility at a time when faith in institutions hangs in the balance.

The second route would be for the authorities to ignore any formal response to an evermore self-evident trail of crimes, and to allow all that political energy to be funneled into manufactured hysteria and eventually a phony provocation of war with Russia. Personally, I’d rather see the US government clean house than blow up the world over an engineered hallucination.

The most perilous time in world history got worse

Posted on March 19, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Stephen Lendman

Source: Intrepid Report

Events ongoing should terrify everyone—things likely heading for greater war than already.

Most Americans, Brits, and others in NATO countries are unaware of the danger posed by hardline Western extremists in charge of policymaking—notably in Washington, London and Israel, the Jewish state an alliance Mediterranean Dialogue member.

Businessman Trump was co-opted to be a warrior president—neocon generals in charge of geopolitical policies, their agenda hardened by Mike Pompeo replacing Rex Tillerson at State, along with torturer-in-chief Gina Haspel appointed new CIA director.

An unholy alliance of US extremist policymakers allied with likeminded ones in partner countries risks war winds reaching gale force, a terrifying prospect if confrontation with Russia, Iran or North Korea occurs—the possibility increased by recent events.

Earlier this week, US Defense Secretary Mattis and UN envoy Haley threatened Russia and Damascus.

Russia vowed to retaliate against US attacks on Syrian forces in East Ghouta or elsewhere endangering its personnel in the country.

Anti-Russia hysteria in Britain over the Sergey Skripal poisoning affair, most certainly Moscow had nothing to do with, soured bilateral relations more than already.

In response to British PM Theresa May demanding swift Russian answers to questions posed about the incident, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman (speaking for her government) replied sharply saying, “One does not give 24 hours notice to a nuclear power,” adding the “Skripal poisoning was not an incident but a colossal international provocation,” addin, not a “single international legal mechanism [exists] to probe the Skripal case.”

Russia’s embassy in London said “Moscow will not respond to London’s ultimatum until it receives samples of the chemical substance to which the UK investigators are referring.”

“Britain must comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention which stipulates joint investigation into the incident, for which Moscow is ready.”

“Without that, there can be no sense in any statements from London. The incident appears to be yet another crooked attempt by the UK authorities to discredit Russia.”

“Any threat to take ‘punitive’ measures against Russia will meet with a response. The British side should be aware of that.”

“Not only is Russia groundlessly and provocatively accused of the Salisbury incident, but apparently, plans are being developed in the UK to strike Russia with cyber weapons.”

“Judging by the statements of the prime minister, such a decision can be taken at tomorrow’s meeting of the National Security Council.”

Given the gravity of the situation, the above comments by Russian diplomats were uncharacteristically strong.

Sergey Lavrov warned Washington that “[i]f a new [US] strike . . . takes place [against Syrian forces], the consequences will be very serious,” adding, “I simply don’t have any normal terms left to describe all this.”

What’s coming remains to be seen. Hostile rhetoric from US and UK officials, along with hawkish extremists Pompeo in charge at State and Haspel appointed new CIA chief likely signal more war, not less.

What’s ongoing assures no possibility of improving dismal bilateral relations with Russia, China, Iran and other sovereign independent countries.

Talks with North Korea could either be scuttled or confrontational if they take place.

Given very disturbing ongoing events, the perilous state of world conditions reached a new low.

Be scared about what may follow—be very scared!

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

The Simulacra Democracy

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By John Steppling

Source: CounterPunch

… a nation in which 87 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four year olds (according to a 2002 National Geographic Society/Roper Poll survey) cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map and 11 percent cannot locate the United States (!) is not merely “intellectually sluggish.” It would be more accurate to call it moronic, capable of being fooled into believing anything …”

— Morris Berman

I cannot remember U.S. culture ever being quite so compromised by ruling class control. Hollywood turns out one jingoistic and militaristic and racist film and TV show after another. Corporate news is completely controlled by the same forces that run Hollywood. It is the complete capitulation of the liberal class to the interests of the increasingly fascistic U.S. elite. And this didn’t start with Donald Trump. Certainly in its current incarnation it goes back at least to Bill Clinton, and really it goes back to the end of World War Two. The ideological trajectory was formed under the Dulles brothers and military industrial complex — representing U.S. business interests and exhibiting a demand for global hegemony. But once the Soviet Union collapsed, the project was accelerated and intensified.

Another starting point might well be the 1960 Bay of Pigs fiasco, or the 1961 CIA (and MI6) assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Or Kennedy’s 1962 speech at American University calling for the end of Pax Americana. We know what happened to Kennedy soon after that. Pick any of these incidents. But it was the fall of the U.S.S.R. that signaled to the governing class, the proprietor class, that the last real obstacle to global domination had been removed. In the interim, one finds the Iran/Contra affair, and the invasion of Iraq. The real and the symbolic meaning of the Soviet Union is forgotten today, I think. Its meaning for the developing world, especially.

The next conscious trial balloon was Clinton’s attack on the former Yugoslavia. A test run for expanding NATO. And it worked. The propaganda machine has never been as successful as it was when it demonized the Serbs and Milosevic. Then came 9/11. And the well honed PR machine spewed an endless barrage of hyper-patriotic rhetoric and disinformation. American exceptionalism was given full credibility. And remember Colin Powell and his cartoon visual teaching aids at the UN? Nobody was going to argue. Certainly not the white liberal class. And Hollywood upped its game in churning out military fantasies. And in just churning out fantasies. A genre that lent itself to obvious neo-colonial messages. By 2007, when Barack Obama announces he will run for President, the master narrative for America was firmly entrenched. The biggest hit from Hollywood in this period is Avatar (2009), a neo-colonial fable that fit seamlessly with Obama’s reconquest of Africa.

Dan Glazebrook recently wrote:

The year 2009, two years before Gaddafi’s murder, was a pivotal one for US-African relations. First, because China surpassed the US as the continent’s largest trading partner; and second, because Gaddafi was elected President of the African Union. The significance of both for the decline of US influence on the continent could not be clearer. Whilst Gaddafi was spearheading attempts to unite Africa politically, committing serious amounts of Libyan oil wealth to make this dream a reality, China was quietly smashing the West’s monopoly over export markets and investment finance. Africa no longer had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF for loans, agreeing to whatever self-defeating terms were on offer, but could turn to China – or indeed Libya – for investment. And if the US threatened to cut them off from their markets, China would happily buy up whatever was on offer. Western economic domination of Africa was under threat as never before.

The US response was to increase base building, upgrade AFRICOM, and then murder Gadaffi. Hollywood hits from this period include The Hurt Locker and The Dark Knight. Meanwhile domestically Obama was giving the OK for militarizing of police departments across the country. On another front….Danny Haiphong wrote…

What isn’t discussed often enough is how Obama has worked tirelessly to protect and fulfill the interests of the corporate healthcare system. In 2009, he collaborated with the monopoly health insurance industry and its pharmaceutical counterparts to repress the demand for single payer healthcare. The conditions at the time appeared ripe for a single payer system. Popular discontent with Republican Party rule was at its highest point. A relatively organized movement for single payer care was represented by organizations such as Healthcare Now. The Democratic Party possessed a majority in both the House and Senate.

Obama came to power as Wall Street went into meltdown, 2008. But instead of hope and change we got almost 5 trillion dollars moving to the top 1% of the financial elite. Poverty increased every year under Obama, as did inequality. Social Network came out in 2010 and Wolf of Wall Street in 2013. Both were big hits. The message from Hollywood never changed. And part of that message is that wealth is its own justification and a symbol of virtue. Hollywood, and U.S. liberals just naturally gravitate toward the rich.

Obama attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen. And it is perhaps that last venture that will prove to be his most significant. Arming, training, and coordinating the Saudi aggression (and now that has escalated to boots on the ground) against the helpless Yemen has resulted in the largest humanitarian catastrophe in five decades.

The U.S. now has all but formally criminalized dissent, especially if that dissent is aimed at Israel.

None of this is to create exact corollaries between political action and studio product. But rather that the overriding message of Hollywood in both film and TV is to validate U.S. exceptionalism. And to hedge criticism with faint token protest. But its not just Hollywood, its theatre and fiction and all the rest of the arts. The erasure of the working class is the most pronounced truth in American culture today. There are no Clifford Odets (a high school drop out) anymore; they have been replaced by a steady stream of well groomed compliant MFA grads. Mostly from elite and expensive schools. Hemingway and James Baldwin were not college grads, nor was Tennessee Williams, the son of a traveling shoe salesman. Even more recent authors such as Thomas Pynchon were college drop outs (to join the Navy), but the point is that today mass culture is carefully controlled. Dreiser was a college drop out, and Twain was a typesetters apprentice. Others like Faulkner, went to University, but also worked. In Faulkner’s case as a postman. Same profession as Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. Stephen Crane and Hemingway worked as journalists, when that was an honorable profession.

The decision makers in mass culture are mostly firmly entrenched in the Democratic Party ethos (witness stuff like House of Cards, Madame Secretary, or Veep). If one only gets one’s news from MSNBC or FOX or CNN then one will take away mostly pure propaganda. Rachel Maddow has a career based on craven parroting of DNC approved talking points and conclusions. Bill Maher, whose show is on HBO, is of late pimping for war. Sunday news talk shows do not invite radical voices, not ever. Michael Parenti isn’t on those shows, nor are Ajamu Baraka or Glen Ford Mike Whitney or Ed Curtin or Dan Glazebrook or Stephen Gowans. No, but there are plenty of retired generals and politicians. This is a media that exerts absolute control of message.

The loss of the working class, of class diversity, has been a far bigger blow to the health of the culture than anything else. One might argue that culture has always been, in the modern era, a province of the bourgeoisie, and that’s true. But there is still a rather pronounced change that has taken place. But Americans are discouraged from thinking in terms of class. They see individualism and identity. Get me more women directors they cry….which would give us more versions of Zero Dark Thirty, I guess. Gender equality matters, something every single socialist country in history has emphasized. Something Chavez saw fit to write into the Bolivarian constitution on day one. Chavez, who liberal avatar Bernie Sanders dismissed as a “dead communist dictator”. Chavez, who feminist avatar Hillary Clinton worked overtime to oust from power.

People are shocked…shocked I say…that US soldiers are killed in Niger. Darn that Donald Trump. When it is pointed out that it was Obama who sent troops there in his pivot to Africa, one is met with blank stares. The concern over U.S. soldiers dying is simply mind numbing in its hypocrisy and blinkered exceptionalism. I mean just count the numbers of dead civilians due to U.S. drone strikes from just one year. Pick any year you like.

Under Obama, the US African Command (AFRICOM) has penetrated every African country but Zimbabwe and Eritrea. AFRICOM has locked African nations into military subservience. In 2014, the US conducted 674 military operations in Africa . According to a recent Freedom of Information Act request by Intercept, the US currently has Special Forces deployed in more than twenty African nations.

Danny Haiphong

People are terrified today lest they be called conspiracy theorists. No single pejorative term has exercised such disproportionate power. There is a subterranean subject position associated with this, too. A masculine identity that connects with the presentation of those accepting of the official version of things. It is ‘no nonsense, mature, and sort of tough guy’ pose. Only weak and muddled (feminine you see!) would bother to question official narratives of…well, anything. It is staggering, really, why so few ask why is it OK to assassinate people without due process? Why is it whistleblowers, truth tellers, are being locked away and shunned? Why are there 900 plus US military bases around the world. Why, given the growing poverty in the U.S. do we need an updated nuclear arsenal that will cost trillions? In fact why is the defense budget over 4 billion a day? The liberal educated class seem not to ask such questions. Let alone ask is the U.S. arming takfiri jihadists in Syria? Most of what people call conspiracy is just perfectly reasonable skepticism. Given a history that includes COINTELPRO, Operation Northwoods, Gladio, MKUltra, and Operation AJAX. This is also relevant in terms of the coming war on *fake news*. An idea put forward by Obama and now in enthusiastic Orwellian operation by Facebook, YouTube, and Google. In the U.K. Theresa May proudly announces the government SHOULD control what one can see on the internet. Censorship is pitched as protection.

And then we come to NATO and Europe. Why does NATO even exist one might ask? I mean the USSR doesn’t exist anymore. Well, the answer has been under construction for a few years now, and that answer is the extraordinary anti Putin propaganda of the U.S. The “Russian Threat” is now an accepted trope in public discourse. Or the anti Iranian disinformation. In fact Iran is far more democratic and less a global threat (actually its NO global threat) than U.S. boon allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Which brings us back to Yemen. The utter destruction of Yemen, poorest Arab country in the world, and now one with the largest Cholera outbreak in history, posed no threat to ANYONE. Certainly not to the United States. Are we to believe the House of Saud is worth supporting? They behead homosexuals and witches in Saudi Arabia. The leader of KSA is a 32 year old psychopath named Mohammed Bin Salman. Someone please explain the U.S. support for this country?

Or Venezuela. The U.S. has waged various campaigns against this sovereign nation for over a decade now. A democracy. But a disobedient one. Where is the outcry? When people are going on about Harvey Weinstein, a troglodyte movie producer that literally everyone knew was a serial abuser, I wonder that the women of Venezuela seem not to count. Or of Libya, or Haiti, or Puerto Rico, or hell, the women of Houston right now. Poor women. Ah, but that is class again. Now perhaps the Weinstein affair will yield good results and some form of collective protection and maybe even unionizing will take place to limit the power of rich white men. I doubt it, but maybe. Still, given that the liberal class today applaud the idea of making it OK for women to bomb defenseless villages in Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen, just like men, and given that most of these horrified by Weinstein were and are solidly behind Hillary Clinton and the DNC, and laud adulation on figures like Maddie Albright, it seems hard to imagine.

David Rosen:

Sexual abuse and violence in the U.S. is as old as the country. America’s patriarchal culture long legitimized sexual abuse and violence toward women — and children — whether conducted at the workplace, at home, a nightclub or on a deserted street. During the nation’s earliest days, the custom of sexual abuse and violence was legitimized through the notion of “chastisement.” This was a feature of Anglo-American common law that recognized the husband as master of “his” household and, thus, permitted him to subject “his” wife to corporal punishment, including rape, so long as he did not inflict permanent injury upon her. Sexual abuse was institutionalized in the rape of African and later African-American female slaves. As the legal scholar Adrienne Davis notes, “U.S. slavery compelled enslaved black women to labor in three markets – productive, reproductive, and slavery – crucial to the political economy.”

One need only note the sexual violence that takes place in the U.S. military (See Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War). But that is not the military you see in this season’s TV shows such as SEAL Team or Valor or The Brave. The current Tom Cruise film American Made is a sort of comedy about Barry Seal who worked as a pilot for the CIA, and with various cartels in South America. Yeah, nothing funnier than squashing a socialist government like in Nicaragua. There is not a single Spanish speaking character who is not either a drunk, a sadist, or just incompetent. This stunningly racist revisionism was called “jaunty and bouncy” by the Hollywood Reporter.

The liberal class will always side with the status quo. Always. They do not care if the status quo is fascist. And its suits them much more to lay out bromides about male abuse of women, as long as this doesn’t mean having to untangle the complexity of women in unfamiliar non tourist visited nations like Yemen or Libya or Honduras. Just like the fact that U.S. domestic police departments murdered over a thousand black men in 2015. And continue to do so, along with increasing numbers of black women. That’s just not a jaunty bouncy story, I guess. Obama has never been comfortable talking about or to black people. He did manage to scold Colin Kaepernick recently though, about the pain he, Kaepernick, might be causing. The pain of white billionaire sports team owners I guess. The Uncle Tomism of what Glen Ford called black misleadership has never been greater. And that’s another crime we can lay, largely, at the feet of Barack Obama.

The U.S. House voted unanimously to sanction Iran and North Korea, an absurdity and a crime, and yet one that barely registered on the media Richter scale. What has Iran or North Korea ever done to hurt anyone in the United States? It is Saudi Arabia and Israel that fear a democratic nation like Iran and the influence they wield in the region. Iran is accused of fomenting instability but evidence is never given. Russia is said to control U.S. public opinion, but evidence is never given. The U.S. doesn’t even bother to really try and make claims about Venzeuela, because its just part of inherited wisdom that they are *bad*. Like Castro was bad, like Gadaffi, like Aristide, like anyone exhibiting independence. The world according to media entertainment is made up of bad guys and good guys. Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA, recently stated that his agency would become a “much more vicious agency” in fighting its enemies. Its actually hard to imagine what that might look like given CIA history. More vicious than rendition, drone killing and black site torture? Remember it was the U.S. and its School of the Americas that trained those death squads in Central America. Hollywood makes comedies about this.

In any event nobody in Hollywood complains. Just as none of the actresses assaulted by Weinstein (and countless others) said anything lest they lose career opportunities. Just as nobody complains about the racism and demonizing of Muslims or Serbs or North Koreans or Russians lest they not get the job. Coercion is silent and a given. It is also absolute. Most actors and directors simply don’t think about it, and most know little beyond what they hear on corporate news or read in the NYTimes. But I understand. People have to eat, have to feed their families. The real problem is that power is ever more consolidated. Distribution of films is monopolized. And for most Americans, foreign policy remains a giant black hole about which they know very little. Tell someone Milosovic was actually a good guy and they will laugh at you (this still happens on the left, too, rather depressingly). Tell them Russia is not threatening the U.S. or Europe, and they will laugh at you. Try to explain what Imperialism is and means, and you get that bored look of irritation. A good rule of thumb is if the U.S. targets a country or leader, then its worth questioning the western generated propagated propaganda in mainstream media about said country or leader (think Syria, Gadaffi, Aristide, Milosovic, Iran, North Korea). The U.S. does not go after countries who welcome western capital.

One of the things I’ve noticed about Hollywood film is the extraordinary amount of self pity from most characters. Self pity, entitlement, and sarcasm. The people who produce and make film and TV today, by and large, tacitly censor themselves. Some don’t have to, of course. But there is a general group think at work. And it extends to the way characters are written. The problems of affluent white people is the template here. Few examine the wider world, and mostly when they do it is seen as a world of threat and menace. An uncivilized place in need of guidance from the civilized white West (The Lost City of Z comes to mind, which made all the approved anti colonial notes while still creating a colonial narrative anyway.). But it is even more narrow than that. Everything resembles a studio; political discussions, even if they take place in outer space, resemble studio executives discussing opening weekend profits, or Neilson ratings. And since Hollywood itself ever more resembles Wall Street, or some corporate headquarters, that is increasingly what the world looks like. It is a profound loss of imagination. Westerns look and sound the same as melodramas set in Santa Monica or New York. Fantasy worlds resemble corporate headquarters or corporate motivational weekends. It is a world created by writers under thirty, largely, and certainly under forty. These are worlds created by people who themselves know very little of the world. They know even less about having to work for a living. The entire universe of film is absent any class awareness. History is simplified the better to appeal to a wider audience. Everything feels and sounds the same. And it is stultifying. There are films and TV from Europe, even from the U.K. that have merit, have heterogeneous sensibilities, but not from Hollywood. Like White House press conferences, the idea is to stay on message. Black characters sound white (or are given caricature *black* dialect and dialogue), brown characters sound white (or are given caricature barrio dialects), and Muslims sound dangerous and devious. Asians seem lifted from Fu Manchu serials or Charlie Chan. Strange when I hear people make fun of ethnic cliches from the 1940s, because it is really no different today (and check the recent TV incarnation of the venerable Star Trek franchise where the Klingon villains are very dark, live in dark spaceships and utter a guttural invented language all of which suggests something oddly racist and like nothing so much as colonial portraits of savages from darkest Africa).

Fixation on Trump’s crimes distracts from a system in which crime is a built-in factor. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. They are only the figureheads that carry water for the system. And the system is the property of the ruling class. People vote as if it crucially matters, and they vote for who they like. Not for policy because mostly they have no idea of policy. Trump is an obvious target, but that’s the problem in a sense. America didn’t become racist and violent overnight. The forces of social unrest have been building for decades. Trump was inevitable. His lack of basic literacy mirrors the nation he nominally heads, and his vulgarity mirrors the vulgarity of America, as does his misogyny and racism. The same advisors are in place and if Hillary had won, those openly fascist thugs applauding Trump would still be committing hate crimes. Has Trump empowered them? To a degree, yes. But an HRC win would likely have provided motivation of a different sort and the same violence would be taking place. You cannot sustain, as a country, this level of inequality. And as more super hurricanes descend on us, as the bio-sphere collapses, none of this may end up mattering. There is something disturbing, actually, about the relentless attacks on Trump. Its like beating up a special needs kid. Where was this hatred and outrage before? I mean Trump’s America, a term I hear a lot, is just America. We have over 2 million people in prison in the U.S. Far and away leaders in the world. Infant mortality however puts the U.S. between 26th and 51st, depending on who is counting. There is no Universal Heath Care, no union protection for workers, no maternity leave, no free education. What is there to feel so special about, exactly? Trump was very popular on his moronic reality TV show. I’m guessing more than few now outraged by this buffoonish reactionary watched that show. I mean it did last fifteen years I believe. Who did they think he was? There is nothing wrong with identifying the crimes of Trump’s administration. But there is something deeply wrong in not recognizing it as a continuation of prevailing policy. Yes, it is worse in many areas. The environment for one. But then again, 47% of the world’s pollution is caused by the military. And the U.S. has a military bigger than the next ten largest militaries in the world. And every president since the first Bush has increased the military budget. The nightmare did not begin with the swearing in of Donald Trump. But nobody likes him. They liked Obama. And that is why he was able to do so much harm. Trump is dangerous not because of what he thinks (he mostly doesn’t) but because of his ignorance and weakness (and fear). And that weakness generated his welcoming hand to the Pentagon. Foreign policy is really in the hands of a man nicknamed ‘Mad Dog’. One cannot blame this catastrophic situation on one man. This is the creation of American history.

Our Bigoted Brains

Posted on March 4, 2018 by Reid Mukai

Photo credit: Art Killing ApathyBigotry,

By Eleanor Goldfield

Source: Popular Resistance

If you’ve ever moved beyond small talk and vapid pleasantries in conversation then you’ve likely dealt with the infuriating occurrence of trying to convince someone of a fact they just don’t want to accept. Beyond just avoiding the information, they almost seem hardwired to reject your proof in a phenomenon that I like to call “fact fear.” I noticed a sharp rise in fact fear during the 2016 elections and levels continue to hover at disturbing heights today. So, what gives? Are we really in a new era of idiocy or are we just seeing our particularly vapid and anti-intellectual culture ping off the most base and stubborn aspects of the human psyche? Both, I think.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.” But in the post-truth, anti-intellectual, “I read it in a blog post so it must be true” era, our opinions and beliefs run the ever-growing risk of being founded on complete bullshit. Filter bubbles (which we covered in Episode 132) and digital spheres protect us from ideas and facts outside our own personal shit heaps and only serve up the information we want to see – which is not always factually accurate. Our culture of quick “news” and a growing lack of intellectual curiosity drive us further into an echo chamber of our own ideas – facts and information be damned. In turn, a false but far from flimsy crust solidifies around our minds –- and the soft light of truth and knowledge can’t get in.

Our brains are wired to find comfort behind that crust. In what’s known as the backfire effect, our minds reject new information that clashes with our belief systems and opinions. As David McRaney, author of the books You Are Not So Smart and You Are Now Less Dumb explains it: “Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.” In other words, that crust acts as a shield for facts that threaten your beliefs. And you’ve probably seen this in action online. Someone posts something like “climate change isn’t real” so you face palm and proceed to post ample proof that they’re wrong and that in fact, climate change is very real. The problem is that with each fact you post, the crust hardens – for both you AND the other person. Of course, it doesn’t help that you can find just as much if not more bullshit online than you can actual truth but much of it is actually tied to the inherent laziness of our brains. “The more difficult it becomes to process a series of statements, the less credit you give them overall…In experiments where two facts were placed side by side, subjects tended to rate statements as more likely to be true when those statements were presented in simple, legible type than when printed in a weird font with a difficult-to-read color pattern. Similarly, a barrage of counterarguments taking up a full page seems to be less persuasive to a naysayer than a single, simple, powerful statement.”

So does this mean that we should just stop pointing out when someone is wrong? That we should let all kinds of ridiculous notions from lizard people to “homeless people are dangerous” slide? Of course not. Rather, it means that if we want to educate and engage, if we want people to wake the fuck up then we have to consider how the human mind works – and how it doesn’t. Furthermore, our goal shouldn’t be to win an argument as if to suggest that as soon as we win the argument, justice is at hand. Indeed, if your goal is to simply be right, the religious zeal with which you defend your ideas will only turn you into the very monster you are trying to slay. Being right, in other words, is not the point. Progress is not a church. We are not looking for converts. Our aim should always be to engage and empower; to share our knowledge and embrace the knowledge of others. Seek and speak truth – then act on it. And do not think that because you found a nugget of information you hold moral superiority over those who don’t know it. Our minds are just as susceptible to that crust as anyone else’s. We are not special or better. Indeed, we must constantly question our opinions, compare them with facts and new information. By that I mean actual facts, not “alt facts” sourced from a single Google search or indeed even something from a “trusted” publication.

In an interview last March with Robert Scheer of Truthdig, author Joel Whitney discusses the 60 year history of fake news and how it was used in the Cold War era to sew distrust and hatred of all things “commie” and Russian. Major and well-trusted media outlets were a part of the propaganda ring and Whitney notes “that the fearful political atmosphere at the time led to “secrecy being used to preside over and rule over the free press — which we’re supposed to be the champions of.” “They drank the Kool-Aid and thought they were saving freedom,” Scheer agrees. The discussion underscores the need for analysis of Cold War-era media as a way to avoid propagandized journalism today. Scheer says, “I look at the current situation, where we don’t even have a good communist enemy, so we’re inventing Russia as a reborn communist power enemy.” “I call it superpolitics,” Whitney concludes, “where essentially there’s something that’s so evil and so frightening that we have to change how our democratic institutions work.” The latest red scare is but one example of how easy it is to mold minds when you use something like the hatred of Trump as a trigger. Blend some tried and true anti-Russia sentiment in there and you’ve got yourself a brand spanking new enemy – one that allows you to further mold those democratic institutions just as seamlessly as the minds you’ve now crusted and convinced. Russia aside, the same propaganda games go for mass media collusion on everything from fracking to the military industrial complex. For example, leaked email messages show that a writer from the LA times colluded with the CIA not only in terms of getting the CIA’s OK on forthcoming stories but actually offered to write stories for them that would put a positive spin on such issues as drone warfare, saying it would be quote “reassuring to the public” and a “good opportunity” for the CIA. Various other email messages show that the same was true for a list of other media outlets.

All this to say, if I may borrow a phrase: no investigation, no right to speak. Do your own research before you claim to know something. Incidentally this will also help steel you from the rumor mill AND infiltrators. Whether it’s taking someone to task on a rumor or engaging someone in discourse, be vigilant. Be vigilant in your drive, your actions, and be primarily vigilant in your own thinking. Release the flimsy beliefs that would just as soon sink you as keep you afloat. Arm yourself with knowledge and reach out to build and to engage, not to win a Facebook tiff. Consider the goal of engagement and empowerment rather than just being right. Consider the reaction you would have if someone came at you with a barrage of links followed by “read a fucking book, asshole!” You’d more than likely write them off as an unhinged asshole even if their information is solid. Try asking a question or perhaps as Ben Franklin suggested, ask them for a favor, something small that seeds trust, pinging off the human psychology that seeks appreciation and the feel of community. Push past political theory and get down to human connection – to start with. For instance, anarchists in several communities will often engage with would-be white supremacists via the common ground of distrust and disgust in the system. They’ll sit and talk; discuss the pitfalls of a system that’s left them behind and from there grow to a discourse on the roots of their discontent, i.e. not black people. In other words, knock on the door rather than trying to break down the wall. Because that wrought iron shit crust is stronger than steel.

Finally, keep in mind that this won’t always work and nor should it. We have to accept that in our grandiose imaginings of the revolution, many people will either be against us or sitting at home praying we all just shut up. But again, if you’re not looking for converts, if you’re engaging to empower, you’ll not only find more people willing to talk to you, you’ll also more than likely learn something in the process. You might even pick something up that’ll put a dent in your own mental crust.

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After the Crash

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

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