Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

Exposing the Libyan Agenda: A Closer Look at Hillary’s Emails

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By Ellen Brown

Source: Web of Debt

Critics have long questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton’s recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.

The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.

But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.”

US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. Today, however, verifiable atrocities are occurring. As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post, “the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees [including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial review,’ and ‘kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant’.”

Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The country boasted the world’s largest irrigation system, the Great Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the cities and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this model throughout Africa.

But that was before US-NATO forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on the country. Today the situation is so dire that President Obama has asked his advisors to draw up options including a new military front in Libya, and the Defense Department is reportedly standing ready with “the full spectrum of military operations required.”

The Secretary of State’s victory lap was indeed premature, if what we’re talking about is the officially stated goal of humanitarian intervention. But her newly-released emails reveal another agenda behind the Libyan war; and this one, it seems, was achieved.

Mission Accomplished?

Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, nearly a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton aide who gained notoriety when he testified against Monica Lewinsky. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, reads in part:

Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver . . . . This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

In a “source comment,” the original declassified email adds:

According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:

  1. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,
  2. Increase French influence in North Africa,
  3. Improve his internal political situation in France,
  4. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
  5. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa

Conspicuously absent is any mention of humanitarian concerns. The objectives are money, power and oil.

Other explosive confirmations in the newly-published emails are detailed by investigative journalist Robert Parry. They include admissions of rebel war crimes, of special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, and of Al Qaeda embedded in the US-backed opposition. Key propaganda themes for violent intervention are acknowledged to be mere rumors. Parry suggests they may have originated with Blumenthal himself. They include the bizarre claim that Qaddafi had a “rape policy” involving passing Viagra out to his troops, a charge later raised by UN Ambassador Susan Rice in a UN presentation. Parry asks rhetorically:

So do you think it would it be easier for the Obama administration to rally American support behind this “regime change” by explaining how the French wanted to steal Libya’s wealth and maintain French neocolonial influence over Africa – or would Americans respond better to propaganda themes about Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops so they could rape more women while his snipers targeted innocent children? Bingo!

Toppling the Global Financial Scheme

Qaddafi’s threatened attempt to establish an independent African currency was not taken lightly by Western interests. In 2011, Sarkozy reportedly called the Libyan leader a threat to the financial security of the world. How could this tiny country of six million people pose such a threat? First some background.

It is banks, not governments, that create most of the money in Western economies, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged. This has been going on for centuries, through the process called “fractional reserve” lending. Originally, the reserves were in gold.  In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt replaced gold domestically with central bank-created reserves, but gold remained the reserve currency internationally.

In 1944, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to unify this bank-created money system globally. An IMF ruling said that no paper money could have gold backing. A money supply created privately as debt at interest requires a continual supply of debtors; and over the next half century, most developing countries wound up in debt to the IMF. The loans came with strings attached, including “structural adjustment” policies involving austerity measures and privatization of public assets.

After 1944, the US dollar traded interchangeably with gold as global reserve currency. When the US was no longer able to maintain the dollar’s gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal with OPEC to “back” the dollar with oil, creating the “petro-dollar.”  Oil would be sold only in US dollars, which would be deposited in Wall Street and other international banks.

In 2001, dissatisfied with the shrinking value of the dollars that OPEC was getting for its oil, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein broke the pact and sold oil in euros. Regime change swiftly followed, accompanied by widespread destruction of the country.

In Libya, Qaddafi also broke the pact; but he did more than just sell his oil in another currency.

As these developments are detailed by blogger Denise Rhyne:

For decades, Libya and other African countries had been attempting to create a pan-African gold standard.  Libya’s al-Qadhafi and other heads of African States had wanted an independent, pan-African, “hard currency.”

Under al-Qadhafi’s leadership, African nations had convened at least twice for monetary unification.  The countries discussed the possibility of using the Libyan dinar and the silver dirham as the only possible money to buy African oil.

Until the recent US/NATO invasion, the gold dinar was issued by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL).  The Libyan bank was 100% state owned and independent.  Foreigners had to go through the CBL to do business with Libya.  The Central Bank of Libya issued the dinar, using the country’s 143.8 tons of gold.

Libya’s Qadhafi (African Union 2009 Chair) conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign States of Africa with one gold currency (United States of Africa).  In 2004, a pan-African Parliament (53 nations) laid plans for the African Economic Community – with a single gold currency by 2023.

African oil-producing nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for oil/gas.

Showing What Is Possible

Qaddafi had done more than organize an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated that financial independence could be achieved. His greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank.

That could explain why this critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. NATO not only bombed the pipeline but finished off the project by bombing the factory producing the pipes necessary to repair it. Crippling a civilian irrigation system serving up to 70% of the population hardly looks like humanitarian intervention. Rather, as Canadian Professor Maximilian Forte put it in his heavily researched book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa:

[T]he goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US.

Mystery Solved

Hillary Clinton’s emails shed light on another enigma remarked on by early commentators. Why, within weeks of initiating fighting, did the rebels set up their own central bank? Robert Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy Journal in 2011:

This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences. I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising.

It was all highly suspicious, but as Alex Newman concluded in a November 2011 article:

Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow . . . may never be known for certain – at least not publicly.

There the matter would have remained – suspicious but unverified like so many stories of fraud and corruption – but for the publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails after an FBI probe. They add substantial weight to Newman’s suspicions: violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about the security of global banking, money and oil.

Errata: Sidney Blumenthal is not an attorney, as originally stated in this article. When he earned notoriety as Bill Clinton’s defender against Monica Lewinsky, it was as special adviser for the Clintons.

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Ellen Brown is an attorney and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com. Listen to “It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown” on PRN.FM.

 

Related Podcast:  Progressive Commentary Hour – 03.15.16 James and Joanne Moriarty on the real motives behind the 2011 invasion of Libya.

Hillary Clinton Breaks the Irony Meter

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By Kevin Carson

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

At the March 9 Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton had this to say about competitor Bernie Sanders’s favorable comments on Castro’s Cuba and the Sandinista regime in the ’80s:  “if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions…, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.” This, coming from a former Secretary of State who backed a right-wing coup in Honduras and proudly name-drops Henry Kissinger — Henry Kissinger! — as a close friend and mentor, is the kind of thing the Onion can’t compete with.

If Kissinger was known for anything in his years as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, it was installing dictators who oppressed, disappeared and imprisoned people. He oversaw a wave of coups that swept South America in the late ’60s and ’70s, installing right-wing military regimes that tortured, murdered or disappeared dissidents by the thousands, and where a common fate for labor and peasant activists was to be found in a ditch with their faces hacked off. Under Kissinger the U.S. actively supported Operation Condor — the program by which these South American dictators used torture and murder to suppress opposition — with military aid and technical assistance. He gave the green light to Indonesia’s genocidal invasion of East Timor.

Clinton has a long history of close personal friendship with this monster, and indeed touts herself as something of a protege. According to both Hillary and Bill, Kissinger praised her for running the State Department better than anybody in decades. And well might he praise her, because she’s followed in his footsteps in many ways. As Secretary of State, she oversaw the sale of millions of dollars worth of arms to despotic regimes that oppressed, disappeared and imprisoned people for expressing their opinions — many of which regimes were also large donors to the Clinton Foundation. And while we’re on the subject of people being murdered and disappeared, how about Berta Caceres — an activist murdered by the right-wing Honduran regime whose seizure of power Clinton backed in 2009?

As senator, Clinton voted to authorize George Bush’s criminal war of aggression on Iraq, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths since 2003. She says now it was “a mistake.” It was a mistake all right. She mistakenly believed the vote would make her more viable as a future presidential candidate. She mistakenly predicted the way the political winds would be blowing when she decided to run for president.

And don’t forget Clinton’s support for the Obama administration’s indiscriminate use of drones for extrajudicial killing. Many of the victims were civilians, and hundreds of them were actually children.

If you add it all up, Hillary Clinton still isn’t quite the war criminal her old friend and mentor Henry Kissinger is. Those are some big, bloody shoes to fill. But if she’s elected she’ll grow into them.

Credible Account Says Clinton Is Behind Violent Protesters at Trump Rallies

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: RINF

This concerns the question of the identity of the people who are behind the violent protesters at Donald Trump’s rallies.

There are going to be ad-hominem attacks against me for my reporting this account, which will contradict the myths that both progressives and conservatives hold regarding the U.S. government, but anyone who recognizes that the press to this day hides its having hidden the incontestable fact that George W. Bush knowingly falsified, lied regarding the evidence concerning “Saddam’s WMD,” will at least give this account, and its source, fair and unprejudiced consideration, as being possibly accurate and honest. Sometimes, in order to get to the truth in a case, it’s necessary to rely upon the testimony of people that one considers despicable; the FBI wouldn’t be able to crack many cases otherwise — and, sad to say, neither can I. So: please don’t dismiss me for relying here upon a researcher whom I personally detest — and whom you might likewise detest.

I believe that the libertarian Roger Stone, who is the Republican Party’s most gifted opposition-researcher, after having been Richard Nixon’s most gifted dirty-trickster, and after his having ferreted out the hypocrisy of Eliot Spitzer for paying prostitutes — after, in other words, Stone’s having worked for politicians I despise, and destroyed the careers of ones I admire — is among this nation’s stellar investigative journalists; and I have found, over the years, that, when he reports about dirty tricks, what he has reported is only confirmed, not disconfirmed, as time passes. In other words: though I don’t like the man, and I disagree with his politics, I respect his news-reporting. And, here is what he says, in a rush interview with the ‘conspiracy theorist’ (another libertarian) Alex Jones, on Saturday evening, March 12th, and I think that the entire nation needs to hear Stone’s account, at least to give it consideration. So, here it is:

https://www.facebook.com/AlexanderEmerickJones/videos/10153989651258459

My rush transcript of highlights from his rush-interview:

I think everybody in the country has now heard about these violent protests [at Trump rallies] which are being blamed on supporters of Bernie Sanders. … This is a false-flag. These demonstrators are flying under a false banner. They are not Sanders supporters by-and-large. This is an operation directed by supporters of Hillary Clinton, paid for by George Soros and Move-On, by David Brock at Media Matters for America, also funded by Soros, and also by the reclusive billionaire Jonathan Lewis. Now, Lewis was identified by the Miami New Times as a ‘mystery man.’ He inherited roughly a billion dollars from his father Peter Lewis … [founder of Progressive Insurance Company]. Jonathan Lewis interestingly withdrew his support of the Democratic National Committee over the immigration bill that he thought was unfair to gays. In any event, this is a Hillary Clinton operation. The idea here, very clearly, is to divide the Sanders economic voters from Trump; in other words, those voters who lost their jobs because of NAFTA and all of the other globalist international trade-deals that have screwed this country, they now realize that these voters are potentially, when Sanders is out of the race, Trump votes, and this is an effort to make Trump toxic, to disqualify him, [as a] racist, bigot, the whole thing is essentially a hoax. It’s a gambit directed, by the way, by Brock. Brock was once a friend of mine and was a comrade in the fight for freedom; but he went over to the dark side, with the Clintons, for money: big, big, big, money; and this is unfortunately his little dirty trick, Unfortunately, they have leaks within their operation, my sources are of the very best. The entire collaboration in Chicago is a Hillary Clinton operation. And, frankly, I can’t see Bernie Sanders having anything to do with it. I don’t agree with Bernie, but I respect him, and this is not his handiwork or the handiwork of his campaign.

[Jones here goes on to explain why he respects the investigative reports from Stone, then says, “When I saw all these Bernie shirts and Bernie people saying ‘We attack!’ — you know, people shooting guns in the air saying ‘We support Bernie!’  that is so clearly a way to attack him, make him look like a radical revolutionary, and to make Hillary look good, and also make Trump look like a racist when the media plays this up. You’re absolutely right. … To be clear: you have sources inside saying this is a Soros/Brock Media Matters, which they admit is run by the White House, they have weekly meetings, Obama’s former transition chief. … We’ve seen the build-up toward race-war this summer, this fall, to try to cloud the entire election; is that what you’re getting at; is this the opening salvo …  ]

[Stone continues] I think Hillary understands that Trump would lose the votes of certain establishment Republicans if he is the nominee. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter, because of his crossover outreach. Right now in Ohio, Democrats and independents in the Mahoning Valley, these people have lost their jobs because of these great globalist trade deals, are lining up to vote for Donald Trump in the Republican primary, which is legal in Ohio with some paperwork. And we saw this same crossover in Michigan. So it occurred to the Clinton people that Bernie’s economic voters — not his hard-left voters, she’s not going to get them, they’re not going for Hillary, blue-collar folks who have just figured out that they have been left out of the new-world-order economy, are a ripe target for Trump; he’s already getting that, she is petrified of it; so, this little maneuver, this David Brock dirty trick, solves two problems at once: it helps knock down Bernie, because after all these people are involved in violence; and it also disqualifies Trump as a future vote, by portraying him as a racist or a bigot. The whole thing is a kabuki dance. And I think it’s very important that Trump understand that it’s not the Sanders campaign that’s disrupting his rallies; this is a Hillary Clinton operation.

[Jones asks for more details.]

[Stone continues] Hillary Clinton empowered a certain member of Congress to approach the billionaire John Lewis to pay for a portion of this overall program. This isn’t just Chicago. You’re now going to see these phony demonstrators, these ringers, showing up at other Trump events. … That’s as much as I’m prepared to say. … 

——

That’s the interview.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign benefits enormously by this tactic:

1: It re-orients the issue away from economics toward race; away from economic issues and toward ethnic conflicts

2: It identifies Sanders with violent supporters.

3: It identifies Trump with racism and violence by his having black ‘Bernie supporters’ (of which there are few) disrupting Trump’s rallies.

4: While it smears both Sanders, her current opponent, and Trump, her likely future opponent, it leaves Hillary herself unscathed.

So: the proposed explanation makes sense, and it’s entirely in character for Hillary Clinton.

Therefore: I believe it.

Death In Honduras: The Coup, Hillary Clinton And The Killing Of Berta Cáceres

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By Media Lens

Source: Dissident Voice

On February 28, Hillary Clinton told an audience from the pulpit of a Memphis church: ‘we need more love and kindness in America’. This was something she felt ‘from the bottom of my heart’.

These benevolent sentiments recalled the national ‘purpose’ identified by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, shortly before he flattened Iraq. It was, he said, ‘to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world’.

Clinton, of course, meant North America, specifically the United States. But other places in America are short on love and kindness, too. Consider Honduras, for example.

On June 28, 2009, the Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped at gunpoint by masked soldiers and forced into exile. Since the ousting, the country ‘has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss’ as the military coup ‘threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and… unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression’. In 2012, Honduras had a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 population, then the highest rate in the world. In 2006, three years before the coup, the murder rate had stood at 46.2 per 100,000.

The years since 2009 have seen ‘an explosive growth in environmentally destructive megaprojects that would displace indigenous communities. Almost 30 percent of the country’s land was earmarked for mining concessions, creating a demand for cheap energy to power future mining operations. To meet this need, the government approved hundreds of dam projects around the country, privatizing rivers, land, and uprooting communities.’ In 2015, Global Witness reported that Honduras was ‘the most dangerous country to be an environmental defender’.COPINH

Berta Cáceres, a mother of four children, was co-founder and general coordinator of the COPINH (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras) group opposing this state-corporate exploitation. Last year, Cáceres was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s leading award recognising grassroots environmental activists, for her work opposing a major dam project. Many of COPINH’s leaders have been murdered in recent years. In 2013, Cáceres said:

The army has an assassination list of 18 wanted human rights fighters with my name at the top. I want to live, there are many things I still want to do in this world. I take precautions, but in the end, in this country where there is total impunity I am vulnerable. When they want to kill me, they will do it.

Last week, on the night of March 3, armed men burst through the back door of Cáceres’s house and shot her four times, killing her in her bed. US media watch site Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) commented:

There was widespread outcry and grief over her death, and the story was covered by major media in the United States. But there was a glaring problem with the coverage: Almost none of it mentioned that the brutal regime that likely killed Cáceres came to power in a 2009 coup d’état supported by the United States, under President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary.

Confidential – The Embassy Perspective

Following the 2009 coup, the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union all condemned Zelaya’s removal as a military coup. A confidential US Embassy cable, later published by Wikileaks, commented:

The Embassy perspective is that there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch… There is equally no doubt from our perspective that Roberto Micheletti’s assumption of power was illegitimate.

That was behind closed doors. In public, fifteen US House Democrats urged the US regime to ‘fully acknowledge that a military coup has taken place and… follow through with the total suspension of non-humanitarian aid, as required by law’. Writing for the Common Dreams website, Alexander Main supplied some detail:

Ann-Marie Slaughter, then director of Policy Planning at the State Department, sent an email to [Secretary of State] Clinton on August 16 [2009] strongly urging her to “take bold action” and to “find that [the] coup was a ‘military coup’ under U.S. law,” a move that would have immediately triggered the suspension of all non-humanitarian U.S. assistance to Honduras.

This, Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused to do, thus implicitly recognising the military takeover. As FAIR noted, Clinton makes clear in her memoirs that she had no intention of restoring President Zelaya to power:

In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.

In September 2009, US State Department officials blocked the OAS from adopting a resolution that would have rejected the legitimacy of Honduran elections carried out under the dictatorship, thus giving the coup the final US seal of approval.

Ousted former president, Manuel Zelaya, said last year:

Secretary Clinton had many contacts with us. She is a very capable woman, intelligent, but she is very weak in the face of pressures from groups that hold power in the United States, the most extremist right-wing sectors of the U.S. government, known as the hawks of Washington. She bowed to those pressures. And that led U.S. policy to Honduras to be ambiguous and mistaken.

Zelaya added:

President Obama has not wanted to hear our peoples. He has turned a deaf ear on the cry of the people. First we protested in the opposition. A few months ago, they physically removed me from the Congress, the National Congress, because our party mounted a peaceful protest. The military removed us, using tear gas in the Congress. They expelled us, beating us with batons, beating us into the street. This is the government that President Obama supports, a government that is repressive, a government that violates human rights, as has been shown by the very Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. It has shown this to be the case.

Alexander Main concluded:

A careful reading of the Clinton emails and Wikileaked U.S. diplomatic cables from the beginning of her tenure, expose a Latin America policy that is often guided by efforts to isolate and remove left-wing governments in the region.

An assertion supported by the increase in US military assistance to Honduras even as state-corporate violence has massively escalated. Noam Chomsky explained the logic:

Zelaya was moving somewhat tentatively towards the kinds of social reforms that the United States has always opposed and will try to stop if it can.

A Local Matter – The Media Response

Corporate politics and media, of course, never tire of proclaiming the West’s ‘responsibility to protect’ in places like Iraq, Libya and Syria. So how did these same humanitarians respond to the murder of a compassionate, respected and awesomely courageous activist in Honduras? FAIR commented on the overwhelming evidence of US support for the coup:

One wouldn’t know any of this reading US reports of Cáceres’ death. The coup, and its subsequent purging of environmental, LGBT and indigenous activists, is treated as an entirely local matter… The Washington Post, Guardian, NBC, CNN and NPR didn’t mention the 2009 coup that brought to power Cáceres’ likely murderers, let alone the US’s tacit involvement in the coup.

On the same day FAIR’s report was published, the first and only reference to these hidden truths in the UK press recorded by the Nexis media database was supplied by Jonathan Watts in the Guardian:

But Washington’s role is also controversial because the US backed the current government, which took power after a 2009 coup that ousted the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. The US is now providing fund [sic] for the Honduran police force.

Watts quoted International Rivers, an NGO that worked with Cáceres:

We must note that during the 2009 military coup in Honduras, the US government, with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, worked behind the scenes to keep Honduras’ elected government from being reinstated. Additionally, the US government continues to fund the Honduran military, despite the sharp rise in the homicide rate, political repression, and the murders of political opposition and peasant activists.

While hardly exhaustive, this is the only mention of these issues we have found in the UK corporate press. A more recent piece by the Guardian’s Washington correspondent, David Smith, mentioned the coup but not US involvement. With touching naivety, Smith observed that ‘the US, determined to stop the flow of illegal immigrants from Central America, has been pouring money into Honduras’s security apparatus’.

The Times – so vocal in promoting Western ‘intervention’ to ‘protect’ human rights from Official Enemies – printed 68 words on the killing penned by the Associated Press. The Telegraph gave the story a single mention. In the Independent, Phil Davison wrote of Cáceres:

As if anyone needed reminding, her murder brought back to Honduras the dark days of the 1980s Central American guerrilla wars, in which they and their neighbours fought to rid themselves of dictators backed by the US.

But in stark contrast to the courage of Cáceres and so many others in Honduras, Davison was not able to bring himself to mention that the tyranny in Honduras is today being backed by the region’s great superpower. Also in the Independent, Caroline Mortimer made no mention of US complicity in the coup. Nor, unsurprisingly, did the BBC in two pieces here and here on the killing.

As ever, ‘mainstream’ ‘compassion’ turns out to be rooted in rather more ‘pragmatic’ concerns. If an Official Enemy had been responsible for Cáceres’s death, the cries of outrage, horror and denunciation would have blazed from our corporate front pages and TV screens. Action would have been demanded, perhaps even ‘intervention’. But when the horror is committed by a faithfully corrupt and brutal servant of Empire aided and abetted by the ‘Leader of the Free World’, none of the buttons on the vast, high-tech propaganda machine are pressed and the story is quickly buried along with the victim.

Needless to say, awareness of the kind offered here threatens to jam a spanner in the conditionally ‘compassionate’ propaganda waterworks and must be scrupulously ignored or, at best, ridiculed.

 

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The second Media Lens book, Newspeak: In the 21st Century by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens’s website.

Related Article: Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup (Democracy Now)

War, Repression and International Gangsterism: U.S. State Policy From Benghazi to Baltimore

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By Ajamu Baraka

Source: CounterPunch.org

A mere two months after clashes between black youth and police in Baltimore following the murder of Freddie Gray while in police custody, President Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the indictment of twenty-four year old Raymon Carter for his alleged involvement in the torching of a CVS pharmacy. The national government’s intervention into the case had an unmistakable message – if you engage in “unauthorized” forms of resistance – in this case, crimes against property – expect to confront the full power of the national government.

U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein made it even clearer: “Anyone in the future who participates in a ‘riot’ should know that police, prosecutors and citizens will track them down and send them to prison.”

This aggressive and speedy move on the part of the DOJ to criminalize poor, black kids in Baltimore differed sharply from the DOJ approach to high government officials, armed servants of the state at the local level and the big banks and investment firms. For the officials involved in torture under the Bush Administration, the financial gangsters who engineered the 2008 economic crisis, and the killer cops across the country who have yet to experience one indictment from Obama’s DOJ after months of “investigations,” DOJ-granted impunity has been the operative principle in practice.

But Obama’s DOJ has not been the only state institution involved in providing cover and impunity for repression and criminality in the service of the capitalist oligarchy.

Impunity for State Terrorism: the Real Story of Benghazi

What might seem oppositional and important in the game of U.S. politics is usually insignificant and diversionary. Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the House Select Committee, ostensibly established to conduct a bi-partisan investigation into the events that led to the death of Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. citizens on September 11, 2012, was a case in point.

Despite the supposed acrimony between the two ruling class parties in Congress, an ideological consensus exists around the overall strategic commitment to maintain U.S. global dominance. On that ultimate objective both corporate parties share an interest in shifting public attention away from state policies and actions that demonstrate the state’s absolute commitment to the principle of “by any means necessary” for maintaining and advancing the interests of the White supremacist, patriarchal, colonial/capitalist order.

For example, initially the Republican majority’s decision to launch another investigation into the events of 2012 was met with a considerable amount of consternation on the part of some democrats who saw the investigation as just another effort to sabotage Clinton’s run for the Presidency. However, when the republicans settled on the issue of Clinton’s emails the democrats were concerned that Clinton’s use of a private server might cause some embarrassment for her candidacy, but it was also clear that the hearings were going to be rigged and the real questions related to Benghazi would never be raised.

If the House Committee had really been committed to public accountability and surfacing the truth, there were a number of questions that could have been raised such as: 1) what was the role of the facility that was attacked? Was it a U.S. Consulate, a CIA facility or some other entity? 2) Why were those facilities set up so quickly even before a stable government was established in the aftermath of the destruction of the Libyan state? 3 ) Why were there estimated to be more than twenty CIA personnel on the ground in Benghazi just miles from the facility on the night of the attack and what was the mission of those CIA personnel? And 4) Why did the U.S. government contract with an organization to provide security for the facility that had clear ties to Jihadist groups that the U.S. considered as part of the international terrorist networks?

These kinds of questions that would have delved into U.S. involvement in Libya were not raised for two reasons: 1) The Syrian issue – Congress didn’t want the public to focus too much attention on the question of the timeline of U.S. involvement. Although many right-wing republicans were upset that the Obama administration was not more aggressive with more open and direct support for its regime change strategy, everyone in Congress knows that the narrative of reluctant and recent involvement on the part of the Obama administration in the events in Syria is pure fiction. And 2) elements in congress and the Obama administration, with the full collaboration of the corporate press, have suppressed the facts around the mission of the CIA and the role of the State Department in Libya during the period leading to the attack on the two compounds because those activities contravened both U.S. and international law.

Investigative journalist Seymore Hersh revealed that a classified annex to a report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Benghazi that was not made public, discussed a secret agreement made in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan administration in Turkey to run an arms supply line from Libya using arms secured with the overthrow of the Libya state to the so-called rebel forces in Syria. The operation was run by CIA director David Petraeus, and the elements that received support included jihadist groups, including the Al Nusrah Front, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate.

So even though information on the real role of the U.S. in the war in Syria is getting more coverage, the elites in Congress and the Administration were still not interested in calling too much attention to the fact that the U.S. provided material support to groups that it defined as terrorists which technically under U.S. law should have made that assistance prosecutable.

Vice President Joe Biden even stated publically that governments allied with the U.S. and their nationals were supplying arms to elements that they knew were terrorists and U.S. officials knew it:

“They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadist coming from other parts of the world. “

Yet not one of these individuals or government officials, many who travel on a regular basis to the U.S. and other Western nations have been charged or had sanctions applied to them. In fact, in a pathetic and disingenuous comment, Biden claims that even though it was pointed out to those states by U.S. officials that their support was going to extremist jihadists forces – “We could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”

Obviously for the Obama Administration charging them, freezing their bank accounts, slapping sanctions on the government as was done with the governments and individuals in Iran and Russia was out of the question.

This is why for anyone whose vision is not distorted by the myopia of white supremacist, capitalist ideology, the crude class politics of the DOJ’s decision to prosecute the young resisters in Baltimore is so outrageous.

Benghazi is only a symptom of a pattern of criminal activity on the part of U.S. officials from both parties. From the illegal attacks on Iraq and Libya, subversion in Syria and Venezuela, surveillance, police state repression and mass incarceration domestically, coups in Honduras and Haiti, support for genocide in Yemen, and the continued occupation of Palestine, it is clear that what unites the elites of both parties is their unshakable commitment to maintaining the power of the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination as the institutional expressions of concentrated white power for as long as possible.

In the meantime, Raymon Carter is facing years in prison because the state claims it has a right to hunt down and prosecute who it defines as criminals.

But the social world is not static and the balance of forces is shifting. One day using that same logic but informed by an alternative ethical framework that centers real justice, the people will be in a position to hunt down and bring to justice the international colonial gangsters who destroy our earth, torture, exploit and bring death to countless millions.

Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence” (CounterPunch Books, 2014). He can be reached atwww.AjamuBaraka.com

Emanuel running scared; White House, Hillary camps alarmed

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

President Obama and putative Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton held a previously unscheduled and unannounced 90-minute luncheon meeting at the White House on December 7. Although the White House termed the meeting “personal,” WMR learned that chief on their agenda was the political scandal in Chicago surrounding former Obama chief of staff and former Clinton administration White House aide Rahm Emanuel. Obama and Clinton fear that an indictment of Emanuel for covering up the shooting death by Chicago police of an unarmed black teen in order to skate to re-election as mayor could upset Chicago and Illinois politics and harm Clinton’s current lead in the polls.

Emanuel, who was re-elected mayor of Chicago last month after defeating his Hispanic challenger, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, in the April run-off primary, is mired in a major scandal arising from his covering up of the existence of a Chicago Police Department tape showing Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke pumping sixteen rounds into Laquan McDonald, a 17-year old African-American, in 2014.

On December 7, just as Obama and Clinton were secretly meeting at White House, the U.S. Justice Department announced it was conducting a criminal probe of the Chicago Police Department. At the same time, Emanuel, who has had a tortured relationship with the press, called a news conference to announce that he would support the federal probe of the police. Last week, after publicly supporting his police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, an import from the New York Police Department, Emanuel suddenly asked for his resignation.

At the news conference, Emanuel, who is normally brash and ill-tempered with the media and others, looked like a deer caught in the headlights. After having rejected a federal probe of his police department, Emanuel reversed himself and said he welcomed it. Mrs. Clinton publicly stated she had faith in Emanuel. Clinton said she was “confident that he’s [Emanuel] going to do everything he can to get to the bottom” of the emerging scandal.

Illinois Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, a longtime friend of Emanuel, like Mrs. Clinton, expressed “shock” after seeing the video of McDonald’s shooting but refrained from criticizing the mayor. However, Rauner, whose wife Diana Mendley Rauner, like Emanuel, is Jewish and a strong supporter of Zionist causes, did criticize Obama for not ordering a federal investigation of the Chicago police earlier. The Obama White House is said to have been livid over Rauner’s criticism and believes it would not have been made without a “wink and a nod” from Emanuel’s backers.

Rauner’s chief operating officer is former Republican Governor of Hawaii Linda Lingle, another supporter of Zionist causes who is helping to deflect criticism away from Emanuel. Emanuel also has a powerful ally in Obama’s Cabinet, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, the founder of PSP Capital Partners and Pritzker Realty Group and an heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a financial backer of Emanuel.

Emanuel has also appointed as a senior adviser to his Task Force for Police Accountability former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, an African-American and a close friend of Obama. Emanuel hopes to avoid any potential indictment for covering up the McDonald shooting by using Patrick, the head of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division under President Bill Clinton, to use his connections with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, also an African-American, and her senior staff to intercede on his behalf.

Emanuel and his political supporters have every reason to be worried. Emanuel stands accused of covering up the existence of the police dash cam video showing that Van Dyke shot McDonald without provocation from the teen. On April 15, 2015, the Chicago City Council, with Emanuel’s obvious blessing, offered to pay the McDonald family $5 million in a settlement. The offer came just a week after Emanuel defeated Garcia and a campaign in which Emanuel convinced the city’s African-American voters that he was a better choice than Garcia, a Cook County Commissioner.

On May 26, 2015, a freelance journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the police dash cam video showing the shooting of McDonald. The city denied the request citing an ongoing investigation of the incident. In November, a judge ordered the city to release the explosive tape that enraged the city’s African-American residents and prompted Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to charge Van Dyke with first degree murder.

However, it was known to Alvarez, McCarthy, and Emanuel what was on the 2014 video and Emanuel stands accused in the court of public opinion and by a number of newspapers of covering up the tape’s existence in order to glide on to re-election. It is certain that if the tape were made public earlier, Garcia would have garnered the support of a majority of Chicago’s African-Americans and defeated Emanuel in the April Democratic primary. Emanuel, the scion of a hard line Zionist family—his father, a former Irgun terrorist from Israel once stated that Arab women were only suited to be cleaning ladies in the White House—harbors his own presidential ambitions in 2020 or 2024. That is why Emanuel, former U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald, and U.S. Judge James Zagel arranged for former Democratic Governor and Emanuel’s predecessor in Illinois’s 5th Congressional District, Rod Blagojevich, to receive a 14-year federal prison sentence for corruption. Blagojevich, who insists he is innocent, is not slated for release until 2025.

Emanuel has called on all his Zionist friends to bail him out of his current political morass. With several quarters calling for his resignation, Emanuel is being hit with the age-old political scandal question arising from the Watergate affair: “What did he [Emanuel] know and when did he know it?”

Emanuel even has his own version of the Richard Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods’s infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in an Oval Office audio tape. The manager of a Burger King testified before a grand jury that Chicago police erased 86 minutes from his restaurant’s security video tape that showed the shooting of McDonald. The FBI confiscated the Burger King’s video recorder and then stated that there was no evidence that the videotape had been altered. When it comes to mishandling and tampering with evidence of a crime, from the Kennedy assassination in Dallas to the crash of TWA flight 800 off Long Island and 9/11, the FBI has no peers. And when it comes to whether to believe a Burger King manager and the FBI, the Burger King manager wins any veracity contest hands down.

In addition to McCarthy, Emanuel fired Scott Ando, the chief administrator of the so-called “Independent” Police Review Authority and replaced him with a former assistant attorney flunky for Fitzgerald in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Sharon Fairley. Fairley’s “independence” is dubious since she served as Emanuel’s general counsel and deputy inspector general during the cover-up of the McDonald shooting. Police confiscated the Burger King tape which was subsequently turned over to the FBI.

As for as the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, Zachary Fardon, Emanuel has little to be concerned with. Fardon replaced Fitzgerald in 2013 and formerly assisted him in prosecuting and convicting former GOP Governor George Ryan after the governor commuted the death sentences of Illinois’s death row inmates after citing police and prosecutorial misconduct in their trials. Fardon’s assistant U.S. Attorney is Gary Shapiro, another pal of Emanuel.

By going after corrupt law enforcement officers and prosecutors, Ryan painted a target on his back. Ryan went to prison because he went after Fitzgerald’s and Fardon’s corrupt cronies. Blagojevich followed Ryan into prison after threatening to expose Obama’s and Emanuel’s political and personal cronyism in Chicago.

Emanuel created a number of enemies on his way up the political ladder. His enemies include Chicago public school teachers, public employee unions, the African-American community, the Hispanic community, former Democratic Governor Pat Quinn—defeated by Emanuel’s pal Rauner—and the Assyrian Chaldean Christian community in the 5th district. During his campaign for Congress, Emanuel had the Assyrians convinced that he, like them, was of Assyrian Christian descent. Emanuel never mentioned that he was a Zionist Jew who served in the Israeli Army during Operation Desert Storm. Now that Emanuel’s political blood is in the water, his enemies are coalescing and are ready to pounce on the political circle of wagons Emanuel believes he has formed around himself in Chicago, Springfield, and Washington, DC. Emanuel, who has been a “divide and conqueror” for all of his political life—he once called progressive and liberal Democrats “fucking retarded”—now stands to be politically “drawn and quartered” by enemies who are uniting in the common goal of seeing Emanuel “perp walked” off to prison.

Why America Will Never Hear the Entire Benghazi Story

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By Larry Hancock

Source: WhoWhatWhy.org

The underlying story of Benghazi is one that cannot and will not be talked about in any open session of Congress. This means that Thursday’s hearing featuring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was nothing but an exercise in futility.

It is the story of a covert CIA operation that was operating from a separate facility in the Benghazi compound that was simply known as the “Annex.” Some two dozen CIA case officers, analysts, translators and special staff were a part of this operation and its security was provided by CIA Global Response Staff (GRS), who had entered the country under diplomatic cover.

The CIA’s mission included arms interdiction — attempting to stop the flow of Soviet-era weapons to Central Africa — and very possibly the organization of Libyan arms shipments to vetted insurgent groups on the ground in Syria.

There is also evidence that the mission was working in concert with military personnel from the Joint Special Operations Group Trans-Sahara. At the time of the attack, an unarmed American surveillance drone was in flight over the territory east of Benghazi and Trans-Sahara military personnel were stationed in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

In contrast, the State Department’s special diplomatic mission facility, classified as “temporary,” was minimally staffed with a rotating series of State Department officers sent to and from Tripoli.

US Ambassador Christopher Stevens had not been in Benghazi for a year. When he arrived for a short stay in September 2012, only a single diplomatic officer was present there, and that officer rotated back to Tripoli upon the ambassador’s arrival. Stevens was accompanied by a communications officer and a handful of Diplomatic Service Security staff. The security personnel provided protection for the ambassador during his travels and meetings in the city. His presence was intended to be extremely low key, but it was exposed in the local media shortly after his arrival.

Fruitless, Meaningless, Pointless Questioning

Asking Clinton to justify maintaining the State Department temporary mission in the face of a worsening security situation is fruitless, given its actual function as a clandestine national security mission cover.

Questioning Clinton about that role would be as meaningless as questioning senior CIA personnel about operational information. Such missions cannot be publicly acknowledged or discussed, and revealing anything about them is strictly prohibited.

The same national security laws constraining State Department and CIA personnel also prevent lawmakers, other than those on select intelligence committees, from being briefed on such missions. And even those privileged individuals could not raise related questions in public — or even in closed sessions that include committee members or staff without the appropriate clearances.

In addition, querying Clinton about her involvement in the immediate response to the attacks is also pointless. The Secretary of State has no legal or operational role in a military response to a diplomatic facility attack. Only National Command Authority (president/secretary of defense) can order a foreign military intervention. The State Department does have Foreign Emergency Support Teams (FEST), composed of personnel from multiple agencies and maintained on alert to respond to crisis. But the FEST teams have no military elements and are dispatched only in the aftermath of a crisis, when the security situation allows. Following an attack their role is damage assessment and recovery.

Earlier investigations have already documented that President Obama ordered a military response immediately upon word reaching Washington. They showed as well that the AFRICOM commander responded to that order right away, directing deployment of the closest military quick reaction units — units which were on station in Spain, training in Eastern Europe, or back in the United States.

There were no armed American aircraft or naval units close enough to respond during the attack, those assets were in operation in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the Horn of Africa in Somalia and Yemen.

Maintaining a Covert Profile

As for the well-equipped paramilitary operatives at the CIA station, according to their own statements, they were initially held back by the CIA station chief — as they had been in other incidents. And the station chief was, in turn, acting under his directive to let local militia groups respond. That practice was intended to maintain the station’s covert profile. Unfortunately, it was not consistent with providing any real time defense for the State Department compound.

Given all of the above, it is clear why the hearing quickly turned into a game of “pin the tail on the donkey.” As Democrats have claimed all along — and some Republicans have recently admitted — the committee’s work is mostly about beating up a political adversary and not at all about advancing the security of American diplomats abroad.

 

Larry Hancock conducts investigative and historical research in the areas of intelligence and national security. He has studied Benghazi in regard to both its covert aspects and the issues it raises for diplomatic security. That work is published in Shadow Warfare, A History of America’s Undeclared Wars (Counterpoint, 2014) and his most recently published book, Surprise Attack, from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 to Benghazi (Counterpoint, Sept. 2015).

Why Hillary Won the Debate (Even though She Didn’t)

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By Gary Leupp

Source: Dissident Voice

CNN and Facebook co-sponsored last week’s Democratic presidential frontrunners’ “debate.” After the event, CNN conducted a poll. “Who won the debate?” it asked. The result: 83% Bernie Sanders; 12% Hillary Clinton.

Facebook also took a poll. “Who do you think won?” Over 79% responded, “Bernie Sanders.”

The CNN editors’ take? “CLINTON’S CONFIDANT SWEEP.”

Slate conducted a poll. “Who won the presidential debate?” asked the magazine. 75% of respondents said Bernie Sanders; 18% gave it to Hillary Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton won,” reported Slate “senior writer” Josh Vorhees exuberantly. “She just needed to be solid in the debate. Instead, she was spectacular.”

Spectacular! with 18% of Slate’s own polling numbers. Go figure.

“Who do you think won?” asked Time Magazine. The response?  Bernie Sanders: 70%, Hillary Clinton 16%.

The Time headline:  “CLINTON IN CONTROL.”

Are you disgusted yet? This goes far beyond distortion, and far beyond the tampering with facts that characterized Soviet-style reporting in Izvestia and Pravda in the decade before the USSR collapsed. This is in-your-face rejection of empirical reality, to say nothing of an insult to the viewers polled. The entire mainstream news media is complicit.

Imagine if the “free” press—free to publish whatever its corporate editors want, including even the truth, at their discretion—had sought to spin this story differently.

“POLLS SHOW BIG WIN FOR SANDERS,” CNN might have proclaimed, between commercials.

“A great night for Sanders,” Slate might have announced.

“SANDERS TROUNCES CLINTON,” Time might have acknowledged.

But no, and this is par for the course. The TV cable news anchors took ages to concede that, well, yes, maybe Jed Bush—despite his solid RNC support and Wall Street’s firm endorsement—is not the inevitable GOP candidate. They’ve had to acknowledge that (for whatever reasons) Donald Trump’s actually striking a much deeper chord than warmonger Dubya’s little brother among likely voters.

But they’re stubbornly refusing to recognize some things they don’t want to see—things that don’t follow their script.

They don’t understand that people in their twenties who constitute the 75-year-old Sanders’ support base have no problem with “socialism” but rather have lots of problems with Wall Street. These “millenials” are even—horrors!—increasingly inclined to question the national god of capitalism itself. It has fewer positive connotations to them than it did for their parents who grew up during the Cold War and were subjected to its particular brainwashing agenda.

That’s the sort of brainwashing that allows Trump, a demagogue preying on the most abjectly ignorant to tell cheering crowds that he calls Sanders “a ‘socialist, slash, communist,’ okay? ‘Cause that’s what he is!”

‘Cause that’s what he is! Sanders is a communist. End of story. End of rational thought.

I myself am not a Sanders supporter. He’s nowhere nearly left enough for me. But then I’m not a supporter of the whole bogus, skewed, money-driven two-party electoral system itself, which seems designed to hoodwink people, channel their energies into itself, and then produce disillusionment soon after the election, as the elected official reneges on promises and proved to be anything other than a harbinger of “change.” The system is wired to then hoodwink people again, re-channel their energies (again back into itself), bouncing people back and forth between two hopelessly corrupt parties that are really two factions of a single corporate party.

The system tells us, “If you don’t vote, you have nothing to say” and reduces political involvement to endorsing one of its (safe) choices. It excludes from the debate stage even the discussion of needed radical change. The electoral process is designed to keep you out of the street (where history is really made) and lead you into a box, like a confessional booth or a porno video cubicle, a private space in which you’re touched by something greater than yourself and leave with a sense of gratification. You were a good citizen. You exercised your precious right to VOTE and did your part!

Casting that ballot in private is supposed to make you feel good about yourself, as a participant in the state. It’s supposed to make you think that, since you actually participated in the construction of the existing polity, when you talk about what it does, you can accept personal responsibility for its crimes.

For example, you might say: “We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq.” In doing so you implicitly include yourself—despite your disagreement—among those who actually did the vicious deed. I prefer to say, “Leave me out of that ‘we,’ since I had nothing to do with it. I fought against it, tooth and nail, attending every anti-war demonstration I could and railing against it to all who would listen.”

“Well, our government did it,” you might correct yourself. “We voted for it.” But I will reply I didn’t; I stayed at home on election day, 2000. It’s like I was invited to a party that day, and disliking all who’d be there, I politely declined to attend.

When you vote, you vote not so much for a person as for the system itself, validating it and the rules surrounding the procedure. Casting the ballot is the state’s highest ritual, the individual’s most intimate connection with the state. It makes you feel one with it. It’s rather like taking the Holy Communion at mass. You’re swallowing something, and making a statement of faith: I believe in this system!

This (corporate) system you vote for, every time you vote at all, commands the (corporate) media to such an extent that it can do what we see in the reportage cited above. It can turn reality on its head and get away with it, whether it’s shaping public opinion about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. successes against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Syrian “moderates” gaining against Assad, or victory in a farcical televised debate.

Whatever you think about Sanders, is it not outrageous that the mass media can obscure his plain victory in that exercise as a triumph for Hillary Clinton? Even a “spectacular” win? Isn’t it clear that she was pronounced the victor not because she actually won out over Sanders but because powerful people steering the “free” press needed her to do so?

As PR/disinformation master Karl Rove once put it (and this should be repeated as often as we repeat that wonderful quote from the imprisoned Goebbels at Nuremberg about using fear to build mass support for war): “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

It’s not a sentiment unique to Republicans. Recall how, during the 2012 Democratic national convention, the crowd clearly voted down the inclusion of a line supporting Jerusalem as the eternal, undivided capital of Israel in its platform. The change required a two-thirds majority of the vote, according to party rules. At least half the delegates voted against it.

Still, the convention chairman to the outrage of many present announced (after some hushed consultation) that the “Ayes” carried the day. So much for democracy at the “Democratic” Party’s convention.

The mainstream press, by and large, wants Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee for president. Wall Street’s leading candidates are Jeb Bush and Clinton; both are beloved of big money and either one will do. Sanders (even though in office he would likely buckle to their will, the same way Greece’s “socialist” Alexis Tsipras buckled to the IMF and European Central Bank) is anathema to Wall Street. And the connections between Wall Street, the Washington power elite, and the press are—to use the Chinese expression—as close as lips and teeth.

Finance capital rules the world and will do so until the “millions and millions” Bernie keeps talking about find some way to effectively challenge it.

Thus Sanders could not win the debate, even though he did. And Hillary was destined to win the debate, even though she didn’t. Get it? And isn’t it great you have the right to vote for her?

 

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu. Read other articles by Gary.