New York Times stokes anti-Russia campaign to promote Facebook, Twitter censorship

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Bill Van Auken

The New York Times has mounted a concerted campaign promoting a crackdown on political expression on social media on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of Russian government interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

In conjunction with a public statement by Facebook last Wednesday on political advertising allegedly originating in Russia, the Times published a sensationalist “investigative” report titled “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” an op-ed piece indicting Facebook for failing to exercise greater censorship of political content and an editorial Saturday touching on the same themes.

Facebook briefed members of both the Senate and House intelligence committees on its findings on September 6. It said it found $50,000 in spending on 2,200 “potentially politically related” ads “that might have originated in Russia” over a two-year period beginning in June 2015. It added that this included Facebook accounts and pages “with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort,” including “accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian.”

The vast majority of the ads, Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos added, “didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate,” but rather appeared to focus on amplifying “divisive social and political messages.”

The testimony was seized upon by Democratic politicians attempting to promote the theme of Russia meddling in the US elections in support of Trump. Representative Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the highly ambiguous Facebook findings “deeply disturbing and yet fully consistent with the unclassified assessment of the intelligence committee.”

The Times “investigation” was as weak in its substantiation of a Russian government operation to influence the 2016 presidential election as the Facebook report, but far more inflammatory.

It described an “unprecedented foreign intervention in American democracy” and a “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.”

It repeated the unproven allegations that Russia was responsible for the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails exposing the party leadership’s attempts to sabotage the presidential campaign of self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, while accusing Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik of having “battered” Hillary Clinton with a “fire hose of stories, true, false and in between.”

The story focuses, however, on the alleged Russian use of Facebook and Twitter, darkly accusing the two companies of failing to prevent themselves from “being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.”

The “evidence” uncovered by the Times consisted of linking “suspect” Facebook accounts, since taken down by the company, that posted material linking to a website, DCLeaks.com, that published hacked emails from billionaire financier and Democratic Party donor George Soros, a former NATO commander, and Democratic as well as Republican functionaries. With no substantiation, the newspaper claims that “United States intelligence concluded” that the site was a creation of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.

The article also accuses Russia of exploiting Twitter, using “hundreds of accounts” for “posting anti-Clinton messages and promoting leaked material.”

It further charges that the alleged Russian campaign employed “automated Twitter bots, which send out tweets according to built-in instruction.”

According to Twitter’s own estimate, there are some 48 million such bots on Twitter, and they accounted for fully 19 percent of all election-related tweets during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Times report acknowledges that it investigated Twitter accounts identified as “Kremlin trolls” to discover that there were real people behind them with no ties to the Russian government. It quoted one of them, Marilyn Justice, 66, from Nova Scotia, who told the newspaper she believed that “Hillary’s a warmonger” and that she was hostile to the anti-Russian bias in the Western media. Another so-called “troll” turned out to be a web producer in Zurich, who expressed sharp disagreement with Western narratives on the Ukraine and Syria.

The existence of such views, the Times concluded was “a victory for Russia’s information war—that admirers of the Kremlin spread what American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.”

The Times followed up its “investigation” with an op-ed piece accusing Facebook of having “contributed to, and profited from, the erosion of democratic norms in the United States” by having allowed the posting of “anti-Hillary ads precisely aimed at Facebook users whose demographic profiles implied a vulnerability to political propaganda.”

It went on to comment: “Unfortunately, the range of potential responses to this problem is limited. The First Amendment grants broad protections to publishers like Facebook.”

The Times editorial published Saturday questions whether “any federal agency is focused on” the alleged “problems” uncovered in the newspaper’s report: “foreign intervention through social media to feed partisan anger and suspicion in a polarized nation.”

There is a farcical element to the Times exposé. The idea that the spending of $50,000, vaguely linked to Russia, on Facebook ads over a two-year period undermined US elections in which total spending is estimated at roughly $7 billion is ludicrous.

Whatever actions may have been taken by the government of Vladimir Putin to promote the international interests of Russia’s ruling oligarchy, Moscow’s alleged Internet activities pale in comparison to the unrelenting campaigns mounted by US government agencies, from the CIA to the Pentagon and the National Endowment for Democracy, to rig foreign elections, engineer regime change operations and militarily destroy entire countries. As the former US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland proudly acknowledged, Washington sunk some $5 billion into promoting pro-Western regime change in Ukraine.

Even more preposterous is the attempt to attribute the sharp social tensions and intense political antagonisms that are ripping apart the seams of American society to Russian propaganda. Both are the product of the crisis of American capitalism, characterized above all by the uninterrupted growth of social inequality.

There is, however, a sinister and deadly serious content to the campaign by the Times editorial board, which functions as a reliable conduit for CIA propaganda. It has joined its long-running campaign around allegations of Russian interference in the US election with the demand for a crackdown on political expression on social media.

The two are inextricably linked. Underlying the Times campaign around Moscow’s supposed assault on the “integrity of American democracy” lies the political agenda of powerful factions within the US ruling establishment, which are demanding the continuation and intensification of the drive toward regime change in, and military confrontation with, Russia.

The preparations for war abroad are inevitably accompanied by the growth of censorship and political repression at home. The Times ’ criticisms of Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding, these corporations, along with Google, are collaborating closely with the US government and its intelligence agencies in the attempt to suppress freedom of speech and thought and censor anti-capitalist and anti-war reporting and opinion.

Under the phony banner of combating “fake news,” Google announced a change in its search algorithms last April that was clearly directed at slashing the readership of anti-war and left-wing websites, with the World Socialist Web Site being hit the hardest, losing more than two-thirds of its traffic from Google search results.

Facebook has followed suit, rolling out a similar announcement in June that it was updating its own News Feed algorithm aimed at “deprioritizing” posts viewed as “problematic” promoting “low quality content” “sensationalism” and “misinformation.”

The attempts by these multi-billion-dollar corporations to arrogate to the themselves the power of gatekeepers of the Internet, censoring content that conflicts with the interests of the American ruling oligarchy and its military-intelligence apparatus has aroused broad popular hostility. The WSWS has spearheaded the opposition to these attacks, with 3,500 people from more than 80 different countries signing it petition demanding that Google cease its censorship of the Internet.

Conspiracy Theory

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberte

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

In the United States “conspiracy theory” is the name given to explanations that differ from those that serve the ruling oligarchy, the establishment or whatever we want to call those who set and control the agendas and the explanations that support the agendas.

The explanations imposed on us by the ruling class are themselves conspiracy theories. Moreover, they are conspiracy theories designed to hide the real conspiracy that our rulers are operating.

For example, the official explanation of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory. Some Muslims, mainly Saudi Arabians, delivered the greatest humiliation to a superpower since David slew Goliath. They outsmarted all 17 US intelligence agencies and those of NATO and Israel, the National Security Council, the Transportation Safety Administration, Air Traffic Control, and Dick Cheney, hijacked four US airliners on one morning, brought down three World Trade Center skyscrapers, destroyed that part of the Pentagon where research was underway into the missing $2.3 trillion, and caused the morons in Washington to blame Afghanistan instead of Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, the Saudia Arabians who humiliated Ameria were involved in a conspiracy to do so.

Is it a believable conspiracy?

The ability of a few young Muslim men to pull off such a feat is unbelievable. Such total failure of the US National Security State means that America was blindly vulnerable throughout the decades of Cold War with the Soviet Union. If such total failure of the National Security State had really occurred, the White House and Congress would have been screaming for an investigation. People would have been held accountable for the long chain of security failures that allowed the plot to succeed. Instead, no one was even reprimanded, and the White House resisted all efforts for an investigation for a year. Finally, to shut up the 9/11 families, a 9/11 Commission was convened. The commission duly wrote down the government’s story and that was the “investigation.”

Moreover, there is no evidence to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11. Indeed, all known evidence contradicts the official conspiracy theory.

For example, it is a proven fact that Building 7 came down at freefall acceleration, which means it was wired for demolition. Why was it wired for demolition? There is no official answer to this question.

It is the known evidence provided by scientists, architects, engineers, pilots, and the first responders who were in the twin towers and personally experienced the numerous explosions that brought down the towers that is described as a conspiracy theory.

The CIA introduced the term “conspiracy theory” into public discourse as part of its action plan to discredit skeptics of the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Any explanation other than the one handed down, which is contradicted by all known evidence, was debunked as a conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories are the backbone of US foreign policy. For example, the George W. Bush regime was active in a conspiracy against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The Bush regime created fake evidence of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” sold the false story to a gullible world and used it to destroy Iraq and murder its leader. Similarly, Gaddafi was a victim of an Obama/Hillary conspiracy to destroy Libya and murder Gaddafi. Assad of Syria and Iran were slated for the same treatment until the Russians intervened.

Currently, Washington is engaged in conspiracies against Russia, China, and Venezuela. Proclaiming a non-existent “Iranian threat,” Washington put US missiles on Russia’s border and used the “North Korean threat” to put missiles on China’s border. The democratically elected leader of Venezuela is said by Washington to be a dictator, and sanctions have been put on Venezuela to help the small Spanish elite through whom Washington has traditionally ruled South American countries pull off a coup and reestablish US control over Venezuela.

Everyone is a threat: Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, tribes in Pakistan, Libya, Russia, China, North Korea, but never Washington. The greatest conspiracy theory of our time is that Americans are surrounded by foreign threats. We are not even safe from Venezuela.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes are quick to debunk as conspiracy theories all explanations that differ from the explanations of the ruling interests that the presstitutes serve.

Yet, as I write and for some nine months to date, the presstitute media has itself been promoting the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was involved in a conspiracy with the president of Russia and Russian intelligence services to hack the US presidential election and place Trump, a Russian agent, in the White House.

This conspiracy theory has no evidence whatsoever. It doesn’t need evidence, because it serves the interests of the military/security complex, the Democratic Party, the neoconservatives, and permits the presstitutes to show lavish devotion to their masters. By endless repetition a lie becomes truth.

There is a conspiracy, and it is against the American people. Their jobs have been offshored in order to enrich the already rich. They have been forced into debt in a futile effort to maintain their living standards. Their effort to stem their decline by electing a president who spoke for them is being subverted before their eyes by an utterly corrupt media and ruling class.

Sooner or later it will dawn on them that there is nothing they can do but violently revolt. Most likely, by the time they reach this conclusion it will be too late. Americans are very slow to escape from the false reality in which they live. Americans are a thoroughly brainwashed people who hold tightly to their false life within The Matrix.

For the gullible and naive who have been brainwashed into believing that any explanation that differs from the officially-blessed one is a conspiracy theory, there are available online long lists of government conspiracies that succeeded in deceiving the people in order that the governments could achieve agendas that the people would have rejected.

If liberty continues to exist on earth, it will not be in the Western world. It will be in Russia and China, countries that emerged out of the opposite and know the value of liberty, and it will be in those South American countries, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia that fight for their sovereignty against American oppression.

Indeed, as historians unconcerned with their careers are beginning to write, the primary lesson in history is that governments deceive their peoples.

Everywhere in the Western world, government is a conspiracy against the people.

The futility and corruption of the drug war

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Jacob Hornberger

Source: Intrepid Report

I just finished watching the much-acclaimed series “Narcos” on Netflix. What a fantastic program. And what an excellent depiction of the futility and corruption of the war on drugs.

The series is a true-life account of Pablo Escobar, a Colombian drug lord who headed up the Medellin drug cartel, a black-market drug group that smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Smuggling an estimated 80 percent of the cocaine into the United States, Escobar became known as called the “King of Cocaine,” attaining in the process a net worth of $30 billion by the early 1990s. According to Wikipedia, Escobar was the wealthiest criminal in history.

Amidst much acclaim and publicity, the U.S. government and the Colombian government, working together, targeted Escobar with arrest or killing. Escobar retaliated by effectively declaring war on the government, a war that consisted of assassinations and bombings. Every time the DEA (which was operating in Colombia, along with the U.S. military and the CIA) and Colombian officials tightened the noose on Escobar’s operation, Escobar responded with bullets and bombs, killing a multitude of government officials and private citizens.

The logic of the drug-war crackdown was clear: By eradicating Escobar, officials thought they would be eradicating 80 percent of the cocaine being shipped into the United States. So, all the death and destruction resulting from the crackdown on Escobar was considered worth it in the long run.

But that’s not what happened. The more they tightened the noose around Escobar, the more his cocaine competitors—that is, the ones who were supplying the 20 percent, expanded their operations, gaining them a larger market share. Among the principal beneficiaries of the crackdown on Escobar was the Cali Cartel, which, not surprisingly, became the next big target of the U.S. and Colombian drug warriors, with similar results—the more they cracked down on the Cali Cartel, the more their competitors stepped into the breach and gained a larger market share.

In 1993, they finally caught up to Escobar and killed him in a shootout. You can imagine how U.S. and Colombian officials trumpeted that drug-war victory. Another “milestone” in the war on drugs, the term they have used for decades whenever they kill or capture some big drug lord.

But of course it was all to no avail. Even though they killed Escobar and ultimately smashed the Medellin and Cali cartels, amidst great fanfare and publicity, other suppliers quickly took their places and continued providing cocaine users in the United States with their drug.

In other words, all those people who lost their lives in the drug war on Escobar died for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

There is something else to consider: what the drug war against Escobar did to law-enforcement agents, both American and Colombian. It corrupted them to the core. Frustrated over all the death and destruction that Escobar was wreaking across the country and over their inability to apprehend him, officials began employing brutal and illegal tactics in return, such as torturing prisoners for information and then murdering them so that they couldn’t talk about what the officials had done to them.

Of course, there was also widespread bribery that was taking place within the Colombian police. In fact, that was one of the reasons they had such a hard time catching up to Escobar—his informants within the police and Colombian military would alert him to whatever was going on.

The pathetic thing about all this death, destruction, mayhem, and corruption is that there was a much simpler way to have put Escobar, the Cali Cartel, and all the other black-market drug suppliers out of business, a way that would not have involved assassinations, bombings, torture, and corruption. All that the U.S. and Colombian governments had to do was legalize drugs.

If they had done that, Escobar and the rest of the black-market suppliers would have been put out of business instantaneously. That’s because of the difference between legal markets and black markets.

In legal markets, suppliers compete against each other by providing better goods and services to their customers. Think CVS, Walgreen, and other pharmacies. Notice that they are not out bombing and assassinating each other and other people.

It’s totally different in black or illegal markets. Competitors in these markets deal with each other through violent turf wars that involve murder, kidnapping, bombing, and mayhem. While people like Escobar are able to thrive in a black market, they inevitably go out of business in a legal market because they lack the skills that are necessary in legal markets.

A good example of this phenomenon is alcohol. We don’t see alcohol dealers killing each other to get a larger share of the market. That’s because booze is legal.

But it wasn’t that way when booze was illegal. During Prohibition, there were people like Al Capone involved in the sale and distribution of alcohol, along with killing, mayhem, and corruption.

This same principle, of course, applies today. Notwithstanding all the hoopla to which all of us are subjected when the feds or state drug warriors make a drug bust, the result is no different than it was 20–30 years ago with Escobar. The minute they make the bust, the supplier is replaced by someone else.

There is only one way to eradicate drug lords and illicit drug dealers, along with all the death, destruction, and corruption that comes with them: End the war on drugs by legalizing drugs.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Wall Street Primitivism: Nicaragua, China, The Middle East & Charlottesville

Posted on September 1, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Caleb Maupin

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Wall Street, London, and the Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund claim to support development and the eradication of poverty around the world. They also claim to support scientific progress and raising the global standard of living. However, often they seem to make friends and allies with very different goals. As Nicaragua proceeds with a huge construction project that has dynamic global implications, one can see a certain international pattern repeating itself, with quite dangerous implications.

“Native Activists” Fighting To Preserve US Maritime Dominance

Control of the Panama Canal by the United States has been vital in asserting control over the world economy. The US military has intervened militarily in Panama on many occasions to secure its control of this vital global shipping and transportation hub.

While the USA currently allows vessels to pass through, this could easily change in the case of a military confrontation. With so much of the world’s industrial shipping passing through this vital point, control of the canal gives the USA a level of unchecked power in the global economy. At any point they could “veto” a country’s economy by stopping ships.

However, a construction project currently in the works in Nicaragua could change that. The Chinese government and corporations based in China are cooperating with the socialist government of Nicaragua to construct a new canal, parallel to the Panama Canal. This canal will not be under US dominion, but under the dominion of the Sandinista government and the People’s Republic of China.

The announcement of the project was followed by all kinds of reports in western media claiming it would be an ecological disaster and contribute to global warming. Now, as the project proceeds, voices of the establishment are crying crocodile tears for the indigenous people who will be forced to move by the project. The Guardian has run stories bemoaning their plight. Amnesty International is warning Nicaragua not to interfere with their protests.

The USA is in the process of putting sanctions on Nicaragua, for their support of Venezuela. A bill currently in the US congress called the NICA Act aims to cripple the socialist government.

While it is ignored in US press reports, the Sandinista government has done a great deal to improve the lives of its population, a large percentage of which is indigenous. Poverty in Nicaragua has been reduced by 30%. The United Nations World Happiness Index reports the great increase of happiness in any country in 2016, as having taken place in Nicaragua.

The socialist government is asserting public control over major industries, guaranteeing jobs, housing, and education to the population, and moving toward a centrally planned economy. The Sandinistas are cultivating a layer of patriotic small business owners, who cooperate with the state to develop the economy with foreign investment. Their methods are similar to those employed by Deng Xiaoping when opening up China during the 1980s.

Though the Sandinistas are widely popular, the forces who oppose the canal project have found a number of indigenous leaders to align with. 76% of people in Nicaragua have some indigenous ancestry. The overwhelming majority of the country is ethnically “mestizo” meaning it has a mixture of European and native ancestry.

However, the forces being rallied to oppose the project are not from the overwhelming majority of the population which has indigenous ancestry, but rather to a specific group of just over 4% of the population, which is described as “unmixed indigenous inhabitants.” These are individuals who have cut themselves off from Nicaraguan society at large, and much like the Amish or Mennonites in the USA, maintain a lifestyle without technology, immersed in religious tradition. While the majority of Nicaraguans are Christians, these forces are Shamanists and practitioners of polytheistic faiths. They reject all “european” concepts and lump Marxism, dialectical materialism, and Christianity into the same basket.

The relationship between this isolated minority in Nicaragua and the US Central Intelligence Agency is not a new development. During the 1980s contra war, the CIA supplied weapons and military training to the indigenous Mosquito peoples to fight the Sandinistas. In addition to the weapons and funding they received from the USA, a number of Anti-Communist US Native American activists such as Russell Means joined with them. Many of these indigenous, anti-technology, and anti-science fanatics stood against what they called the “Racist European Marxism” of the Sandinista government, which was made up largely of dark skinned people with indigenous blood. While they claimed to oppose both “capitalism and communism” as European concepts, they quietly and sometimes not-so-quietly, worked with the Pentagon and the CIA.

Just as they took up guns in the 1980s in alliance with Washington, they now get promoted by pro-US Non-Governmental Organizations and Non-Profits, who conveniently see maintaining US maritime dominance as the latest, trendy, ecological, liberal cause, done to rescue some “mystical people” with “beautiful ancient traditions” being crushed by “racist” “dogmatic” Marxists.

“Traditionalist” CIA-Allies in China

Western utilization and manipulation of primitivist, conservative, and reactionary social forces in order to stop economic development is not restricted to Latin America. The political allies of the United States on the Chinese mainland, who work against the People’s Republic, often while spouting rhetoric about “human rights” are a rather interesting bunch.

The Chinese government has just cracked down on an extremist cult known as “Eastern Lightning.” The group is also known as the “Church of the Almighty God” and worships a woman who they claim is the second coming of Jesus Christ. They are reported to torture, mutilate, and even execute members who attempt to leave. Members of the group famously murdered a man in a Mcdonalds restaurant for refusing to allow his daughter to give her phone number to them.

While some would dismiss this simply as an obscure religious cult, it is important to note that the lead minister of the Church, along with the woman who claims to be Jesus Christ, both currently live in the USA. In 2001, they sought “political exile” in the United States, and while millions of people die attempting to cross the US border, the US government happily grants visas to anti-China activists, order to help them escape “persecution” from the US government.

Another friend of the USA in China is the Falun Gong, a strange buddhist sect. The group calls for the public execution of homosexuals and opposes inter-racial marriage. Li Hongzi, the group’s founder, lives in Queens, New York. His organization has been presented with awards by the Heritage Foundation.

Much like Eastern Lightning, the Falun Gong preaches that the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership, in particular its policies advancing the position of women, are harmful to society. The Falun Gong argues that the Chinese Communist Party’s rule represents a “Dharma Ending Period” and that its efforts to include women in government positions is one of its most grievous crimes. The group is also known for separating young people from their families, and threatening ex-members.

Following this pattern, the USA has worked endlessly to promote the deposed feudal theocratic monarchy of Tibet. The Dalia Lama, who ruled Tibet with an iron fist and executed and tortured all who questioned him, is presented as a harmless self-help, spiritual guru in US media.

While he is presented as a man of peace, it is widely known that his brother was given military training in Colorado, and air dropped into the Tibet Autonomous Region in the 1950s. With guns and weapons from the USA, the Tibetan separatists waged a violent proxy war in the mountains for years. This is all boasted about in the right-wing, anti-China book “The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet.”

All these bizarre religious groups aligned with the USA in China seem to glorify feudal, pre-Communist China. They all oppose the Chinese Communist Party for its modernization. While they speak different languages, and glorify different traditions, they probably would agree a lot with the Nicaraguan, US-backed “indigenous activists” who oppose the socialism of the Sandinistas. Meanwhile, it is a similar crowd of western liberals who admire them, and would accuse any who criticized them of “racism” and “white-splaining.”

Not only does Washington have a history of aligning with primitivist and feudalist forces, so do European fascists. Julius Evola, the Italian far-right ideologue who spoke of a “revolt against the modern world” had a particular admiration for feudalism and primitive societies around the world. In his book “Man Among Ruins” he speaks of “the demonic nature of the economy” in western countries, which people are always trying to advance, create, and become more prosperous. He admires pre-capitalist civilization for its poverty and “stability” amid starvation.

As members of the European far-right, the Nazis also admired primitivism and poverty. Heinrich Harrier, the author of the beloved “Seven Years in Tibet,” practically a holy book for advocates of Tibetan seperatism, was actually an SS officer. The Nazis believed Germans to be descended from Tibetans, and sent scientists to measure ancient skulls in order to somehow prove this. The Nazis had similar admiration for the caste system in ancient India, and adopted the swastika as their symbol for that reason.

CIA Loves Islamic Extremists

It was the British empire that first discovered the political value of Wahabbism. The Saudi monarchy owes its origins to a cleric named Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab. His interpretation of Islam in 1700s enabled the Saudi royal family to establish its brutal, repressive theocratic monarchy. The British cooperated with the Saudi royal family, which conveniently allowed them access to oil in exchange for propping up the barbaric regime. In 1945, the USA joined with the British is coddling the Saudi autocracy.

Today, Saudi Arabia is one of the only countries in the world where housing in bedouin tents, not modern buildings is widespread. The lack of infrastructural development accompanies a government that outlaws women from driving cars, conducts public floggings and beheadings, and punishes crimes with mutilation. Every person and everything in Saudi Arabia is the property of the King. Citizens are routinely executed for “insulting the King” or “sorcery” among other crimes. Sometimes bodies are crucified and left on public display after execution.

A large percentage of the Saudi population are guest workers who live as slaves with no human rights. Even among the Saudi born population, the Shia oil workers face brutal discrimination and exploitation on the job, with their religious freedom often denied.

While the western economic institutions and governments all claim to support “poverty alleviation” and “development” in the third world, they embrace the Saudi Monarchy in all its horror and backwardness. Meanwhile, the targets of the USA and NATO in the Middle East, are not the primitive oil autocracies, but rather, regimes that work toward modernization.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 deposed western capitalism, and established a government under the slogan of “not capitalism, but Islam.” After the revolution, even in the context of a massive war with Iraq, Imam Khomeni launched a “construction Jihad.” In this effort inspired by Stalin’s Five Year Plans and the rapid industrialization of socialist countries, Iranians were mobilized to build highways, schools, hospitals, power plants, and so much else in order to bring the country out of poverty. Despite sanctions and attacks from the west, Iran has utilized oil revenue and central planning to construct a highly modern country, with a comparatively prosperous population. The Islamic Republic of Iran that emerged from the 1979 revolution, and has made huge strides toward modernization, is now the target of western leaders.

The Syrian Arab Republic, born in the Baath Socialist revolution, is also targeted by the west. This is a government that has multiple parties in office, and has worked with Russia and China to construct huge power plants and highways. Syrian industrial workers are organized into labor unions, and have legal protections on the job. The Communist Party and the Communist Party (Baghdash) are permitted to participate in the government process. Religious freedom is guaranteed with Sunnis, Shia, Alawi, Christians, Druze, and other religious groups all freely practicing their faith. The achievements of Syria’s state controlled healthcare system are widely praised by international bodies, with many doctors and medical professionals trained the state run Universities.

Fitting with this pattern, western leaders are now arming and training Wahabbis, a force representing primitivism and barbarism of the Saudi variety, in the hopes of toppling the Syrian government. It is worth noting that prior to 2011, when the USA began working to foment civil war in the context of the Arab Spring, Syria had begun constructing an oil pipeline, connecting Iran to Mediterranean.

Prior to its destruction by NATO bombs in 2011, Libya was the most prosperous country on the African continent. It had the highest life expectancy, and had constructed a huge irrigation system in order to spread water across this dry, desert country. The forces backed by the United States to topple the Islamic Socialist government in Libya were Wahabbis. Now ISIS and Al-Queda have set up shop in the country, and citizens are fleeing on rafts trying to reach Europe.

Different Definitions of Imperialism

In his 1917 book “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin argued that capitalism had entered a globalist phase. He talked about the rise of “monopoly capitalists” in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. He spoke of how bankers had triumphed over industrial capitalists, and described how wealthy financial elites in the west teamed up with governments to battle against each other, carving out “spheres of influence” in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. He described how third world countries were utilized as “captive markets” in which western countries could sell commodities without competition.

Imperialism, as Lenin understood it, was about keeping the world poor, so that western bankers could stay rich. Furthermore, imperialism meant dividing the working class within the western countries. A “labor aristocracy” of well paid workers was created. These were working class people who could be cultivated to identify with the western capitalists against the colonized people. With their rising standard of living, they would see their interests as identical to the interests of the monopolists that controlled their governments.

This understanding of imperialism was developed by Lenin, and adopted by figures like Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Huey Newton. Even non-Marxists like Michel Aflaq, Juan Peron, and Moammar Gaddafi studied and came to understand imperialism this way. For various anti-imperialist figures of the 20th century, third world revolutions against imperialism were about raising their countries up from poverty, modernizing, and developing.

However, a large section of the modern political left has abandoned this understanding. The understanding of “imperialism” taught in Universities across the USA and western Europe is quite different.

Starting in the 1950s, the New Left, specifically beloved “cultural critics” in the Frankfurt School and elsewhere, began speaking about “cultural imperialism.” Suddenly, among western academics and leftist activists, imperialism wasn’t about holding back development and keeping people poor. Rather, it was about eroding “beautiful” “traditions” and “ways of life” and “imposing” supposedly “western” values.

So-called “Mcworld” & Wahabbi Extremists Work Together

When describing the supposed leftist critique of imperialism in his book “On Paradise Drive” New York Times Columnist David Brooks said that “anti-American” and anti-imperialist forces oppose “McDonalds, Barnes and Noble, and boob jobs.” Those who object to Wall Street running the world are depicted as Native American mystics, Islamic fanatics, or others who object to the industrialization, commercialization, and sexual freedom of western life.

This misrepresentation is widespread. The false dichotomy is often stated as “Mcworld vs. Jihad,” and was widely promoted in the USA, prior to, but especially after 9/11. In this “Clash of Civilizations” narrative, the forces said to represent “Jihad” were the Saudi Monarchy and Osama Bin Laden, while the forces said to represent “Mcworld” were the IMF, the World Bank, and Wall Street.

In reality, Mcworld globalizationists and the forces represented as “Jihad” are on the same team. They have never been enemies. Washington has been on friendly terms with Saudi Arabia since 1945. The CIA worked with Wahabbi extremists in Afghanistan to topple an independent, modernizing government called the People’s Democratic Party. The USA and Saudi Arabia worked with Wahabbis in Chechnya to fight against the Soviet Union and afterwards the Russian Federation. The USA currently funds and arms Wahhabis in Syria, and cooperated with these forces in Libya to topple the Islamic Socialist government.

The conservative forces in the Middle East that oppose modernization and development, and embrace the Wahabbi ideology of the 1700s are not enemies of Wall Street or the London Stock Exchange. Unlike the Shia revolutionaries, or the Baath Socialists, which represent legitimate resistance, the Wahabbi forces do not wish to modernize or industrialize the region. They want to keep it a mess of impoverished oil plantations ruled over by autocratic vassals. Wall Street has no objection to this setup, and it can largely be traced back to the Sykes-Pickot agreement, crafted by western colonizers.

However, in the west, especially in circles considered to be “progressive” there is a strange mystical and cosmopolitan admiration for the forces of primitivism. For example, those who defend the Syrian government, and point out the terrorist nature of the anti-government forces are labelled “Islamophobic.” Liberal crowds in the United States swoon over the pro-Saudi demagogue named Linda Sarsour as she wears a headscarf, uses exotic sounding Arabic words, accuses those who oppose her of racism, and holds rallies calling for the USA to topple the Syrian government.

This degeneration of leftist politics has been a long time in the making. In the 1960s, the Hare Krishna movement, an extremely right-wing Hindu sect in India, suddenly became a beloved staple of Peace Marches. Gurus from India, figures who promoted drug use for “spiritual” purposes, all suddenly became the fixture of the left. Previously these kinds of bohemian elements had been embraced by the far-right and fascists.

In the 1950s, it was Republicans and the “China Lobby” that rallied support for the Dalia Lama and his insurgency in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Republicans accused the democrats of “losing China.” However, in the present context it is liberals who sport “Free Tibet” bumper stickers, while the right-wing is less interested in foreign meddling and applauds to the words “America First.” No matter what region is being discussed, in the present context, it is the liberals, not the conservatives, whose hearts bleed the loudest for US proxy fighters around the world.

While in the 1980s, it was conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Oliver North who championed the fight against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, it is now liberals who moan for the “indigenous cultures” that are supposedly being “oppressed” by the Marxist government, which dares challenge the hegemony of the Panama Canal.

The US Central Intelligence Agency is probably the most involved with supporting forces of primitivism around the world, as they work to battle independent modernizing governments that threaten the monopoly of western capitalism. It should be no surprise, that since the 1950s, the CIA has also been heavily involved in supporting the anti-communist political left, which seems now fully dedicated to their latest crusade.

The CIA began its infamous “Congress for Cultural Freedom” in the 1950s, hoping to direct anti-capitalist activists and artists away from the pro-Soviet Communist Parties in the USA and Europe. The CIA funded the art of Jackson Pollack, experimental music, and all kinds of cultural strata intended to clash with Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism and socialist realism. The CIA also launched a program called “MK-Ultra” which involved distributing drugs on college campuses.

The Monument Fights in the USA

The media in western countries, as it champions various primitivist forces, has essentially embraced Julius Evola’s critique of the “demonic nature of the economy.” Like Mother Teresa who infamously said “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” the non-Marxist, “liberal” element now sees social, economic, and technological progress as its enemy, and looks on poverty, ignorance, and primitivism in a condescending admiration.

While once it was the right-wing that pushed malthusian ideas about “overpopulation” it is now billionaire liberals like Bill Gates that work to decrease the global population. Often in the name of ecology, liberals will boast about how they refrain from shopping, and live frugal lives.

Now in the USA, a political clash that is very dangerous is unfolding. The fight involves monuments to various historical figures who did reprehensible things, such as owning slaves or fighting for the Confederacy in the hopes of preserving the slave system.

While it easy for anyone who hates racism and the racist mythology of films like “Gone With The Wind” and “The Birth of a Nation” to celebrate the destruction of Confederate Monuments, and they are absolutely right to do so, the context of their destruction, and who is destroying them, presents a new danger.

The forces that seek to defend the Confederate monuments are white supremacists, Ku Klux Klansmen, admirers of Hitler, traditionalists, and others. These are forces that want the USA to return to segregation, racial division, and other things overcome through decades of struggle. These forces are known to use violence, and they are widely hated and unpopular, though their prestige is slowly growing due to the absurd political context.

The problem is not that reactionary symbols are being destroyed. This is a positive thing. The problem is rather that the forces who line up against them do not seek to replace their hateful ideology with something new. In Charlottesville and elsewhere, the battle is taking place in which bigots who think Robert E. Lee was a hero are facing and off and violently clashing with those who believe society should have no heroes at all.

Racism Battles Post-Modernism

While the racist, hateful messaging and views of White Nationalists fill the airwaves, and become the subject of debate, what does Anti-Fa believe in? The media refers to crowds opposing the “Alt Right” as “anti-racist activists.” The White Nationalists are quick to call them “Communists.” But what ideas does “The Resistance” believe in? What alternative vision do they hold up to combat the right-wing?

The crowds of post-modern, non-ideological leftists largely do not seek to replace statues they destroy with statues of progressive figures like Frederick Douglas, Huey Newton, or William Z. Foster. Rather, they rally around the concept that “no one should be worshipped” and “there is no truth.” Images of Abraham Lincoln, the man who defeated Robert E. Lee and led the fight against slavery are now being destroyed, alongside the Confederates.

While “Anarchists” and liberals who destroy monuments are quick to point out and emphasize these leaders real crimes, the slogan they rally in opposition with is “No Gods and No Masters.” They fall back on concepts like “think for yourself” “question everything” and more subtly: “don’t believe in anything” “there is no truth.”

As media eulogized Heather Heyer, who was murdered by a white nationalist in Charlottesville, very few reports mentioned that she was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW, an anarcho-syndicalist labor union formed in 1905, also known as “the wobblies,” indeed has an ideology and belief system of its own. The IWW believes in creating a society in which the major industries and workplaces are controlled by those who work in them. Throughout its history, it was known for working in favor something, it syndicalist vision, not simply for the destruction the old. Not surprisingly, US media, which largely cheers for the opposition to the Alt-Right, obscures this important aspect of the woman who recently died opposing them.

As the media champions the fight against the Alt-Right, they work to obscure any solid ideology that would oppose them. The primary voices opposing the Alt-Right are post-modernists from middle class backgrounds, trained at elite Universities. They tear down the statues of confederate monuments as they cheer for the “Syrian revolution” that reduces Syria to chaos, or the various “oppressed” primitivist groups that fight against China or the government of Nicaragua.

Bill Maher, a left-wing TV commentator interviewed Leah Remini about her painful history in the Church of Scientology. In the interview, Maher outrageously compared scientology to Communism. The outrageous comparison was in reference to the low income of scientology practitioners.

As the polarization continues, the dangerous reality is that this is not the 1930s. The fighting fascists are not armed with Marxism-Leninism and guided by the Soviet Union, fighting for the ideal of Communism. Unlike the anti-fascist of the 1930s, anti-fa and the liberals who support them are not fighting to impose their own ideology onto society. Rather, they are fighting in the hopes of destroying ideology itself.

This is a hopeless mission. Every society since the dawn of agriculture has involved ideas, religions, and some concept morality, however, incorrect or distorted they may have been. These things are the foundation of human civilization. Even pre-historic tribes of hunter gathers had some rules or beliefs to guide their actions. Post-modernism and relativism cannot lay the foundations of a healthy society.

Western capitalism now rallies around the belief that “there is no truth.” At home it promotes free market capitalism and austerity, an economic model in which selfishness rules, and many people are left in poverty and misery. Meanwhile, it emphasizes a social liberalism based on hedonism and shallow values. Internationally, the west aligns itself with forces that seek to stop economic and technological progress, and freeze their societies in poverty and ignorance, so that Wall Street can maintain its monopoly.

As Americans, like all human beings, long for something to believe in, and long for their lives to improve, not get worse, they are likely to rally around forces who offer them such things. If no alternative is presented, only the now marginal far right-wing will be available to offer such things.

While its easy to call Trump a fascist, something far more deadly, and far closer the reactionary regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy could gain support. A population told to chose between either anarchy, chaos, and nihilism, or the hateful “truths” of reaction, could be pushed toward a very dangerous trajectory.

Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Color Revolution Comes Home?

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

Source: Popular Resistance

The United States has perfected the art of regime change operations. The US is the largest empire in world history with more than 1,000 military bases and troops operating throughout the world. In addition to military force, the US uses the soft power of regime change, often through ‘Color Revolutions.’ The US has been building its empire since the Civil War era, but it has been in the post-World War II period that it has perfected regime change operations.

Have the people of the United States been the victims of regime change operations at home? Have the wealthiest and the security state created a government that serves them, rather than the people? To answer these questions, we begin by examining how regime change works and then look at whether those ingredients are being used domestically.

Color Revolutions and Regime Change Operations

Almost from the start, the CIA’s role has been more than intelligence gathering. It has been a key player in putting in place governments friendly to the United States and conducting other operations, e.g. the CIA is currently involved in drone strikes.

One of the first regime change operations of the CIA was Operation Ajax conducted in Iran, and led by Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, who was president when the US solidified its global empire ambitions. The CIA was founded in 1947 and the regime change coup in Iran was 1953. Greg Maybury writes in “Another Splendid Little Coup“: “Placing to one side an early dress rehearsal in Syria in 1949, the Iran coup was the first post-War exercise in regime change upon the part of Anglo-American alliance…” Just this month the US government released documents showing the CIA and State Department’s planning and implementation of the coup against the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. This release supplements one from 2013 that did not reveal the full role of the US in the coup.

The Iran coup was crude compared to more modern efforts but had the ingredients that have become common – civil society protests against the government, media reports supporting the protests, agents within the government supporting the coup and replacement of the government with a US-friendly regime. The Iran coup may have been the most costly mistake in US foreign policy because it undermined a secular democratic government in Iranthat could have been the example for the region. Instead the US installed the brutal Shah of Iran, whose rule ended in the 1979 revolution, in which, as Maybury reports, the US was also implicated because it felt the Shah had overstayed his welcome.

The Iran coup was perceived as a great CIA success, so it was copied in other Middle Eastern countries as well as countries in Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Regime change is still a major tool of US foreign policy. There is a long-term ongoing coup campaign in Venezuela, with its most recent episode last week in which a helicopter attack on the Supreme Court was tied to the US DEA and CIA. The US has allied with oligarchs, supported violent protests and provided funds for the opposition, which has also worked to undermine the Venezuelan economy — a tactic the US has used in other coups, e.g. the coup of Allende in Chile.

The coup in Ukraine, which the media falsely calls a ‘democratic revolution,’ was, as the head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor says, “the most blatant coup in history.” The CIA and State Department played the lead roles.

Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state under Clinton, bragged that the US spent $5 billion to build civil society opposition against a government that leaned toward Russia. The government funded civil society opposition through US AID, which is the open vehicle for what the CIA used to do covertly, along with the National Endowment for Democracy. This funding was used to build oppositional civil society groups and create destabilization. They focused on the issue of corruption, which exists in every government, and built it up to a centerpiece for regime change. The US allied with extremist right-wing groups in Ukraine.

The US picked the new leaders of Ukraine. This included Petro Poroshenko, whom U.S. officials refer to as “Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko” in a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 . The selected Prime Minister was Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Before the coup, Victoria Nuland told the US Ambassador to Ukraine that ‘Yats’ should be the prime minister. And, the Finance Minister was Natalia Jaresko, a long-time State Department official who moved to Ukraine after the US-inspired coup, the Orange Revolution, to become a conduit for US funding of civil society through her hedge fund. She was a US citizen whom Poroshenko made a Ukrainian on the day she was appointed Finance Minister. To top it off, fmr. Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and fmr. Secretary of State John Kerry’s longtime financial ally, Devon Archer, were put on the board of the largest private gas corporation in the Ukraine. Yet, the US media refuses to call this complete take over of the country by the United States a coup and instead describes Russia as the aggressor.

The US has perfected regime change operations from the 1950s up through today. The standard method of operation is finding an issue to cause dissent, building opposition in a well funded civil society ‘movement’, manipulating the media, putting in place US friendly leaders and blaming US opposition for the coup to hide US involvement. This approach is consistent no matter which party is in power in the US.

The Kleptocratic Oligarch Coup In The United States

Let’s apply the lessons from around the world to the United States. There is no question the US is an oligarchy. We say no question because recent political studies have proven it in multiple ways.

One difference in the US is that money plays an outsized influence in US elections. The wealthy can buy the government they want through campaign donations and by anonymous spending but the tools of color revolutions are still needed to legitimize the government. Legitimacy is getting harder to buy. Many realize we live in a mirage democracy. The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs reported in 2016 the extent of the loss of legitimacy of US government:

“Nine in 10 Americans lack confidence in the country’s political system, and among a normally polarized electorate, there are few partisan differences in the public’s lack of faith in the political parties, the nominating process, and the branches of government.”

Jimmy Carter has pointed to the “unlimited bribery” of government as turning the US into an oligarchy. The government needs to use the tools of regime change at home in order to create an veneer of legitimate government.

The Donald Trump presidency, which we regularly criticize, brings a lot of these tools to the forefront because Trump beat the system and defeated the elites of both parties. As a result, Democratic Party propaganda is being used to undermine Trump not only based on his policies but also through manufactured crises such as RussiaGate. The corporate media consistently hammers home RussiaGate, despite the lack of evidenceto support it. Unlike the Watergate or Iran-Contra scandals, there is no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia to get elected. And, the security state – the FBI and the agencies that conduct regime change operations around the world – is working to undermine Trump in a still unfolding domestic coup.

Civil society also has a strong role. John Stauber writes that:

“The professional Progressive Movement that we see reflected in the pages of The Nation magazine, in the online marketing and campaigning of MoveOn and in the speeches of Van Jones, is primarily a political public relations creation of America’s richest corporate elite, the so-called 1%, who happen to bleed Blue because they have some degree of social and environmental consciousness, and don’t bleed Red. But they are just as committed as the right to the overall corporate status quo, the maintenance of the American Empire, and the monopoly of the rich over the political process that serves their economic interests.”

Civil society groups created or aligned with the Democratic Party are defining the new form of false-resistance as electing Democrats. The Democrats, as they have done throughout history as the oldest political party, know how to control movements and lead them into ineffectiveness to support the Democratic Party agenda. We described, in “Obamacare: The Biggest Insurance Scam in History,” how this was done skillfully during the health reform process in 2009. This new resistance is just another tool to empower the elites, not resistance to the oligarchic-kleptocrats that control both parties. In fact, a major problem in progressive advocacy is the funding ties between large non-profits and corporate interests. The corruption of money is seen in organizations that advocate for corporate-friendly policies in education, health care, energy and climate, labor, and other issues.

Color Revolution Tools Used In The US

Now the tools the US uses for regime change around the world are being used at home to funnel activist energy and efforts into the Democratic party and electoral activities. In order to resist this new “resistance” we need to be aware of it and how it operates. We need to see through propaganda, such as RussiaGate, and attempts to manipulate the masses through scripted events that are portrayed as organic, such as the recent “sit in” by Rep. John Lewis and Sen. Cory Booker on the Capitol steps, or through highly emotional cultural content that portrays the plutocratic parties as parties of the people. We have to remember that the root issue is plutocracy and the US has two plutocratic parties, often referred to as “The Duopoly.”

We must continue to focus on the issues that are in crisis such as the economy, health care, education, housing, racism, inequality and militarization at home and abroad. We must fight for these issues independent of political party. We must be clear and uncompromising in our demands so that we are not taken off track. And we must have a clear vision of the future that we want to see.

Popular Resistance is a co-convener of the People’s Congress of Resistance. The People’s Congress will bring people together from around the US to meet in Washington, DC this September to outline a vision from the grassroots. A draft of that vision will be circulated over the next few months so that many people will provide input. Check out the People’s Congress here and get involved however you are able.

How mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media pump their government’s lies to deceive the public

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Intrepid Report

Now that finally the U.S. government has officially terminated its arming and training of the jihadist gangs that are fighting to overthrow and replace Syria’s government, the neoconservative mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media are disagreeing with each other over how to communicate this fact to the American people without contradicting, or otherwise violating, the false ‘history’ they’ve all been presenting and preserving, throughout the past five years, which has described the U.S. government as being opposed to the jihadists in Syria, instead of as the U.S. government’s arming and training jihadists to overthrow and replace Syria’s government. That’s a pretty blatant ‘historical’ lie, which they’ve all been maintaining, now, for five years; and, they’re at loggerheads over whether or how they’ll deal with it, now that the program (whose very existence they’ve helped the government to hide from the public) has been so publicly and suddenly ordered to end.

On July 19, a neoconservative Democratic Party newspaper, the Washington Post, headlined one of their many anti-Trump news-articles, “Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow.” Their angle on this (actually momentous and constructive) action by Trump to abandon ‘the rebels’ (almost all of whom are, in fact, jihadists), was that this Republican president had done that in order to please Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (who defends Syria’s government, which secular government is knee-jerk-vilified in this and all American newspapers), and the WP article quoted neoconservatives who criticized the move by Trump to end the program.

The August 7 issue of a neoconservative Republican Party magazine, The Weekly Standard, headlines “Trump Got This One Right: Shutting down the CIA’s ghost war in Syria,” and doesn’t attack the previous, Democratic, president for having initiated and run that “ghost war,” and doesn’t make clear what it was, or why it was being waged, but does say hostile things against the leaders both of Russia and of Syria, such as that “Putin . . . has the blood of many Syrian civilians on his hands,” and allegations also against the Syrian government, such as:

Russian and Syrian jets have indiscriminately and repeatedly bombed civilian targets. The Assad regime has used chemical weapons, which Trump himself objected to, bombing a Syrian airfield in response. The United States cannot endorse these war crimes by allying itself with the perpetrators of mass murder in Syria.

Besides the fact that at least some of those assertions are demonstrably false, the United States government has actually (and often) done such things as that propaganda-article alleges Russia and Syria to have done, but nothing is said in this far-right magazine about that; readers of The Weekly Standard don’t get to see even a mention of this reality. The publication fools its readers, instead of informs them.

What’s even more important to take note of here, however, is that the article does not so much as even just mention the key fact: that Russia’s forces were invited into Syria by Syria’s secular government, in order to defend it against the jihadist gangs America was assisting, and that America’s forces weren’t invited by Syria’s government, but are instead invaders there, trying to overthrow that government, and are not only trying to help to defeat the ISIS jihadists who have also invaded Syria in order to overthrow Syria’s secular government. The crucial fact, that the Obama administration was insistent that Russia in Syria not bomb Al Qaeda forces in Syria and that that insistence upon protecting Al Qaeda there was the key reason why Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to reach an agreement with Russia about Syria had failed (they were actually sabotaged by his own boss, President Obama), is ignored by The Weekly Standard. (Also ignored by this far-right magazine is that the U.S. government has the blood of at least as many “Syrian civilians on its hands” there, as does the Russian government or any other participant in the war. That magazine’s playing to this false ‘us’-against-‘them’ prejudice, insults the intelligence of its readers, but is done in order to divert their duped reader’s attention away from the reader’s real enemies, which include the owners of that magazine, who want to manipulate, instead of to inform, their readership, for the benefit of Republican aristocrats. Those aristocrats need these dupes to remain duped.)

This shows that even when Republican ‘news’ media defend a Republican president who is reversing an imperialistic policy of his Democratic predecessor, it’s done in such a way, so it’s designed to keep the American public still deceived about the actual ugly history, which indicts both of America’s political parties—indicts the U.S. government itself, at its highest levels, where both parties are united together, in order to conquer the entire planet (including Syria, including Russia), for the benefit of America’s aristocrats.

Instead of reporting this crucial truth, The Weekly Standard says:

Russia intervened in Syria in September 2015, and the timing was not accidental. Just months earlier, in March, the “Army of Conquest” took over the northwestern province of Idlib. This rebel coalition was no band of moderates. It was led by Nusra and included its closest Islamist and jihadist partners. The Army of Conquest was on the march, threatening the Assad family’s stronghold of Latakia on the coast.

The message the magazine is trying to convey to its conservative American readership, is that Russia there was defending “the Assad family,” and not defending Syria’s sovereignty over Syria’s own territory—not defending the independence of the Syrian government, from the demands of the U.S. aristocracy (which are mainly concerned with building oil and gas pipelines through Syria in order to replace Russia as the main energy-supplier to the world’s biggest energy-market, the EU, by the U.S. and its royal Arab allies as the main energy-suppliers there).

This is an imperialistic war, and the only way for the U.S. aristocracy to win it, is militarily (and/or via coups such as it did in Ukraine) to break apart Russia’s foreign alliances, in order to grab control of Russia’s assets (including that oil and gas)—but the U.S. oligarchs are also going after China’s assets, and Iran’s assets, and the assets of any well-armed government that’s not yet a vassal-nation to the U.S. aristocracy (vassals such as Europe, Japan, and all other U.S. allies).

America (with the assistance of the Sauds, and of the U.S. aristocracy’s other fundamentalist-Sunni business-partners in the Middle East) uses jihadists to serve as those “boots on the ground,” against secular governments such as Syria and Russia, because that’s a lot cheaper to do than to re-institute the U.S. military draft and to send tens of thousands of American soldiers out to overthrow, or at least to weaken, the ‘enemy’ government. It’s much cheaper “boots on the ground,” to grab new territory via these proxies, than via U.S. troops.

The supreme international issue in our time is sovereignty—the independence, or freedom, of nations. It’s international democracy, which is really at stake, in all of this. The alternative (which the U.S. government leads) is international fascism. It’s a vast program, not composed merely of invasions (the ‘Defense’ Department) and of coups (the State Department, etc.).

Now that (after 24 February 1990) the United States has been committed to world-conquest, there is, regarding international news-reporting in the United States, nothing that is fundamentally true that’s reported in the U.S. ‘news’ media, regarding international relations—it’s all based upon a shared lie by both wings of the U.S. aristocracy, Republican and Democratic, saying that the U.S. government supports freedom and democracy around the world, and that the nations which the U.S. government is trying to conquer, do not favor international freedom and democracy. The standard American account (that it supports, instead of opposes, democracy around the world) is the exact opposite of the truth.

For example: How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when twice in one day the secretary general of the United Nations said that the U.S. president’s insistence upon having a veto-power regarding who would, and who would not, be allowed to become Syria’s next president, was “totally unfair and unreasonable” and that instead “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people.” No publicity for those statements. None at all. The fact (that the U.S. president refused to accept that “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people”) was shocking. But it wasn’t reported to the American people. Americans never knew about it.

How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when the U.S. government was one of only three governments in the entire world to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against a resolution to condemn racism, fascism, and denial of the Holocaust? None. None at all. The fact was shocking. But it, too, wasn’t reported.

And: How many Americans know that on the night of 24 February 1990, the U.S. president secretly told the chancellor of West Germany that all of their statements to Soviet President (soon to become only Russia’s president) Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. and its alliances would end the Cold War on their side if the Soviet Union and its alliances did on theirs, had been mere lies and that the Cold War would henceforth continue to be waged on the Western side until Russia itself would be conquered?

How can a nation be a ‘democracy,’ while its government (and its ‘news’ media) hides the most important parts of history, and pumps instead lies, to its people, regarding international relations? Who is the actual sovereign in the United States—its public, or its aristocracy?

And how many U.S. news media will carry this article, which is submitted to all of them, to publish free-of-charge? For any of them that has a large audience, to publish it, could precipitate an unprecedented revolution within the U.S. aristocracy itself (a revolution against their lies), because it would, in effect, officially acknowledge that the existing ‘history’ is founded upon lies. But, if this fact is not publicly recognized in the U.S. now, then when will the truth about these matters be allowed to be published here? Or, will it ever? Or will it never.

The Washington Post’s article said that “a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” said: “Putin won in Syria.” The anonymous source didn’t say: “The Syrian people won in Syria.”

Western-sponsored polls in Syria showed that 55% of Syrians wanted Assad to remain as president, and 82% of Syrians blamed America for the presence of jihadists in Syria trying to overthrow Assad.

Are the U.S. ‘news’ media hopeless—beyond salvaging? Is democracy in America beyond salvaging? Is 1984 here locked-in? What would that mean for the future of the world?

‘News’ media in the countries that are allied with the U.S. are just as trashy. For example, here’s an article from a brilliant blogger ripping to shreds an August 1 article from Britain’s Reuters ‘news’ agency, about the war in Yemen. That Reuters ‘news’-report could just as well have been published by the New York Times or Washington Post.

Maybe ‘news’ media now are that rotten all over the world. But any mainstream ‘news’ medium in the U.S., or its allied countries, has no realistic basis for criticizing ‘news’ media in other nations. Yet they do criticize the press in those nations, constantly. That’s just another lie, from ‘news’ media that might as well be pure lies.

The presumption when reading the ‘news’ should therefore be: What are they really trying to sell, and to whom? In a world dominated by lies, the thing that’s actually more important than anything else, is the motives. And nothing should then be believed on the basis of trust. In international relations, everything now is war, and the first victim of war is truth. And that is the reality today.

The Age of No Privacy: The Surveillance State Shifts Into High Gear

Posted on July 27, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.” ― William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, dissenting in Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 341 (1966)

The government has become an expert in finding ways to sidestep what it considers “inconvenient laws” aimed at ensuring accountability and thereby bringing about government transparency and protecting citizen privacy.

Indeed, it has mastered the art of stealth maneuvers and end-runs around the Constitution.

It knows all too well how to hide its nefarious, covert, clandestine activities behind the classified language of national security and terrorism. And when that doesn’t suffice, it obfuscates, complicates, stymies or just plain bamboozles the public into remaining in the dark.

Case in point: the National Security Agency (NSA) has been diverting “internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans.”

It’s extraordinary rendition all over again, only this time it’s surveillance instead of torture being outsourced.

In much the same way that the government moved its torture programs overseas in order to bypass legal prohibitions against doing so on American soil, it is doing the same thing for its surveillance programs.

By shifting its data storage, collection and surveillance activities outside of the country—a tactic referred to as “traffic shaping” —the government is able to bypass constitutional protections against unwarranted searches of Americans’ emails, documents, social networking data, and other cloud-stored data.

The government, however, doesn’t even need to move its programs overseas. It just has to push the data over the border in order to “[circumvent] constitutional and statutory safeguards seeking to protect the privacy of Americans.”

Credit for this particular brainchild goes to the Obama administration, which issued Executive Order 12333 authorizing the collection of Americans’ data from surveillance conducted on foreign soil.

Using this rationale, the government has justified hacking into and collecting an estimated 180 million user records from Google and Yahoo data centers every month because the data travels over international fiber-optic cables. The NSA program, dubbed MUSCULAR, is carried out in concert with British intelligence.

No wonder the NSA appeared so unfazed about the USA Freedom Act, which was supposed to put an end to the NSA’s controversial collection of metadata from Americans’ phone calls.

The NSA had already figured out a way to accomplish the same results (illegally spying on Americans’ communications) without being shackled by the legislative or judicial branches of the government.

The USA Freedom Act was just a placebo pill intended to make the citizenry feel better and let the politicians take credit for reforming mass surveillance. In other words, it was a sham, a sleight-of-hand political gag pulled on a gullible public desperate to believe that we still live in a constitutional republic rather than a down-and-out, out-of-control, corporate-controlled, economically impoverished, corrupt, warring, militarized banana republic.

In fact, more than a year before politicians attempted to patch up our mortally wounded privacy rights with the legislative band-aid fix that is the USA Freedom Act, researchers at Harvard and Boston University documented secret loopholes that allow government agents to bypass Fourth Amendment protections to conduct massive domestic surveillance on U.S. citizens.

Mind you, this metadata collection now being carried out overseas is just a small piece of the surveillance pie.

The government and its corporate partners have a veritable arsenal of surveillance programs that will continue to operate largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and the like, beyond the scrutiny of most of Congress and the taxpayers who are forced to fund its multi-billion dollar secret black ops budget.

In other words, the surveillance state is alive and well and kicking privacy to shreds in America.

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

We have now moved into a full-blown police state that is rapidly shifting into high-gear under the auspices of the surveillance state.

Not content to merely transform local police into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are working to turn the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone Stingray devices and so much more.

Add in the fusion centers, city-wide surveillance networks, data clouds conveniently hosted overseas by Amazon and Microsoft, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras, and biometric databases, and you’ve got the makings of a world in which “privacy” is reserved exclusively for government agencies.

Thus, the NSA’s “technotyranny” is the least of our worries.

A government that lies, cheats, steals, sidesteps the law, and then absolves itself of wrongdoing cannot be reformed from the inside out.

Presidents, politicians, and court rulings have come and gone over the course of the NSA’s 60-year history, but none of them have managed to shut down the government’s secret surveillance of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages, transactions, communications and activities.

Even with restrictions on its ability to collect mass quantities of telephone metadata, the government and its various spy agencies, from the NSA to the FBI, can still employ an endless number of methods for carrying out warrantless surveillance on Americans, all of which are far more invasive than the bulk collection program.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people.

And of course that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. Indeed, Facebook, Amazon and Google are among the government’s closest competitors when it comes to carrying out surveillance on Americans, monitoring the content of your emails, tracking your purchases, exploiting your social media posts and turning that information over to the government.

“Few consumers understand what data are being shared, with whom, or how the information is being used,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Most Americans emit a stream of personal digital exhaust — what they search for, what they buy, who they communicate with, where they are — that is captured and exploited in a largely unregulated fashion.”

It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.

All of those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have (Forbes refers to them as “(data) pipelines to our intimate bodily processes”)—the smart watches that can monitor our blood pressure and the smart phones that let us pay for purchases with our fingerprints and iris scans—are setting us up for a brave new world where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

For instance, imagine what the NSA could do (and is likely already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a fingerprint. Described as “the next frontline in the battle against overweening public surveillance,” the collection of voiceprints is a booming industry for governments and businesses alike.

As The Guardian reports, “voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of individuals. There is already discussion about placing voice sensors in public spaces… multiple sensors could be triangulated to identify individuals and specify their location within very small areas.”

Suddenly the NSA’s telephone metadata program seems like child’s play compared to what’s coming down the pike.

That, of course, is the point.

The NSA is merely one small part of the shadowy Deep State comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under surveillance and, thus, under control.

For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government.

In other words, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its domestic surveillance efforts.

At every turn, we have been handicapped in our quest for transparency, accountability and a representative government by an establishment culture of secrecy: secret agencies, secret experiments, secret military bases, secret surveillance, secret budgets, and secret court rulings, all of which exist beyond our reach, operate outside our knowledge, and do not answer to “we the people.”

Incredibly, there are still individuals who insist that they have nothing to fear from the police state and nothing to hide from the surveillance state, because they have done nothing wrong.

To those sanctimonious few, secure in their delusions, let this be a warning.

There is no safe place and no watertight alibi.

The danger posed by the American police/surveillance state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law-abider alike, black and white, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, blue collar and white collar, and any other distinction you’d care to trot out.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, in an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.

Eventually, we will all be made to suffer the same consequences in the electronic concentration camp that surrounds us.

Google ‘News’ is hideous

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

Even before its recent “redesign,” which was claimed to provide an “uncluttered” look, Google News was one of the worst news aggregator sites on the Internet. Many longtime Google News users have complained about the site’s quality and dubious “news” content. Google has offered no reasonable explanations for its poor business decisions that have resulted in Google News being a repository for misleading news links. Keeping in mind that Google received its initial seed investment from the CIA’s IN-Q-IT, now known as IN-Q-TEL, the agency’s venture capital firm in the Silicon Valley, the CIA may be playing some sort of massive social network experiment on Google News users.

The fact that Google News programmers cannot seem to distinguish between “World News” and “U.S. News” is laughable for a multi-billion dollar company that has supposedly recruited the best and brightest technologists into its ranks. The following appeared under Google News’s “World News” section on July 3, 2017:

“Media reaps benefit from Trump attacks,” The Hill

“White House pays women 80 cents for every dollar paid to men,” CNN

“New Jersey welfare fund arrests spark anti-Semitic sentiment,” USA Today

“Police Say Abduction Suspect Viewed Sexual Fetish Website,” U.S. News & World Report, with a story on the same subject regarding the University of Illinois appearing in the Champagne/Urbana News-Gazette

“Colorado man mistakes son for intruder, shoots and kills him,” WHIO

“5 significant gas explosions in Pennsylvania in the past decade,” PennLive.com

Something is seriously wrong with Google’s algorithms or the foreign programmers they have hired, to the exclusion of American employees, do not realize that from a U.S. perspective, events in Washington, DC, New Jersey, Illinois, Colorado, and Pennsylvania do not constitute “World News.”

Even Google News’s Science offering is trashed by nonsensical click bait, such as a Washington Post story, titled “No, NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on Mars.” The story emanates from comments made on the Infowars show by Alex Jones and his guest Robert Steele about a secret program to kidnap children and send them to Mars. With the advent of the Trump presidency, those who were once considered “controversial” are now just plain crazy. Yet, such wild rantings are found under “Science” in Google News!

Google News’s search engine is no better. Some apologists for Google claim that the searches are tailored for each customer. If that is so, why do this editor’s searches on various countries and areas of the world come back with the first ten stories being about sports. I do not like professional sports and never visit sporting websites. Therefore, if Google is to be believed, no sports stories should be returned on searches on international place names.

As an example, the following comes back from Google News on a search for “Barbados”:

“Marion makes Africa umpire team,” The Nation

“Barbados lose football opener to Dominica,” Nation News

“Young Gems leave for Botswana,” Nation News

Try out a search for “South Africa,” not an insignificant country, and returned are:

“England v South Africa: Faf du Plessis to miss first Test for family reasons,” BBC Sport. Among professional sports, which I detest in general, cricket is dead last on the list of topics to be ignored. This “top news story” about South Africa is followed by:

“South Africa disappointed by Cosafa exit,” BBC Sport. Cosafa is the Council of Southern Africa Football Associations and not a Covfefe-like typo by Donald Trump. This is a totally unimportant story about professional football of the soccer variety. Who cares? I don’t. Ranked around number five is a story about an upcoming no-confidence vote by the South African parliament against Jacob Zuma, the president of the country. Yet, cricket and soccer stories are given more prominence by Google News.

Try another country, New Zealand, and the result is the same, except rugby is considered more important by Google News than anything else happening in the nation:

“Lions beat New Zealand on tiniest of margins, and a thrilling finale awaits,” The Guardian

“New Zealand club rugby player in intensive care with spinal injury,” Telegraph (UK). Sad story, but the player might have taken up a safer line of work, like programming actual news stories for Google News searches.

Ranked third by Google in the search return is a fairly important story:

“New Zealand’s immigration laws favour the rich, a South African family says.” Radio New Zealand.

Ranked fourth is another non-news topic concerning Google News’s other distraction affectation, Entertainment News:

“Katy Perry gushes about her great ‘love’ for New Zealand,” Newshub. Katy Perry? Really, who gives a crap about her? Hillary Clinton loves her, as do many women motorcyclists. I don’t and don’t want stories about Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, or Taylor Swift returned on searches about important events around the world. Unless, of course, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, along with Madonna, go missing on a flight over New Guinea and Don McLean writes a song about them. He could title it “American Magpies.”

Google News received five thumbs down before their recent “redesign.” Now, there are not enough thumbs in the world to express displeasure about them.

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