In Foreign Events Coverage Guardian Presstitutes Slip Beyond the Reach of Embarrassment
Reporters without conscience: once a nominally left of centre liberal publication became firmly
embedded part of the Foreign Office, MI6 and the US Department of State
Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England,
nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country
who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it
is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice
or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All
you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Hermann Goering, President of the Reichstag, Nazi Party, and Luftwaffe Commander in Chief
Lapdog is easy role, watchdog is hard.
Lapdogs are lazy but get fed, watchdogs stand out in the cold, and get kicked.
Lapdogs get rich, watchdogs remain poor.
Lapdogs eat shit, and watchdogs kick ass.
Lapdogs need many masters, watchdogs are their own master.
Lapdogs are part of the problem, watchdogs are part of the solution.
@RIP, lapdogs are dismissed even by the asses they kissed, while history remembers watchdogs
for the asses they kicked.
When Gerald Celente branded the American media “presstitutes,” he got it right. The US print
and TV media (and NPR) whore for Washington and the corporations. Reporting the real news is their
last concern. The presstitutes are a Ministry of Propaganda and Coverup. This is true of the entire
Western media, a collection of bought-and-paid-for whores.
Not ashamed to manipulate stuff from CCTV about migrant work in Xinjiang into "forced
labour" and "BBC findings". Typical for western "journalists" in China, mostly sitting in
their apartments quaffing cheap liquor or going to the .. erm barber shops for a da feiji
(打飞机) ..
I was looking at an article in The Graud (on a musical subject and therefore possibly
reliable) when I noticed their little begging bowl bit:
"In these perilous times, a truth-seeking global news organisation like the Guardian is
essential. We have no shareholders or billionaire owner, meaning our journalism is free
from commercial and political influence – this makes us different . When it's never
been more important, our independence allows us to fearlessly investigate, challenge and
expose those in power .
In a year of unprecedented intersecting crises in 2020, we did just that, with revealing
journalism that had real-world impact: the inept handling of the Covid-19 crisis , the
Black Lives Matter protests, and the tumultuous US election."
Yes, I recall reading this "We have no ties to anyone and are fearlessly independent"
spiel before. And of course, the old "expose those in power" bit too. And note that "inept
handling of the Covid-19 crisis". Well maybe the Graud was amongst the ones who pressurised
Boris into the lockdown he was already planning anyway?
Oh what a circus, oh what a show!
Schmitz Katze , Jan 20, 2021 9:38 PM
With barricades and armed troops some sources spoke of 40 thousand soldiers who were
guarding men and women with slipping corona masks who hugged each other to me it looked more
like a new military junta than the swearing in of a democratically elected president.
Funny thing happend, as the family were watching this bizarre event on Austrian TV suddenly
the simultaneous translation into German was interrupted for less than a minute just as Biden
was talking about the importance of "truth and honesty" .
With the familiy somewhat nonplussed I ventured forth and I must have taken Biden by his word
and translated his following sentence as „
I promise many new millitary interventions around the world and many jobs transferred to
China"
I got away with it. My husband gave Biden credit for his candor only to suggest a renaming of
the USA into
Chimerica-))
image , Jan 20, 2021 9:35 PM
Like we was was telling another disillusioned bunch of people.. There is no 1st
Amendment.. There are no Amendments period. . Americas is a Corporation.. There IS NO
Democratic process .
"... As an ex-fan of the Guardian, I thought it was jolly decent of the Editors to flag BS stories by omitting the Reader Comments beneath the article. It saved me a lot of time during the transition from reliable News outlet to reliable Mawkish Drivel outlet. Some of the drivel can be amusingly pointless/naif-ish. ..."
"... "The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. " ..."
I have a poorly researched theory on the Guardian to share here if i may... a mix of
interesting events reconstructed into a theoretical conspiracy of sorts... here it goes.. I
won't take any reasoned or better informed debunking personally i assure you.
-Since the Edward Snowden scandal, it appears the Guardian has experienced a
transformation of sorts. From rogue investigative journalism, to MSM / Intel Services
propaganda mouthpiece... a la WaPo, NY Times etc...
-To my knowledge, the Guardian's original independence and journalistic integrity was
facilitated by a Trust Fund of sorts which allowed it some form of editorial independence
and objectivity based on finances not entirely reliant on ad revenue/sponsorship and
various other corporate partnership/ownership deals
-I am not particularly sure about the exact timings, but in recent years this Trust Fund of
sorts began to underperform and The Guardian started running into financial trouble
-The Guardian's financial misadventures roughly coincided with significant changes in its
editorial content, key departures including Glen Greenwald himself and various other legal
disputes and misfortunes
My amateurish thesis..
Could it be that this Trust Fund of sorts was deliberately sabotaged, through toxic
Board infiltrations or deliberate bad financial advice, aimed at eroding The Guardian's
financial independence and thus its editorial independence and promotion of dissenting
narratives? Given the extent of integration between Intel/Weapons/Finance industries, a
congruence of mutual interests is not unexpected, and if this Fund was advised or run by
members of major Wall St et al. firms, it doesn't seem too far fetched to conceive of such
a possibility.
Please feel free to post any relative info or comment.
As an ex-fan of the Guardian, I thought it was jolly decent of the Editors to flag
BS stories by omitting the Reader Comments beneath the article. It saved me a lot of time
during the transition from reliable News outlet to reliable Mawkish Drivel outlet. Some of
the drivel can be amusingly pointless/naif-ish.
Guardian changed after 2014 when they published the Edward Snowden leaks. Cameron
threatened to take over the newspapers for revealing the Five Eyes' global
surveillance.
The Guardian was once a comparatively good newspaper. The Snowden episode changed
everything.
Nowadays it's just another pseudo-liberal, post-feminist, opinionated propaganda outlet. In
some way a Daily Mail for "intellectuals".
Basically half of their articles are "opinion" pieces. The only thing worth reading is the
football section (and even that gets more and more opinionated).
So the evil-doers carry out a complicated mission with many moving parts, plus a huge
monetary outlay. They wait seven years before finishing the dastardly deed, just to thicken
the plot. The Guardian says yeah, that sounds plausible. Because they know their readers
have been groomed for years to believe BS.
Reminds me of the Skripal nutty shifting narratives, or better yet Jonathon Chait's New
York Magazine piece (Trump a Russian asset since 1987).
Martin Chulov should be scolded by his Minders for not linking Russia to the plot (the
three were "joint Russian-Syrian citizens"). Maybe that will be written into the script in
the next Guardian article.
My understanding is that for years the bulk of The Fraudian's funding was subsidised by
revenues from sales of Manchester-based tabloid newspapers. I believe this continued into
the 1990s and maybe the first decade of this century. A major part of The Fraudian's income
also used to come from government employment advertisements in the pre-Internet age.
Once the connections with Manchester-based newspapers were cut by the Trust that runs
The Fraudian, and other traditional sources of funding dried up, the newspaper started
sacking editorial and other office staff. This was about the same time The Fraudian opened
offices in the US and Australia in an effort to get more readers (and more subscribers),
and also coincides with Julian Assange working with The Fraudian and other MSM papers on
releasing Wikileaks email revelations. The sackings were disguised as voluntary
redundancies or retirements and the scale was quite huge, a fair few hundred jobs were
cut.
This of course led to The Fraudian having to partner with various "media agencies" in
the Middle East, eastern Europe and other parts of the world. You can guess who funds these
other agencies The Fraudian calls its "partners".
That Martin Chulov writes an article linking the Syrian govt to last year's bomb blast
is no surprise. The news comes just before Joe Biden's inauguration. I had expected that
one of his first priorities as POTUS would be resuming the US invasion of Syria, using any
excuse. The Chulov article smacks of the same devious cherry-picking that Bellingcat
engaged in to finger and "identify" two Russian tourists in Salisbury in 2018 as GRU
agents. I would not be surprised if Chulov, like Higgins, had been told what to write and
by the same people.
Ahem... refreshing to see some content that isn't about the whole Trump
situation in the USSA.
As with other things, including, in part, the Trump thing, we're witnessing full "1984"
level shit from the media and governments. Everyone knows that the CIA and other Pentagram
offices (and MI6) have full control over what Western media publishes, but it's like they
aren't even trying anymore. Just full-on lie mode with zero accountability even when what
they print is refuted beyond any doubt.
Of course they were going to blame Syria, Iran or Venezuela. If any external government
was involved and it wasn't simply negligence by Lebanon's, then it was Israel. Period.
Jesus F*cking Christ, it's so obvious.
Guardian did a good job reporting on the Iraq War II...it was after that (2008), and in
response to its halfway decent reporting of Iraq that the ownership mechanism was
changed.
The new Guardian ownership enacted a "constitution" guaranteeing it would retain its
earlier journalistic integrity, but that was pure horseshit, as it went down hill rapidly
after the ownership change and became just another mouthpiece for
neoliberal/neoconservative propaganda.
Why Martin Chulov, the Guardian's Middle East correspondent and author of the piece, did
not do the basic diligence of checking the records or chose not to tell his readers that
such address sharing is extremely common and does not prove anything is beyond me.
If the Guardian had a proper fact checker that would defeat the purpose of the Guardian
in the first place. I'm not sure if that counts as a circular argument.
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Jan 15 2021 16:41 utc | 23
And you can get your nails and a (bikini) waxing done next door. I guess it's safer that
doing it at home.
... I recall a story how The Guardian was tamed. In the aftermath of Snowden
revelations, The Guardian was raided and the people who run it were seriously threatened.
Ever since, they diligently follow the orders which are given to them with some
sophistication (this is England after all, not Zimbabwe), hence preserving some shreds of
"leftists credibility". Apparently, unlikely as it may seem, some people still read it.
Just before I stopped reading them, they had an actually interesting series about police
shootings in USA. Criticizing local governments in USA is still allowed.
@Et Tu #8
You're thinking too hard.
Matt Taibbi has nailed it on the head: Facebook and Google's ongoing strangulation of news
via monopolization of the channel and demonetization of classified ads has forced
newspapers (and other media) to become ever more click-bait focused. This in turn has
caused them to focus ever more narrowly on "engaged" (read: made angry) groups.
The Guardian's turn is directly linked with Russiagate, not Snowden.
... my real important point about the fascist aristocrat dictatorship of the USSA. The
ruling class aristocracy is certainly not at all in the business of increasing their
profits by acquiring yet more money. That's just a very stupid notion. For all relevant
purposes they already possess all the money. Let's get real. Their sole real business is
simply to retain power. Period. And how do they do that? Easy.
They establish and constantly maintain a churnatistic society. They just keep the
commonalty spinning around in circles by constantly churning 'current events'.
They start a war, or an obviously fake election, or an economic depression, or a mass
shooting, or any outlandish disaster they can churn up to keep the masses in a constant
state of bewilderment.
And then they drop the cherry on top by publishing narratives in media such as the
Guardian that the poor serfs always know deep down make no sense at all.
Therefor no revolt is possible because the serfs are in a perpetual state of
disorientation. All fascist societies are ultimately based on churnatism.
Confused Ponderee - as you'll know, in the media world the Guardian is the English
equivalent of the NYT though, if that's possible, considerably more down market. So we can
ignore its use of the word "racist" as being too imprecise to mean much. In Guardian idiom
"racist" can mean anything from full bore KKK to being insufficiently ashamed of being
white.
Then we come to the main burden of the hit piece. As far as I could make out the
Guardian's chief complaint is that two of the Georgia candidates are rich.
Most successful politicians are rich. If they get to be very successful they get to be
very rich. Blair and the Clintons showed us how but the Bidens and the Merkels are coming
along handily -
Trump's unusual in that he gained his wealth partly by bribing politicians rather than
being bribed himself. I recollect a speech of his in 2016 (Phoenix Arizona, if memory serves)
in which he explained how he had to bribe them to get building permits. That's if Trump did
gain untold wealth. You never know with real estate tycoons.
In this elevated world whichever way the money flows it flows like water. The three times
Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, was the most impressive, being given a million on a golf course.
What was impressive about that was that the transaction was so trivial he forgot about it. No
one, so far, has given me a million pounds on a golf course - I don't play golf - but if they
had I sure as hell wouldn't forget it. And I don't need to remind you about feats nearly as
impressive on the German political scene.
If you're interested in the English equivalent when it comes to such corruption don't
bother. There isn't one, not to any extent. It's the mark of a loser in England for a
politician or official to take illegal bribes since the process of legally bribing is
available to all. (Cave & Rowell, "A Quiet Word ..." 2015 goes into some of it) As for
Brussels, lets leave that one alone. We haven't got all night.
So, like sex scandals, wealth scandals are lying around waiting to be used whenever the media
want to gun for this or that politician. Usually they get ignored. Doesn't mean the
politicians who are being ignored are clean. Just that they're not today's target.
The Guardian wants to gun for these politicians. It's done so. Why, at this time, would
those two Republican candidates be chosen as targets by the Guardian?
I suppose that question more or less answers itself.
And that's by design. False flags like Scripal Novichok saga are just a smoke screen over UK
problems, the ciursi of neoliberalism in the country, delegitimization of neoliberal elites and
its subservience to the USA global neoliberal empire, which wants to devour Russia like it
plundered the USSR in the past.
But why outgoing MI6 chief decided to tell us the truth? This is not in the traditions of the
agency.
After years of focusing on combating terrorism, US Special Forces are preparing to turn
their attention to the possibility of future conflict with adversaries Russia and China. The
outgoing head of MI6, the UK's clandestine intelligence service, says that the perceived threat
posed by Russia and China against the UK is overstated and distract from addressing the UK's
domestic problems. Meanwhile, his replacement insists that the threat posed by Russia and China
is real and is growing in complexity. Rick Sanchez explains. Then former US diplomat Jim Jatras
and "Going Underground" host Afshin Rattansi share their insights.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting for a for a final day of deliberations before the
confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump's controversial pick for the US
Supreme Court. RT America's Faran Fronczak reports. RT America's Trinity Chavez reports on the
skyrocketing poverty across the US as coronavirus relief funds dry up and the White House
stalls on additional stimulus. RT America's John Huddy reports on the backlash against Facebook
and Twitter for their suppression of an incendiary new report about Democratic nominee Joe
Biden's son Hunter Biden and his foreign entanglements.
"... AP is hardly the Ministry of Truth, dictating Newspeak under the penalty of torture. As it turns out, it doesn't have to be. A bit of updated style – and thought – guidance announced on Twitter from time to time will do. ..."
Used as the journalism Bible by most English-language media, the AP Stylebook has updated its guidance for employing the word 'riot,'
citing the need to avoid "stigmatizing" groups protesting "for racial justice."
While acknowledging the dictionary definition of riot as a "wild or violent disturbance of the peace," AP said the word
somehow "suggests uncontrolled chaos and pandemonium."
Worse yet, "Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize
broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice " the Stylebook account tweeted on
Wednesday.
The claim that something has been used in the past in a racist way has already led to banishing many English terms to the Orwellian
"memory hole." It certainly appears the AP is trying to do the same with "riot" now.
Instead of promoting precision, the Stylebook is urging reporters to use euphemisms such as "protest" or "demonstration."
It advises "revolt" and "uprising" if the violence is directed "against powerful groups or governing systems,"
in an alarming shift in focus from what is being done towards who is doing it to whom .
There is even a helpful suggestion to use "unrest" because it's "a vaguer, milder and less emotional term for a condition
of angry discontent and protest verging on revolt."
Translated to plain English, this means a lot more mentions of "unrest" and almost no references to "riot," in media
coverage going forward, regardless of how much actual rioting is happening.
Mainstream media across the US have already gone out of their way to avoid labeling what has unfolded since the death of George
Floyd in May as "riots." Though protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota turned violent within 48 hours, before spreading to other
cities across the US – and even internationally – the media continued calling them "peaceful" and "protests for racial
justice."
Yet in just the first two weeks of the riots, 20 people have been killed and the property damage has
exceeded $2 billion , according
to insurance estimates – the highest in US history.
AP is no stranger to changing the language to better comport to 'proper' political sensitivities. At the height of the riots in
June, the Stylebook decided to capitalize"Black" and "Indigenous" in a "racial, ethnic or cultural sense."
A month later, the expected decision
to leave "white" in lowercase was justified by saying that "White people in general have much less shared history and culture,
and don't have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color."
Moreover, "Capitalizing the term 'white,' as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs,"
wrote AP's vice-president for standards John Daniszewski.
The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, as its full name goes, has effectively dictated the tone of English-language
outlets around the world since it first appeared in 1953. It is also required reference material in journalism schools.
So when it embraces vagueness over precision and worrying about "suggestions" and "subtly conveying" things over
plain meaning, that rings especially Orwellian – in both the '1984' sense of censoring speech and thought and regarding the corruption
of language the author lamented in his famous 1946
essay 'Politics and the English language.'
AP is hardly the Ministry of Truth, dictating Newspeak under the penalty of torture. As it turns out, it doesn't have to be.
A bit of updated style – and thought – guidance announced on Twitter from time to time will do.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent
those of RT.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from
2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
"... Are you arguing that sociopaths have an inalienable right to hold office, even though they will inevitably use that office to aggrandize themselves at the expense of everyone else, and could spark a general war just for their own enjoyment and to gather yet more power to themselves? ..."
"... How do people who don't share your beliefs get represented if you rig the system to exclude them? People unlike you are sociopaths? It isn't even tempting. Your cost benefit study benefits you. The world is destabilized if your guys don't get in? No surprise. ..."
"... The under-employment rate is also very informative. People working less hours or in lower positions than their investment in education should have returned to them. They are working, but not enough to be able to independently sustain themselves, which makes them insecure in variety of ways. ..."
"... It all depends on what the penalties are. Confiscation of hidden assets would chill that behavior, strike one. Loss of the privilege to conduct business with federal and state entities would also chill such behavior, strike two. Finally, for persistent violations of the cap, loss of citizenship and expulsion form the country, three strikes and you are literally out, would be the ultimate penalty. ..."
"... The United States is actually both a federation (hardly unique by the way) and a representative democracy. Whether you call them members of Parliament or members of Congress, their representatives are elected by the people. ..."
Huge numbers of people who disagree with me and don't share my particular beliefs are not sociopaths, nothing would stop them
from running or holding office, and I've no problem with that.
Are you arguing that sociopaths have an inalienable right to hold office, even though they will inevitably use that office
to aggrandize themselves at the expense of everyone else, and could spark a general war just for their own enjoyment and to gather
yet more power to themselves?
How do people who don't share your beliefs get represented if you rig the system to exclude them? People unlike you are sociopaths?
It isn't even tempting. Your cost benefit study benefits you. The world is destabilized if your guys don't get in? No surprise.
Love this line: "the gig economy combined with record debt and astronomically high rent prices cancel out any potential economic
stability for millions of people."
The under-employment rate is also very informative. People working less hours or in lower positions than their investment in
education should have returned to them. They are working, but not enough to be able to independently sustain themselves, which
makes them insecure in variety of ways.
Do you think the interpreters might turn out to be agents, or perhaps even assassins, from other governments? Or maybe everybody
will be knocked out with fentanyl gas at dinner. In the dining room.
1. It all depends on what the penalties are. Confiscation of hidden assets would chill that behavior, strike one. Loss of the
privilege to conduct business with federal and state entities would also chill such behavior, strike two. Finally, for persistent
violations of the cap, loss of citizenship and expulsion form the country, three strikes and you are literally out, would be the
ultimate penalty.
The alternative, continuing to allow unlimited wealth accumulation will ultimately destroy democracy and end in a dictatorship
nearly impossible to remove without massive casualties. Is that preferable to trying to control the behavior of wealth addicts?
Make no mistake: billionaires are addicts, their uncontrollable addiction to more is an extreme form of hoarding dysfunction,
one that, like all uncontrolled addictions, has had disastrous consequences for everyone but them.
3. Fewer Representatives means you are concentrating power rather than dispersing it. More means smaller districts, which in
turn means more accountability, not less. As it stands now, Congresscritters can safely ignore the wishes of the public, because
when someone "represents" nearly a million citizens, it means they actually represent only themselves. If taken in conjunction
with item #2, more citizens would be invested in the political process and far more likely to pay attention.
4. The Hare test is a standard written exam that is difficult to cheat. Getting caught at cheating or attempting to cheat would
mark one automatically as a sociopath. The latest studies of brain structures show that sociopaths have physically different brains,
and those physical differences are detectable. Brain activity as shown by fMRI also clearly marks a sociopath from a normal, since
while they can fake emotional responses very well, their brain activity shows their true lack of response to emotionally charged
images, words, etc. Using a three-layer test, written>fMRI>genetic should be robust enough to correctly identify most. The stakes
are too huge to risk a set of sociopaths and their lackeys control of the machinery of government. The genetic test is the most
likely to give problematic results, but if the written is failed, the fMRI would then be done to confirm or reject the written
results, while the genetics would be a supplementary confirmation. Widespread genetic testing of politicians and would-bes would
undoubtedly advance research and understanding dramatically.
When you do even a casual cost-benefit study, the answer is clear: test them. Ask yourself: is the thwarting of an individual's
potential career in politics really that great a cost compared to preventing unknowingly electing a sociopath who could destabilize
the entire world?
Another big difference of course is a little thing called the law.
Are you under the impression the British don't have rule of law? Their elected representatives make their laws, not
their ceremonial royal family. Their royal family's job is to abide by the same laws as every other UK citizen, stay out of politics
and promote British tourism and gossip magazines.
The United States is actually a federal republic, not a democracy.
The United States is actually both a federation (hardly unique by the way) and a representative democracy. Whether you call
them members of Parliament or members of Congress, their representatives are elected by the people.
If we move the cheap manufacturing to the US, and wages are lower due to a depression, people will take the jobs, and the
job numbers will improve. And China will be toast.
We will never beat China at manufacturing cheap and efficient products using human labor. Robotic labor maybe, but that might
not happen for a decade or more at least--if they or another country doesn't beat us to retooling our factories.
Labor and manufacturing will never return in the US--unless we have another world war we win, in which all global production is
again concentrated in the US because the rest of the worlds factories are bombed to rubble. Besides, they have the most central
location for manufacturing in the world and a cheap source of endless labor.
What they don't have is innovation, tech and freedom to try products out on a free market. We are squandering those advantages
in the US when we cut education and limit college education to the masses.
Are Americans the most immoral people on earth? I don't think so. Do we have the strictest code of laws on earth? I don't think
so either. Yet we have the highest incarceration rate on earth. Higher than authoritarian countries like China & Russia.
This alone should tell you something is wrong with our system. Never mind the stats about differing average sentences depending
on race & wealth.
Doubt implies a reason behind the wrong, where uncertainty implies an unknowing trait--a mystery behind the wrong.
The right, what with all its fake news scams, deep state BS and witch hunt propaganda, is uncertainty at best, a mystery of sorts--it
provides us with a conspiracy that can neither be proved or unproven--an enigma.
Doubt, about if Russia meddled in the US election in collusion with the president or at the least his advisors, surely implies
something is wrong, especially in the face of criminal charges, doubt is inherent and well intentioned, but not always true and
can be proven false in the face of doubt.
At one time the US was agrarian and one could subsist via bartering. Consider reliance on for-profit healthcare, transportation
systems, debt, credit cards, landlords, grocery stores, and the lack of any ability to subsist without statewide and nationwide
infrastructure. Right now, people in the US already die prematurely if they can't afford healthcare. Many are homeless. And this
is when things are better than ever? What will happen here is what happened in Europe during WWII. People will suffer, and they
will be forced to adopt socialist practices (like the EU does today). People in Europe really did starve to death, and people
in India, Africa, and other countries are starving and dying today. China doles out food rations because they practice communism.
That's why they have cheap, efficient labor that serves to manufacture products for US consumers. Communism and socialism help
American corporations big time.
Citizens United is a First Amendment decision. Which part of the First Amendment do you want moot? What gives any government the
right to decide which assemblies of citizens have no free speech rights?
You are aware, I imagine, that the US can adjust its money supply to adapt to circumstances? We can feed ourselves. We have our
own power sources. We can improvise, adapt, and overcome. Prices go up and down. No big deal. Scaring people for political gain
doesn't have the clout it onvce did.
Too many virtue signalers seem to think that only the innocent are ever convicted.
The system is not crooked, but if you can set up a better one that doesn't bankrupt every community, have at it.
You really, really, really like screaming racist, don't you? And slide in a Godwin. Wow. The concept that black pastors would
be negatively impacted by financial attacks on their churches never ever occurred to you, did it? You get off on pretending to
care about people that you have no direct, routine connection to. How virtuous of you. Wouldn't deliberately harming black churches
make you the racist storm trooper?
Violence will break out when credit cards stop working. Can't even imagine what will happen if people are starving. No problem
in a socialistic country like Finland, but a big problem here. My guess is that Trump knows the economy is hanging by a thread,
so needs to create an alternate reason (trade wars). Or he figures he might as well have a trade war if it's all going to pieces
anyway. Of course China manufactures just about everything for the US. If we move the cheap manufacturing to the US, and wages
are lower due to a depression, people will take the jobs, and the job numbers will improve. And China will be toast.
Don't forget as the Trump trade war heats up and China decides to sell off US bonds en-masse (they own 1.17 trillion in US debt).
That's gonna put a hurt on the already low US dollar and could send inflation soaring. China could also devalue its currency and
increase the trade deficit. Combine those with all the things you've pointed out and you've got financial troubles the likes of
which no large government has ever dealt with in human history.
Starving people--China can handle in droves; not so much the US. We're talking nasty violence if that kinda stuff happens here.
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for
profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable,
unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection,
safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
Occupy Wall Street began due to income inequality when the worst effects of the Great Recession were being felt by the population.
Wealth inequality has only increased since then.
Right now, the population is held at bay because the media and politicians claim that the economy is so incredibly hot it's overheating.
But we know that's a lie. For one, the gig economy combined with record debt and astronomically high rent prices cancel out any
potential economic stability for millions of people. This year, 401(k) plans have returned almost nothing (or are going negative).
This was also the case in 2016. Savings accounts have returned almost nothing for the last decade (they should be providing approximately
5% interest).
The worker participation rate today is 3.2% below what it was in 2008 (during the Great Recession). The US population, meanwhile,
has increased by approximately 24,321,000. That's a 7.68% increase. The labor force has increased by 5% during this time (unemployment
rate was relatively similar, 5.6% vs 4%). From June 2008 to June 2018, the labor force increased by approximately 8 million. However,
if the worker participation rate was the same now as it was then, there would be approximately 8 million more people in the labor
force. If you add 8 million people to the current number of people who are counted as unemployed by the BLS, the unemployment
rate is approximately 9%. This is about as high as the unemployment rate got during the depths of the Great Recession, right when
Occupy Wall Street was born.
Now, OK, sure, the economy has REPLACED lost jobs, but it has not ADDED jobs for the last decade. The unemployment rate is false.
It should be at least 8%. There's many millions of Americans who do not have steady, gainful employment - or any employment -
and they are not counted.
The billionaires and their bought politicians are responsible for fixing this. They can fix it and should fix it. Otherwise, the
economy and their profits are going to fall off a giant cliff any day now. The next recession has basically already begun, but
it can still be alleviated. If things continue as they are, unemployment could be 16% by 2020, with the U6 measure approaching
or exceeding 25%. If stocks drop enough, people may starve to death.
Who supported Citizen's United? All cons and republicans
Who supports campaign finance reform and legislation that would make Cititzen's United moot? Democrats and progressives
Really tired of the false equivalencies. Republicans are now the polar opposite of Democrats in policy and principles. Vote Blue
this November and get rid of the republicans; every single one of them. It can be done if people get out and vote.
1. Anything is possible but I don't think this is practical. The rich can just cheat on the definition of ownership, pass it around
between family members, offshore it, sink it into their businesses in token ways, etc. When you try to take wealth (power) away
from the most powerful people in the country they will start devoting SERIOUS resources to getting around it.
3. I'm not saying we need fewer people doing congress's job in total. But we should be electing fewer of them, and letting
those fewer people do more hiring/delegating. The way things are now, most of the public only knows much about the president.
Everyone else is mostly just a vote for a party. But if the country only voted for 50 Congressmen in total - or even fewer - then
we would all have a more careful eye on them. We would know them better and see them more individually. They would have less pressure
to toe the party line all the time.
4. As long as there's a written test then it will get cheated. Right now the testing is rarely given and the specific consequences
don't determine powerful people's careers. Make it a widespread & important thing and people will learn to cheat it.
The genetic + fMRI research is interesting but the whole thing opens up serious cans of worms. We're talking about DQ'ing somebody
from an important career based partially on the results of a genetic screening for a character trait. That's a dangerous business
for our whole society to get into. Although I do realize the payoff for this specific instance would be very big.
1. Why do you think that? Using teams of forensic accountants and outlawing secret accounts would go a long way towards increasing
enforceability. But you are viewing it as a legal problem rather than a cultural problem. If an effective propaganda campaign
aimed on one level at the public and another level at the billionaires, it could work. Many billionaires are already committed
to returning their fortunes to the economy (mostly after they are dead, true). Convince a few and the rest will follow. Give them
the lure of claiming the title of the richest who ever were and some would be eager for that place in history.
Anything can be done if the will is there.
2. Income taxes are just a portion of the federal revenues, ~47%. Corporate taxes, parkland fees, excise taxes, ~18% taken
together and Social Security make up the rest. Revenues would increase as taxpayers topped off step amounts to keep control. The
beauty of it is that Congress would see very clearly where the nation's priorities were. Any politician trying to raise fines
so that they had more money under their control would soon find themselves out of office. Unpopular programs would
have to be financed out of the 18%, and that would likely make them increase corporate taxes. But most importantly, it would cut
the power of politicians and decrease the effectiveness of lobbyists.
3. Actually, we have too few, not too many. The work of governance suffers because there is too much to be done and too few
to do it. Spreading the workload and assigning responsibility areas would increase efficiency. Most importantly though, it would
break up the oligarchic duopoly that keeps a stranglehold on the nation's politics, and bring more third party candidates into
office giving Congress a more diverse culture by adding viewpoints based on other things than business interests.
4. Actually, advances in fMRI equipment and procedures, along with genetics and written testing can prove beyond a reasonable
doubt whether or not someone is a sociopath, do some research and you'l see it is true. False positives in any testing regime
are always an issue, but tens of millions of workers submit to drug tests to qualify for their jobs, and their jobs don't usually
run the risk of plunging the world into war, economic or environmental disasters. False positives are common in the workplace
and cost many thousands their jobs.
And there's an easy way to prove you aren't really a sociopath: be honest, don't lie, and genuinely care about people...things
sociopaths cannot do over time.
Seriously, it is a societal safety issue that demands to be done, protecting the few against false positives means opening
the floodgates for the many sociopaths who seek power over others.
Not just eliminate--alter and add to it, but since it takes 2/3 majority of the house and senate to amend the constitution--it's
not an easy feat--that's why there has only been 17 amendments altogether and two of them are there to cancel each other out!
You see, the beauty behind the National
Popular Vote Bill is that it's done on a state by state basis and will only work when the required 270 electoral votes are
gained with the bill--this means all voters would have their votes tallied in a presidential election and it eliminates swing
states with a winner takes all approach. The electoral college and state control of elections are preserved and every one is happy.
I feel like you've not read up on any of this even though I provide a link. 12 of these bills have been enacted into state law
already, comprising of 172 electoral votes and 3,112 legislative sponsors. That's more than halfway there.
To continue to say that changing the way we vote by altering the EC is a fantasy is in itself a fantasy because obviously it is
gaining traction across the country.
Which 'side' do you imagine I'm on Mike ? FYI.. Im not a member of any tribe especially regarding the republican or democrat parties...
you may have noticed that as part of the progress towards a globalized economy, 'Money' now has open borders...but the restrictions
of movement for people are growing as nationalism rises and wealth and the power it yields, becomes ever more concentrated in
fewer hands...this is a dangerous precedent and history repeats if lessons of the past are not learned.
I can well recall when humanity and the ability of the individual to attain freedom and liberty based upon the merit of the individual
was once celebrated.
What really irks me and causes me to voice my opinion on this forum, ( thank you Guardian for your continued efforts at informing
us all and especially for promoting participation) is how easily people are duped .. when 'others' can easily see that they are
being lied to. My parents fought for freedom and liberty against vicious tyranny in Europe and paid a HUGE price..by the time
the scales had tipped the balance towards fascism, it was far too late for anything other than all out war... the fact that they
survived the required sacrifice to pitch in to protect democracy, and the freedom and liberty which comes with it, still seems
miraculous..
Billionaires on the left should put some of that money into paying for and distributing subscriptions to newspapers and magazines
which live up to the standards of professional journalism. These papers should be made available, free, at high schools, colleges,
libraries, and commercial centers of loitering and "neighborly" discussions. May I suggest the NYT, WP, The Guardian, and The
Economist.
"What the country sorely needs is a new constitution."
No thanks! The Founders were quite a bit more intelligent than the current national 'brain trust' -- on the both sides
of the Aisle -- that would be charged with writing a new Constitution.
The Guardian is running a more sophisticated version of the story. It claims the Russians
hacked the papers and gave them to Jeremy Corbyn so he could win the General Elections of
December 2019:
The stolen documents – a 451-page dossier of emails – ultimately ended up in
the hands of Jeremy Corbyn during last winter's election campaign after Russian actors
tried to disseminate the material online.
They had been posted on the social media platform Reddit and brought to the attention of
the then Labour leader's team. Corbyn said the documents revealed the NHS "was on the
table" in trade talks with the US.
Details of Russia's targeting of Fox's emails were first revealed on Monday by Reuters,
which said his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October last year.
It was unclear if the documents were obtained when the staunch leave supporter was still
trade secretary; he was dropped by Boris Johnson on 24 July.
However, it still is keeping the earliest date as July 12th, thus reproducing the entire
Reuters' version.
My guess is that The Guardian adapted the story to its center-left (i.e. Blairite)
audience, in a way both Corbyn and the Conservative and Unionist Party could be melded
together as a single evil force. If that's the case, then it is circumstantial evidence for a
highly and centrally coordinated propaganda machine in the UK, possibly ran directly from the
MI5/6, which directly involves all the important British newspapers, TV channels and
more.
It's interesting to see how The Guardian sophisticated the clearly fake story. In the
excerpt I quoted above, it is clear the source of the leak could've only been secretary Fox
(or Fox served as the sacrificial lamb, it doesn't matter for the sake of the argument
here).
Then, it connected Fox's leak with Raab's public accusation of Russia (that story where he
accused Russia in the name of the British government, but didn't reveal the evidence).
To end with a high note, the Guardian then revived a story of hacked e-mails from 2012 and
2017.
You can then see how the British are capable of recycling old, failed propaganda
attacks/fake news to transform then into a new "truth". Very curious and sophisticated
methodology of building a long-term, sustained, false narrative. It almost mirrors the
Christian method of typology, where a previous event is brought up from oblivion to serve as
a prelude for the new event (i.e. the newest fake news).
"The attack bore the hallmarks of a state-backed operation."
There is no such thing.
Look at the Twitter hack last week. Everyone said "must be some sophisticated actor,
possibly state-sponsored". Turns out it was a 17-year-old in Florida. That has happened
repeatedly in the last ten years or more: hacks that looked "sophisticated" turned out to be
done by a single individual. People forget that some organized crime hacker groups earn
millions of dollars from their hacks and can afford to put quite an effort into the
development of sophisticated hacking tools that are the equal of anything a state
intelligence agency can produce.
People in infosec know the truth: it's not that hard to compromise any corporation or
individual. And "attribution by target" - that is, the notion that because a particular
person or organization is government or media, therefore it has to be a state-related hacker
- is completely false. *Any* hacker will hit *any* target that provides 1) a challenge,
and/or 2) personal identification information, and/or intellectual property that can be sold
on the Dark Web.
Only situations where specialized knowledge that is not commonly available to individuals
or civilian groups was used in the hack can clearly indicate a state actor. Stuxnet is the
classic example, requiring access to and the ability to test the malware with specific pieces
of hardware that aren't commonly available to persons outside of industrial or nuclear
engineering.
Stealing some papers from a government individual off his phone or home or office desktop
is almost trivial in comparison.
"his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October"
So for three months they did nothing to fix his security? Good work, guys...you're fired.
This is typical - hackers sitting in a corporation's network for months or even years without
being detected. It's likely they didn't even notice the unauthorized access until they
decided to look back. Not to mention that a government worker isn't supposed to be using
"personal email" to host classified information. So the idiot involved should be fired.
Typical infosec clusterfuck. That's assuming it happened at all, of course, which is
doubtful.
Well, lost two post due to the VPN being on...sigh...
OK, to quote the old British comedy radio show, "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again"...
"...the attack bore the hallmarks of a state-backed operation."
There is no such thing. *Any* hacker will hack *any* target provided it provides 1) a
challenge, and/or 2) personal identification information, and/or 3) intellectual property,
the latter two being sold on the Dark Web. Trying to attribute the hacker based on his target
is a fool's game - not that there is any lack of fools in the infosec space who use such
attribution as marketing, such as CrowdStrike.
Then there's the fact that this guy's account was accessed several times over a
three-month period - meaning no one was monitoring his email security, least of all him. Not
to mention that he was passing classified papers over a personal email account - which should
get him fired. Email is *insecure*, period, unless encrypted between the parties involved.
And even then, you just compromise one party's desktop, laptop or phone, and bingo,
encryption bypassed. And compromising an individual's or organization's email system is not
particularly hard, as any penetration tester knows. One phishing email targeted to the right
person usually does it.
People's old ways of understanding what's going on in the world just aren't holding together
anymore.
Trust in the mass media is at an all-time low, and it's only getting lower.
People are more aware than ever that anything they see can be propaganda or
disinformation.
Deepfake technology will soon be so advanced and so accessible that nobody will even trust
video anymore.
The leader of the most powerful country on earth speaks in a way that has no real
relationship with facts or reality in any way, and people have just learned to roll with
it.
Ordinary people are hurting financially but Wall Street is booming, a glaring plot hole in
the story of the economy that's only getting more pronounced.
The entire media class will now spend years leading the public on a wild goose chase for
Russian collusion and then act like it's no big deal when the whole thing turned out to be
completely baseless.
... ... ...
New Cold War escalations between the U.S.-centralized empire and the unabsorbed governments
of China and Russia are going to cause the media airwaves around the planet to become saturated
in ever-intensifying propaganda narratives which favor one side or the other and have no
interest in honestly telling people the truth about what's going on.
Russia sees the UK as one of its "top targets" in the West, according to the
Intelligence and Security Committee.
The ISC's long-awaited report said the UK was targeted due to its close relationship
with the US and because it is "seen as central to the Western anti-Russian lobby".
Its inquiry covers disinformation campaigns, cyber tactics and Russian expatriates in
the UK.
But much of the "highly sensitive" detail will not be published.
Kind of like a British news release that reports, "Mysterious foreign entity revealed to
be searching for which European men are best in bed – Surprise! it's the British!!"
I guess if nobody else is talking about you. you have to invent lions under the bed.
There's a word for it in psychology.
And from "highly likely" we arrive at another mincing expression used by the British:
The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has judged it "credible" that Russia
attempted to interfere in the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 as part of an effort
to influence political life in the UK.
Incredible!!!
See:
UK politics news live: Latest updates as long-awaited Russia report released | The
Independent
The committee – made up of a cross-party group of UK MPs – thanked a long
list of people for their contributions to the inquiry. They curiously included former MI6 spy
Christopher Steele, American journalist Anne Applebaum, American-British financier Bill
Browder and British security specialist Edward Lucas.
See:
UK parliament's intelligence report claims Russia tried to 'influence' Scottish
referendum, spy agencies should probe Brexit
Ha, ha, ha!! Thanks for a great laugh! It reminds me of an open letter someone showed me
the other day, from the New York Police Department and entitled "What Did You Think Would
Happen?" It explored what a third-world shithole the city is becoming now that police are
ordered to keep their distance and their faces in the naughty corner. I didn't get to read it
all, but by the time I could get home and look it up, it had been pulled from the site.
That's how governments on every level cover their fuckups these days – they just
order them scrubbed from public view.
Impressions? It's a shitshow. There's some reference to widely reported 'Open
Source' intelligence (28/40+), i.e. everybody but actual intelligence professionals and lots
of unquestioned conclusions from the likes of Ed Lucas et al (not me). There is much wailing
and gnashing of teeth that the UK is not prepared or that the government takes notice of Open
Source intelligence. It also complains that the UK has been easy to launder 'Russian money'
and buy influence, but not providing a shred of proof of course – except the word of
one William Browder. Those dirty Russians!
The report even uses the term 'Londongrad.' (50) It's almost as if the report has been
written for a tv drama. Of course nobody is named because that would have legal
implications. Can't have that, especially when they say that ' a number of Members of
the House of Lords have business interests linked to Russia, or work directly for major
Russian companies linked to the Russian state.. '
The report even references reports by now closed BuzzFeed UK articles (58), i.e. the
company that published the string of lies that is the Christopher Steele report that he had
been shopping around the western media for months and getting no bites at all.
The report complains that (100) In the case of Russia, the potential for escalation is
particularly potent: the Russian regime is paranoid about Western intelligence activities and
"is not able to treat objectively" international condemnation of its actions.109 It views any
such moves as Western efforts to encourage internal protest and regime change . –
of course there is a complete absence of any mention of multiple regime change operations by
the west on Russia's borders/strategic periphery, but the UK does not need to justify its
actions when they are Just.
Oh, they also recommend a US style Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) (114+) to keep
an even tighter eye on 'them.' The committee thinks this would be 'effective.' Not too bright
really as there are already plenty of other tools available for the same job, sic threatening
to ban RT fro the UK. With or without a UK FARA, the obvious counter-measure for Russia would
be to ban the BBC and others but nothing has happened because the UK believes its media is
more effective and thus useful soft power tool in Russia than RT is in the UK (Ed Lucas says
RT has a tiny UK following but it is a vanity project for powerful people around Putin).
The UK cannot afford to threaten rich Russians with Unexplained Wealth Orders (119).
Whining that other u-Ropean countries don't want to go along with the UK's Russophobia
– referencing Guardian and The Economist articles. (128)
Curiously there is no mention of Georgia when it comes to 'Russia upsetting relations with
the West.'
In short, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament is a rubber stamping
committee that has put out a very poorly sourced report, accepted unquestionably conclusions
from a whole host of very well known russophobes. I suppose the most surprising thing about
the report is how little there is in it. That it is completely one-sided, blinkered,
unquestioning bleating and crying is hardly a surprise. This report only has propaganda value
and nothing more. That is why is wasn't released earlier. Content? Nah!
I'll just repost the first five paragraphs of the Introduction to show what a self-serving
butter wouldn't melt in our mouths aka 'I'm a virgin' view the committee takes of the
UK. Done nuffink wrong guv!
1.
The dissolution of the USSR was a time of hope in the West. In the 1990s and early
2000s, Western thinking was, if not to integrate Russia fully, at least to ensure that it
became
a partner. By the mid-2000s, it was clear that this had not been successful. The murder
of
Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 demonstrated that Russia under President Putin had moved
from potential partner to established threat. Since then, there have been a number of
attempts
to repair relations between Western countries and Russia (for example, the US 'Russian
reset' in 2009, and the Prime Minister's visit to Moscow in 2011 in which he expressed a
desire to rebuild the relationship), but the events of recent years show that none has had
any
impact on Russian intent, and therefore on the security threat that Russia poses.
2.
Russia is simultaneously both very strong and very weak. The strengths which
Russia retains are largely its inheritances from the USSR and its status as a victor of
the
Second World War: nuclear weapons, a space presence and a permanent seat on the UN
Security Council. By contrast, it has a small population compared with the West; a lack
of
both reliable partners and cultural influence outside the countries of the former USSR; a
lack of strong public and democratic institutions, including the rule of law; and, of
course,
a weak economy.
3.
Despite its economic weakness, it nonetheless heavily resources its intelligence
services and armed forces, which are disproportionately large and powerful. Moreover,
Russia is adept at using its apparent weaknesses to its advantage: for example, its poor
national brand and lack of long-term global friends appear to feed its enormous risk
appetite
– perhaps on the basis that it thinks it has nothing to lose; its lack of democracy and
rule of
law allows its intelligence agencies to act quickly, without constraint or consideration;
and
its lack of strong independent public bodies and the fusion of government and business
allow it to leverage all its intelligence, military and economic power at the same time
to
pose an all-encompassing security threat.
What does Russia want?
4.
The security threat posed by Russia is difficult for the West to manage as, in our
view and that of many others, it appears fundamentally nihilistic. Russia seems to see
foreign policy as a zero-sum game: any actions it can take which damage the West are
fundamentally good for Russia. It is also seemingly fed by paranoia, believing that
Western
institutions such as NATO and the EU have a far more aggressive posture towards it than
they do in reality. There is also a sense that Russia believes that an undemocratic 'might
is
right' world order plays to its strengths, which leads it to seek to undermine the Rules
Based
International Order – whilst nonetheless benefitting from its membership of
international
political and economic institutions.
5.
Russia's substantive aims, however, are relatively limited: it wishes to be seen as a
resurgent 'great power' – in particular, dominating the countries of the former USSR
– and
to ensure that the privileged position of its leadership clique is not damaged
Didn't have to read further than the second line. There was never a time in the west
when integration of Russia or partnership was ever entertained. Russia broached the idea of
joining NATO, and was told it was not ready and frankly never would be, and a primary partner
in the refusal, by reason of its national objection, was the UK. Putin was right –
Washington runs the west, and Washington wants vassals, not partners. Russia is too big to be
ruled as a colony, and if it cannot be ruled over, the west wants no part of it. The ideal
western solution has always been to break it up into small constituent republics along ethnic
lines, and set them with intrigues and gossip to warring with one another so that they remain
destabilized and suspicious.
"It is also seemingly fed by paranoia, believing that Western institutions such as NATO
and the EU have a far more aggressive posture towards it than they do in reality." Ha, ha;
that's good, that, when Jens Jerkenberg is on the airwaves every other week bleating that
NATO needs to take a firm hand with Russia and be prepared to fight it – and spend much
more money to get ready to do that – when it has not ever been attacked by
Russia.
I write as somebody who held Top Secret clearance for 21 years, with extensive daily
use of Top Secret material that entire time, and the highest possible specific codeword
clearance above Top Secret for 11 years. I personally conducted for the FCO the largest
"action on" operation in GCHQ history .
"Credible open source reporting" is a propaganda formulation designed to fool you and
give a false imprimatur to any dubious piece of published work .
####
So, no surprise to us here and many other people. It is in fact, yet again, western
Hybrid Warfare.
Nonetheless, I daresay Moscow will be 'furious' and 'fuming'. Thanks for reading all that
rubbish so I don't have to. It struck me this morning how few remaining institutions there
are for which I have any respect at all. For instance, how am I supposed to have any respect
for the medical profession when they're all kitted out in those stupid paper masks, not even
the N-95's, but the expandable rectangular blue ones that have a pinch clip for the nose, and
leave big gaps on either side of the face? If they will wear those without demur, they either
believe they are being protected from viral infections, or are simply going through the
motions because it's an order. You could say the same of the Intelligence Agencies. Rubbish
off Twitter and photos with no provenance are now perfectly acceptable for intelligence work,
and Bellingcat is recognized as a working NATO asset. These agencies are caught time and
again attempting to foist doctored photos and fabricated stories on the public, and only back
down when caught redhanded. Consequently, all their product must be suspected of tampering
and politicization. There really are precious few organizations in the west which can still
be trusted. I'm assuming there are some, although to be honest I can't think of any off the
top of my head. But they want you to believe Russia is jealous of our freedoms. What
freedoms? Of our access to the Rule of Law. But we willingly partner with Saudi Arabia, which
is ruled by a monarchy and where they cut off your hand for stealing – that's the Rule
of Law, too, innit? None higher, when you think about it; it's Hudud, which comes straight
from God.
Tutisicecream
Jul 17, 2020 8:44 AM Yikes! The Ruskies are hacking again! Let's not forget that the British Superb plan for
Brexit was born out of Vova's cunning mind.
From the people who brought you polonium in a teacup, Basha's bouncing Barrel Bombs,
Salisbury Plain Pizza and the Covid- Horrid. Now want you to know Vova is back!
Last weekend they launched their counter move with Luke Harding interviewing himself
about his new book
The decline of the Guardian is legend and one of their supposed ace gumshoes, Luke
Harding, who has been the chief protagonist of the "Stupid Russia/ Cunning Russia" Guardian
editorial line gets this time to interview himself. Displacement in psychology, as I'm sure
Luke must have learnt from his handlers, is where we see in others that which we can't or
fail to recognise in ourselves.
Those CIFers long in the tooth will recall how he moderated his own BTL comments on
Russia until it all got too much for him. At which point they were cancelled. Now it seems
it's all gone to a new level as Harding apparently interviews himself about his new book! In
the Guardian's new post apocalyptic normal, where self censorship plus self promotion is the
norm for their self congratulatory hacks and hackets Harding never fails to amaze at this
genre.
As expected the reader is taken into the usual spy vs spy world of allusion and
narrative plus fake intrigue and facts, so much the hallmark of Harding's work. None of which
stands up to serious analysis as we recall:
where we have Arron Maté, a real journalist doing a superb job of exposing Harding
as the crude propagandist he truly is.
This interview is about Harding's last book "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and
How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win the 2016 US election".
Now we have a new cash cow where clearly with Harding's latest shtick the Guardian can't
be arsed having him interviewed for another piece of self promotion by one of their hacks. So
they go for the off the shelf fake interview where they allow Harding to talk to himself.
Clearly as they point out Harding is working for home, with more than one foot in the
grave it must be time to furlough him.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch I'm tempted to say this is really good news, but that
would be very unkind. By contrast, the Spectator is still growing:
Drilldown , Jul 16, 2020 9:40 PM Reply to
John Pretty
The Guardian will use this to become more American controlled. they have two offices there
and only one in the UK. I wish they are going under, at least you know Fox is lying to you,
the Guardian pretends to be your friend then lies to you. They are just an arm of the
Neo-liberal hell, like all the other media.
Straighthrough , Jul 16, 2020 10:01 PM Reply to
Drilldown
Guardians of the galaxy, Masters of gaslightling – as are all politico's! media
being no exception, and left right centre distractions aside.
Eyes Open , Jul 16, 2020 10:38 PM Reply to
Drilldown
Yes. I call the Guardian 'the guardian of neoliberalism'.
"... Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is 'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak. ..."
VK, re: Russia's grip on Europe is gradually tightening from the U.K.'s
INDEPENDENT
It's behind a paywall but I read just enough to be curious as to how someone could
possibly justify a clickbait title like that.
I suspect that the rest of the article is just
going to recap Russia's alleged sins in order to fan hatred but how can someone objectively
say that Russia is tightening its grip on Europe?
FUCKUS banned Russia from the Olympics on a bogus state sponsored steroid scam, no
reinstatement on horizon.
FUCKUS kicked Russia out of the now G7 and imposed a trade embargo that destroyed a large
commercial relationship w/Germany.
What is the 'overwhelming' evidence that the Russians poisoned the Skripal's, Novichok can be
made by just about anyone.
Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia
has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is
'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak.
Notable also that this ludicrous story, whose promotion by the MI6 Guardian confirms the
obvious suspicions about it, also includes the wild claim that the Russian unit responsible
for the bounties was also behind the "Novichok" "attack" on the Skripals.
It is another loyalty oath operation designed to force intelligent people into professing to
believe incredible nonsense.
The bottom line of the bounty claim is that very few Americans have in fact been killed. If
there were an actual bounty the country is full of GIs ripe for plucking. And the money
compares well with poppy growing.
In any event, the publication of the Mueller report has cleared things up for me. I get it now. The investigation was never about
Trump colluding with Russia. It was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with Russia that the investigation
was not about. Mueller was never looking for collusion. It was not his job to look for collusion.
His job was to look for obstruction of his investigation of alleged obstruction of his investigation of non-collusion, which he
found, and detailed at length in his report, and which qualifies as an impeachable offense.
... ... ...
In other words, his investigation was launched in order to investigate the obstruction of his investigation. And, on those terms,
it was a huge success. The fact that it didn't prove "collusion" means nothing -- that's just a straw man argument that Trump and
his Russian handlers make. The goal all along was to prove that Trump obstructed an investigation of his obstruction of that investigation,
not that he was "colluding" with Putin, or any of the other paranoid nonsense that the corporate media were forced to report on,
once an investigation into his obstruction of the investigation was launched.
From comments: "
neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce
wholly artificial directives. Also, the work of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana
Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving into a totalitarian system of control through
cybernetic data aggregation."
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and
creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more
oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and
micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and
hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The
introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age
of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom
but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of
freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so
much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
"... The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with nationhood. ..."
Thousands of people march through London to protest against underfunding and privatisation
of the NHS. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Images M y life was saved last year by the
Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skilful procedure
to remove a cancer from my body . Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from
the floor. I've just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On
the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff
had objected to a decision by the National Health Service
to privatise the hospital's cancer scanning . They complained that the scanners the private
company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital's own machines. Privatisation, they
said, would put patients at risk. In response,
as the Guardian revealed last week , NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel
if its staff continued to criticise the decision.
The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping
privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech,
promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism
was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a
semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.
Workers find themselves enmeshed in a
Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend
on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down,
hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into
public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is
brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and
silence.
Much of the theory behind these transformations arises from the work of Ludwig von Mises. In
his book Bureaucracy , published in 1944, he
argued that there could be no accommodation between capitalism and socialism. The creation of
the National Health Service in the UK, the New Deal in the US and other experiments in social
democracy would lead inexorably to the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany.
He recognised that some state bureaucracy was inevitable; there were certain functions that
could not be discharged without it. But unless the role of the state is minimised –
confined to defence, security, taxation, customs and not much else – workers would be
reduced to cogs "in a vast bureaucratic machine", deprived of initiative and free will.
By contrast, those who labour within an "unhampered capitalist system" are "free men", whose
liberty is guaranteed by "an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote". He
forgot to add that some people, in his capitalist utopia, have more votes than others. And
those votes become a source of power.
His ideas, alongside the writings of
Friedrich Hayek , Milton Friedman and other neoliberal thinkers, have been applied in this
country by Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Theresa May and, to an alarming extent, Tony
Blair. All of those have attempted to privatise or marketise public services in the name of
freedom and efficiency, but they keep hitting the same snag: democracy. People want essential
services to remain public, and they are right to do so.
If you hand public services to private companies, either you create a private monopoly,
which can use its dominance to extract wealth and shape the system to serve its own needs
– or you introduce competition, creating an incoherent, fragmented service characterised
by the institutional failure you can see every day on our railways. We're not idiots, even if
we are treated as such. We know what the profit motive does to public services.
So successive governments decided that if they could not privatise our core services
outright, they would subject them to "market discipline". Von Mises repeatedly warned against
this approach. "No reform could transform a public office into a sort of private enterprise,"
he cautioned. The value of public administration "cannot be expressed in terms of money".
"Government efficiency and industrial efficiency are entirely different things."
"Intellectual work cannot be measured and valued by mechanical devices." "You cannot
'measure' a doctor according to the time he employs in examining one case." They ignored his
warnings.
Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name
of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became
not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control.
Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself.
Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test , depriving
children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling
patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and
persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics . Universities urge their
researchers to
write quick and superficial papers , instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores
under the research excellence framework.
As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the
destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds
of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system
causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania
claims to address.
New extremes in the surveillance and control of workers are not, of course, confined to the
public sector. Amazon has patented
a wristband that can track workers' movements and detect the slightest deviation from
protocol. Technologies are used to monitor peoples' keystrokes, language, moods and tone of
voice. Some companies have begun to experiment with the
micro-chipping of their staff . As the philosopher Byung-Chul
Han points out , neoliberal work practices, epitomised by the gig economy, that
reclassifies workers as independent contractors, internalise exploitation. "Everyone is a
self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise."
The freedom we were promised turns out to be
freedom for capital , gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has
created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by
managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency
measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no
argument or complaint.
Attempts to resist are met by ever more extreme methods, such as the threatened lawsuit at
the Churchill Hospital. Such instruments of control crush autonomy and creativity. It is true
that the Soviet bureaucracy von Mises rightly denounced reduced its workers to subjugated
drones. But the system his disciples have created is heading the same way.
The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a
radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have
been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to
legitimise itself.
Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist
ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian
orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become
overt.
The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a
medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs
collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with
nationhood.
A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of democracy. The final
restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no separate market
and state, just a totalitarian market state.
This is the best piece of writing on neoliberalism I have ever seen. Look, 'what is in
general good and probably most importantly what is in the future good'. Why are we
collectively not viewing everything that way? Surely those thoughts should drive us all?
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the
imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version
of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the
laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state
are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version
called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate
from 'the market'?
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How
to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are
doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing.
Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of
capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping
its implementation.
Finally. A writer who can talk about neoliberalism as NOT being a retro version of classical
laissez faire liberalism. It is about imposing "The Market" as the sole arbiter of Truth on
us all.
Only the 'Market' knows what is true in life - no need for 'democracy' or 'education'.
Neoliberals believe - unlike classical liberals with their view of people as rational
individuals acting in their own self-interest - people are inherently 'unreliable', stupid.
Only entrepreneurs - those close to the market - can know 'the truth' about anything. To
succeed we all need to take our cues in life from what the market tells us. Neoliberalism is
not about a 'small state'. The state is repurposed to impose the 'all knowing' market on
everyone and everything. That is neoliberalism's political project. It is ultimately not
about 'economics'.
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of
anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left
(Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will
Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of
control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives. Also, the work
of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving
into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.
Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the
state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so
we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise
we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state
is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices,
they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know
there would be socialism. This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of
government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is,
neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state
based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t
totalitarianism. Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals
are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their
preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification
of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively
measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not
lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been
enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical
(market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make
them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no
relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are
measured, with absurd results.
It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that
neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of
understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to
universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were
Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to
the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand
neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.
However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to
economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any
other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic
irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes
that Hayek railed against.
Nationalised rail in the UK was under-funded and 'set up to fail' in its latter phase to make
privatisation seem like an attractive prospect. I have travelled by train under both
nationalisation and privatisation and the latter has been an unmitigated disaster in my
experience. Under privatisation, public services are run for the benefit of shareholders and
CEO's, rather than customers and citizens and under the opaque shroud of undemocratic
'commercial confidentiality'.
What has been very noticeable about the development of bureaucracy in the public and private
spheres over the last 40 years (since Thatcher govt of 79) has been the way systems are
designed now to place responsibility and culpability on the workers delivering the services -
Teachers, Nurses, social workers, etc. While those making the policies, passing the laws,
overseeing the regulations- viz. the people 'at the top', now no longer take the rap when
something goes wrong- they may be the Captain of their particular ship, but the
responsibility now rests with the man sweeping the decks. Instead they are covered by tying
up in knots those teachers etc. having to fill in endless check lists and reports, which have
as much use as clicking 'yes' one has understood those long legal terms provided by software
companies.... yet are legally binding. So how the hell do we get out of this mess? By us as
individuals uniting through unions or whatever and saying NO. No to your dumb educational
directives, No to your cruel welfare policies, No to your stupid NHS mismanagement.... there
would be a lot of No's but eventually we could say collectively 'Yes I did the right thing'.
'The left wing dialogue about neoliberalism used to be that it was the Wild West and that
anything goes. Now apparently it's a machine of mass control.'
It is the Wild West and anything goes for the corporate entities, and a machine of control
of the masses. Hence the wish of neoliberals to remove legislation that protects workers and
consumers.
Those are far from failures, those were successful disinformation/propaganda operations conducted with a certain goal --
remove Trump -- which demonstrate the level of intelligence agencies control of the MSM. In other words those are
parts of a bigger intelligence operation -- the color revolution against Trump led most probably by Obama and Brennan.
Now we know that Obama played an important role in Russiagate media hysteria and, most porbably, in planning and executing the
operation to entrap Flynn.
Notable quotes:
"... They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused ..."
"... Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors" went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script: ..."
"... Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked Ukrainian artillery apps; they then retracted it . ..."
"... The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies -- the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community." ..."
"... Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered "sex for favors" were totally false (and scurrilous). ..."
BuzzFeed was once notorious for
traffic-generating "listicles," but has since become an impressive outlet for deep
investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the
news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story
that, like so many others of its kind,
blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the
extremely rare step to
label its key claims "inaccurate."
But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures
in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by
the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news,
the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger
they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets
(particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most
embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is
so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end
with (dis)honorable mention status.
Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave
threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media
outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would
expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories.
That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media
clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors"
went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the
same agenda and script:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)
On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that
C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false:
Holy shit. Russia state propaganda (RT) "hacked" into C-SPAN feed and took over for a good
40 seconds today? In middle of live broadcast. https://t.co/pwWYFoDGDU
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat
During the Winter (WashPost)
On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S.
electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along
with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's
notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S.
electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was
false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:
Breaking: Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont
https://t.co/LED11lL7ej
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the
Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive
Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post
published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian
infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being
"routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of
at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation
campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."
Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that
reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge
Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig,
and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul
Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note
in memory appended to the top of the article (but
not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the
media ecosystem):
Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent
researchers https://t.co/3ETVXWw16Q
Just want to note I hadn't heard of Propornot before the WP piece and never gave
permission to them to call Bellingcat "allies" https://t.co/jQKnWzjrBR
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under
Senate Investigation (CNN)
On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the
Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story
and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network. 6. Russia Attacked
U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave
Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC
spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia
was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic
or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea
what to make of it.
But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered
any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective
psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds"
the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean
male cricket during mating season.
An @NBCNews
exclusive: After more than a year of mystery, Russia is the main suspect in the sonic attacks
that sickened 26 U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials in Cuba. @MitchellReports has the
latest. pic.twitter.com/NEI9PJ9CpD
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy
and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
On November 27, 2018, the Guardian
published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed
to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,
and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators
exploded.
Seven weeks later,
no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged;
the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into
hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian
official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:
Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in
London, and visited around the time he joined Trump's campaign, the Guardian has been told.
https://t.co/Fc2BVmXipk
The Guardian reports that Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks,
the same month that Manafort joined Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, a meeting
that could carry vast implications for the Russia investigation https://t.co/pYawnv4MHH
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story
Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump
Tower Meeting (CNN)
On July 27, 2018, CNN
published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that
President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two
problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that
"contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis
was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous
other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however,
to this date has refused to do either: 2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and Witness Interviews Proving Trump
Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)
BREAKING: President Trump personally directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie
to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in order to obscure his
involvement. https://t.co/BEoMKiDypn
The allegation that the President of the United States may have suborned perjury before
our committee in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings
with Russia is among the most serious to date. We will do what's necessary to find out if
it's true. https://t.co/GljBAFqOjh
Listen, if Mueller does have multiple sources confirming Trump directed Cohen to lie to
Congress, then we need to know this ASAP. Mueller shouldn't end his inquiry, but it's about
time for him to show Congress his cards before it's too late for us to act. https://t.co/ekG5VSBS8G
To those trying to parse the Mueller statement: it's a straight-up denial. Maybe Buzzfeed
can prove they are right, maybe Mueller can prove them wrong. But it's an emphatic denial
https://t.co/EI1J7XLCJe
. @Isikoff :
"There were red flags about the BuzzFeed story from the get-go." Notes it was inconsistent
with Cohen's guilty plea when he said he made false statements about Trump Tower to Congress
to be "consistent" with Trump, not at his direction. pic.twitter.com/tgDg6SNPpG
We at The Post also had riffs on the story our reporters hadn't confirmed. One noted Fox
downplayed it; another said it "if true, looks to be the most damning to date for Trump." The
industry needs to think deeply on how to cover others' reporting we can't confirm
independently. https://t.co/afzG5B8LAP
Washington Post says Mueller's denial of BuzzFeed News article is aimed at the full story:
"Mueller's denial, according to people familiar with the matter, aims to make clear that none
of those statements in the story are accurate." https://t.co/ene0yqe1mK
If you're one of the people tempted to believe the self-evidently laughable claim that
there's something "vague" or unclear about Mueller's statement, or that it just seeks to
quibble with a few semantic trivialities, read this @WashPost story about this https://t.co/0io99LyATS
pic.twitter.com/ca1TwPR3Og
You can spend hours parsing the Carr statement, but given how unusual it is for any DOJ
office to issue this sort of on the record denial, let alone this office, suspect it means
the story's core contention that they have evidence Trump told Cohen to lie is fundamentally
wrong.
New York Times throws a bit of cold water on BuzzFeed's explosive -- and now seriously
challenged -- report that Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress: https://t.co/9N7MiHs7et
pic.twitter.com/7FJFT9D8fW
I can't speak to Buzzfeed's sourcing, but, for what it's worth, I declined to run with
parts of the narrative they conveyed based on a source central to the story repeatedly
disputing the idea that Trump directly issued orders of that kind.
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to the WikiLeaks Email Archive
(CNN/MSNBC)
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched
one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so
grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a
major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to
have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have
been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked
emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC
videos
here ).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally
and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks
archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before.
Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and
MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian
message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole
world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all
got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong
in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete
silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple,
independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating
– and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources
who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the
internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just
what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing
is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he
awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously
is:
Knowingly soliciting or receiving anything of value from a foreign national for campaign
purposes violates the Federal Election Campaign Act. If it's worth over $2,000 then penalties
include fines & IMPRISONMENT. @DonaldJTrumpJr may be in bigly
trouble. #FridayFeeling
https://t.co/dRz6Ph17Er
CNN is leading the way in bashing BuzzFeed but it's worth remembering CNN had a
humiliation at least as big & bad: when they yelled that Trump Jr. had advanced access to
the WL archive (!): all based on a wrong date. They removed all the segments from YouTube,
but this remains: pic.twitter.com/0jiA50aIku
ABC News' Brian Ross is fired for
reporting Trump told Flynn to make contact with Russians when he was still a candidate;
in fact, Trump did that after he won.
The New York Times claimed Manafort provided
polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a person "close to the Kremlin"; in fact, he
provided them to Ukrainians, not Russians.
Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked
Ukrainian artillery apps;
they then retracted it .
Bloomberg and the WSJ reported Mueller subpoenaed Deustche Bank for Trump's financial
records; the NYT said
that never happened .
Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very melodramatically
claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick her by sending her a fake Top Secret
document modeled after the one published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come
from the U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the document before it
was published by us and thus must have had special access to it; in fact,
Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on the document ; the fake sent to Maddow
was created after we published the document, and was sent to her by a random member of the
public who took the document from the Intercept's site and doctored it to see if she'd fall
for an obvious scam. Maddow's entire timeline, on which her whole melodramatic conspiracy
theory rested, was fictitious.
The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence
agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally
retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies --
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not
approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community."
AP claimed on February 2, 2018, that the Free Beacon commissioned the Steele Dossier;
they thereafter acknowledged that was false and
noted, instead: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was
initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until
after Democratic groups had begun funding it."
Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered
"sex for favors" were
totally false (and scurrilous).
After a Russian regional jet crashed on February 11, 2018, shortly after it took off from
Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard, Harvard Law Professor and frequent MSNBC contributor
Laurence Tribe
strongly implied Putin purposely caused the plane to go down in order to murder Sergei
Millian, a person vaguely linked to George Papadopoulos and Jared Kushner; in fact, Millian
was not on the plane nor, to date, has anyone claimed they had any evidence that Putin
ordered his own country's civilian passenger jet brought down.
Under the subtitle The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, Thomas Rid helps remind us how we reached this
morass, one with antecedents reaching back to Czarist Russia and the Bolshevik revolution. To be sure, the US can use all the help
it can get as it navigates the current election cycle and the lies, rumours and
uncertainty that
shroud the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Rid was born in West Germany amid the cold war. The Berlin Wall fell when he was a teenager. He is now a professor at Johns Hopkins.
So what are “active measures”? Previously, Rid
testified they were “semi-covert or covert intelligence operations to shape an adversary’s political decisions”.
“Almost always,” he explained, “active measures conceal or falsify the source.”
The special counsel’s report framed them more narrowly as “operations conducted by Russian security services aimed at influencing
the course of international affairs”. Add in technology and hacking, and an image of modern asymmetric warfare emerges.
Rid travels back to the early years of communist
Russia, recounting the efforts of the government to discredit the remnants of the ancien régime and squash attempts to restore
the monarchy. The Cheka, the secret police, hatched a plot that involved forged correspondence, a fictitious organization, a fake
counter-revolutionary council and a government-approved travelogue.
Words and narratives morphed into readily transportable munitions. The émigré community was declawed and the multi-pronged combination
deemed “wildly successful”. The project also “served as an inspiration for future active measures”. A template had been set.
Fast forward to the cold war and the aftermath of the US supreme court’s landmark school desegregation case. The tension between
reality and the text and aspirations of the Declaration of Independence was in the open again. Lunch-counter sit-ins and demands
for the vote filled newspapers and TV screens. The fault lines were plainly visible – and the Soviet Union pounced.
In 1960, the KGB embarked on a “series of race-baiting disinformation operations” that included mailing Ku Klux Klan leaflets
to African and Asian delegations to the United Nations on the eve of a debate on colonialism. At the same time, Russian “operators
posed as an African American organization agitating against the KKK”.
More than a half-century later, Russia ran an updated version of the play. Twitter came to host
the fake accounts of both “John Davis”, ostensibly a gun-toting Texas Christian and family man, and @BlacktoLive”, along with
hundreds of others.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian troll factory, organized pro-Confederate flag rallies.
As detailed by Robert Mueller, the IRA also claimed that the civil war was not “about slavery” and instead was “all about money”,
a false trope that continues to gain resonance among Trump supporters and proponents of the “liberate the states” movement. According
to Brian
Westrate, treasurer of the Wisconsin Republican party, “the Confederacy was more about states’ rights than slavery.”
Depicting West Germany as Hitler’s heir was another aim. At the time, “some aging former Nazis still held positions of influence”,
Rid writes. In the late 1960s, “encouraging ‘anti-German tendencies in the West’ was very much a priority”.
In 1964, with Russian assistance, Czech intelligence mounted
Operation Neptun, sinking
Nazi wartime
documents to the bottom of the ominous sounding Black Lake, near the German border. The cache was then “discovered” – media pandemonium
ensued. Four years later the mastermind of the scheme, Ladislav Bittman, defected to the US.
Prior to 2016, Russia’s most notable active measure using the US as a foil was the lie that Aids was “made in the USA”. In retaliation
for US reports of Soviet use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan, the KGB unfurled Operation Denver, a multi-platformed campaign that
falsely claimed “Aids
was an American biological weapon developed at Fort Detrick, Maryland”. Central to the effort was the earlier publication of
an anonymous letter with a New York byline by an Indian newspaper. The forged missive claimed “Aids may invade India: mystery disease
caused by US lab experiments.”
MSM now run under control of intelligence agencies and use State Department of Foreign Office talking points, much like in the USSR, where this role was played by communist Party
Notable quotes:
"... Part of the problem is that newspapers have morphed into viewspapers. The distinction between reporting and comment has been blurred. Back in the 70s, leading publications only had one comment piece and an editorial. Their pages were packed with news items, with stories reported factually and without a 'bent'. ..."
"... Today, comment has taken over, but while there's no shortage of 'opinion', most of it is saying very much the same thing. I think we first saw this phenomenon in the lead up to the Iraq War. I was one of the very few mainstream commentators who ridiculed the claim that Iraq had WMDs. It was obvious to me that if the leaders of the UK and US genuinely believed Saddam possessed these terrible weapons, they wouldn't be planning to do the one thing which would provoke the Iraqi leader into using them, i.e. invade his country. Yet the Great WMDs Hoax, which a child of five could see through, was promoted by nearly all 'serious' journalists. The most vociferous media cheerleaders for the invasion faced no professional blowback, on the contrary, their careers have flourished. ..."
Trust in the written press in Britain is the lowest in 33 European countries. That's hardly surprising seeing how so many journalists
have become mere stenographers for, or lackeys of, the Establishment power elites. Just when you think the reputation of the UK media
couldn't sink any lower, it just did. An annual survey undertaken by EurobarometerEU, across 33 countries, puts the UK at the bottom,
with a net trust of -60. Yes that's right, minus 60 . It's a fall of 24 points since last year. Just 15 percent of Brits trust
their print media. But it's not the only survey showing a similar trend.
The attached graphic about trust in the written press, published last week, has not been widely reported in Britain. This is
a huge annual survey by @EurobarometerEU
across 33 countries. It's the ninth year out of the past ten that the UK has been last. We have a problem.
pic.twitter.com/8eYoQR7XZw
Newspapers came in rock bottom (with a rating of -50) in a YouGov poll on Sky where the question was asked, "How much do you
trust the following on Coronavirus?" And in case you think it's only the Sun we're talking about here, another poll showed that
distrust of so-called 'upmarket' papers was running at 52 percent.
How did we get here? I've got a collection of old newspapers and magazines dating back several decades. Part of the problem
is that newspapers have morphed into viewspapers. The distinction between reporting and comment has been blurred. Back in the 70s,
leading publications only had one comment piece and an editorial. Their pages were packed with news items, with stories reported
factually and without a 'bent'.
Today, comment has taken over, but while there's no shortage of 'opinion', most of it is saying very much the same thing.
I think we first saw this phenomenon in the lead up to the Iraq War. I was one of the very few mainstream commentators who ridiculed
the claim that Iraq had WMDs. It was obvious to me that if the leaders of the UK and US genuinely believed Saddam possessed these
terrible weapons, they wouldn't be planning to do the one thing which would provoke the Iraqi leader into using them, i.e. invade
his country. Yet the Great WMDs Hoax, which a child of five could see through, was promoted by nearly all 'serious' journalists.
The most vociferous media cheerleaders for the invasion faced no professional blowback, on the contrary, their careers have flourished.
As bad as the Iraq War propaganda was, things have got even worse since then. Obnoxious gatekeepers have ensured that the parameters
of what can and can't be said in print have narrowed still further.
In the mid-Noughties, I was writing regularly in the UK mainstream print media. So too was John Pilger. Our articles were popular
with readers, but not with the gatekeepers. When I
wrote a balanced, alternative
view on Belarus for the New Statesman in 2011, I came under fierce gatekeeper attack.
I forgot that on Belarus and many other issues, only one point of view was allowed. Silly me.
Only one thing can save UK print press
Today, the lack of diversity of opinion is one of the reasons why newspaper sales have crashed – (sales have
slumped by two-thirds in the past 20 years), and conversely why 'alternative' sites, and media outlets where a wide range of
opinions ARE heard have done so well. Who wants to pay money for a paper when the political views published in it range from pro-war
centrist-left, to pro-war centrist-right?
If there was a single newspaper or magazine column which examined forensically whether Labour really did have an anti-Semitism
'crisis' under Jeremy Corbyn, I must have missed it.
And apart from Mary Dejevsky in the i paper, where was the journalism examining the many inconsistencies in the official narrative
of the Skripal case? Why has 'Private Eye', which bills itself as 'anti-Establishment', not covered the ongoing Philip Cross Wikipedia
editing scandal ?
I'm sure the old 'Eye' of Richard Ingrams and Bron Waugh would have if Wikipedia had been around then.
And what about the Covid-19 coverage? Has any journalist asked the very simple question: if the virus is as bad as the government
says it is, and a domestic lockdown is necessary to stop its spread, why have flights continued to come into the country (including
from virus hotspots) unchecked?
Don't get me wrong, there are still some good columnists out there, but sadly you can count them on one hand.
The only thing that can save UK print media from total collapse is if there is a large-scale clear-out of the faux-left/neocon-dominated
commentariat and their replacement by writers who actually address the issues that readers are interested in. Newspapers used to
be published for their readers, now it seems most are published for people who write for other newspapers – and to enable 'Inside
the Tenters' to congratulate each other for their 'brilliant' articles on Twitter.
The smug, mutual back-slapping nonsense, seen at its worst at journalist 'award' ceremonies, has gone on for too long. We need
more old-style chain-smoking journos, not frightened of telling truth to power – and less smoke and mirrors.
Trust in British print media can be restored, but only if we go back to the future.
If you like this story, share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.
He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66 is a journalist,
writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world
affairs @NeilClark66 6 May, 2020 17:39
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Oh, there are the customary snide asides to the effect that the Russian 'doctors' are
actually all military-intelligence spies, but this report seems to shift the blame for that
to La Stampa, and points out through the Italian staff that the equipment Russia supplied is
both useful and of excellent quality and effectiveness. Responses to questions by the Russian
medical staff who are interviewed are not portrayed as the most hilarious lies you ever
heard, as they usually are.
I'm not foolish enough to think it signals a change in policy, but it is refreshing
nonetheless.
The article was written by local Bergamo freelance writer, Anna Bonalume. She seems to be a
recent recruit as she has just one other article at The Fraudian.
Lo and behold, the article suggests that Bergamischi self-reliance, enterprise, hard-nosed
pragmatism, a strong work ethic and tendency to get going when the going gets tough might
have doomed the city, when the natives should have done was to call for an immediate lockdown
and then shutter all their businesses, batten down the hatches and wait for government
largesse (if any) to flow through the streets.
Nothing in the article about how air pollution levels
in the city – Bergamo is in that province (Lombardia) of northern Italy which is
notorious for registering some of the highest air pollution levels in Europe, second or equal
to parts of southern Poland where coal production is still dominant – together with the
unique physical geography of the province (most cities in Lombardia are located in or near a
river valley at the foot of the Alps: a perfect environment for annual thermal inversions in
which cold air containing air pollutants sits under warm air so everyone keeps breathing
polluted air) might have set a context in which COVID-19 or indeed any other major illness
transmitted through respiratory and/or tactile channels could proliferate with devastating
effects on the most vulnerable groups in society.
" Jonathan Reid, a Bristol University professor researching airborne transmission of
coronavirus, told The Guardian, "It is perhaps not surprising that while suspended in air,
the small droplets could combine with background urban particles and be carried around."
"
Looks like The Fraudian still has to get that information about air pollution particles
carrying droplets of coronavirus out to Bonalume.
Neoliberalism destroys solidarity; as the result it destroys both the society and individuals
Notable quotes:
"... Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you're reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others. ..."
"... On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won't be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare , the best-known specialist on psychopathy today. ..."
"... the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation. ..."
"... Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it's known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other. ..."
"... Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms ..."
"... More important, though, is the serious damage to people's self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being "Who needs me?" For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one. ..."
"... A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. ..."
"... the paradox of our era as: "Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless." ..."
An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities
'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose
outside the success narrative is limited.'
We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic
practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities.
Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has
become normative. If you're reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain
personality traits and penalises others.
There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over
as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won't really
be noticed.
It's important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you've got plenty of experience
under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact
that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That's why
you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.
On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads
to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won't be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy
checklist by Robert Hare , the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.
This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social
level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes
an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation
than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.
Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent
venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it's known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging
from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.
Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms.
This results in what the sociologist
Richard Sennett has aptly described
as the "infantilisation of the workers". Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities ("She got
a new office chair and I didn't"), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings
of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees
as adults.
More important, though, is the serious damage to people's self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we
receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel
to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion
when he sees the main question for employees these days as being "Who needs me?" For a growing group of people, the answer is: no
one.
Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and
putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated,
guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to
choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage
of our social security system.
A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies
entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe
in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if
they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in
the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the
paradox of our era as: "Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless." We are indeed freer than before, in the sense
that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like.
We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet,
on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There
are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.
Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, "make" something of ourselves. You don't
need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person
with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure
success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a
master's degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?
There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral
and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy
reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.
"... Corbyn's weakness was always the elephant in the room but was fully revealed when he had to step up to plate and fight. No leader can survive without being able to fight his enemies and no country should be led by such a person. Saddly he squandered the enormous opportunity handed to him in the last election: in hindsight, that opportunity was handed to him by an electorate steeped in wishful thinking ..."
"... Of course it's criticism of the state of Israel. And of course that's not anti-Semitism. But the label "anti-Semitism" is the kiss of death to the executive class i.e. that middle layer who "inform" the masses. If you are one of them and you get called "anti-Semitic", it's the equivalent of your boss saying, "I want a word – and bring your coat!" ..."
"... Corbyn seems like a nice enough guy, an honest, yet unremarkable footsoldier MP, but the idea he was suited to leading the Labour Party into an epic struggle with a revitalised Tory Party under a strong leader like Boris Johnson, is a fantastic notion. Johnson had to be cut down to size, before the election. ..."
"... And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy that's required. That strategy is the one Donald Trump employed, taking on the media and identifying them as the enemy and explaining why they publish lies. Corbyn should have publically taken on both the Guardian and the BBC, rather than appeasing them, unsuccessfully, because appeasing them isn't possible. ..."
"... Why didn't Corbyn express anger and shock when he was accused of being a paedophile, sorry, an anti-Semite? Those MPs who went along with that sordid narrative, should have been kicked out of Labour immediately by Corbyn himself. ..."
"... "A big part of why Labor and Corbyn lost so badly is the complete abdication of "the Left" on Brexit. The left were supposed to be anti-globalists, in which case their task was to join battle offering an egalitarian, left-populist version of Brexit which would have benefited the people. Instead, faced with a real decision and a real opportunity they punted and ran home to globalist mama. This removed one of the main reasons to bother supporting them. ..."
"... The point about the EU not being directly responsible for Tory austerity is technically true but it is nonetheless a neo liberal monster crushing the shit out of the most vulnerable ..."
"... Especially when it comes to countries like Greece. I don't understand the constant veneration of the EU. By design, our membership did nothing to protect us from the carnage of this Tory crime wave. The EUs constitutional arrangements contains baked in obligations to maintain permanent austerity in the service of ever greater corporate profit. ..."
No one feels like recalling, for example, that more people voted against the Tories than for them (13.9mn for and 16.2mn against).
Or that 10.3 million people still voted Labour despite the entirety of the unprecedentedly vicious and Stalinist hate campaign
conducted against them – and Corbyn in particular – since the latter became leader in 2015.
Which fact, along with Labour's near-win in 2017 and the surprise Brexit victory in 2016, implies the mainstream media's ability
to direct and manipulate public opinion is a lot less wholesale and guaranteed than we oftentimes assume, and that this is unlikely
to be a single explanation for yesterday's result.
More importantly, no one – even those who are boggling at the implausibility – is questioning the validity of the result.
No one.
It's as if even suggesting election fraud can happen in a nice majority-white western country like the UK is improper and disrespectful.
Election fraud is – as every good racist knows – done by brown people or Orientals, or 'corrupt' eastern European nations, not by
fine upstanding empire builders like the British.
This seems to be so much of a given that the results of any vote are simply accepted as 100% valid – no matter how improbable
they may seem.
And apparently even in the face of clear evidence for at least some level of shady activity.
Remember this? It only happened on Wednesday but it's already some way down the Memory Hole.
There's been a lot of effort expended in
minimising the significance of this in social media and in the mainstream press – and indeed by resident trolls on OffG. There
have been claims it's 'routine' – as if that somehow makes it ok. Or that Kuenssberg was misinformed, or 'tired'.
And after all this, Labour heartlands – red since World War 2, through Thatcher and Foot and every anti-Labour hate campaign the
media could muster – all voted Conservative?
Does that seem likely?
I don't know, all I do know is I think that discussion needs to start. I think it's time to think the unthinkable, and at least
open the prospect of electoral fraud up for real discussion.
How secure is our electoral process? Can results be stage-managed, massaged or even rigged? What guarantees do we have that this
can't happen here? In an age of growing corruption and decay at the very top, do the checks and balances placed to safeguard our
democracy sill work well, or even at all?
This Friday the Thirteenth, with BoJo the Evil Clown back in Downing Street, looks like a good moment to get it going.
aspnaz ,
Corbyn's weakness was always the elephant in the room but was fully revealed when he had to step up to plate and fight. No
leader can survive without being able to fight his enemies and no country should be led by such a person. Saddly he squandered
the enormous opportunity handed to him in the last election: in hindsight, that opportunity was handed to him by an electorate
steeped in wishful thinking. Should he apologise to his supporters, probably not, they backed the wrong horse but the limp
was visible from day one.
That inequality and poverty will continue increasing under neoliberal economic policies, and the majority of us will continue
being ground into the dirt, or that Julian Assange will end up in the U.S for certain to face a Stalinesque show trial, or the
observation about George Galloway.
George Mc ,
I know it's bad for my health but oh I just can't stop myself. Had another Groan trip. Here's one from that good time gal Jess
Phillips:
I only supply the link to see if anyone can see any actual content in this. I suppose it must be a real cushy number to get
paid for pitching in a lot of foaming waffle that feels purposeful but remains totally non-commital. That and those nice cheques
rolling in from that Hyslop and Merton quiz fluff.
George Mc ,
You have to understand that it's all showbiz. Why did the Tories prefer Boris to Jeremy Hunt? Because Hunt looked and sounded
like the oily little tyke everyone wanted to kick. Whereas Boris was the cutesie country womble from a Two Ronnies sketch. When
Boris appeared on his test outing as host for Hignfy, all he had to do was to be incompetent i.e. all he had to do was turn up.
Oh how we all laughed.
As for Jess – well, she's the ballsy fake prole tomboy – like a WOKE verson of Thatcha. I doubt anyone is "buying this" (to
use one of the Americanisms we'll all be spouting as we become the 51st state) but it's all part of "the movie".
ricked by its sharp thorn anywhere near the heart. Don't know what the street name will be for it but it has two current codewords
i heard 'stellar' & 'jessa'.
George Mc ,
"Share On Twitter" target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=When+I+said+%26%238220%3Bcome+clean%26%238221%3B+I+meant+as+...+&url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2019%2F12%2F13%2Fboris-johnsons-incredible-landslide%2F%23comment-106199">
When I said "come clean" I meant as in "reveal yourself". I really think you should calm down. Take some deep breaths. Have a
nice cup of tea.
By all means comment, but when you slander those who actually felt it important that their vote counted, that their opinion
mattered and then were told to fuck off by the very people asking them for their opinion, its expected you get blow back, which
is what has happened.
Now, may i enquire, do you have a belief in democracy and upholding democratic outcomes, do you believe that Russian interference
actually resulted in the Brexit vote itself, and do you believe that the working class is so fucking pig ignorant that it should
never be allowed to vote.
In summation, are you a Blairite by any chance as they way you communicate shows an utter contempt for those poor sods slagged
off by Remainiacs for so long to just fuck off.
As for economic decline, strange, but the UK is one of the top 10 wealthy nations globally, much of said wealth now from the
FIRE Economy, which means its extractive and put to no real purpose, whilst the break-up of the Union is up to the constituent
parts itself – as i support Irish reunification, i don't weep for Northern Ireland, whilst the Scots have every right o be free
of Westminster, its not as if they held an actual Referedum on it prior to the signing of the Act of Union is it.
And as for wales, well, here's a small country who's political establishment are incapable of recognising it elected to Leave
the EU, which sometimes has aspirations itself to Independence, an Independence it will never gain due to the fact nearly 800K
English live within our lands, but the fantasists persist none the less.
Now, as the EU, via the Treaty named after Lisbon is very much a neoliberal organisation, one that puts monetary union above
the welfare of its own citizens, please explain why I must support such an Institution that does not benefit the average Joe in
most member States?
Alan Tench ,
What you must remember is that a democratic decision isn't always a good one. In my view, the current one concerning Brexit, is
a bad one. The fact that a majority support it doesn't make it good or right. We just have to live with it. Consider the death
penalty. I'm sure the vast majority of voters in this country would vote in favour of it. Would that might it right?
Ruth ,
Don't blame them. In all likelihood they had their votes hijacked by MI5
Alan Tench ,
All this anti-Semitism stuff – anyone know what it's about? I assume it had zero influence on the electorate. Just how does it
manifest itself? Is most of it – maybe nearly all of it – concerned with criticism of the state of Israel? If so, it's not anti-Semitism
.
George Mc ,
Of course it's criticism of the state of Israel. And of course that's not anti-Semitism. But the label "anti-Semitism" is
the kiss of death to the executive class i.e. that middle layer who "inform" the masses. If you are one of them and you get called
"anti-Semitic", it's the equivalent of your boss saying, "I want a word – and bring your coat!"
MichaelK ,
I think the Labour Party's election strategy, and long before, was fatally flawed. I'm shocked by it. How bad it was. First they
should never have agreed to an election at this time. Wait, at least until Spring. The idea, surely, was to keep weakening Johnson's
brand and splitting the Tories apart. Johnson wanted an election for obvious reasons, that alone should have meant that one did
everything in one's power not to give him what he wanted. Labour did the exact opposite of what they should have done, march onto
a battleground chose by Johnson.
Of course one can argue that the liberals and the SNP had already hinted that they would support Johnson's demand, but Labour
could have 'bought them off' with a little effort. Give the SNP a pledge on a second referendum and give the Liberals a guarantee
of electoral reform, whatever.
The Liberals actually had an even more stupid and incompetent leadership than Labour and suffered a terrible defeat too. Why
is it that it's only the Tories who know how to play the election game, usually?
Corbyn seems like a nice enough guy, an honest, yet unremarkable footsoldier MP, but the idea he was suited to leading
the Labour Party into an epic struggle with a revitalised Tory Party under a strong leader like Boris Johnson, is a fantastic
notion. Johnson had to be cut down to size, before the election.
Allowing the Tories to become the People's Party, the Brexit Party in all but name; was a catastrohic mistake by Labour; unforegivabel
really.
And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy
that's required. That strategy is the one Donald Trump employed, taking on the media and identifying them as the enemy and explaining
why they publish lies. Corbyn should have publically taken on both the Guardian and the BBC, rather than appeasing them, unsuccessfully,
because appeasing them isn't possible.
Why didn't Corbyn express anger and shock when he was accused of being a paedophile, sorry, an anti-Semite? Those MPs who
went along with that sordid narrative, should have been kicked out of Labour immediately by Corbyn himself. He needed to
be far more aggressive and proactive, taking the fight to his enemies and using his position to crush them at once. Call me a
kiddy fiddler and I'll rip your fucking throat out! Only Corbyn was passive, defencesive, apathetic and totally hopeless when
smeared so terribly. People don't respect a coward, they do respect someone who fights back and sounds righteously angry at being
smeared so falsely. Corbyn looked and sounded like someone who had something to hide and appologise about, which only encouraged
the Israeli lobby to attack him even more! Un-fuckin' believable.
What's tragic is that the right understood Corbyn's weaknesses and character far better than his supporters, and how to destroy
him.
Ruth ,
I agree with you about the election timing
Derek ,
And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy that's
required.
Yes you are absolutely right, he should have stolen a journalists phone or hid in a fridge, maybe stare at the ground when
shown a picture of a child sleeping on a hospital floor. Now that's turning turning events to your advantage right?
He made many mistakes and you are right, but caving into "remain" the perceived overturning of the referendum by the Labour
party is what dunnit, the final nail in his coffin. I am sorry to see him go.
tonyopmoc ,
Judging by the spelling of "Labour", I guess an American wrote this on The Moon of Alabama's blog. It is however very accurate
and I know that MOA is a German man, running his blog from Germany. His analyses, are some of the best in the world.
Tony
"A big part of why Labor and Corbyn lost so badly is the complete abdication of "the Left" on Brexit. The left were supposed
to be anti-globalists, in which case their task was to join battle offering an egalitarian, left-populist version of Brexit which
would have benefited the people. Instead, faced with a real decision and a real opportunity they punted and ran home to globalist
mama. This removed one of the main reasons to bother supporting them.
Posted by: Russ | Dec 13 2019 7:09 utc | 33″
MichaelK ,
I thought the left were supposed to be internationalists too? I dunno. I think they should never have supported the referendum
scam in the first place. If the Tories wanted it, that alone should have made them oppose it. Look at what's happened, the referendum
and Brexit have massively benefitted the Tories and crushed everyone else. Isn't that an objective fact, or am I missing something;
seriously?
What does 'anti-globalist' really mean? The tragedy was allowing the Tories to blame Europe for the devastating consequences
of their own 'austerity' policies which hit the North so hard. These policies originated in London, not Bruxelles!
The truth is harsh. Corbyn was a terrible leader with awfully confused policies that he couldn't articulate properly and a
team around him that were just as bad.
Pam Ryan ,
The point about the EU not being directly responsible for Tory austerity is technically true but it is nonetheless a neo liberal
monster crushing the shit out of the most vulnerable.
Especially when it comes to countries like Greece. I don't understand the constant veneration of the EU. By design, our
membership did nothing to protect us from the carnage of this Tory crime wave. The EUs constitutional arrangements contains baked
in obligations to maintain permanent austerity in the service of ever greater corporate profit.
Thom ,
'Incredible' is the word. We're expected to believe that for all his personal and intellectual flaws, Johnson achieved a landslide
on the scale of Blair and Thatcher; that he drew in Leave supporters from traditional Labour voters while holding on to Remain
Tories; that all three major UK opposition parties flopped, including the one party pushing for outright Remain; and that turnout
fell even though millions registered just before the election. Sorry, but it doesn't add up.
nottheonly1 ,
"Share On Twitter" target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=What+just+happened+was+an+inverted+U.S.+selectio...+&url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2019%2F12%2F13%2Fboris-johnsons-incredible-landslide%2F%23comment-106262">
What just happened was an inverted U.S. selection. In the U.S., a confused rich man got elected, because the alternative was a
psychopathic war criminal. In the U.K. a confused upper class twat got elected, because the alternative was too good to be true.
Something like that?
tonyopmoc ,
Something strange going on in Sedgefield. What the hell is Boris Johnson doing there today? Tony Blair Labour, Boris Johnson
Tory. What's the difference? Same neocons. Same sh1t?
tonyopmoc ,
Dungroanin, Jeremy Corbyn is 70 now. He's done his bit. Now its time for him to take it easy.
Incidentally "Viscount Palmerston was over 70 when he finally became Prime Minister: the most advanced age at which anyone
has ever become Prime Minister for the first time."
George Mc ,
The Groan is keen to highlight the sheer thanklessness of the BBC's undying fight to objectively bring The Truth to the masses:
And for all the tireless work they do, they are open to accusations of "conspiracy theory" and worse:
"The conspiracy theories that abound are frustrating. And let's be clear – some of the abuse which is directed at our journalists
who are doing their best for audiences day in, day out is sickening. It shouldn't happen. And I think it's something social
media platforms really need to do more about."
Sickening social media abuse? Echoes of all those frightfully uncivil – and never verified – messages that wrecked poor little
Ruth Smeeth's delicate health.
Thom ,
The only way the BBC and Guardian will understand if people don't pay the licence fee and don't click on their articles (and obviously
don't contribute!). Hit them in the pockets.
George Mc ,
It didn't take long for the Groaniad to "dissect" the Labour defeat. Here we get THE FIVE REASONS Labour lost the election:
Interesting. Note the space given to Blairite toadies Ruth Smeeth and Caroline Flint. Note the disingenuousness of this:
"In London, antisemitism and what people perceived as the absence of an apology appeared to be a key issue."
It's always suspicious when we get that expression "what people perceived". What "people"? And note that the dubiousness relates
to the absence of an apology for anti-Semitism – not the anti-Semitism itself which is, of course, taken for granted.
Also note the conclusion:
"With a new Conservative government led by Boris Johnson poised for office, the Guardian's independent, measured, authoritative
reporting has never been so vital."
Yes – The Groaniad is yer man, yer champion, yer hero!
George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV
and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.
Whoever replaces outgoing BBC Director General Tony Hall, be sure that establishment
interests will be in safe hands. But multiple scandals the broadcaster has been involved in
damaged it quite possibly beyond repair.
... ... ...
Corbyn had to be destroyed at almost ANY cost. Their news and current affairs output (and
appointments) over the Corbyn era of 2015-2019 was as crude, and crudely effective, as any
screaming, screeching Rupert Murdoch tabloid. Perhaps they were worried the ghost of Sir
Alasdair Milne would return to haunt them in the form of his son Seumas Milne, Corbyn's
director of communications and strategy and right-hand man. The junior Milne – also
Winchester and Oxford – is a considerably harder nut to crack than anyone the BBC had
ever had to deal with before
"... "disinformation and the cost of fake news." ..."
"... "how post-truth culture has become an increasingly dangerous part of the global information environment," ..."
"... To say Stelter's involvement in the documentary attracted mockery online would be an understatement. "This is like Harvey Weinstein doing a documentary on sexual assault," lawyer and journalist Rogan O'Handley wrote. ..."
"... "HBO has hired Brian Stelter to do a documentary on Fake News. That's like hiring Bernie Madoff to teach accounting. Like hiring Michael Moore to host a fashion show. Not to mention [Stelter] is the dullest human ever on television," ..."
If you were making a documentary on fake news and wanted to get journalists involved behind
the scenes, there are a few people you may want to avoid. One of those is CNN host Brian
Stelter. The HBO network is rightly being mocked for putting Stelter – the host of a CNN
show ironically named 'Reliable Sources' – on the team for an upcoming documentary on
fake news.
According to Stelter himself, the documentary will investigate "disinformation and the
cost of fake news." The film, for which Stelter was executive producer, will dive into
"how post-truth culture has become an increasingly dangerous part of the global information
environment," according to WarnerMedia.
HBO just announced something I've been working on for a couple of years: A documentary
titled "AFTER TRUTH: DISINFORMATION AND THE COST OF FAKE NEWS." The film will premiere on TV
and online this March. Directed by @a_rossi !
To say Stelter's involvement in the documentary attracted mockery online would be an
understatement. "This is like Harvey Weinstein doing a documentary on sexual assault," lawyer
and journalist Rogan O'Handley wrote.
"HBO has hired Brian Stelter to do a documentary on Fake News. That's like hiring Bernie
Madoff to teach accounting. Like hiring Michael Moore to host a fashion show. Not to mention
[Stelter] is the dullest human ever on television," radio host Mark Simone added.
I hear tell that Emperor Trump is also grooming his potential successor/s
It's a neck and neck race between Kim Kardashian, who Trump is giving personal 'hands on'
assistance, and Montgomery Burns, who is one of Trump's role models.
'He might be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch'. Surely a 'Yeltsin' must replace
or join 'Quisling' in the popular lexicon as a title for a traitor, in future.
"... The economic/social model in the neo-liberal West is one of outright parasitism driving ever increasing inequality and elite wealth, which is the expression in real life of the psychopathic elites' INTENSE hatred of others. For Russia to follow China in creating a society of utilitarian concern for ALL the population, of poverty reduction and of social solidarity between all levels of the population, increases the risk of what Chomsky called 'the good example' ..."
"... 'He might be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch'. Surely a 'Yeltsin' must replace or join 'Quisling' in the popular lexicon as a title for a traitor, in future. ..."
The US/NATO/EU bloc is eagerly awaiting the chance to replace Putin with a pro-Western neo-liberal. One who will increase
national debt, implement austerity, privatise industry, gut the public sector, and open up Russia to the IMF just like has been done
all over the Western world.
Search
Jan 18, 2020
15
Russian Reforms: Is Putin planning for his successor?
Curbs to Presidential power could be intended to preserve Russia from a West-backed President
Kit Knightly
Kit Knightly
Last week, after Putin put forward constitutional reforms that would "empower the legislative
branch" and his entire government resigned, the Western press (and the West-backed "opposition" in Russia) went on at
length about how Putin was preparing to "extend his power", to move to an office "without term limits", or something
along those lines.
After years complaining about the amount of power the President of Russia has, the MSM decided that limiting those
powers was ALSO bad (or perhaps, never even actually read the speech itself at all).
This isn't deliberate deception on their part, they are just trained animals after all. Criticising Putin is a
Pavlovian response to the man saying, or doing absolutely anything.
There's no point in gain-saying it, or analysing it. It is dogs howling at the moon. Instinctive, base and – to a
rational mind – entirely meaningless.
Forget what our press says. It is white noise. They have no insight and no interest in acquiring any.
However, even the alternative media are confused on this one. MoA is a good analyst, but he's
not sure what's at play here
.
.so what IS going on in Russia? Why the constitutional reforms?
Let's take a look at the headline proposals:
Limit the Presidency to a two-term maximum
Empower the Duma to appoint the Prime Minister and cabinet, in place of the President
Anyone running for President has to have lived in Russia for 25 years
Dual-nationals are forbidden from holding public offices
Are these really steps designed centralize the power of the state in an individual? Do they logically support the
argument "Putin wants to be in power for life"?
Given that list, I would say "no". I would say, quite the opposite.
The first two points limit the powers of the Presidency, whilst empowering the legislative branch. Why would Putin
limit the powers of the President if he intends a third term?
Western "analysts" argue Putin plans to stay on as Prime Minister, but these rule changes don't empower the PM,
they only empower the Duma to
choose
the PM.
If he were going to change the constitution to keep himself in power, why not just scrap term limits? Or increase
the Presidental term length?
The third proposed change is interesting – "prevent dual nationals from holding public offices" – is this a way of
limiting possible Western interference in Russian politics?
In the days of the Roman Empire, upon conquering a province the Romans would take children of members of the
ruling class to back to Rome, to be fostered in Roman families and raised as Romans. Then, when they reached
adulthood, the new Romanised Celts or Assyrians or Goths would be sent back to the land of their birth and rule as
the province in Rome's name, serving Rome's interests.
The modern Rome, the United States, does exactly the same thing.
The US/NATO/EU bloc is eagerly awaiting the chance to replace Putin with a pro-Western neo-liberal. One who will
increase national debt, implement austerity, privatise industry, gut the public sector, and open up Russia to the
IMF just like has been done all over the Western world.
So: We have rules limiting the power of the office of President, and a rule clearly aimed at making it impossible
for a US-backed puppet to be inserted into said office.
Here's where we get into some hardcore speculation:
I think, having done the hard work to fix many of Russia's societal and security-related problems, Putin is
seeking to make systemic changes that prevent this work being undone.
I think Putin wants to go – or is at least considering it – and is trying to put rules in place to protect Russia
from his possible successors.
To demonstrate my point, we should take a look at the other parts of Putin's speech – the parts no one in the
Western press is interested in discussing.
In many ways, it was a speech you could have heard coming out of Jeremy Corbyn's mouth. Laying out a vision of
Russia with improved healthcare, free (hot) school meals for all children, internet access for all Russian citizens.
(You can read the whole thing
here
.)
If a British politician made this speech, it would be considered "radical". If an American had done so, they would
be called a crazy socialist. But there's more to this than just socialist economic policies.
Here is Putin on pensions:
We have a law on this, but we should formalise this requirement in the Constitution along with the principles
of decent pensions, which implies a regular adjustment of pensions according to inflation.
On minimum wage:
Therefore, I believe that the Constitution should include a provision that the minimum wage in Russia must not
be below the subsistence minimum of the economically active people.
On local government:
the powers and practical opportunities of the local governments, a body of authority that is closest to the
people, can and should be expanded and strengthened.
On the Judiciary:
The country's fundamental law should enshrine and protect the independence of judges, and their subordination
only to the Constitution and federal law
On Russian sovereignty:
requirements of international law and treaties as well as decisions of international bodies can be valid on the
Russian territory only to the point that they do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens
and do not contradict our Constitution.
On Constitutional law:
extending the powers of the Constitutional Court to evaluate not only laws, but also other regulatory legal
acts adopted by various authorities at the federal and regional levels for compliance with the Constitution.
Is there a pattern here?
Enshrining economic reforms in the constitution
Decentralizing the power for the federal government
Legally protecting the independence of the courts
Protecting Russian law from international bodies
Reviewing future laws to make sure they don't breach the constitution
These could be interpreted as legal backstops. Safeguards on the progress Russia has made under Putin.
Under Yeltsin, Russia was a borderline failed state. Putin pulled them back from that brink.
Yeltsin's
1993 Constitutional Referendum
drastically enhanced the powers of the President, he doesn't wield quite as
supreme executive power as the office of POTUS, but it's comparable:
The referendum approved the new constitution, which significantly expanded the powers of the president, giving
Yeltsin the right to appoint the members of the government, to dismiss the Prime Minister and, in some cases, to
dissolve the Duma.
It could be argued Putin has used that power as it was intended – for the benefit of the Russian people. Perhaps
he feels he cannot rely on anyone who comes after him to be as diligent.
By disempowering the role of President before he leaves office, he ensures that anyone who follows – be they a
US-educated plant, a corrupt billionaire, or a hardline hawkish nationalist – can't undo all the good his
administration has accomplished.
Whether or not Putin wants to be in "power for life" is an answer known only to the man himself, but there's
nothing to suggest it in this speech, and none of the reforms put forward would appear to help in that regard at all.
It looks more like a man securing his legacy.
Perhaps the question becomes not "does Putin want another term?", but rather does Putin even intend to serve all
of this one?
Baron
,
(1) What he proposed isn't the final word, the proposals will be debated, (2) the danger of Navalny's
getting in even with a strong push by the Americans, or their NGO poodles, is minimal, the greater risk
is the communist and their fellow travellers gaining power, (3) the last twenty years have shown Putin
may not be the ideal leader, but he's as close to an ideal as the Russians may ever hope to get, his
remaining in a position of some power after his Presidency term expires should be a positive for Russia.
Putin infuriates the Western Governing Elites (GEs) because he totally contradicts their progressive,
PC, woke agenda and, to make matters worse, his stance resonates with the Western unwashed. That's
unforgivable for the GEs, but one hopes he'll continue doing so. Just as our Parliament functions best if
the opposition has some muscle, so the world also needs a strong opposition to keep the GEs of the nation
of the "exceptional people" in check.
Jen
,
The answer to KK's second question, that is, whether Putin intends to serve out his current term, is that
any constitutional reforms such as what he proposed in his speech to the Federal Assembly need time to be
discussed, analysed, put to referendum, approved and included in the Constitution. Also a succession plan
needs to be in place by 2024 when Putin leaves the Presidency. By then we'll know if Mishustin or anyone
else (Rogozhin? Glazyev?) might replace him as President....
richard le sarc
,
The economic/social model in the neo-liberal West is one of outright parasitism driving ever increasing
inequality and elite wealth, which is the expression in real life of the psychopathic elites' INTENSE
hatred of others. For Russia to follow China in creating a society of utilitarian concern for ALL the
population, of poverty reduction and of social solidarity between all levels of the population, increases
the risk of what Chomsky called 'the good example', like Cuba has been for sixty years as the rest of the
Latin American continent, under US terror, descended into a charnel-house and mass immiseration. So
'Russia delenda est', and Putin is Hannibal, and, thankfully, the rotten cadaver called the 'Home of
Free', in a fit of malignant self-delusion, ain't gonna produce no Scipios any time soon. They've been
reduced to creating Pompeo Adiposus Minors.
Brianeg
,
...Watching a documentary about poverty and homelessness in America by Deutsche Welle, it is criminal
what is going on in that country especially when it seems fit to up the military budget to $750 billion.
Surely at some point civil war will come to that country to correct the gross imbalance.
Reading about the strange actions of the liquid magma going on deep underground, you almost wish that
nature might intervene and deflect America away from its constant onslaught of war and interference in
other countries politics.
'He might be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch'. Surely a 'Yeltsin' must replace or join
'Quisling' in the popular lexicon as a title for a traitor, in future.
"... a friend of mine, born in Venice and a long-time resident of Rome, pointed out to me that dogs are a sign of loneliness. ..."
"... And the cafes and restaurants on weekends in Chicago–chockfull of people, each on his or her own Powerbook, surfing the WWW all by themselves. ..."
"... The preaching of self-reliance by those who have never had to practice it is galling. ..."
"... Katherine: Agreed. It is also one of the reasons why I am skeptical of various evangelical / fundi pastors, who are living at the expense of their churches, preaching about individual salvation. ..."
"... So you have the upper crust (often with inheritances and trust funds) preaching economic self-reliances, and you have divines preaching individual salvation as they go back to the house provided by the members of the church. ..."
George Monbiot on human loneliness and its toll. I agree with his observations. I have been cataloguing them in my head for
years, especially after a friend of mine, born in Venice and a long-time resident of Rome, pointed out to me that dogs are
a sign of loneliness.
A couple of recent trips to Rome have made that point ever more obvious to me: Compared to my North Side neighborhood in Chicago,
where every other person seems to have a dog, and on weekends Clark Street is awash in dogs (on their way to the dog boutiques
and the dog food truck), Rome has few dogs. Rome is much more densely populated, and the Italians still have each other, for good
or for ill. And Americans use the dog as an odd means of making human contact, at least with other dog owners.
But Americanization advances: I was surprised to see people bring dogs into the dining room of a fairly upscale restaurant
in Turin. I haven't seen that before. (Most Italian cafes and restaurants are just too small to accommodate a dog, and the owners
don't have much patience for disruptions.) The dogs barked at each other for while–violating a cardinal rule in Italy that mealtime
is sacred and tranquil. Loneliness rules.
And the cafes and restaurants on weekends in Chicago–chockfull of people, each on his or her own Powerbook, surfing the
WWW all by themselves.
That's why the comments about March on Everywhere in Harper's, recommended by Lambert, fascinated me. Maybe, to be less lonely,
you just have to attend the occasional march, no matter how disorganized (and the Chicago Women's March organizers made a few
big logistical mistakes), no matter how incoherent. Safety in numbers? (And as Monbiot points out, overeating at home alone is
a sign of loneliness: Another argument for a walk with a placard.)
In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at school, at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct
us to stand on our own two feet.
With different imagery, the same is true in this country. The preaching of self-reliance by those who have never had to
practice it is galling.
Katherine: Agreed. It is also one of the reasons why I am skeptical of various evangelical / fundi pastors, who are living
at the expense of their churches, preaching about individual salvation.
So you have the upper crust (often with inheritances and trust funds) preaching economic self-reliances, and you have divines
preaching individual salvation as they go back to the house provided by the members of the church.
"... One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them.' ..."
"... 'If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country.' ..."
Wikipedia – the most popular source of information for most people – boldly
announces:
"Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy
that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without
directly refuting or disproving their argument. It is particularly associated with Soviet and
Russian propaganda Prominent usage: Soviet Union propaganda."
Perusal of recent mainstream articles adds one more dimension to the story. Not only
everything negative is habitually associated with Soviets and Russians, unless of course, it is
Iranians or North Koreans, when the equation has frequently been reversed.
If something negative occurs: Cherchez La Russie.
Mass media bias against President Trump has been observed on numerous occasions, but what is
particularly fascinating about this negativity is a persistent desire to paint Trump with the
Russian brush.
So it is hardly surprising that Trump has been turned into a practitioner of Russian
"Whataboutism," allowing Washington Post to
declare triumphantly: "Whataboutism: The Cold War tactic, thawed by Putin, is brandished by
Donald Trump."
The article elaborates:
What about the stock market? What about those 33,000 deleted emails? What about Benghazi?
.. What about what about what about. We've gotten very good at what-abouting. The president
has led the way. His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow, but President
Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet propaganda tactic."
The WaPo article by Dan Zak goes even further and explains the reasons behind Trump's
embrace of Russian Whataboutism. It is moral relativism, you see. It is a ploy of tyrannical
regimes, which intend to divert attention from their crimes:
That's exactly the kind of argument that Russian propagandists have used for years to
justify some of Putin's most brutal policies,"
wrote Michael McFaul , former ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration. ..
"Moral relativism -- 'whataboutism' -- has always been a favorite weapon of illiberal
regimes," Russian chessmaster and activist Garry Kasparov told the Columbia
Journalism Review in March."For a U.S. president to employ it against his own country
is tragic.
Viewed from the historical perspective, all this is blatantly false.
It is the democratic systems that need propaganda, spinning, and other soft-power weapons.
It is the democracies that rely on one party blaming another party for its own transgressions.
It is the liberal economic structures that need to promote one brand of toothpaste by
denigrating another brand.
"Whataboutism" is an integral fabric of Western society, as both its business and political
models depend on comparing, contrasting, diverting attention and so on.
Soviets, who had difficulty obtaining even one kind of toilet paper, did not need the
commercials that claim that the other brand leaks more. Soviet leadership that relied primarily
on the power of the gun didn't need to spend time and effort and hone its skills in the art of
maligning another party.
In other words, Soviets, and consequently Russians, are plain amateurs when it comes to
"whataboutism." When their government felt the need to resort to it, they would do it rather
sloppily and amateurishly, so that the people would just laugh it off, as the endless political
jokes testify.
Soviets were forced to resort to it during the time of Cold War, however, when there was a
real competition for the hearts and minds of several European countries such as France and
Italy, where post-war sympathies for Communists were running strong.
Needless to say, the Soviets were beaten soundly. The arguments that American freedoms were
worse than Soviets because of American racism did not really work for Europeans, who preferred
their Louis Armstrong to Leonid Utesov and their Jackson Pollock to Alexander Gerasimov. In the
battle between Georgy Alexandrov's Marion Dixon of Circus (1936) and Ernst Lubitsch's
Ninotchka (1939), Ninotchka won.
That's why I find it extremely ironic and peculiar that these methods of "whataboutism,"
these lines of reasoning that have pervaded the Western news coverage to the core, have been
magically turned into a signature method of Soviet Propaganda.
Equally ironic is the fact that any attempt to question Western hypocrisy, spinning, and
relentless brainwashing is deflected by a silly counter-attack: this criticism is nothing but
"whataboutism," the favorite activity of Russians and other moral relativists and denizens of
illiberal regimes.
Additional irony, of course, lies in the fact that Russians are the most self-critical
people that I know. That's the one thing they truly excel at – criticizing themselves,
their state, their people, their customs and their political system. It is another irony that
the information the West habitually exploits in its own shameless "whataboutism" was provided
to it free of charge by Russian dissidents from Herzen all the way to Solzhenitsyn and Masha
Gessen.
There is rarely an article in the mass media which, while addressing some ills of modern
society, doesn't refer to the evils of Gulag, Stalin, lack of democracy and other "ills" of
Soviet life. How many articles in the mass media do we read where references to the
extermination of the native population, of workers burning in their factories, of thugs
dispersing protests or demonstrations, of brutal exploitation, mass incarceration, deportation
of the Japanese, witch hunts, or cruel cynical wars – occur without simultaneous
references to Stalin's Russia?
You complain about the lack of political choices during elections? What, you want Commies to
run you life? You complain about economic inequality? What, you want drab socialism instead? In
other words, instead of a traditionally defined "whataboutism," Western propaganda utilizes a
slightly more subtle version revealing something bad about itself, but then rapidly switching
to demonizing and criticizing its rivals.
The classic example of this approach was described by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in
their 1988 study Manufacturing Consent .
In the chapter entitled "Worthy and Unworthy Victims," the authors draw the comparison
between the coverage of Polish priest, murdered by in Poland in 1984 and the media coverage of
Catholic Priests assassinated in Latin America. Jerzy Popieluszko had 78 articles devoted to
him, with ten articles on the front page. In the meantime, seventy-two religious victims in
Latin America during the period of 1964-78 were subject of only eight articles devoted to all
of them combined, with only one article making the front page (Chomsky & Herman,
Manufacturing Consent , Pantheon Books, 2002, p. 40).
Presumably, Soviets become a subject of jokes when, instead of addressing the question of
Stalin's victims, they embark on discussing the lynching of black Americans. What is worth
pondering is why the United States hasn't become the subject of similar jokes when they write
hundreds of articles on one death within the Soviet zone of influence while practically
ignoring persistent right-wing violence in their own sphere.
"Whataboutism" is not just a rhetorical device invented to deflect criticism; the accusation
in "whataboutism" leveled at anyone who defends himself from arbitrary or illogical charges is
the accusation that reveals a particular set of power relations.
These accusations of "whataboutism" imply a certain inequality, when the accuser bullies the
accused into admitting his guilt.
The accuser puts the accused on the defensive, clearly implying his moral superiority. This
moral superiority, of course, is rather fictional, especially if we keep in mind that the
Hebrew word "satan" means an accuser. Accusing and blaming others has a satanic ring to that,
something that anyone engaged in accusations should remember.
– You belched yesterday during dinner. You violated the laws of good table
manners.
– But everybody belches!
– It is irrelevant, please answer the charge and don't try to avoid it by resorting
to 'whataboutism." Did you belch or not?
"Putin's a killer," Bill O'Reilly said to Trump in a February interview. "There
are a lot of killers," Trump
whatabouted . "We've got a lot of killers. What do you think -- our country's so
innocent?"
Here, the media dismisses as "whataboutism" Trump's perfectly logical and correct answer
– the one that Trump highlighted himself last week when he ordered the killing of the
Iranian general Soleimaini.
Trump's answer, however, was interpreted as somehow outrageous. How dare he compare? As if
only a Russian stooge engaged in "whataboutism" can suggest that Western murders and violence
are not different from Russian ones.
Dan Zak, who invents a verb "to whatabout" in reference to Trump's exchange with O'Reilly,
reveals another highly significant dimension of the term. Due to the abuse of the concept
during the Cold War era, and due to the relentless propaganda of the likes of
Edward
Lucas or the former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, the charge of "whataboutism"
began to be leveled at anyone who says anything critical about the United States.
You talk about US racism – you are carrying water for Soviet "whataboutists;" you talk
about militarism, police brutality, wars and regime changes, or complain about the destruction
of nature – you are a Russian stooge.
And God forbid you criticize failed policies of the Democrats, the Clintons in particular.
You are worse than a stooge. You are a Soviet troll spitting "whataboutism," while interfering
in the US electoral process.
Trump might have more faults than any of the recent American political leader. Yet, it is
the charge of Russian connection and its merging with the charge of "Whataboutism" that began
to highlight some sort of sick synergy: if Trump uses this trope of Russian propaganda, he has
to be working with Putin. That's the tenor of all recent applications of the term in the mass
media.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the Trump administration's murky
ties to Vladimir Putin and his associates, whataboutism is viewed by many as a Russian
import,"
opines Claire Fallon in her essay on the subject, while the title says it all:
"Whataboutism, A Russian Propaganda Technique, Popular With Trump, His Supporters."
The list of publications with very similar titles can obviously go on and on.
And herein lies the most pernicious legacy of the term.
It subconsciously invokes the spirit of Joe McCarthy. And as such it is still very effective
in stifling discourse, in dismissing criticism, while character-assassinating dissenting
voices.
Never mind that the press, as in the good old days of Father Popieluszko, is still filled to
the brim with endless stories of Russian discrimination of the gay community, of Chinese abuse
of the Uighurs, or the absence of new and old freedoms in the countries that Pentagon
classifies as adversary.
To complain about the lack of balance and the biased focus would be engaging in "Soviet
Style of Whataboutism," wouldn't it be?
Vladimir Golstein, former associate professor at
Yale University, is currently Chair of the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown
University.
Charlotte Russe ,
US propaganda has been quite effective. After all, isn't it merely the merchandising and
selling of ideas. So why wouldn't a hyper-capitalist country be extremely effective at using
words and images to control behavior. That's how multibillion dollar corporations stimulate
consumerism. They convince the public to buy goods and services they don't really need. So
why not use those same marketing skills to impart ideological beliefs.
Essentially, isn't that how the notion of "exceptionalism" became rooted in the American
psyche, establishing a rationale to pursue a slew of military misadventures. And think of the
ingenious propagandist who invented the idea of "spreading democracy" via bombs, drones, and
bullets. For decades this secured public consent for innumerable military escapades.
However, the arrival of Trump changed everything. He unwittingly forced the US propaganda
machine to stumble and fumble with contradictory messages disassembling the control
mainstream media news once happily secured over the entire population.
In desperation to avoid building political consciousness the US state-run media neglected
to attack Trump exclusively over reactionary policies, but misguidedly warmongered against
Russia for more than three years. Liberal media accused right-wing Trump of being a Russian
asset a tactic used more than half a century ago by McCarthyite Russophobes to discredit the
Left. Perhaps, the silliness of this propaganda could only produce "lackluster" results
consequently never gaining substantial traction among the working-class.
The security state ultimately loses its ability to control the population with sloppy
propaganda–they just tune it out. Americans are becoming similar to their Russian
counterparts who just assume that all mainstream media news is contrived and not to be
believed.
George Mc ,
I thought the reference to the Wiki article was a piss take until I went direct to the
source. I see no logical connection between Russia or indeed any country and the rhetorical
device of "whataboutism". But it seems the mighty omniscient Wiki says otherwise. Yes –
and there's Trump getting a prominent place in the Wiki entry. Is every entry in Wiki geared
to the current demands of propaganda? What next I wonder? How about:
"Anti-Semitism": an ideology of hate originating with Corbyn's Labour party.
"Socialists": Misogynists who hate Laura Kuenssberg.
"US/Iran conflict": A distraction to divert everyone's attention away from Harry and
Meghan.
Willem ,
I first read about whataboutism at Chomsky's website. I thought Chomsky made a very good
definition at the time, so I looked up what he actually said and thought of quoting him here.
Well his definition is typical for Chomsky where he says some truthful things, which he
immediately buries under a pack of lies
Chomsky on whataboutism:
'CHOMSKY: One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the
anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis
Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them.'
That is correct. But unfortunately for the professor, he is not devoid of a little
whataboutism himself, where he continues to say that
'If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they
could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first
duty is to concentrate on your own country.'
Then Chomsky buries this whataboutism with another lie saying that:
'And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation, because in the case of
official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms.'
Which isn't a truism at all, but apparantly all official enemies of the US are, by
definition enemies of Chomsky.Then Chomsky continues by saying that
'It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become contentious, or even
outrageous. But they remain truisms.'
Not necessarily so, but it's close enough to pass for truth when discussing whataboutism.
After which Chomsky adds another lie, i.e., that
'In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents, for the
simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a
substantial influence on government policy.'
I mean, that is just so much bullshit that I do not even know where to start. For instance
Solzjenitsyn, SU greatest dissident, wrote his books in the SU, the Russians didn't like it,
and they let Solzjenitsyn go to Switzerland where he become famous and a millionaire, a Nobel
price winner, everything that money could buy. He returned to Russia in 1990 and was lauded
by amongst others Putin himself and died peacefully in 2008.
'Free society', bollocks: most of us have the freedom to watch the show that others play
on their behalf and toil, 'no repression': tell that to Assange, 'substantial influence on
government policy': quite difficult when most of the government's decisions are faceless.
This type of lying by Chomsky just goes on and on and I am amazed that I hadn't seen
through it the first time I read Chomsky.
Worst is his hypocrisy where professor Chomsky, the worlds best known 'dissident', whose
books are sold at airports, who received grants from the MIC to work on linguistics, and who
became a millionaire by airing his convoluted views that are not what they are supposed to be
(ie dissident), dares to write in the same interview that
'Elementary honesty is often uncomfortable, in personal life as well, and there are people
who make great efforts to evade it. For intellectuals, throughout history, it has often come
close to being their vocation. Intellectuals are commonly integrated into dominant
institutions. Their privilege and prestige derives from adapting to the interests of power
concentrations, often taking a critical look but in very limited ways.'
I mean that is just Chomsky writing about himself, but pretending a whataboutism about all
those other bad intellectuals.
Chomsky's an example of the establishment "pet intellectual" who quietly rages against his
master. Youthful dissidence, he found after a few police beatings, is a fool's game, noisy,
bloody and futile. Better to growl from a safe distance, repeat the obvious with clear logic
and wallow in unearned respect.
lundiel ,
According to a 2019 Gallop poll 40% of American women under 30 would like to leave the
US.
When you move to a racist, nationalist country, you have to spend every opportunity thanking
them for taking you and congratulating them for allowing you to work yourself to death so you
can pay the mortgage on your shed home.
Many of them are economic refugees who come here after B-52s have turned their country into a
parking lot or the elite of other countries who were caught selling out their nations and
enriching themselves or those that actually believed the PR that the USG actually gives a
flying phuk about "freedom and democracy" propagated by the child molesting perverts in Pedo
Wood.
There are also a number who have specifically come here to get even and who can blame
them?
Dungroanin ,
What about the 'Russian influence' report not published by Bozo The PM?
& while I'm here
What about the Durham investigation into Russiagate which also seems to have disappeared
from imminent publication over a month ago?
Hmm – wasn't it Kruschevs staffers who admired the US propaganda / Perception
Management advertising/PR industry by saying in Russia nobody believed the Russian propaganda
because Russians knew that's what it was; but all westerners swallowed it and rushed out to
buy ever 'better' washing powders, poisonous foods and products without realising they were
being lied to.
What about US violations of international law?
What about US wars of aggression?
What about US regime change operations?
What about US lying propaganda?
What about US murderous sanctions?
What about US funding, arming and training of jihadist terrorists?
What about US funding, arming and training of fascist terrorists?
What about US threats and intimidation of the International Criminal Court?
What about US exceptionalism, which mirrors nothing so much as the Nazi ideas of ubermensch
and untermensch?
richard le sarc ,
In Trump and Pompeo you see the evolution of a new type-the Ubumensch.
"... The Las Vegas billionaire gave Republicans $82m for the 2016 elections and his views, notably staunch support for Netanyahu's Israel, are now the official US line ..."
"... Adelson's considerable support for Republicans is in no small part motivated by what he regards as their more reliable support for the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu , which appear intent on preventing the creation of an independent Palestinian state. ..."
"... Adelson gave $82m toward Trump's and other Republican campaigns during the 2016 election cycle – more than three times the next largest individual donor, according to Open Secrets . ..."
"... That commitment bought him an attentive hearing from the new administration as he pushed for the appointment of Bolton as national security adviser knowing that he would be an important ally in getting the White House to kill the Iran nuclear deal. The New York Times reported that Adelson is a member of a " shadow National Security Council " advising Bolton. ..."
"... The day after Trump announced that the US was pulling out of the Iran agreement, Adelson was reported to have held a private meeting at the White House with the president, Bolton and Vice-President Mike Pence. ..."
"... Adelson was so enthusiastic about the move that he offered to pay for some of the costs and provided a jet to fly Guatemala's official delegation to Israel for the ceremony. (The Central American country has also announced plans to follow Trump and move its own embassy .) ..."
"... "Adelson is a linchpin in bringing together the radical extremists on the Israeli right and this group of hardliners on Israel and neoconservatives," said Levy, who is now president of the US-based Middle East Project. ..."
"... He paid for a new headquarters for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), spent $100m to fund "birthright" trips for young Jewish Americans to Israel, and funds a group opposing criticism of the Jewish state at US universities. ..."
"... In 2015 he secretly bought the Las Vegas newspaper, the Review-Journal , which had led the way in critical coverage of the billionaire's business dealings. Several reporters subsequently left the paper complaining of editorial interference and curbs on reporting of the gambling industry. ..."
"... Right now, Adelson is concentrated on ensuring the Republicans remain in control of Congress, and is pouring $30m into funding the GOP's midterm elections campaign. ..."
"... Adelson is no less active in Israel where he owns the country's largest newspaper, a publication so closely linked with Netanyahu's administration it has been dubbed the "Bibipaper" after the prime minister's nickname. ..."
"... In 2014, he told a conference during a discussion about the implications for democracy of perpetual occupation or annexation of parts of the West Bank without giving Palestinians the right to vote in Israeli elections: "Israel isn't going to be a democratic state. So what?" ..."
The Las Vegas
billionaire gave Republicans $82m for the 2016 elections and his views, notably staunch support
for Netanyahu's Israel, are now the official US line
Sheldon Adelson
has spent millions on backing Israel and attacking supporters of Palestinian rights in the US.
Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP In 2015, the billionaire casino owner and Republican party funder
Sheldon
Adelson spent days in a Las Vegas courtroom watching his reputation torn apart and
wondering if his gambling empire was facing ruin.
An official from Nevada's gaming control board sat at the back of the court listening to
mounting evidence that
Adelson bribed Chinese officials and worked with organised crime at his casinos in Macau
– allegations that could have seen the magnate's Las Vegas casinos stripped of their
licenses.
The case, a civil suit by a former manager of the Macau gaming operations who said he was
fired for curbing corrupt practices, was another blow in a bad run for Adelson.
He had thrown $150m into a futile effort to unseat the "socialist" and "anti-Israel" Barack
Obama in the 2012 election. His credibility as a political player was not enhanced by his
backing of Newt Gingrich for president.
But three years on from the court case, Adelson's influence has never been greater.
"Adelson's established himself as an influential figure in American politics with the amount
of money that he has contributed," said Logan Bayroff of the liberal pro-Israel group, J
Street. "There's no doubt that he has very strong, very far-right dangerous positions and that
– at very least – those positions are really being heard and thought about at the
highest levels of government."
As the 2015 court hearing unfolded, the billionaire swallowed his considerable pride and
paid millions of dollars to settle the lawsuit, heading off the danger of the graft allegations
being tested at a full trial.
The casinos stayed in business and continued to contribute to a vast wealth that made
Adelson the 14th
richest person in America last year with a net worth of $35bn, according to Forbes.
Adelson has put some of that money toward pushing an array of political interests ranging
from protecting his business from online gambling to opposition to marijuana legalisation.
But nothing aligns more closely with his world view than the intertwining of the Republican
party and Israel .
Adelson's considerable support for Republicans is in no small part motivated by what he
regards as their more reliable support for the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu , which appear
intent on preventing the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Adelson gave $82m toward Trump's and other Republican campaigns during the 2016 election
cycle – more than three times the next largest individual donor, according
to Open Secrets .
That commitment bought him an attentive hearing from the new administration as he pushed for
the appointment of Bolton as national security adviser knowing that he would be an important
ally in getting the White House to kill the Iran nuclear deal. The New York Times reported that
Adelson is a member of a " shadow
National Security Council " advising Bolton.
The day after Trump announced that the US was pulling out of the Iran agreement, Adelson was
reported to have held a
private meeting at the White House with the president, Bolton and Vice-President Mike
Pence.
Facebook
Twitter Pinterest Sheldon Adelson attends the opening ceremony of the new US embassy in
Jerusalem in May. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP
The casino magnate also pushed hard to see the US embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem
– an action previous presidents had shied away from because of the diplomatic
ramifications.
Adelson was so enthusiastic about the move that he offered to pay for some of the costs and
provided a jet to fly Guatemala's official delegation to Israel for the ceremony. (The Central
American country has also announced plans to
follow Trump and move its own embassy .)
Daniel Levy, a former member of Israeli negotiating teams with the Palestinians and policy
adviser to the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, said that Adelson's money had helped
resurface neoconservative policies which had been discredited after the US invasion of
Iraq.
"Adelson is a linchpin in bringing together the radical extremists on the Israeli right and
this group of hardliners on Israel and neoconservatives," said Levy, who is now president of
the US-based Middle East Project.
The billionaire is also deeply committed to protecting Israel within the US.
An example
of an anti-BDS poster funded by Sheldon Adelson. Photograph: Courtesy of Robert Gardner
He paid for a new headquarters for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington
(the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), spent $100m to fund "birthright" trips for
young Jewish Americans to Israel, and funds a group opposing criticism of the Jewish state at
US universities.
The Israeli newspaper
Haaretz recently revealed that Adelson funded an investigation by an Israeli firm with ties
to the country's police and military into the American activist Linda Sarsour, a co-chair of
the Women's March movement who campaigns for Palestinian rights and supports a boycott of the
Jewish state.
Adelson also funds Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his World Values Network which published a
full-page personal attack in the New York Times on the actor Natalie Portman for refusing an
award from Israel because of its government's policies.
For his part, the casino magnate does not take criticism well.
In 2015
he secretly bought the Las Vegas newspaper, the Review-Journal , which had led the way in
critical coverage of the billionaire's business dealings. Several reporters subsequently left
the paper complaining of editorial interference and curbs on reporting of the gambling
industry.
Right now, Adelson is concentrated on ensuring the Republicans remain in control of
Congress, and is pouring $30m into funding the GOP's midterm elections campaign.
Adelson is no less active in Israel where he owns the country's largest newspaper, a
publication so closely linked with Netanyahu's administration it has been dubbed the
"Bibipaper" after the prime minister's nickname.
Personal relations with Netanyahu have soured but Adelson remains committed to the prime
minister's broader "Greater Israel" political agenda and to strengthening ties between the
Republicans' evangelical base and Israel.
It's not always a welcome involvement by a man who is not an Israeli citizen – not
least because Adelson's vision for the Jewish state does not represent how many of its people
see their country.
In 2014, he told a conference during a discussion about the implications for democracy of
perpetual occupation or annexation of parts of the West Bank without giving Palestinians the
right to vote in Israeli elections: "Israel isn't going to be a democratic state. So what?"
Manipulation of the language is one of the most powerful Propaganda tool. See the original Orwell essay at George Orwell Politics
and the English Language. among other things he stated "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
Notable quotes:
"... we were set a writing task as a follow-up, reporting on the same story using the same facts, from completely opposing points of view, using euphemism and mind-numbing cliches. Teach children to do this themselves and they can see how language can be skewed and facts distorted and misrepresented without technically lying. ..."
"... It might be taught in Media Studies, I suppose - but gosh, don't the right really hate that particular subject! Critical thinking is anathema to them. ..."
I remember at school we read Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language in an English class and then we were set
a writing task as a follow-up, reporting on the same story using the same facts, from completely opposing points of view, using
euphemism and mind-numbing cliches. Teach children to do this themselves and they can see how language can be skewed and facts
distorted and misrepresented without technically lying.
How many children in schools are taught such critical thinking these days, I wonder? It might be taught in Media Studies,
I suppose - but gosh, don't the right really hate that particular subject! Critical thinking is anathema to them.
Look at this way, the Democratic Party had two terms in office, under Obama,in order to deliver
a 'New Deal'.
It turned out,they were selling Snake Oil, life got no easier for ordinary Americans,
particularly those of colour.
So, the poor decided to give the Republicans a try, cutting out the middle men of the
democratic party.
Now,in order to get back into power, the neoliberal Left are breaking Trump's legs and the cycle
will start all over again, with so much time and money that could have been used to help those
who need it, going to the politicians and lawyers who run the charade.
The rich will get richer and the ears of the suckers who vote will bleed from listening to
all the bullshit.
Well, calling out the democrats for these. Things is not really a problem rather the
depressing truth. With clown shows like Nader and Schiff on display its not hard for voters
to conclude that the Democratic Party has become haters, undemocratic, not believers in rules
of evidence or due process, all foundations of American justice.
In other words
anti-American. Turning their so called investigation into the Schiff show has confirmed what
most Americans have come to understand, democrats are not fit to lead the country, and will
not after this next November.
When justice is muddied by the vengeance of politics there is little surety of integrity for
the common citizen believe in. When fighting each other in the name of the people becomes an
obsessive intent to hurt but not to serve, there is little foundation left for the common man
to be believe in.
Whilst perfection was never sought nor expected of those who were chosen by
the people to represent their hopes and wishes, the boundaries of common sense and
commonwealth must never be breached. The war which rages on in Washington is one which
represents little, if anything, of or for the people. In truth, regardless of Trump's fate,
the theatre of narrow political dreams go on, in the name of the people.
Since Trump stepped into office the Democrats were looking for something that would make him
impeachable. The deep state delivered them Russiagate, the claim that Trump 'colluded' with
the Russian government, by taking seriously an obvious fake dossier the Clinton campaign had
ordered and paid for. FBI agents who hated Trump even faked FISA court certification
submissions to be able to spy on the Trump campaign. They found nothing that supported the
'collusion' claims.
The FISA court is not amused about that:
"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be
unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld
information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in
other FBI applications is reliable," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order published
Tuesday.
The Dems would have been.better off just coming up with some better more appealing
policies but here's the rub, they haven't and that's because they can't, their agenda is one
of stay tje same, no change, keep the status quo, forever wars and printing money and just
hope it all gos away. Instead of hope we've got horseshit.
This article is spot on.
Impeachment probably persuaded only a tiny number of vacillating voters, sidelined Trump's
worst crimes, and rallied his base. Meanwhile, as the author states, the public is no closer to knowing what the Dems stand
for -- another downside in their election chances.
There has never been a president in my lifetime at least that has been so put under the
spotlight as Trump. Literally under investigation since the day he took office and yet the
best they have is a highly disputed telephone conversation. Meanwhile Biden is there on video
in all his glory boasting about using US aid to force behaviour that suited him.
Trump will be aquitted and the Democrats will suffer for their desperation.
you seem to be suffering from the delusion that actual policies and beliefs are being fought
over by two opposing sides,its a pathetic sideshow between two almost identical parties with
identical policies and the same paymasters,the outcome of this farce is utterly meaningless
to the ordinary citizen.
"... Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal' mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore. ..."
"... Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning, the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a series of impossible demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Qatar not long ago ..."
"... Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. ..."
"... Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia. ..."
"... Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way. ..."
"... False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army. On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media ..."
As a history student years ago I remember our teacher explaining how past events are linked to what happens in the future. He
told us human behaviour always dictates that events will repeat in a similar way as before. I remember we studied 20th century history
and discussed World War I and the links to World War II. At this time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and in unchartered waters
and I couldn't really link past events to what was likely to happen next. Back then I guess like many I considered US presidents
more as statesman. They talked tough on the Soviet Union but they talked peace too. So, the threat to humanity was very different
then to now. Dangerous but perhaps a stable kind of dangerous. After the break up of the Soviet Union we then went through a phase
of disorderly change in the world. In the early 1990s the war in the Former Yugoslavia erupted and spread from republic to republic.
Up until the mid-to-late nineties I didn't necessarily sense that NATO and the West were the new threat to humanity. While there
was a clear bias to events in Yugoslavia there was still some even-handedness or fairness. Or so I thought. This all changed in 1999
with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges
and so on. But my wake-up call was the daily NATO briefings on the war. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being
destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage
of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative.
When the peace agreement was reached, out of 300 Serbian tanks which had entered Kosovo at the start of the conflict, over 285
were counted going back into Serbia proper which was
confirmation he had been
lying .
From this conflict onwards I started to see clear parallels with events of the past and some striking similarities with the lead
up to previous world wars. This all hit home when observing events in Syria and more recently Venezuala. But looking around seeing
people absorbed in their phones you wouldn't think the world is on the brink of war. For most of us with little time to watch world
events there are distractions which have obscured the picture historians and geopolitical experts see more clearly.
Recent and current
western leaders haven't been short people in military uniform shouting. That would be far too obvious. It's still military conflict
and mass murder but in smart suits with liberal sound-bites and high-fives. Then the uncool, uncouth conservative Trump came along
and muddied the waters.
Briefly it seemed there might be hope that these wars would stop. But there can be little doubt he's been
put under pressure to comply with the regime change culture embedded in the Deep State. Today, through their incendiary language
we see US leaders morphing into the open style dictators of the past. The only thing missing are the military uniforms and hats.
Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal'
mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up
to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore.
Let's look at some of these:
1) Military build up, alliances and proxy wars – for all the chaos and mass murder pursued by the Obama Administration he did
achieve limited successes in signing agreements with Iran and Cuba. But rather than reverse the endless wars as promised Trump cancels
the agreements leaving the grand sum of zilch foreign policy achievements. NATO has been around for 70 years, but in the last 20
or so has become obsessed with military build up. Nowadays it has hundreds of bases around the world but keeps destablising non-aligned
states, partly to isolate Russia and China. And Syria sums up the dangers of the regime change model used today. With over a dozen
states involved in the proxy war there is a still high risk of conflict breaking out between US and Russia. The motives for military
build up are many. First there are powerful people in the arms industry and media who benefit financially from perpetual war. The
US while powerful in military terms are a declining power which will continue, new powers emerging. The only return on their money
they can see is through military build up. Also there are many in government, intelligence services and media who can see that if
the current order continues to crumble they are likely to be prosecuted for various crimes. All this explains the threatening language
and the doubling-down on those who challenge them. In 1914, Europe had two backward thinking military alliance blocks and Sarajevo
showed how one event could trigger an unstoppable escalation dragging in many states. And empires such as Austro-Hungary were crumbling
from within as they are now. So a similar mentality prevails today where the powerful in these empires under threat favour conflict
to peace. For these individuals it's a last throw of the dice and a gamble with all our lives.
2) Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning,
the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and
unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US
has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a
series of impossible
demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic
as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day
US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with
Qatar not long ago.
3) Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is
in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. In addition we face a situation
of highly unpredictable, ideological regional leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Most worrying of all, the language, threats
and actions of Trump, Pompeo and Bolton suggests there are psychopathic tendencies in play. Behind this is a Deep State and Democrat
Party pushing even harder for conflict. The level of paranoia is discouraging any notion of peace. 30 years ago Russia and US would
sit down at a summit and reach a consensus. Today a US leader or diplomat seen talking to a Russian official is accused of collusion.
When there are limited channels to talk in a crisis, you know we are in trouble. In Germany in the 1930s, ideology, propaganda and
creating enemies were key in getting the population on side for war. The leaders within the Nazi clique, Hitler, Goring and Himmler
look disturbingly similar to the Trump, Pompeo, Bolton line up.
4) Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public
would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been
a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia.
The terms and words; regime change, mass murder and terrorist have all been substituted by the media with 'humanitarian intervention',
'limited airstrikes' and 'moderate rebels' to fool a distracted public that the victims of the aggression are the bad guys. Western
funded 'fact checking' sites such as Bellingcat have appeared pushing the misdirections to a surreal new level. Obama was portayed
in the media as a cool guy and a little 'soft' on foreign policy. This despite the carnage in Libya, Syria and his drones. Sentiments
of equal rights and diversity fill the home affairs sections in the liberal press, while callous indifference and ethno-centrism
towards the Middle East and Russia dominate foreign affairs pages. In the press generally, BREXIT, non-existent anti-Semitism and
nonsense about the 'ISIS bride' continues unabated. This media circus seeks to distract from important matters, using these topics
to create pointless divisions, causing hostility towards Muslims and Jews in the process. The majority of a distracted public have
still not twigged largely because the propaganda is more subtle nowadays and presented under a false humanitarian cloak. A small
but vocal group of experts and journalists challenging these narratives are regularly smeared as
Putin
or Assad "apologists" . UK journalists are regularly caught out lying and some long standing hoaxes such as Russiagate exposed.
Following this and Iraq WMDs more people are starting to see a pattern here. Yet each time the media in the belief they've bamboozled
enough move on to the next big lie. This a sign of a controlled media which has reached the point of being unaccountable and untouchable,
deeply embedded within the establishment apparatus. In the lead up to World War II the Nazis ran an effective media propaganda campaign
which indoctrinated the population. The media in Germany also reached the point their blindingly obvious lies were rarely questioned.
The classic tactic was to blame others for the problems in Germany and the world and project their crimes on to their victims. There
are some differences as things have evolved. The Nazis created the media and state apparatus to pursue war. Nowadays this is the
opposite way around. Instead the state apparatus is already in place so whoever is leader whether they describe themself as liberal
or conservative, is merely a figurehead required to continue the same pro-war policies. Put a fresh-looking president in a shiny
suit and intoduce him to the Queen and you wouldn't think he's the biggest mass murderer since Hitler. Although there are some differences
in the propaganda techniques, all the signs are that today's media are on a similar war-footing as Germany's was just prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
5) Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli
aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for
time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily
unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way.
6) False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by
Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of
the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army.
On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being
played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media. The next flashpoint in Syria is Idlib, where it's highly
likely a new chemical fabrication will be attempted this Spring. In the 1930s the Nazis were believed to use false flags with increasing
frequency to discredit and close down internal opposition. Summary – We now live in a society where exposing warmongering is a more
serious crime than committing it. Prisons hold many people who have bravely exposed war crimes – yet most criminals continue to walk
free and hold positions of power. And when the media is pushing for Julian Assange to be extradicted you know this is beyond simple
envy of a man who has almost single-handedly done the job they've collectively failed to do. They are equally complicit in warmongering
hence why they see Assange and others as a threat. For those not fooled by the smart suits, liberal platitudes and media distraction
techniques, the parallels with Germany in the 1930s in particular are now fairly obvious. The blundering military alliances of 1914
and the pure evil of 1939 – with the ignorance, indifference and narcissism described above make for a destructive mix. Unless something
changes soon our days on this planet are likely be numbered. Depressing but one encouraging thing is that the indisputable truth
is now in plain sight for anyone with internet access to see and false narratives have collapsed before. It's still conceivable that
something may create a whole chain of events which sweep these dangerous parasites from power. So anything can happen. In the meantime
we should keep positive and continue to spread the message.
Kevin Smith is a British citizen living and working in London. He researches and writes down his thoughts on the foreign wars
promoted by Western governments and media. In the highly controlled and dumbed down UK media environment, he's keen on exploring
ways of discouraging ideology and tribalism in favour of free thinking.
2- 'Israel and its US relationship'. The 'hands off' policy of the Western powers, guarantees that Syria cannot even be a trigger
to any 'global conflict', supposing that a 'global conflict' was on the cards, especially when Russia is just a crumbling shadow
of the USSR and China a giant with feet of clay, heavily dependent on Western oligarchic goodwill, to maintain its economy and
its technological progress.
In 1914, the Serbian crisis was just trigger of WWI and not a true cause. It is not even clear if it was Germany that dragged
Austria-Hungary into the war or Russia. Although there was a possibility (only a possibility), that a swift and 'illegal' attack
by Austria-Hungary (without an ultimatum), would have localised and contained the conflict.
There is no similarity whatsoever between the 1914 'diktats' and modern US policy, as the US is the sole Superpower and its
acts are not opposed by a balancing and corresponding alliance. Save in the Chinese colony of North Korea, where the US is restrained
by a tacit alliance of the North Eastern Asiatic powers: China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, that oppose any military action
and so promote and protect North Korean bullying. Qatar, on the other hand, is one of the most radical supporters of the Syrian
opposition and terrorist groups around the muslim world, even more than Saudi Arabia and there are powerful reasons for the confrontation
of the Gulf rivals.
You should go back in Time and STUDY what really happened .. that means going back to the Creation of the socalled British Empire
..the Bank of England , the British East Indian Company , the Opium Wars and the Opium Trafficing , the Boer Wars for Gold and
Diamonds , the US Civil War and its aftermath , the manipulations of Gold and Silver by socalled british Financial Interests ,
The US Spanish Wars , the Japanese Russian War , the failed Coup against Czar Russia 1905 , the Young Turk Coup against the Ottoman
Empire 1908, the Armenian Genocide , the Creation of the Federal Reserve 1913 , the Multitude of Assinations and other Terror
Attacks in the period from 1900 and upwards , WHO were the perpetraders ? , , WW 1 and its originators , the Bolshevik Coup 1917
, the Treaty of Versailles and the Actors in that Treaty ,the Plunder of Germany , the dissolution of Austria Hungary , the Bolshevik
Coup attempts all over Europe , and then the run up to WW 2 , the Actions of Poland agianst Germans and Czechs .. Hitler , Musolini
and finally WW 2 .the post war period , the Nuernberg Trials , the Holocaust Mythology , the Creation of Israel , Gladio , the
Fall of the Sovjet Empire and the Warshav Pact , the Wars in the Middle East , the endless Terror Actions , the murder of Kennedy
and a mass of False Flag Terrorist Attacks since then , the destruction of the Balkans and the Middle east THERE IS PLENTY of
EXCELLENT LITERATURE and ANALYSIS on all subjects .
It was your Obama that 'persecuted' Mr Assange !!!
Syria demonstrates that there has NOT been a Western strategy for regime change (specially after the 'defeats' in Iraq and
Afghanistan), let alone a proxy war, but, on the contrary, an effort to keep the tyranny of Assad in power, in a weaker state,
to avoid any strong, 'revolutionary' rival near Israel. Russia has been given a free hand in Syria, otherwise, if the West had
properly armed the resistance groups, it would have been a catastrophe for the Russian forces, like it was in Afghanistan during
the Soviet intervention.
Trump's policy of 'equal' (proportional) contributions for all members of NATO and other allies, gives the lie to the US military
return 'argument' and should be understood as part of his war on unfair competition by other powers.
The 'military' and diplomatic alliances of 1914 were FORWARD thinking, so much so that they 'repeated' themselves during WWII,
with slight changes. But it is very doubtful that the Empires, like the Austro-Hungarian o the Russian ones, would have 'crumbled'
without the outbreak of WWI. They were never under threat, as their military power during the war showed. Only a World War of
cataclysmic character could destroy them. A war, triggered, but not created, by the 'conflict seeking mentality' of the powerful
in the small countries of the Balkans.
Generally attributed to Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918 that 'when war comes the first casualty is truth' is as much a truism
now as it was then.
I'm more inclined to support hauptmanngurski's proposition that the members of the armed forces, from both sides, who return
from conflicts with life-changing injuries or even in flag-draped caskets defended only the freedom of multinational enterprises
and conglomerates to make and continue to make vast profits for the privileged few at the population's expense.
As Kevin Smith makes abundantly clear we are all subject to the downright lies and truth-stretching from our government aided
and abetted by a compliant main stream media as exemplified in the Skripal poisoning affair, which goes far beyond the counting
of Serbian tanks supposedly destroyed during the Balkans conflict. The Skripals' are now God knows where either as willing participants
or as detainees and our government shows no signs of clarifying the matter, so who would believe what it put out anyway in view
of its track record of misinformation ? The nation doesn't know what to believe.
Sadly, I believe this has always been the way of things and I cannot even speculate on how long it will be before this nation
will realise it is being deliberately mis-led.
I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to
break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire,
continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence
make sense. IMO as I said.
Gary Weglarz ,
I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's
findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time
that -- "hell freezes over" -- as they say.
Jen ,
They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on
autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met
start their investigations.
What just happened was an inverted U.S. selection. In the U.S., a confused rich man got
elected, because the alternative was a psychopathic war criminal. In the U.K. a confused
upper class twat got elected, because the alternative was too good to be true.
As Tony Kevin reported (watch-v=dJiS3nFzsWg) at one small fundraiser
Bill Clinton made an interesting remark. He said that the USA should always have enemies. That's absolutely true, this this
is a way to unite such a society as we have in the USA. probably the only way. And Russia simply fits the
bill. Very convenient bogeyman.
Notable quotes:
"... The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium. ..."
One aspect of this report in the NYT is very troubling but not a great surprise to those who
pay attention to Asian affairs.
The reports that US military leaders had no idea of what to
do in Afghanistan and constantly lied to the public should rouse citizens in America to take
a different view of military leaders. That view must be to trust nothing coming from the
Pentagon or from spokespersons for the military. Included must be any and all secretaries of defence, and all branches of the military.
It is totally unacceptable that 1-2 trillion dollars and several thousand lives were spent
by America for some nebulous cause. This does not include many thousands of civilians.
During the Vietnam disaster, it became obvious that American military was lying to the
public and taking many causalities in an unwinnable war. Nothing was learned about Asia or
Asian culture because America entered Afghanistan without a real plan and no understanding of
the country or it's history.
The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up
all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and
America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in
Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which
has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium.
The Washington DC foreign policy establishment are too busy appearing before the impeachment
inquiry and telling them how the orange man hurt their feelings.
File under: Tell us something that we didn't know already!
The reality is of course: that the media knows and understands that we are being lied to
all the time about these interventions, be it in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Honduras, Venezuela and
soon Iran, but they go along with it all because they are in the regime change echo
chamber club!
As George Carlin said: "It's a big club...but you ain't in it!"
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So your argument consists essentially of name-calling to exercise your own demons. You make
Trump look good, like the other stark raving lunatics opining on this , many in the
Democratic Party. You have zero chance of unseating Trump by impeachment and by the looks of
things that might not be such a bad thing, he said, making the sign of the cross and mouthing
pagan incantations, begging forgiveness from the ether.
You recall Bill Maher's comment before a previous election. "The Republicans have shifted
to the right and the Dems have shifted right into the insane asylum."
Since you bring up the issue of educating schoolgirls, it's worth remembering that when the
U.S. connived to drag the Soviet Union into its own Afghanistan conflict, one of the tactics we
used to inflame the mujahedeen was to remind them that, under Afghanistan's communist
government, girls were being educated as a matter of policy.
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky
"I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And
probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants
which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence
(something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.
He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch
of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to
get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on
"oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.
Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really,
its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations
of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding
for a shabby argument.
Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering
journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course
if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were
to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.
That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand
the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg
And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future
president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?
"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and
calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about
him."
I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing
that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist.
Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.
Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman
"all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always
cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.
Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises
'' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling
the postal service company for transportation costs.
@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration
commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he
really reformed? I doubt it.
MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests
in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.
I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views
and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.
What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a
neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.
Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected
him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?
Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards
Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only
moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort
to tie him to Russia.
Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?
Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings.
Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.
Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths
or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate
to The Real News.
GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other
issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC
server was hacked.
Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know
if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever
you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase
that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.
NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would
not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election.
Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller?
LIAR!!!!
Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say
he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.
It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work.
But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even
a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on
this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions.
You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.
Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here..
How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro
Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was
the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian
Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html
Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's
in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia.
:)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.
Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one
spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story
and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess
at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.
I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with
the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate
Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.
"... "She went in out of a sense of duty," a friend said. "Once she was in the White House, she tried to impose some sense of order and process on the chaos over Russia policy. When there was a State Department translator in meetings Trump meetings with Putin, that didn't happen by accident." ..."
"... She handed responsibilities to her successor, Tim Morrison, on 15 July, and actually left the White House on 19 July, six days before Trump's infamous call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which the US president asked for "a favour" in carrying out certain targeted investigations. ..."
"... It is unclear whether Trump's efforts to use Ukrainian reliance on the US to his political advantage affected the timing of Hill's departure ..."
"... The American chapter in her life opened quite by chance. After winning a scholarship to St Andrews University, she was in Moscow during the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev summit and got an internship making coffee for the NBC Today Show. There, she met an American professor who suggested she apply for postgraduate studies at Harvard. ..."
"... some pointing to the fact that she knows Christopher Steele , the author of the famous 2016 dossier alleging Trump's collusion with the Kremlin, from a previous stint in government, in the National Intelligence Council. ..."
Fiona Hill, a coalminer's daughter from County Durham who became the top Russia expert in
the White House, is the latest official to find herself at the eye of the
impeachment storm engulfing Donald Trump .
British-born Hill arrived on Capitol Hill on Monday morning to give testimony behind closed
doors to congressional committees investigating Trump's conduct in his relations with his
Ukrainian counterpart.
The committees are looking for evidence on whether Trump abused his office to try to
persuade the government in Kyiv to provide compromising material on a political opponent,
former vice-president Joe Biden.
Hill is likely to be interviewed on a much broader range of subjects, however. She was
senior director for Europe and Russia in the National Security
Council (NSC) for more than two years, giving her a front seat at the struggle over US policy
towards Moscow and Trump's peculiar personal attachment to Vladimir Putin.
Hill was brought into the White House by Trump's second national security adviser, HR
McMaster, plucking her out of the Washington thinktank world, because of her expertise on Putin
and Russia. She had co-written a book on the Russian autocrat, titled Mr Putin:
Operative in the Kremlin , that stressed the extent that his KGB career had shaped his
worldview.
"She went in out of a sense of duty," a friend said. "Once she was in the White House,
she tried to impose some sense of order and process on the chaos over Russia policy. When there
was a State Department translator in meetings Trump meetings with Putin, that didn't happen by
accident."
Hill planned to work at the NSC for a year but was asked to stay on by McMaster's successor,
John Bolton, despite calls to get rid of her from Trump acolytes, aware Hill was not a
political loyalist.
She handed responsibilities to her successor, Tim Morrison, on 15 July, and actually
left the White House on 19 July, six days before Trump's infamous call with Volodymyr
Zelenskiy, in which the US president asked for "a favour" in carrying out certain targeted
investigations.
It is unclear whether Trump's efforts to use Ukrainian reliance on the US to his
political advantage affected the timing of Hill's departure , but she is expected to
testify about the emergence of a parallel Ukraine policy run by Rudy Giuliani, the former
New York mayor who is commonly described as Trump's personal lawyer.
Giuliani clearly thought his channel, focusing on digging dirt on the Bidens, had priority,
and has sought to portray Hill as being out of the loop.
"Maybe she was engaged in secondary foreign policy if she didn't know I was asked to take a
call from President Zelenskiy's very close friend," he
told NBC News .
Texts released by Congress between two diplomats working with Giuliani, the ambassador to
the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and Kurt Volker, formerly special envoy for Ukraine,
suggest that they expected more flexibility from Morrison, Hill's replacement.
Hill was born in Bishop Auckland, Durham, the daughter of a miner and a nurse, and became a
dual national after marrying an American she met at Harvard. She still speaks with flat
northern English vowels.
The American chapter in her life opened quite by chance. After winning a scholarship to
St Andrews University, she was in Moscow during the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev summit and got an
internship making coffee for the NBC Today Show. There, she met an American professor who
suggested she apply for postgraduate studies at Harvard.
Since it became clear Hill would be an important witness in the House impeachment hearings,
she has been subjected to furious attack on hard-right talkshows and conspiracy theories on
social media, some pointing to the fact that she knows
Christopher Steele , the author of the
famous 2016 dossier alleging Trump's collusion with the Kremlin, from a previous stint in
government, in the National Intelligence Council.
Such attacks have become a routine form of intimidation aimed at stopping officials like
Hill saying what they know about the inner workings of the Trump White House.
Hill's manner is understated, precise and discreet. Since entering the White House, she has
hardly talked to the press and not made appearances in the thinktank world. Her deposition to
Congress puts her into an unaccustomed limelight.
"She was not looking forward to it but she knew she was going to testify. She will
answer the questions and says what she knows, but she is not going to give some sweeping
denunciation of the -> Trump administration ," her
friend said.
"She has respect for the people she worked for, even if she didn't necessarily agree with
them. They have all been in the same foxhole together."
"... We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras. ..."
"... So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ' ..."
"... I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting. ..."
"... Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported. ..."
"... He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation. ..."
"... Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline. ..."
"... But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine. ..."
"... From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany & Austria. ..."
"... Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate interests. ..."
"... Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs, politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order." ..."
"... "The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"." ..."
"... So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free. ..."
"... Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep. ..."
"... Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the get go. ..."
"... This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order). ..."
"... Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the greater fools want. ..."
"... Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management. ..."
"... Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they could get their greedy hands on at the time. ..."
"... Once pond scum always pond scum. ..."
"... It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm – always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society. ..."
"... Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can to get what they want. ..."
"... All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm ..."
In 2014, the German journalist and writer Udo Ulfkotte published a book that created a big stir, describing how the journalistic
profession is thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by intelligence services.
Although eagerly anticipated by many, the English translation of the book, Bought Journalists , does not seem to be forthcoming
anytime soon.
So I have made English subtitles and transcribed this still very relevant 2015-lecture for those that are curious about Ulfkotte's
work. It covers many of the subjects described in the book.
Udo Ulfkotte died of a heart attack in January 2017, in all likelihood part of the severe medical complications he got from his
exposure to German-made chemical weapons supplied to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
Transcription
[Only the first 49 minutes are translated; the second half of the lecture deals mostly with more local issues]
Introducer Oliver: I am very proud to have such a brave man amongst us: Udo Ulfkotte
Udo Ulfkotte: Thanks Thanks for the invitation Thanks to Oliver. I heard to my great surprise from Oliver that he didn't
know someone from the intelligence services (VVS) would be present. I wish him a warm welcome. I don't mean that as a joke, I heard
this in advance, and got to know that Oliver didn't know. If he wants – if it is a man – he can wave. If not? no? [laughter from
the audience]
I'm fine with that. You can write down everything, or record it; no problem.
To the lecture. We are talking about media. we are talking about truth. I don't want to sell you books or such things. Each one
of us asks himself: Why do things develop like they do, even though the majority, or a lot of people shake their heads.
The majority of people in Germany don't want nuclear weapons on our territory. But we have nuclear weapons here. The majority
don't want foreign interventions by German soldiers. But we do.
What media narrates and the politicians say, and what the majority of the population believes – seems often obviously to be two
different things.
I can tell you this myself, from many years experience. I will start with very personal judgments, to tell you what my experiences
with 'The Lying Media' were – I mean exactly that with the word 'lying'.
I was born in a fairly poor family. I am a single child. I grew up on the eastern edge of the Ruhr-area. I studied Law, Political
Science and Islamic Studies. Already in my student years, I had contact with the German Foreign Intelligence, BND. We will get back
to that later.
From 1986 to 2003, I worked for a major German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), amongst other things as a war
reporter. I spent a lot of time in Eastern and African countries.
Now to the subject of lying media. When I was sent to the Iran-Iraq war for the first time, the first time was from 1980 to July
1986, I was sent to this war to report for FAZ. The Iraqis were then 'the good guys'.
I was bit afraid. I didn't have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in
a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign
TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The
first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: "oops,
if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel'. I decided to in the future also carry
a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.
We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing.
First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents
of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks
in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.
It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.
While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames
and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war
in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.
So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking
all the time? '
'Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.'
That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:'Young man, you
didn't see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?'
I returned to Baghdad. There weren't any mobile phones then. We waited in Hotel Rashid and other hotels where foreigners stayed,
sometimes for hours for an international telephone line. I first contacted my mother, not my newspaper. I was in despair, didn't
know what to do, and wanted to get advice from an elder person.
Then my mother shouted over the phone: 'My boy, you are alive!' I thought: 'How so? Is everything OK?'
'My boy, we thought ' 'What's the matter, mother?' 'We saw on TV what happened around you' TV had already sent lurid stories, and I tried to calm my mother down, it didn't happen like that. She thought I had lost my mind
from all the things that had happened in the war – she saw it with her own eyes!
I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism
and war reporting.
That is, I was very shocked by the first contact, it was entirely different from what I had experienced. But it wasn't an exceptional
case.
In the beginning, I mentioned that I am from a fairly poor family. I had to work hard for everything. I was a single child, my
father died when I was young. It didn't matter further on. But, I had a job, I had a degree, a goal in life.
I now had the choice: Should I declare that the whole thing was nonsense, these reports? I was nothing, a newbie straight out
of uni, in my first job. Or if I wanted to make money, to continue, look further. I chose the second option. I continued, and that
for many years.
Over these years, I gained lots of experience. When one comes from university to a big German newspaper – everything I say doesn't
only apply to FAZ, you can take other German or European media. I had contact with other European journalists, from reputable media
outlets. I later worked in other media. I can tell you: What I am about to tell you, I really discovered everywhere.
What did I experience? If you, as a reporter, work either in state media financed by forced license fees, or in the big private
media companies, then you can't write what you want yourself, what you feel like. There are certain guidelines.
Roughly speaking: everyone knows that you won't, for example in the Springer-newspapers – Bild, die Welt – get published articles
extremely critical of Israel. They stand no chance there, because one has to sign a statement that one is pro-Israel, that one won't
question the existence of the state of Israel or Israeli points of view, etc.
There are some sort of guidelines in all the big media companies. But that isn't all: I learned very fast that if one doesn't
– I don't mean this negatively – want to be stuck in the lower rungs of editors, if one wants to rise; for me this rise was that
I was allowed to travel with the Chancellor, ministers, the president and politicians, in planes owned by the state; then one has
to keep to certain subjects. I learned that fast.
That is, if one gets to follow a politician – and this hasn't changed to this day – I soon realized that when I followed the president
or Chancellor Helmut Kohl etc, one of course isn't invited because your name is Udo Ulfkotte, but because you belong to the newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip,
the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or
the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations,
briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the
same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported.
All the time you no one tells you to write it this or that way but you know quite exactly that if you DON'T write it this or that
way,then you won't get invited next time. Your media outlet will be invited, but they say 'we don't want him along'. Then you are
out.
Naturally you want to be invited. Of course it is wonderful to travel abroad and you can behave like a pig, no one cares. You
can buy what you want, because you know that when you return, you won't be checked. You can bring what you want. I had colleagues
who went along on a trip to the US.
They brought with them – it was an air force plane – a Harley Davidson, in parts. They sold it when they were back in Germany,
and of course earned on it. Anyway, just like the carpet-affair with that development minister, this is of course not a single instance.
No one talks about it.
You get invited if you have a certain way of seeing things. Which way to see things? Where and how is this view of the world formed?
I very often get asked: 'Where are these people behind the curtain who pulls the wires, so that everything gets told in a fairly
similar way?'
In the big media in Germany – just look yourself – who sit in the large transatlantic think-tanks and foundations,the foundation
The Atlantic Bridge, all these organizations, and how is one influenced there? I can tell from my own experience.
We mustn't talk only theoretically. I was invited by the think-tank The German Marshall Fund of the United States as a fellow.
I was to visit the United States for six weeks. It was fully paid. During these six weeks I could this think-tank has very close
connections to the CIA to this day, they acquired contacts in the CIA for me and they got me access to American politicians, to everyone
I wanted. Above all, they showered me with gifts.
Already before the journey with German Marshall Fund, I experienced plenty of bought journalism. This hasn't to do with a particular
media outlet. You see, I was invited and didn't particularly reflect over it, by billionaires, for example sultan Quabboos of Oman
on the Arabian peninsula.
When sultan Qabboos invited, and a poor boy like me could travel to a country with few inhabitants but immense wealth, where the
head of state had the largest yachts in the world, his own symphony orchestra which plays for him when he wants – by the way he bought
a pub close to Garmisch-Patenkirchen, because he is a Muslim believer, and someone might see him if he drank in his own country,
so he rather travels there. The place he bought every day fly in fresh lamb from Ireland and Scotland with his private jet. He is
also the head of an environmental foundation.
But this is a digression. If such a person, who is so incredibly rich, invites someone like me, then I arrive first class. I had
never traveled first class before. We arrive, and a driver is waiting for me. He carries your suitcase or backpack. You have a suite
in the hotel. And from the very start, you are showered with gifts. You get a platinum or gold coin. A hand-weaved carpet or whatever.
I interviewed the sultan, several times. He asked me what I wanted. I answered among other things a diving course. I wanted to
learn how to dive. He flew in a PADI-approved instructor from Greece. I was there for two weeks and got my first diving certificate.
On later occasions, the sultan flew me in several times, and the diving instructor. I got a certificate as rescue diver, all paid
for by the sultan. You see, when one is attended to in such a way, then you know that you are bought. For a certain type of journalism.
In the sultan's country, there is no freedom of the press.
There are no human rights. It is illegal to import many writings, because the sultan does not wish so. There are reports about
human rights violations, but my eyes are blind. I reported, like all German media when they report about the Sultanate of Oman, to
this day, only positive things. The great sultan, who is wonderful. The fantastic country of the fairy tale prince, overshadowing
everything else – because I was bought.
Apart from Oman, many others have bought me. They also bought colleagues. I got many invitations through the travel section in
my big newspaper. 5-star. The reportage never mentioned that I was bought, by country A or B or C. Yemenia, the Yemeni state airline,
invited me to such a trip.
I didn't report about the dirt and dilapidation in the country, because I was influenced by this treatment, I only reported positively,
because I wanted to come back. The Yemenis asked me when I had returned to Frankfurt what I wished In jest, I said "your large prawns,
from the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean, they were spectacular.", from the seaport of Mocha (Mocha-coffee is named after it). Two
days later, Yemenia flew in a buffet for the editorial office, with prawns and more.
Of course we were bought. We were bought in several ways. In your situation: when you buy a car or something else, you trust consumer
tests. Look closer. How well is the car tested? I know of no colleagues, no journalists, who do testing of cars, that aren't bribed
– maybe they do exist.
They get unlimited access to a car from the big car manufacturers, with free petrol and everything else. I had a work car in my
newspaper, if not, I might have exploited this. I had a BMW or Mercedes in the newspaper. But there are, outside the paper, many
colleagues who only have this kind of vehicle all year round. They are invited to South Africa, Malaysia, USA, to the grandest travels,
when a new car is presented.
Why? So that they will write positively about the car. But it doesn't say in these reports "Advertisement from bought journalists".
But that is the reality. You should also know – since we are on the subjects of tests – who owns which test magazines? Who owns
the magazine Eco-test? It is owned by the Social Democrats. More than a hundred magazines belong to the Social Democrats. It isn't
about only one party, but many editorial rooms have political allegiance. Behind them are party political interests.
I mentioned the sultan of Oman and the diving course, and I have mentioned German Marshall Fund. Back to the US and the German
Marshall Fund. There one told me, they knew exactly, 'hello, you were on a diving course in Oman ' The CIA knew very precisely. And
the CIA also gave me something: The diving gear. I received the diving gear in the United States, and I received in the US, during
my 6-week stay there, an invitation from the state of Oklahoma, from the governor. I went there. It was a small ceremony, and I received
an honorary citizenship.
I am now honorary citizen of an American state. And in this certificate, it is written that I will only cover the US positively.
I accepted this honorary citizenship and was quite proud of it. I proudly told about it to a colleague who worked in the US. He said
'ha, I already have 31 of these honorary citizenships!'
I don't tell about this to be witty, today I am ashamed, really.
I was greedy. I accepted many advantages that a regular citizen at my age in my occupation doesn't have, and shouldn't have. But
I perceived it – and that is no excuse – as entirely normal, because my colleagues around me all did the same. But this isn't normal.
When journalists are invited to think-tanks in the US, like German Marshall Fund, Atlantic Bridge, it is to 'bring them in line',
for in a friendly way to make them complicit, naturally to buy them, to grease them with money.
This has quite a few aspects that one normally doesn't talk about. When I for the first time was in Southern Africa, in the 80s,
Apartheid still existed in South Africa, segregated areas for blacks and whites. We didn't have any problems with this in my newspaper,
we received fully paid journeys from the Apartheid regime to do propaganda work.
I was invited by the South-African gold industry, coal industry, tourist board. In the first invitation, this trip was to Namibia
– I arrived tired to the hotel room in Windhoek and a dark woman lay in my bed. I at once left the room, went down to the reception
and said 'excuse me, but the room is already occupied' [laughter from the audience]
Without any fuss I got another room.
Next day at the breakfast table, this was a journalist trip, my colleagues asked me 'how was yours?' Only then I understood what
had happened. Until then, I had believed it was a silly coincidence.
With this I want to describe which methods are used, maybe to film journalists in such situations, buy, make dependent. Quite
simply to win them over to your side with the most brutal methods, so that they are 'brought in line'.
This doesn't happen to every journalist. It would be a conspiracy theory if I said that behind every journalist, someone pulls
the wires.
No. Not everyone has influence over the masses. When you – I don't mean this negatively – write about folk costume societies or
if you work with agriculture or politics, why should anyone from the upper political spheres have an interest in controlling the
reporting? As far as I know, this doesn't happen at all.
But if you work in one of the big media, and want up in this world, if you want to travel with politicians, heads of state, with
CEOs, who also travel on these planes, then it happens. Then you are regularly bought, you are regularly observed.
I said earlier that I already during my study days had contact with the intelligence services.
I will quickly explain this to you, because it is very important for this lecture.
I studied law, Political Science and Islamology, among other places in Freiburg. At the very beginning of my study, just before
end of the term, a professor approached me. Professors were then still authority figures.
He came with a brochure, and asked me: 'Mr. Ulfkotte, what are your plans for this vacation?'
I couldn't very well say that I first planned to work a bit at a building site, for then to grab my backpack and see the ocean
for the first time in my life, to Italy, 'la dolce vita', flirting with girls, lie on the beach and be a young person.
I wondered how I would break it to him. He then came with a brochure [Ulfkotte imitating professor]: 'I have something for
you a seminar, Introduction to Conflict Studies, two weeks in Bonn I am sure you would want to participate!'
I wondered how I would tell this elderly gentleman that I wanted to flirt with girls on the beach. Then he said 'you will get
20 Marks per day as support, paid train journey, money for books 150 Marks You will naturally get board and lodging.' He didn't stop
telling me what I would receive.
It buzzed around in my head that I had to achieve everything myself, work hard. I thought 'You have always wanted to participate
in a seminar on Introduction to Conflict Studies!'
So I went to Bonn from Freiburg, and I saw other students who had this urge to participate in this seminar. There were also girls
one could flirt with, about twenty people. The whole thing was very strange, because we sat in a room like this one, there were desks
and a lectern, and there sat some older men and a woman, they always wrote something down. They asked us about things; What we thought
of East Germany, we had to do role play.
The whole thing was a bit strange, but it was well paid. We didn't reflect any further. It was very strange that in this house,
in Ubierstraße 88 in Bonn, we weren't allowed to go to the second floor. There was a chain over the stairs, it was taboo.
We were allowed to go to the basement, there were constantly replenished supplies of new books that we were allowed to get for
free. Ebay didn't exist then, but we could still sell them used. Anyway, it was curious, but at the end of the fortnight, we were
allowed to go up these stairs, where we got an invitation to a continuation course in Conflict Studies.
After four such seminars, that is, after two years, someone asked me 'you have probably wondered what we are doing here'.
He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction
to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at
potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact
me later, in my occupation.
They gave me a lot of money. My mother has always taught me to be polite. So I said 'please do', and they came to me. I was then
working in the newspaper FAZ from 1986, straight after my studies.
Then the intelligence services came fairly soon to me. Why am I telling you this? The newspaper knew very soon. It is also written in my reference, therefore I can say it loud and clear. I had very close contact with the intelligence service BND.
Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given,
but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline.
I highlight certain things to explain them. But if I had said here: 'There are media that are influenced by BND', you could rightly
say that 'these are conspiracy theories, can you document it?'
I CAN document it. I can say, this and that article, with my byline in the paper, is written by the intelligence services, because
what is written there, I couldn't have known. I couldn't have known what existed in some cave or other in Libya, what secret thing
were there, what was being built there. This was all things that BND wanted published. It wasn't like this only in FAZ.
It was like this also in other media. I told about it. If we had rule of law, there would now be an investigation commission.
Because the political parties would stand up, regardless of if they are on the left, in the center or right, and say: What this Ulfkotte
fella says and claims he can document, this should be investigated. Did this occur in other places? Or is it still ongoing?'
I can tell you: Yes it still exists. I know colleagues who still have this close contact. One can probably show this fairly well
until a few years ago. But I would find it wonderful if this investigation commission existed.
But it will obviously not happen, because no one has an interest in doing so. Because then the public would realize how closely
integrated politics, media, and the secret services are in this country.
That is, one often sees in reporting, whether it is from the local paper, regional papers, TV-channels, national tabloids and
so-called serious papers.
Put them side by side, and you will discover that more than 90% looks almost identical. A lot of subjects and news, that are not
being reported at all, or they are – I claim reported very one-sided. One can only explain this if one knows the structures in the
background, how media is surrounded, bought and 'brought onboard' by politics and the intelligence services; Where politics and intelligence
services form a single unity. There is an intelligence coordinator by the Chancellor.
I can tell you, that under the former coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer, under Kohl, I walked in and out of the Chancellery and received
stacks of secret and confidential documents, which I shouldn't have received.
They were so many that we in the newspaper had own archive cabinets for them. Not only did I receive these documents,but Schmidbauer
should have been in jail if we had rule of law. Or there should have been a parliamentary commission or an investigation, because
he wasn't allowed
For example if I couldn't bring along the documents if the case was too hot, there was another trick. They locked me in a room.
In this room were the documents, which I could look through. I could record it all on tape, photograph them or write them down. When
I was done, I could call on the intercom, so they could lock me out. There were thousands of these tricks. Anonymous documents that
I and my colleagues needed could be placed in my mail box.
These are of course illegal things. BUT, you ONLY get them if you 'toe the line' with politics.
If I had written that Chancellor Helmut Kohl is stupid, a big idiot, or about what Schmidbauer did, I would of course not have
received more. That is, if you today, in newspapers, read about 'soon to be revealed exposures, we will publish a big story based
on material based on intelligence', then none of these media have dug a tunnel under the security services and somehow got hold of
something secret. It is rather that they work so well with intelligence services, with the military counterespionage, the foreign
intelligence, police intelligence etc, that if they have got hold of internal documents, it is because they cooperate so well that
they received them as a reward for well performed service.
You see, in this way one is in the end bought. One is bought to such a degree that at one point one can't exit this system anymore.
If I describe how you are supplied with prostitutes, bribed with cars, money; I tried to write down everything I received in gifts,
everything I was bribed with. I stopped doing so several years ago, more than a decade ago.
It doesn't make it any better, but today I regret everything. But I know that it goes this way with many journalists.
It would make me very happy if journalists stood up and said they won't participate in this any longer, and that they think this
is wrong.
But I see no possibility, because media corporations in any case are doing badly. Where should a journalist find work the next
day? It isn't so that tens of thousands of employers are waiting for you. It is the other way round. Tens of thousands of journalists
are looking for work or commissions.
That is, from pure desperation one is happy to be bribed. If a newsroom stands behind or not an article that in reality is advertising,
doesn't matter, one goes along. I know some, even respected journalists, who want to leave this system.
But imagine if you are working in one of the state channels, that you stand up and tell what you have received. How will that
be received by your colleagues? That you have political ulterior motives etc.
September 30 [2015], a few days ago, Chancellor Merkel invited all the directors in the state channels to her in the Chancellery.
I will claim that she talked with them about how one should report the Chancellors politics. Who of you [in the audience] heard about
this incident? 3-4-5? So a small minority. But this is reality. Merkel started already 6 years ago, at the beginning of the financial
crisis, to invite chief editors ..she invited chief editors in the large media corporations, with the express wish that media should
embellish reality, in a political way. This could have been only claims, one could believe me or not.
But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times,
and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw
their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything
will be fine.
In such a way it should be reported. Ladies and gentlemen, what I just said can be documented. These are facts, not a conspiracy
theory.
I formulated it a bit satirically, but I ask myself when I see how things are in this country: Is this the democracy described
in the Constitution? Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press?
Where one has to be afraid if one doesn't agree with the ruling political correctness, if one doesn't want to get in trouble.
Is this the republic our parents and grandparents fought for, that they built?
I claim that we more and more – as citizens – are cowards 'toeing the line', who don't open our mouths.
It is so nice to have plurality and diversity of opinions.
But it is at once clamped down on, today fairly openly.
Of my experiences with journalism, I can in general say that I have quit all media I have to pay for, for the reasons mentioned.
Then the question arises, 'but which pay-media can I trust?'
Naturally there are ones I support. They are definitely political, I'll add. But they are all fairly small. And they won't be
big anytime soon. But I have quit all big media that I used to subscribe to, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine, etc. I would like
to not having to pay the TV-license fee, without being arrested because I won't pay fines. But maybe someone here in the audience
can tell me how to do so without all these problems?
Either way, I don't want to financially support this kind of journalism. I can only give you the advice to get information from
alternative, independent media and all the forums that exist.
I'm not advertising for any of them. Some of you probably know that I write for the publishing house Kopp. But there are so many
portals. Every person is different in political viewpoint, culturally etc. The only thing uniting us, whether we are black or white,
religious or non-religious, right or left, or whatever; we all want to know the truth. We want to know what really happens out there,
and exactly in the burning political questions: asylum seekers, refugees, the financial crisis, bad infrastructure, one doesn't know
how it will continue. Precisely with this background, is it even more important that people get to know the truth.
And it is to my great surprise that I conclude that we in media, as well as in politics, have a guiding line.
To throw more and more dust in the citizens' eyes to calm them down. What is the sense in this? One can have totally different
opinions on the subject of refugees with good reasoning.
But facts are important for you as citizens to decide the future. That is, how many people will arrive? How will it affect my
personal affluence? Or will it affect my affluence at all? Will the pensions shrink? etc. Then you can talk with people about this,
quite openly. But to say that we should open all borders, and that this won't have any negative consequences, is very strange. What
I now say isn't a plug for my books. I know that some of them are on the table in front.
I'm not saying this so that you will buy books. I am saying this for another reason that soon will be clear. I started to write
books on certain subjects 18 years ago. They have sold millions. It is no longer about you buying my books. It is important that
you hear the titles, then you will see a certain line throughout the last ten years. One can have different opinions about this line,
but I have always tried to describe, based on my subjective experiences, formed over many years in the Middle East and Africa.
That there will be migration flows, from people from culture areas that are like; if one could compare a cultural area with an
engine, that one fills petrol in a diesel engine then everyone knows what will happen, the engine is great, diesel is great, but
if there too much petrol, then the engine starts to splutter and stop.
I have tried to make you aware of this, with drastic and less drastic words. What we can expect, and ever faster. The book titles
are SOS Occident; Warning Civil War; No Black,Red, Yellow [the colors in the German flag], Holy War in Europe; Mecca Germany.
I just want to say, when politicians and media today claim no one could have predicted it, everything is a complete surprise;
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not at all surprising. The migration flows, for years warnings have been coming from international
organizations, politicians, experts, exactly about what happened and it is predictable, if we had a map over North Africa and the
Middle East..
If the West continues to destabilize countries like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, country by country, Iraq when we toppled Saddam
Hussein, Afghanistan. We as Europeans and Germans have spent tens of billions on a war where we allegedly defend peace and liberty,
at the mountain range Hindu Kush [in Afghanistan]. And here, in front of our own door, we soon have Hindu Kush.
We have no stabilization in Afghanistan. Dozens of German soldiers have lost their lives for nothing. We have a more unstable
situation than ever.
You can have your own opinions. I am only saying that these refugee flows didn't fall from the sky. It is predicable, that if
I bomb and destabilize a country, that people – it is always so in history – it hasn't anything to do with the Middle East or North
Africa. I have seen enough wars in Africa. Naturally they created refugee flows.
But all of us didn't want to see this. We haven't prepared. And now one is reacting in full panic, and what is most disconcerting
with this, is when media and politicians, allegedly from deepest inner conviction, say: 'this was all a complete surprise!'
Are they drunk? What are they smoking? What sort of pills are they eating? That they behave this way?
End transcription
The transcription has been edited for clarity, and may differ from the spoken word. The subtitles and transcription are for the
first 49 minutes of the lecture only. Subtitled and transcribed by Terje Maloy. This article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial
purposes.
Terje Maloy (
Website ) is a Norwegian citizen, with roots north of the Arctic Circle. Nowadays, he spends a lot of time in Australia, working
in the family business. He has particular interests in liberty, global justice, imperialism, history, media analysis and what Western
governments really are up to. He runs a blog , mostly in Norwegian,
but occasionally in English. He likes to write about general geopolitical matters, and Northern Europe in particular, presenting
perspectives that otherwise barely are mentioned in the dominant media (i.e. most things that actually matter).
Tim Jenkins
From 1:18 minutes, Ulfkotte reveals without question, that the EU Political 'elite's' combined intelligence services work with
& propagate . . .
Terror, Terrorists & Terrorism / a conscious organised Politics of FEAR ! / Freedom of Movement, of fully armed IS Agents
Provocateurs & with a Secret Services get out of jail free card, 'Hände Weg Nicht anfassen', it's 'Hammertime', "U Can't
Touch this", we're armed state operatives travelling to Germany & Austria, " don't mess with my operation !" & all journalists'
hands tied, too.
The suggestions & offers below to translate fully, what Ulfkotte declares publicly, make much sense. It is important to understand
that even an 'Orban' must bow occasionally, to deep state Security State Dictators and the pressures they can exert in so many
ways. Logic . . . or else one's life is made into hell, alive or an 'accidental' death: – and may I add, it is a curiously depressing
feeling when you have so many court cases on the go, that when a Gemeinde/Municipality Clerk is smiling, celebrating and telling
you, (representing yourself in court, with only independent translator & recorder), "You Won the Case, a superior judge has over-ruled
" and the only reply possible is,
"Which case number ?"
life gets tedious & time consuming, demanding extreme patience. Given his illness, surely Ulfkotte and his wife, deserve/d
extra credit & 'hot chocolate'. Makes a change to see & read some real journalism: [email protected]
Excellent Professional Journalism on "Pseudo-Journalist State Actors & Terrorists". If you see a terrorist, guys, at
best just reason with him or her :- better than calling
INTERPOL or Secret Services @theguardian, because you wouldn't want a member of the public, grassing you up to your boss, would
you now ? ! Just tell the terrorist who he really works for . . . Those he resents ! Rather like Ulfkotte had to conclude,
with final resignation. My condolences to his good wife.
Wilmers31
Very good of you to not forget Ulfkotte. If I did not have sickness in the house, I would translate it. Maybe I can do one chapter
and someone else can do another one? What's the publisher saying?
You wouldn't say that if you could speak German, my friend ! ?
From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on
a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany
& Austria.
But, don't let that revelation bother you, living under a Deep State 'Politic of Fear' in the West and long unedited speeches
gets kinda' boring now, I know a bit like believing in some kinda' dumbfuk new pearl harbour, war on terror &&& all phoney propaganda
fairy story telling, just like on the 11/9/2001, when the real target was WTC 7, to hide elitist immoral endeavours, corruption
& the missing $$$TRILLIONS$$$ of tax payers money, 'mislaid' by the D.o.D. announced directly the day before by Rumsfeld, forgotten
? Before ramping the Surveillance States abilities in placing & employing "Parallel Platforms" on steroids, so that our secret
services can now employ terror & deploy terrorists at will .., against us, see ?
Plus ca change....
I remember on a similar note a 60 Minutes piece just prior to Clinton's humanitarian bombing of Serbian civilian infrastructure
(and long ago deleted, I'm sure) on a German free-lancer staging Kosovo atrocities in a Munich suburb, and having the German MSM
eating it up and asking for more. (WWII guilt assuagement at work, no doubt).
mark
Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate
interests.
That is their job.
That is what they do.
They have long since forfeited all credibility and integrity.
They have lied to us endlessly for decades and generations, from the Bayonetted Belgian Babies and Human Bodies Turned Into Soap
of WW1 to the Iraq Incubator Babies and Syrian Gas Attacks of more recent times.
You can no longer take anything at face value.
The default position has to be that every single word they print and every single word that comes out of their lying mouths is
untrue.
If they say it's snowing at the North Pole, you can't accept that without first going there and checking it out for yourself.
You can't accept anything that has not been independently verified.
This applies across the board.
All of the accepted historical narrative, including things like the holocaust.
And current Global Warming "science."
We know we have been lied to again and again and again.
So what else have we been lied to without us realising it?
mark
Come to think of it, I need to apologise to sex workers.
I have known quite a few of them who have quite high ethical and moral standards, certainly compared to the MSM.
And they certainly do less damage.
Vert few working girls have blood on their hands like the MSM.
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
Seamus Padraig
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
I heartily agree. Even if one disapproves morally of prostitution, how can it possibly be worse to sell your body than to sell
your soul?
Oliver
Quite. Checking things out for yourself is the way to go. Forget 'Peer Reviews', just as bent as the journalism Ulfkotte described.
DIY.
Mortgage
So natural, all it seems
Part II:
Bought Science
Part III:
Bought Health Services
mapquest directions
The video you shared with great info. I really like the information you share.
boxnovel
Gary Weglarz
I knew we were in dangerous new territory regarding government censorship when after waiting several years for Ulfkotte's best
selling book to finally be available in English – it suddenly, magically, disappeared completely – a vanishing act – and I couldn't
get so much as a response from, much less an explanation from, the would be publisher. Udo's book came at a time when it could
have made a difference countering the fact-free complete and total "fabrication of reality" by the U.S. and Western powers as
they have waged a brutal and ongoing neocolonial war on the world's poor under the guise of "fighting terrorism."
Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and
completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human
rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs,
politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used
to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice
is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities
that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order."
Ramdan
After watching the first 20 min I couldn't help but remembering this tale:
"The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who
lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have
to live on lentils.'
To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"."
which is also the reason why such a large part of humanity lives in voluntary servitude to power structures, living the dream,
the illusion of being free..
Ramdan
"English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalists" Suppressed?" at Global Research 2017!!
Just rechecked Amazon. Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News
by Udo Ulfkotte PH.D. The tag line reads.
Hard cover – currently unavailable; paperback cover – currently unavailable; Kindle edition – ?
Book burning anyone?
nottheonly1
No translation exists for this interview with Udo Ulfkotte on KenFM, the web site of Ken Jebsen. Ken Jebsen has been in the cross
hairs of the CIA and German agencies for his reporting of the truth. He was smeared and defamed by the same people that Dr. Ulfkotte
had written extensively about in his book 'Gekaufte Journalisten' ('Bought Journalists').
The reason why I add this link to the interview lies in the fact that Udo Ulfkotte speaks about an important part of Middle
Eastern and German history – a history that has been scrubbed from the U.S. and German populations. In the Iraq war against Iran
– that the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R. – German
chemical weapons were used under the supervision of the U.S. regime. The extend of the chemical weapons campaign was enormous
and to the present day, Iranians are born with birth defects stemming from the used of German weapons of mass destruction.
Dr. Ulfkotte rightfully bemoans, that every year German heads of state are kneeling for the Jewish victims of National socialism
– but not for the victims of German WMD's that were used against Iran. He stresses that the act of visual asking for forgiveness
in the case of the Jewish victims becomes hypocrisy, when 40 years after the Nazis reigned, German WMD's were used against Iran.
The German regime was in on the WMD attack on Iran. It was not something that happened because they had lost a couple of thousand
containers with WMDs. They delivered the WMD's to Iraq under U.S. supervision.
Ponder that. And there has never been an apology towards Iran, or compensations. Nada. Nothing. Instead, the vile rhetoric
and demagogery of every U.S. regime since has continued to paint Iran in the worst possible ways, most notably via incessant psychological
projection – accusing Iran of the war crimes and crimes against humanity the U.S. and its Western vassal regimes are guilty of.
Here is the interview that was recorded shortly before Udo Ulfkotte's death:
If enough people support the effort, I am willing to contact KenFM for the authorization to translate the interview and use
it for subtitles to the video. However, I can't do that on my own.
nottheonly1
Correction: the interview was recorded two years before his passing.
Antonym
the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R.
So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free.
nottheonly1
It would help if you would use your brain just once. 'Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired
outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You
are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep.
But then, with all the assaults by the unintelligence agencies, it does not come as a surprise when facts are twisted.
Antonym
Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the
get go. The timing of operation Barbarossa was brilliant though: it shocked Stalin into a temporary limbo as he had
his own aggressive plans.
Casandra2
This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting
attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order).
This approach has been assiduously applied, across the board, over many years, to the point were they now own and run everything
required to subjugate the 'human race' to the horrors of their psychopathic inclinations. They are presently holding the global
economy on hold until their AI population (social credit) control system/grid is in place before bringing the house down.
Needless to say, when this happens a disunited and frightened Global Population will be at their mercy.
If you wish to gain a full insight of what the Controlling Elite is about, and capable of, I recommend David Icke's latest
publication 'Trigger'. I know he's been tagged a 'nutter' over the past thirty years, but I reckon this book represents the 'gold
standard' in terms of generating awareness as a basis for launching a united global population counter-attack (given a great strategy)
against forces that can only be defined as pure 'EVIL'.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools
for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the
greater fools want. Engaging in compromise allows both parties to have complicit & explicit understanding that corruption
and falsehood are the tools of the trade. To all-of-a-sudden develop a conscience after decades of playing the part of a willing
participant is understandable in light of the guilt complex one must develop after screwing everyone in the world out of the critical
assessment we all need to obtain in order to make decisions regarding our futures.
Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least
the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have
instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management.
Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all
writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as
writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers
don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence
Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they
could get their greedy hands on at the time.
Developing a conscience late in life is too late.
May all that sell their souls to the Intel agencies understand that pond scum never had a conscience to begin with.
Once pond scum always pond scum.
MOU
nottheonly1
What is not addressed in this talk is the addictive nature of this sort of public relation writing. Journalism is something different
altogether. I know that, because I consider myself to be a journalist at heart – one that stopped doing it when the chalice was
offered to me. The problem is that one is not part of the cabal one day to another.
It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm
– always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other
name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society.
And I would also write a critique about a great restaurant – never paying a dime for a fantastic dinner. The point though is
that I would not write a good critique for a nasty place for money. I have never written anything but the truth – for which I
received sometimes as much as a bag full of the best rolls in the country.
Twisting the truth for any form of bribes is disgusting and attests of the lowest of any character.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is
involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can
to get what they want.
All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable
than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm.
If the devil offers inducements be sure to up the ante to outsmart the drunken sot.
I'm still quite annoyed about being called a "paid pro-Putin shill" on one of the Guardian's
comment sections. "Paid"! If only!
mark
I've been trying to get my KGB back pay for years. I wrote to the accounts dept. saying I'd
take roubles or bitcoin, but nothing has come through.
mark
We are all Russian assets now. I myself have been a Russian asset for years. I have had to do
Putin's bidding ever since he threatened to publish old KGB photographs of me having sex with
a rhinoceros.
Since then, I've been a Kremlin puppet, just like Trump. Gabbard and Jill
Stein.
Seamus Padraig
I am a Russian asset and I approve of this message!
Essentially neoliberal MSM were hijacked. Which was easy to do. The current anti-Russian campaign is conducted under
the direct guidance of MI6 and similar agencies
Notable quotes:
"... committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes add: "This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it." ..."
"... These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would "jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel". It was marked "private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media". ..."
"... "The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] and the Telegraph published only a short". It continued by noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations". It added, "The BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story." ..."
"... The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act". It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies. ..."
"... The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair noted that after GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper's laptops "engagement with The Guardian had continued to strengthen". ..."
"... But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this, noting that "the process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice Committee] member". ..."
"... The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing. ..."
"... In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented "exclusive" with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The article noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history". It was co-written by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice Committee. This was not mentioned in the article. ..."
"... The MI5 chief was given copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson and his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files." ..."
"... Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The Guardian itself reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004". ..."
"... The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives" as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent any revelations of this kind happening again. ..."
"... The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically. While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts. In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour concluded that the party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race equality law." ..."
"... A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The Times rather than The Guardian." ..."
"... The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden go? DM ..."
The Guardian, Britain's leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been
successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the 'security state', according to newly released
documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.
The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents
leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Snowden's bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and
its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of
mass surveillance
operated by both agencies.
According to minutes of meetings of the UK's Defence and Security Media Advisory
Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.
" This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [committee] before publishing the
first tranche of information," state
minutes of a 7 November
2013 meeting at the MOD.
The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small
number of journalists are also invited to sit on the committee. Its
stated purpose is to "prevent inadvertent public disclosure
of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations". It can issue "notices" to the media to encourage them
not to publish certain information.
The committee is currently chaired by the MOD's director-general of security policy Dominic Wilson, who was
previously director of security and intelligence
in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who
describes himself as an "accomplished, senior
ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level leadership".
The D-Notice system describes itself as voluntary ,
placing no obligations on the media to comply with any notice issued. This means there should have been no need for the Guardian
to consult the MOD before publishing the Snowden documents.
Yet committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes
add: "This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it."
' Considerable efforts'
These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published
the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would "jeopardise
both national security and possibly UK personnel". It was
marked "private and confidential: not
for publication, broadcast or use on social media".
Clearly the committee did not want its issuing of the notice to be publicised, and it was nearly successful. Only the right-wing
blog Guido Fawkes made it public.
At the time, according to the committee
minutes , the "intelligence
agencies in particular had continued to ask for more advisories [i.e. D-Notices] to be sent out". Such D-Notices were clearly seen
by the intelligence services not so much as a tool to advise the media but rather a way to threaten it not to publish further Snowden
revelations.
One night, amidst the first Snowden stories being published, the D-Notice Committee's then-secretary Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance
personally called Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian. Vallance "made clear his concern that The Guardian had failed to
consult him in advance before telling the world",
according to a Guardian journalist who interviewed Rusbridger.
Later in the year, Prime Minister David Cameron again used the D-Notice system as a threat to the media.
" I don't want to have to use injunctions or D-Notices or the other tougher measures," he
said
in a statement to MPs. "I think it's much better to appeal to newspapers' sense of social responsibility. But if they don't
demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act."
The threats worked. The Press Gazette reported
at the time that "The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] and the Telegraph
published only a short". It continued by noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations". It added, "The
BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story."
The Guardian, however, remained uncowed.
According to the committee
minutes , the fact
The Guardian would not stop publishing "undoubtedly raised questions in some minds about the system's future usefulness". If the
D-Notice system could not prevent The Guardian publishing GCHQ's most sensitive secrets, what was it good for?
It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.
GCHQ and laptops
The security services ratcheted up their "considerable efforts" to deal with the exposures. On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials
entered The Guardian's offices at King's Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published. At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent
three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents.
The Guardian staffers, according to one of the newspaper's reporters,
brought "angle-grinders, dremels – drills with revolving bits – and masks". The reporter added, "The spy agency provided
one piece of hi-tech equipment, a 'degausser', which destroys magnetic fields and erases data."
Johnson
claims
that the destruction of the computers was "purely a symbolic act", adding that "the government and GCHQ knew, because we
had told them, that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode
hadn't changed anything."
Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee
minutes for November
2013 outlined: "Towards the end of July [as the computers were being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice
advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue [with the committee] had been reasonable and improving."
The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act". It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The
Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive
and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies.
The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair
noted that after
GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper's laptops "engagement with The Guardian had continued to strengthen".
Moreover, he added
, there were now "regular dialogues between the secretary and deputy secretaries and Guardian journalists". Rusbridger later
testified to the Home Affairs Committee that Air Vice-Marshal Vallance of the D-Notice committee and himself "collaborated"
in the aftermath of the Snowden affair and that Vallance had even "been at The Guardian offices to talk to all our reporters".
But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice
Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this,
noting that "the
process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice
Committee] member".
At some point in 2013 or early 2014, Johnson – the same deputy editor who had smashed up his newspaper's computers under the watchful
gaze of British intelligence agents – was approached to take up a seat on the committee. Johnson attended his first meeting in
May 2014 and was
to remain on it until
October 2018
.
The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee
alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing.
A new editor
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations but agreed to Johnson
taking a seat on the D-Notice Committee as a tactical sop to the security services. Throughout his tenure, The Guardian continued
to publish some stories critical of the security services.
But in March 2015, the situation changed when the Guardian
appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services. Viner
had started out on fashion and entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security reporting. According
to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the Snowden affair than Janine Gibson in the US (Gibson was another
candidate
to be Rusbridger's successor).
Viner was then editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, which was
launched just two weeks before the first Snowden
revelations were published. Australia and New Zealand comprise two-fifths of the so-called
"Five Eyes" surveillance alliance exposed by Snowden.
This was an opportunity for the security services. It appears that their seduction began the following year.
In November 2016, The Guardian
published an unprecedented "exclusive" with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The article
noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history". It was co-written
by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice
Committee. This was not mentioned in the article.
The MI5 chief was given
copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson
and his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the
Snowden files."
Parker told the two reporters, "We recognise that in a changing world we have to change too. We have a responsibility to talk
about our work and explain it."
Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, the Guardian
published another unprecedented "exclusive", this time with Alex Younger, the sitting chief of MI6, Britain's external
intelligence agency. This exclusive was awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian's investigations editor, Nick
Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.
The interview was the first Younger had given to a national newspaper and was again softball.
Titled "MI6 returns to 'tapping up' in an effort to recruit black and Asian officers", it focused almost entirely on the
intelligence service's stated desire to recruit from ethnic minority communities.
" Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain," Younger told Hopkins. "Every community from every part of Britain should
feel they have what it takes, no matter what their background or status."
Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The Guardian itself
reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's
decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant
wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004".
None of this featured in The Guardian article, which did, however, cover discussions of whether the James Bond actor Daniel Craig
would qualify for the intelligence service. "He would not get into MI6," Younger told Hopkins.
More recently, in August 2019, The Guardian was
awarded yet another exclusive, this time with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, Britain's most senior
counter-terrorism officer. This was Basu's " first major interview since taking up his post" the previous year and resulted in a
three-part series of articles, one of which was
entitled "Met police examine Vladimir Putin's role in Salisbury attack".
The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives" as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising
the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent
any revelations of this kind happening again.
What, if any, private conversations have taken place between Viner and the security services during her tenure as editor are not
known. But in 2018, when Paul Johnson eventually left the D-Notice Committee, its chair, the MOD's Dominic Wilson,
praised Johnson who, he said, had been "instrumental in re-establishing links with The Guardian".
Decline in critical reporting
Amidst these spoon-fed intelligence exclusives, Viner also oversaw the breakup of The Guardian's celebrated investigative team,
whose muck-racking journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations.
One well-placed source
told the Press Gazette at the time that journalists on the investigations team "have not felt backed by senior
editors over the last year", and that "some also feel the company has become more risk-averse in the same period".
In the period since Snowden, The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues,
notably Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were
replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state. The current
defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh,
started
at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history of covering national security.
" It seems they've got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way," one current
Guardian journalist told us.
Indeed, during the last two years of Rusbridger's editorship, The Guardian published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6
on its website. Since Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by year.
" Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies -- epitomised by the Snowden scoops but also many other stories
-- appears to have been abandoned," a former Guardian journalist told us. The former reporter added that, in recent years, it "sometimes
seems The Guardian is worried about upsetting the spooks."
A second former Guardian journalist added: "The Guardian no longer seems to have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence
services, and is perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden. This is concerning, because spooks are always manipulative and not
always to be trusted."
While some articles critical of the security services still do appear in the paper, its "scoops" increasingly focus on issues
more acceptable to them. Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any articles based on an intelligence
or security services source that was not officially sanctioned to speak.
The Guardian has, by contrast,
published a steady stream of exclusives on the major official enemy of the security services, Russia, exposing Putin,
his friends and the work of its intelligence services and military.
In the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, which revealed how companies and individuals around the world were using an offshore
law firm to avoid paying tax, The Guardian's front-page launch scoop was authored by Luke Harding, who has received many security
service
tips focused on the "Russia threat", and was
titled "Revealed:
the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin".
Three sentences into the piece, however, Harding notes that "the president's name does not appear in any of the records" although
he insists that "the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured
without his patronage".
There was a much
bigger story
in the Panama Papers which The Guardian chose to downplay by leaving it to the following day. This concerned the father of
the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, who "ran an offshore fund that avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small
army of Bahamas residents – including a part-time bishop – to sign its paperwork".
We understand there was some argument between journalists about not leading with the Cameron story as the launch splash. Putin's
friends were eventually deemed more important than the Prime Minister of the country where the paper published.
Getting Julian Assange
The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator
during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.
One 2017 story came from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who writes for The Guardian's sister paper The Observer,
titled "When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange". This concerned the visit of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage to the Ecuadorian embassy
in March 2017,
organised by the radio station LBC, for whom Farage worked as a presenter. Farage's producer at LBC accompanied Farage
at the meeting, but this was not mentioned by Cadwalladr.
Rather, she posited that this meeting was "potentially a channel of communication" between WikiLeaks, Farage and Donald Trump,
who were all said to be closely linked to Russia, adding that these actors were in a "political alignment" and that " WikiLeaks is,
in many ways, the swirling vortex at the centre of everything".
Yet Cadwalladr's one official on-the-record source for this speculation was a "highly placed contact with links to US intelligence",
who told her, "When the heat is turned up and all electronic communication, you have to assume, is being intensely monitored, then
those are the times when intelligence communication falls back on human couriers. Where you have individuals passing information
in ways and places that cannot be monitored."
It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to
undermine Assange.
In 2018, however, The Guardian's attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began
on 18 May 2018 with
one alleging Assange's "long-standing relationship with RT", the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been
closely
documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial
evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.
One story, co-authored again by Luke Harding,
claimed that "Russian diplomats held secret talks in London with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they
could help him flee the UK, The Guardian has learned". The former consul in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at this time, Fidel
Narvaez, vigorously denies the existence of any such "escape plot" involving Russia and is involved in a complaint process with The
Guardian for insinuating he coordinated such a plot.
This apparent mini-campaign ran until November 2018, culminating in a front-page
splash , based on anonymous sources, claiming that Assange had three secret meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy with Trump's
former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
This "scoop" failed all tests of journalistic credibility since it would have been impossible for anyone to have entered the highly
secured Ecuadorian embassy three times with no proof. WikiLeaks and others have strongly argued that the story was
manufactured
and it is telling that The Guardian has since failed to refer to it in its subsequent articles on the Assange case. The Guardian,
however, has still not retracted or apologised for the story which remains on its website.
The "exclusive" appeared just two weeks after Paul Johnson had been congratulated for "re-establishing links" between The Guardian
and the security services.
The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped
create the conditions for
a deal between Ecuador, the UK and the US to expel Assange from the embassy in April. Assange now sits in Belmarsh maximum-security
prison where he faces extradition to the US, and life in prison there, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Acting for the establishment
Another major focus of The Guardian's energies under Viner's editorship has been to attack the leader of the UK Labour Party,
Jeremy Corbyn.
The context is that Corbyn appears to have recently been a target of the security services. In 2015, soon after he was elected
Labour leader, the Sunday Times
reported a
serving general warning that "there would be a direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became prime minister".
The source told the newspaper: "The Army just wouldn't stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise
the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that."
On 20 May 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was
fed the story that "MI5 opened a file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his links to the IRA". It formed part of a Telegraph
investigation claiming to reveal "Mr Corbyn's full links to the IRA" and was sourced to an individual "close to" the MI5 investigation,
who said "a file had been opened on him by the early nineties".
The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was also said to be monitoring Corbyn in the same period.
Then, on the very eve of the General Election, the Telegraph gave space to an
article from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6, under a headline: "Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation.
At MI6, which I once led, he wouldn't clear the security vetting."
Further, in September 2018, two anonymous senior government sources
told The Times that Corbyn had been "summoned" for a "'facts of life' talk on terror" by MI5 chief Andrew Parker.
Just two weeks after news of this private meeting was leaked by the government, the Daily Mail
reported another leak, this time revealing that "Jeremy Corbyn's most influential House of Commons adviser has been barred
from entering Ukraine on the grounds that he is a national security threat because of his alleged links to Vladimir Putin's 'global
propaganda network'."
The article concerned Andrew Murray, who had been working in Corbyn's office for a year but had still not received a security
pass to enter the UK parliament. The Mail reported, based on what it called "a senior parliamentary source", that Murray's application
had encountered "vetting problems".
Murray later heavily suggested that the security services had leaked the story to the Mail. "Call me sceptical if you must, but
I do not see journalistic enterprise behind the Mail's sudden capacity to tease obscure information out of the [Ukrainian security
service]," he wrote
in the New Statesman. He added, "Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt
if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?"
Murray told us he was approached by the New Statesman after the story about him being banned from Ukraine was leaked. "However,"
he added, "I wouldn't dream of suggesting anything like that to The Guardian, since I do not know any journalists still working there
who I could trust."
The Guardian itself has run a remarkable number of news and comment articles criticising Corbyn since he was elected in 2015 and
the paper's clearly hostile stance has been widely
noted .
Given its appeal to traditional Labour supporters, the paper has probably done more to undermine Corbyn than any other. In particular,
its massive coverage of alleged widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped to disparage Corbyn more than other smears
carried in the media.
The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem
in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically. While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when
Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been
investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts. In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour
concluded
that the party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated
every single United Kingdom race equality law."
Analysis of two YouGov surveys, conducted in 2015 and 2017,
shows that anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters declined substantially in the first two years of Corbyn's tenure and
that such views were significantly more common among Conservative voters.
Despite this, since January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-Semitism, an average of
around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. In the same period, The Guardian published
just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party's much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example,
found that nearly half of the Tory Party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.
At the same time, some stories which paint Corbyn's critics in a negative light have been suppressed by The Guardian. According
to someone with knowledge of the matter, The Guardian declined to publish the results of a months-long critical investigation by
one of its reporters into a prominent anti-Corbyn Labour MP, citing only vague legal issues.
In July 2016, one of this article's authors emailed a Guardian editor asking if he could pitch an investigation about the first
attempt by the right-wing of the Labour Party to remove Corbyn, informing The Guardian of very good inside sources on those behind
the attempt and their real plans. The approach was rejected as being of no interest before a pitch was even sent.
A reliable publication?
On 20 May 2019, The Times newspaper
reported on a Freedom of Information request made by the Rendition Project, a group of academic experts working on torture
and rendition issues, which showed that the MOD had been "developing a secret policy on torture that allows ministers to sign off
intelligence-sharing that could lead to the abuse of detainees".
This might traditionally have been a Guardian story, not something for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. According to one civil
society source, however, many groups working in this field no longer trust The Guardian.
A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in
torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The
Times rather than The Guardian."
The Times published its scoop under a strong
headline , "Torture: Britain breaks law in Ministry of Defence secret policy". However, before the article was published,
the MOD fed The Guardian the same documents The Times were about to splash with, believing it could soften the impact of the revelations
by telling its side of the story.
The Guardian
posted its own article just before The Times, with a headline that would have pleased the government: "MoD says revised
torture guidance does not lower standards".
Its lead paragraph was a simple summary of the MOD's position: "The Ministry of Defence has insisted that newly emerged departmental
guidance on the sharing of intelligence derived from torture with allies, remains in line with practices agreed in the aftermath
of a series of scandals following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." However, an inspection of the documents showed this was clearly
disinformation.
The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state
to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has
been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden
go? DM
The Guardian did not respond to a request for comment.
Daily Maverick will formally launch Declassified – a new UK-focused investigation and analysis organisation run by the
authors of this article – in November 2019.
Matt Kennard is an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified . He was previously director of the
Centre for Investigative Journalism in London, and before that a reporter for the Financial Times in the US and UK. He is the author
of two books, Irregular Army and The Racket .
Mark Curtis is a leading UK foreign policy analyst, journalist and the author of six books including Web of
Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World and Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam .
The story goes like this: sometime during the height of the Cold War a group of American
journalists were hosting a visit to the U.S. of some of their Soviet counterparts.
After allowing their visitors some time to soak up the media zeitgeist stateside, most of
the Americans expected their guests to express unbridled envy at the professional liberties
they enjoyed in the Land of the Free Press.
One of the Russian scribes was indeed compelled to express his unabashed 'admiration' to his
hosts in particular, for the "far superior quality" of American "propaganda". Now it's
fair to say his hosts were taken aback by what was at best a backhanded compliment.
After some collegial 'piss-taking' about the stereotypes associated with Western "press
freedom" versus those of the controlled media in the Soviet system, one of the Americans called
on their Russian colleague to explain what he meant. In fractured English, he replied with the
following:
It's very simple. In Soviet Union, we don't believe our propaganda. In America, you
actually believe yours!"
"... Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name. ..."
"... In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets, also funded by the FO. ..."
"... "The Guardian is struggling for money" Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets. ..."
OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article
Hypocrisy Taints UK's
Media Freedom Conference , was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in
the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually creepy. Let's just look back at one of the four "main themes"
of this conference:
Building trust in media and countering disinformation
"Countering disinformation"? Well, that's just another word for censorship. This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT
accreditation. They claim RT "spreads disinformation" and they "countered" that by barring them from attending. "Building trust"?
In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, "building trust" is just another way of saying "making people believe us" (the word usage
is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust). The whole conference is shot through with this language
that just feels off. Here is CNN's
Christiane Amanpour :
Our job is to be truthful, not neutral we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence."
Being "truthful not neutral" is one of Amanpour's
personal sayings
, she obviously thinks it's clever. Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for "bias". Refusing to cover evidence of The White
Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally
claim to only publish "the truth", to get around impartiality and then set about making up whatever "truth" is convenient. Oh, and
if you don't know what "creating a false moral quivalence is", here I'll demonstrate: MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical
media. OffG: But you're supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down. BBC: No. That's not the same. OffG: It seems the
same. BBC: It's not. You're creating a false moral equivalence . Understand now? You "create a false moral equivalence" by
pointing out mainstream media's double standards. Other ways you could mistakenly create a "false moral equivalence": Bringing up
Gaza when the media talk about racism. Mentioning Saudi Arabia when the media preach about gay rights. Referencing the US coup in
Venezuela when the media work themselves into a froth over Russia's "interference in our democracy" Talking about the invasion of
Iraq. Ever. OR Pointing out that the BBC is state funded, just like RT. These are all no-longer flagrant examples of the media's
double standards, and if you say they are , you're "creating a false moral equivalence" and the media won't have to allow
you (or anyone who agrees with you) air time or column inches to disagree. Because they don't have a duty to be neutral or show both
sides, they only have a duty to tell "the truth" as soon as the government has told them what that is. Prepare to see both those
phrases – or variations there of – littering editorials in the Guardian and the Huffington Post in the coming months. Along
with people bemoaning how "fake news outlets abuse the notion of impartiality" by "being even handed between liars the truth tellers".
(I've been doing this site so long now, I have a Guardian-English dictionary in my head).
Equally dodgy-sounding buzz-phrases litter topics on the agenda. "Eastern Europe and Central Asia: building an integrated support
system for journalists facing hostile environments" , this means pumping money into NGOs to fund media that will criticize our
"enemies" in areas of strategic importance. It means flooding money into the anti-government press in Hungary, or Iran or (of course),
Russia. That is ALL it means. I said in my earlier article I don't know what "media sustainability" even means, but I feel I can
take a guess. It means "save the government mouthpieces". The Guardian is struggling for money, all print media are, TV news
is getting lower viewing figures all the time. "Building media sustainability" is code for "pumping public money into traditional
media that props up the government" or maybe "getting people to like our propaganda". But the worst offender on the list is, without
a doubt "Navigating Disinformation"
"Navigating Disinformation" was a 1 hour panel from the second day of the conference. You can watch it embedded above if you really
feel the need. I already did, so you don't have to. The panel was chaired by Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister. The
members included the Latvian Foreign Minister, a representative of the US NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Ukrainian
Deputy Minister of Information
Have you guessed what "disinformation" they're going to be talking about? I'll give you a clue: It begins with R. Freeland, chairing
the panel, kicks it off by claiming that "disinformation isn't for any particular aim" . This is a very common thing for establishment
voices to repeat these days, which makes it all the more galling she seems to be pretending its is her original thought. The reason
they have to claim that "disinformation" doesn't have a "specific aim" is very simple: They don't know what they're going to call
"disinformation" yet. They can't afford to take a firm position, they need to keep their options open. They need to give themselves
the ability to describe any single piece of information or political opinion as "disinformation." Left or right. Foreign or domestic.
"Disinformation" is a weaponised term that is only as potent as it is vague. So, we're one minute in, and all "navigating disinformation"
has done is hand the State an excuse to ignore, or even criminalise, practically anything it wants to. Good start. Interestingly,
no one has actually said the word "Russia" at this point. They have talked about "malign actors" and "threats to democracy", but
not specifically Russia. It is SO ingrained in these people that "propaganda"= " Russian propaganda" that they don't need
to say it.
The idea that NATO as an entity, or the individual members thereof, could also use "disinformation" has not just been dismissed
it was literally never even contemplated. Next Freeland turns to Edgars Rinkēvičs, her Latvian colleague, and jokes about always
meeting at NATO functions. The Latvians know "more than most" about disinformation, she says. Rinkēvičs says disinformation is nothing
new, but that the methods of spreading it are changing then immediately calls for regulation of social media. Nobody disagrees. Then
he talks about the "illegal annexation of Crimea", and claims the West should outlaw "paid propaganda" like RT and Sputnik. Nobody
disagrees. Then he says that Latvia "protected" their elections from "interference" by "close cooperation between government agencies
and social media companies". Everyone nods along. If you don't find this terrifying, you're not paying attention. They don't say
it, they probably don't even realise they mean it, but when they talk about "close cooperation with social media networks", they
mean government censorship of social media. When they say "protecting" their elections they're talking about rigging them. It only
gets worse. The next step in the Latvian master plan is to bolster "traditional media".
The problems with traditional media, he says, are that journalists aren't paid enough, and don't keep up to date with all the
"new tricks". His solution is to "promote financing" for traditional media, and to open more schools like the "Baltic Centre of Media
Excellence", which is apparently a totally real thing .
It's a training centre which teaches young journalists about "media literacy" and "critical thinking". You can read their depressingly
predictable list of "donors" here . I truly wish I was joking. Next
up is Courtney Radsch from CPJ – a US-backed NGO, who notionally "protect journalists", but more accurately spread pro-US propaganda.
(Their token effort to "defend"
RT and Sputnik when they were barred from the conference was contemptible).
She talks for a long time without saying much at all. Her revolutionary idea is that disinformation could be countered if everyone
told the truth. Inspiring. Beata Balogova, Journalist and Editor from Slovakia, gets the ship back on course – immediately suggesting
politicians should not endorse "propaganda" platforms. She shares an anecdote about "a prominent Slovakian politician" who gave exclusive
interviews to a site that is "dubiously financed, we assume from Russia". They assume from Russia. Everyone nods.
It's like they don't even hear themselves.
Then she moves on to Hungary. Apparently, Orban has "created a propaganda machine" and produced "antisemitic George Soros posters".
No evidence is produced to back-up either of these claims. She thinks advertisers should be pressured into not giving money to "fake
news sites". She calls for "international pressure", but never explains exactly what that means. The stand-out maniac on this panel
is Emine Dzhaparova, the Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Information Policy. (She works for the Ministry of Information – nicknamed
the Ministry of Truth, which was formed in 2014 to "counter lies about Ukraine". Even
The Guardian thought that sounded dodgy.)
She talks very fast and, without any sense of irony, spills out a story that shoots straight through "disinformation" and becomes
"incoherent rambling". She claims that Russian citizens are so brainwashed you'll never be able to talk to them, and that Russian
"cognitive influence" is "toxic like radiation." Is this paranoid, quasi-xenophobic nonsense countered? No. Her fellow panelists
nod and chuckle. On top of that, she just lies. She lies over and over and over again. She claims Russia is locking up Crimean Tartars
"just for being muslims", nobody questions her. She says the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, but doesn't mention that her
side is responsible for over 80% of civilian deaths.
She says only 30% of Crimeans voted in the referendum, and that they were "forced". A fact not supported by
any polls done by either side in the last
four years, and any referenda held
on the peninsula any time in the last last 30 year. It's simply a lie. Nobody asks her about the journalists
killed in Ukraine since their
glorious Maidan Revolution . Nobody questions the fact that she works for something called the "Ministry of Information". Nobody
does anything but nod and smile as the "countering disinformation" panel becomes just a platform for spreading total lies.
When everyone on the panel has had their ten minutes on the soapbox, Freeland asks for recommendations for countering this "threat"
– here's the list:
Work to distinguish "free speech" from "propaganda", when you find propaganda there must be a "strong reaction".
Pressure advertisers to abandon platforms who spread misinformation.
Regulate social media.
Educate journalists at special schools.
Start up a "Ministry of Information" and have state run media that isn't controlled, like in Ukraine.
This is the Global Conference on Media Freedom and all these six people want to talk about is how to control what can be said,
and who can say it. They single only four countries out for criticism: Hungary, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Russia .and Russia takes
up easily 90% of that. They mention only two media outlets by name: RT and Sputnik. This wasn't a panel on disinformation, it was
a public attack forum – a month's worth of 2 minutes of hate. These aren't just shills on this stage, they are solid gold idiots,
brainwashed to the point of total delusion.
They are the dangerous glassy eyes of a Deep State that never questions itself, never examines itself, and will do anything it
wants, to anyone it wants whilst happily patting itself on the back for its superior morality. They don't know, they don't care.
They're true believers. Terrifyingly dead inside. Talking about state censorship and re-education camps under a big sign that says
"Freedom". And that's just one talk. Just one panel in a 2 day itinerary filled to the brim with similarly soul-dead servants of
authority. Truly, perfectly Orwellian.
Read and be appalled at what America is up to .keep for further reference. We are in danger.
Tim Jenkins
It would serve Ms. Amanpour well, to relax, rewind & review her own interview with Sergei Lavrov:-
Then she might see why Larry King could stomach the appalling corporate dictatorship, even to the core of False & Fake recording
of 'our' "History of the National Security State" , No More
Amanpour was forced to laugh uncontrollably, when confronted with Lavrov's humorous interpretations of various legal aspects
of decency & his Judgement of others' politicians and 'Pussy Riots' >>> if you haven't seen it, it is to be recommended, the whole
interview, if nothing else but to study the body language and micro-facial expressions, coz' a belly up laugh is not something
anybody can easily control or even feign that first spark of cognition in her mind, as she digests Lavrov's response :- hilarious
Einstein
A GE won't solve matters since we have a Government of Occupation behind a parliament of puppets.
Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which
is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name.
In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business
of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign
countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets,
also funded by the FO.
Pryce's ventriloquist's dummy in parliament, the pompous Alan Duncan, announced another £10 million of public money for this
odious brainwashing programme.
Tim Jenkins
That panel should be nailed & plastered over, permanently:-
and as wall paper, 'Abstracts of New Law' should be pasted onto a collage of historic extracts from the Guardian, in
offices that issue journalistic licenses, comprised of 'Untouchables' :-
A professional habitat, to damp any further 'Freeland' amplification & resonance,
of negative energy from professional incompetence.
Francis Lee
Apropos of the redoubtable Ms Freeland, Canada's Foreign Secretary.
The records now being opened by the Polish government in Warsaw reveal that Freeland's maternal grandfather Michael (Mikhailo)
Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator from the beginning to the end of the war. He was given a powerful post, money, home and car by
the German Army in Cracow, then the capital of the German administration of the Galician region. His principal job was editor
in chief and publisher of a newspaper the Nazis created. His printing plant and other assets had been stolen from a Jewish newspaper
publisher, who was then sent to die in the Belzec concentration camp. During the German Army's winning phase of the war, Chomiak
celebrated in print the Wehrmacht's "success" at killing thousands of US Army troops. As the German Army was forced into retreat
by the Soviet counter-offensive, Chomiak was taken by the Germans to Vienna, where he continued to publish his Nazi propaganda,
at the same time informing for the Germans on other Ukrainians. They included fellow Galician Stepan Bandera, whose racism against
Russians Freeland has celebrated in print, and whom the current regime in Kiev has turned into a national hero.
Those Ukrainian 'Refugees' admitted to Canada in 1945 were almost certainly members of the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia 1.
These Ukie collaboraters – not to be confused with the other Ukie Nazi outfit – Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army -were
held responsible for the massacre of many Poles in the Lviv area the most infamous being carried out in the Polish village of
Huta Pienacka. In the massacre, the village was destroyed and between 500] and 1,000 of the inhabitants were killed. According
to Polish accounts, civilians were locked in barns that were set on fire while those attempting to flee were killed. That's about
par for the course.
Canada's response was as follows:
The Canadian Deschênes Commission was set up to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the collaborators
Memorial to SS-Galizien division in Chervone, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine
The Canadian "Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes" of October 1986, by the Honourable Justice Jules Deschênesconcluded that in
relation to membership in the Galicia Division:
''The Galicia Division (14. Waffen grenadier division der SS [gal.1]) should not be indicted as a group. The members of Galicia
Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division
have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this
Commission. Further, in the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia
Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.''
However, the Commission's conclusion failed to acknowledge or heed the International Military Tribunal's verdict at the Nuremberg
Trials, in which the entire Waffen-SSorganisation was declared a "criminal organization" guilty of war crimes. Also, the Deschênes
Commission in its conclusion only referenced the division as 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr.1), thus in legal
terms, only acknowledging the formation's activity after its name change in August 1944, while the massacre of Poles in Huta Pieniacka,
Pidkamin and Palikrowy occurred when the division was called SS Freiwilligen Division "Galizien". Nevertheless, a subsequent review
by Canada's Minister of Justice again confirmed that members of the Division were not implicated in war crimes.
Yes, the west looks after its Nazis and even makes them and their descendants political figureheads.
mark
Most of these people are so smugly and complacently convinced of their own moral superiority that they just can't see the hypocrisy
and doublethink involved in the event.
Meanwhile Owen Jones has taken to Twitter to rubbish allegations that a reign of terror exists at Guardian Towers – the socialist
firebrand is quoted as saying 'journalists are free to say whatever they like, so long as it doesn't stray too far from Guardian-groupthink'.
Good analysis Kit, of the cognitive dissonant ping pong being played out by Nazi sympathisers such as Hunt and Freeland.
The echo chamber of deceit is amplified again by the selective use of information and the ignoring of relevant facts, such
as the miss reporting yesterday by Reuters of the Italian Neo-Nazi haul of weapons by the police, having not Russian but Ukrainian
links.
Not a word in the WMSM about this devious miss-reporting as the creation of fake news in action. But what would you expect?
Living as I do in Russia I can assure anyone reading this that the media freedom here is on a par with the West and somewhat
better as there is no paranoia about a fictitious enemy – Russians understand that the West is going through an existential crisis
(Brexit in the UK, Trump and the Clinton war of sameness in the US and Macron and Merkel in the EU). A crisis of Liberalism as
the failed life-support of capitalism. But hey, why worry about the politics when there is bigger fish to fry. Such as who will
pay me to dance?
The answer is clear from what Kit has writ. The government will pay the piper. How sweet.
I'd like to thank Kit for sitting through such a turgid masquerade and as I'm rather long in the tooth I do remember the old
BBC schools of journalism in Yelsin's Russia. What I remember is that old devious Auntie Beeb was busy training would be hopefuls
in the art of discretion regarding how the news is formed, or formulated.
In other words your audience. And it ain't the public
The British government's "Online Harms" White Paper has a whole section devoted to "disinformation" (ie, any facts, opinions,
analyses, evaluations, critiques that are critical of the elite's actual disinformation). If these proposals become law, the government
will have effective control over the Internet and we will be allowed access to their disinformation, shop and watch cute cat videos.
Question This
The liberal news media & hypocrisy, who would have ever thought you'd see those words in the same sentence.
But what do you expect from professional liars, politicians & 'their' free press?
Can this shit show get any worse? Yes, The other day I wrote to my MP regards the SNP legislating against the truth, effectively
making it compulsory to lie! Mr Blackford as much as called me a transphobic & seemed to go to great length publishing his neo-liberal
ideological views in some scottish rag, on how right is wrong & fact is turned into fiction & asked only those that agreed with
him contact him.
Tim Jenkins
"The science or logical consistency of true premise, cannot take place or bear fruit, when all communication and information is
'marketised and weaponised' to a mindset of possession and control."
B.Steere
Mikalina
I saw, somewhere (but can't find it now) a law or a prospective law which goes under the guise of harassment of MPs to include
action against constituents who 'pester' them.
I only emailed him once! That's hardly harassment. Anyway I sent it with proton-mail via vpn & used a false postcode using only
my first name so unlikely my civil & sincere correspondence will see me locked up for insisting my inalienable rights of freedom
of speech & beliefs are protected. But there again the state we live in, i may well be incarcerated for life, for such an outrageous
expectation.
Where to?
"The Guardian is struggling for money"
Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets.
Harry Stotle
Its the brazen nature of the conference that is especially galling, but what do you expect when crooks and liars no longer feel
they even have to pretend?
Nothing will change so long as politicians (or their shady backers) are never held to account for public assets diverted toward
a rapacious off-shore economic system, or the fact millions of lives have been shattered by the 'war on terror' and its evil twin,
'humanatarian regime change' (while disingenuous Labour MPs wail about the 'horrors' of antisemitism rather than the fact their
former leader is a key architect of the killings).
Kit remains a go-to voice when deconstructing claims made by political figures who clearly regard the MSM as a propaganda vehicle
for promoting western imperialism – the self-satisfied smugness of cunts like Jeremy Cunt stand in stark contrast to a real journalist
being tortured by the British authorities just a few short miles away.
It's a sligtly depressing thought but somebody has the unenviable task of monitoring just how far our politicians have drifted
from the everyday concerns of the 'just about managing' and as I say Mr Knightly does a fine job in informing readers what the
real of agenda of these media love-ins are actually about – it goes without saying a very lengthy barge pole is required when
the Saudis are invited but not Russia.
Where to?
This Media Freedom Conference is surely a creepy theatre of the absurd.
It is a test of what they can get away with.
Mikalina
Yep. Any soviet TV watcher would recognise this immediately. Message? THIS is the reality – and you are powerless.
mark
When are they going to give us the Ministry of Truth we so desperately need?
"... We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.' ..."
"... Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the public. ..."
"... All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here , and here .) ..."
"... The purpose of this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.' ..."
Here was, of course, another surreal spectacle, this time courtesy of one of the Deep State's most dangerous, reviled, and divisive
figures, a notable protagonist in the Russia-Gate conspiracy, and America's most senior diplomat no less.
Not only is it difficult to accept that the former CIA Director actually believes what he is saying, well might we ask, "Who can
believe Mike Pompeo?"
And here's also someone whose manifest cynicism, hypocrisy, and chutzpah would embarrass the much-derided
scribes and Pharisees of Biblical days.
We have Pompeo on record recently in a rare moment of
honesty admitting – whilst laughing his ample ass off, as if recalling some "Boy's Own Adventure" from his misspent youth with a
bunch of his mates down at the local pub – that under his watch as CIA Director:
We lied, cheated, we stole we had entire training courses.'
It may have been one of the few times in his wretched existence that Pompeo didn't speak with a forked tongue.
At all events, his candour aside, we can assume safely that this reactionary, monomaniacal, Christian Zionist 'end-timer' passed
all the Company's "training courses" with flying colours.
According to Matthew Rosenberg
of the New York Times, all this did not stop Pompeo however from name-checking Wikileaks when it served his own interests. Back
in 2016 at the height of the election campaign, he had ' no compunction about pointing people toward emails stolen* by Russian hackers
from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks."
[NOTE: Rosenberg's omission of the word "allegedly" -- as in "emails allegedly stolen" -- is a dead giveaway of bias on his part
(a journalistic Freudian slip perhaps?), with his employer
being one of those MSM marques leading the charge with the "Russian Collusion" 'story'. For a more insightful view of the source
of these emails and the skullduggery and thuggery that attended Russia-Gate, readers are encouraged to
check this out.]
And this is of course The Company we're talking about, whose past and present relationship with the media might be summed up in
two words:
Operation Mockingbird (OpMock). Anyone vaguely familiar with the well-documented Grand Deception that was OpMock, arguably the
CIA's most enduring, insidious, and successful
psy-ops gambit, will know what
we're talking about. (See
here ,
here ,
here , and
here .) At its most basic, this operation was all about propaganda and censorship, usually operating in tandem to ensure all
the bases are covered.
After opining that the MSM is 'totally infiltrated' by the CIA and various other agencies, for his part former NSA whistleblower
William Binney recently added , ' When it
comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other
statements about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically the lapdogs for the government.'
We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.'
In order to provide a broader and deeper perspective, we should now consider the views of a few others on the subjects at hand,
along with some history. In a 2013 piece musing on the modern significance of the practice, my compatriot John Pilger
ecalled a time when he met
Leni Riefenstahl
back in 70s and asked her about her films that 'glorified the Nazis'.
Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger
noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's
spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the
"submissive void" of the public.
All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria,
blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also
impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included
bankers, financiers, industrialists,
and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the
ill-fated
beer-hall
putsch. (See
here , and here .)
" Triumph " apparently still resonates today. To the surprise of few one imagines, such was the impact of the film -- as casually
revealed in the excellent 2018 Alexis Bloom documentary Divide and
Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes -- it elicited no small amount of admiration from arguably the single most influential propagandist
of recent times.
[Readers might wish to check out Russell Crowe's recent portrayal of Ailes in Stan's mini-series
The Loudest Voice , in my view one the best performances of the man's career.]
In a recent piece unambiguously titled "Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems", my other compatriot Caitlin Johnstone also
had a few things to
say about the subject, echoing Orwell when she observed it was all about "controlling the narrative".
Though I'd suggest the greater "root" problem is our easy propensity to ignore this reality, pretend it doesn't or won't affect
us, or reject it as conspiratorial nonsense, in this, of course, she's correct. As she cogently observes,
I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don't have the time or energy to write about every single narrative control
tool that the US-centralised empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn
fast, because they're just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.'
Fittingly, in a discussion encompassing amongst other things history, language, power, and dissent, he opined, ' Determining how
individuals communicate is' an objective which represents for the power elites 'the best chance' [they] have to control what people
think. This translates as: The more control 'we' have over what the proles think, the more 'we' can reduce the inherent risk for
elites in democracy.
' Clumsy men', Saul went on to say, 'try to do this through power and fear. Heavy-handed men running heavy-handed systems attempt
the same thing through police-enforced censorship. The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on creating intellectual
systems which control expression through the communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of censorship
and uniformed men.'
In other words, along with assuming it is their right to take it in the first place, ' those who take power will always try to
change the established language ', presumably to better facilitate their hold on it and/or legitimise their claim to it.
For Oliver Boyd-Barrett, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open
exchange of ideas.' Yet for the author of the recently published
RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media , 'No such infrastructure exists.'
The mainstream media he says, is 'owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates'
that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates:
The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies
that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.'
Of course the word "inability" suggests the MSM view themselves as having some responsibility for maintaining such an egalitarian
news and information environment. They don't of course, and in truth, probably never really have! A better word would be "unwilling",
or even "refusal". The corporate media all but epitomise the " plutocratic self-regard" that is characteristic of "oligopoly capitalism".
Indeed, the MSM collectively functions as advertising, public relations/lobbying entities for Big Corp, in addition to acting
as its Praetorian bodyguard , protecting their secrets,
crimes, and lies from exposure. Like all other companies they are beholden to their shareholders (profits before truth and people),
most of whom it can safely be assumed are no strangers to "self-regard", and could care less about " histories, perspectives and
vocabularies" that run counter to their own interests.
It was Aussie social scientist Alex Carey who
pioneered the study of nationalism ,
corporatism , and moreso for our purposes herein, the
management (read: manipulation) of public opinion, though all three have important links (a story for another time). For Carey, the
following conclusion was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that
we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' This former farmer
from Western Australia became one of the world's acknowledged experts on propaganda and the manipulation of the truth.
Prior to embarking on his academic career, Carey was a successful sheep
grazier . By all accounts, he was a first-class judge of the
animal from which he made his early living, leaving one to ponder if this expertise gave him a unique insight into his main area
of research!
In any event, Carey in time sold the farm and travelled to the U.K. to study psychology, apparently a long-time ambition. From
the late fifties until his death in 1988, he was a senior lecturer in psychology and industrial relations at the Sydney-based University
of New South Wales, with his research being lauded by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, both of whom have had a thing
or three to say over the years about The Big Shill. In fact such was his admiration, Pilger
described him as "a second Orwell", which in anyone's lingo
is a big call.
In fact, for anyone with an interest in how public opinion is moulded and our perceptions are managed and manipulated, in whose
interests they are done so and to what end, it is as essential reading as any of the work of other more famous names. This tome came
complete with a foreword by Chomsky, so enamoured was the latter of Carey's work.
For Carey, the three "most significant developments" in the political economy of the twentieth century were:
the growth of democracy the growth of corporate power; and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against
democracy.
For Carey, it is an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is 'distinctive'
of totalitarian regimes. Yet as he stresses: the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda
is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is
vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not).' In this context, 'conventional
wisdom" becomes conventional ignorance; as for "common sense", maybe not so much.
The purpose of this propaganda
barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as
possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic
right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering
business interests.'
An extreme example of this view playing itself right under our noses and over decades was the cruel fiction of the "
trickle down effect " (TDE) -- aka the 'rising tide that would lift all yachts' -- of
Reaganomics . One of several mantras that defined Reagan's
overarching political shtick, the TDE was by any measure, decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said "torrent" was going up
not down. This reality as we now know was not in Reagan's glossy economic brochure to be sure, and it may have been because the Gipper
confused his prepositions and verbs.
Yet as the GFC of 2008 amply demonstrated, it culminated in a free-for all, dog eat dog, anything goes, everyman for himself form
of cannibal (or anarcho) capitalism -- an updated, much
improved version of the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much reminiscent of the
Gilded Age and the
Robber Barons who 'infested' it, only one
that doesn't just eat its young, it eats itself!
Making the World Safe for Plutocracy
In the increasingly dysfunctional, one-sided political economy we inhabit then, whether it's widgets or wars or anything in between,
few people realise the degree to which our opinions, perceptions, emotions, and views are shaped and manipulated by propaganda (and
its similarly 'evil twin' censorship ,) its most adept practitioners, and those elite, institutional, political, and corporate entities
that seek out their expertise.
It is now just over a hundred years since the practice of propaganda took a giant leap forward, then in the service of persuading
palpably reluctant Americans that the war raging in Europe at the time was their war as well.
This was at a time when Americans had just voted their then-president
Woodrow Wilson back into office for a second term, a victory
largely achieved on the back of the promise he'd
"keep us out of the War." Americans were
very much in what was one of their most
isolationist
phases , and so Wilson's promise resonated with them.
But over time they were convinced of the need to become involved by a distinctly different appeal to their political sensibilities.
This "appeal" also dampened the isolationist mood, one which it has to be said was not embraced by most of the political, banking,
and business elites of the time, most of whom stood to lose big-time if the Germans won, and/or who were already profiting or benefitting
from the business of war.
For a president who "kept us out of the war", this wasn't going to be an easy 'pitch'. In order to sell the war the president
established the Committee on Public Information
(aka the Creel Committee) for the purposes of publicising the rationale for the war and from there, garnering support for it
from the general public.
Either way, Bernays 'combined their perspectives and synthesised them into an applied science', which he then 'branded' "public
relations".
For its part the Creel committee struggled with its brief from the off; but Bernays worked with them to persuade Americans their
involvement in the war was justified -- indeed necessary -- and to that end he devised the brilliantly inane slogan,
"making the world safe for democracy"
.
Thus was born arguably the first
great propaganda catch-phrases of the modern era, and certainly one of the most portentous. The following sums up Bernays's unabashed
mindset:
The conscious, intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power
of our country.'
The rest is history (sort of), with Americans becoming more willing to not just support the war effort but encouraged to view
the Germans and their allies as evil brutes threatening democracy and freedom and the 'American way of life', however that might've
been viewed then. From a geopolitical and historical perspective, it was an asinine premise of course, but nonetheless an extraordinary
example of how a few well chosen words tapped into the collective psyche of a country that was decidedly opposed to any U.S involvement
in the war and turned that mindset completely on its head.
' [S]aving the world for democracy' (or some 'cover version' thereof) has since become America's positioning statement, 'patriotic'
rallying cry, and the "Get-out-of-Jail Free" card for its war and its white collar criminal clique.
At all events it was by any measure, a stroke of genius on Bernays's part; by appealing to people's basic fears and desires, he
could engineer consent on a mass scale. It goes without saying it changed the course of history in more ways than one. That the U.S.
is to this day still using a not dissimilar meme to justify its
"foreign entanglements" is testament to both its utility and durability.
The reality as we now know was markedly different of course. They have almost always been about power, empire, control, hegemony,
resources, wealth, opportunity, profit, dispossession, keeping existing capitalist structures intact and well-defended, and crushing
dissent and opposition.
The Bewildered Herd
It is instructive to note that the template for 'manufacturing consent' for war had already been forged by the British. And the
Europeans did not 'sleepwalk'
like some " bewildered herd ' into this conflagration.
For twenty years prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914, the then stewards of the British Empire had been diligently preparing
the ground for what they viewed as a preordained clash with their rivals for empire the Germans.
To begin with, contrary to the opinion of the general populace over one hundred years later, it was not the much touted German
aggression and militarism, nor their undoubted imperial ambitions, which precipitated its outbreak. The stewards of the British Empire
were not about to let the Teutonic upstarts chow down on their imperial lunch as it were, and set about unilaterally and preemptively
crushing Germany and with it any ambitions it had for creating its own imperial domain in competition with the Empire upon which
Ol' Sol never set.
The "Great War" is worth noting here for other reasons. As documented so by Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty in their two books
covering the period from 1890-1920, we learn much about propaganda, which attest to its extraordinary power, in particular its
power to distort
reality en masse in enduring and subversive ways.
In reality, the only thing "great" about World War One was the degree to which the masses fighting for Britain were conned via
propaganda and censorship into believing this war was necessary, and the way the official narrative of the war was sustained for
posterity via the very same means. "Great" maybe, but not in a good way!
The horrendous carnage and destruction that resulted from it was of course unprecedented, the global effects of which linger on
now well over one hundred years later.
Such was the
enduring power
of the propaganda that today most folks would have great difficulty in accepting the following; this is a short summary of historical
realities revealed by Macgregor and Docherty that are at complete odds with the official narrative, the political discourse, and
the school textbooks:
It was Great Britain (supported by France and Russia) and not Germany who was the principal aggressor in the events and actions that
let to the outbreak of war; The British had for twenty years prior to 1914 viewed Germany as its most dangerous economic and imperial
rival, and fully anticipated that a war was inevitable; In the U.K. and the U.S., various factions worked feverishly to ensure the
war went on for as long as possible, and scuttled peacemaking efforts from the off; key truths about this most consequential of geopolitical
conflicts have been concealed for well over one hundred years, with no sign the official record will change; very powerful forces
(incl. a future US president) amongst U.S. political, media, and economic elites conspired to eventually convince an otherwise unwilling
populace in America that U.S. entry onto the war was necessary; those same forces and many similar groups in the U.K. and Europe
engaged in everything from war profiteering, destruction/forging of war records, false-flag ops, treason, conspiracy to wage aggressive
war, and direct efforts to prolong the war by any means necessary, many of which will rock folks to their very core.
But peace was not on the agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so embarrassing and costly, some key players in the
British government were willing to talk about peace. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be thrown under
the bus. The unelected European leaders had one common bond: They would fight Germany until she was crushed.
Prolonging the Agony details how this secret cabal organised to this end the change of government without a single vote being
cast. David Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister
in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister
in France. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Lord
Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the
decision-makers in British politics.
Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till
the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America.
Propaganda Always Wins
But just as the pioneering adherents of propaganda back in the day might never have dreamt how sophisticated and all-encompassing
the practice would become, nor would the citizenry at large have anticipated the extent to which the industry has facilitated an
entrenched, rapacious plutocracy at the expense of our economic opportunity, our financial and material security, our physical, social
and cultural environment, our values and attitudes, and increasingly, our basic democratic rights and freedoms.
We now live in the Age of the Big Shill -- cocooned in a submissive void no less -- an era where nothing can be taken on face
value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken
at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where 'open-book' history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable,
upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed
neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual -- albeit dubious -- freedoms.
More broadly, it's the "Roger Ailes" of this world -- acting on behalf of the power elites who after all are their paymasters
-- who create the intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures, whilst ensuring these systems
require only 'the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.'
They are the shapers and moulders of the discourse that passes for the accepted lingua franca of the increasingly globalised,
interconnected, corporatised political economy of the planet. Throughout this process they 'will always try to change the established
language.'
And we can no longer rely on our elected representatives to honestly represent us and our interests. Whether this decision making
is taking place inside or outside the legislative process, these processes are well and truly in the grip of the banks and financial
institutions and transnational organisations. In whose interests are they going to be more concerned with?
We saw this all just after the
Global Financial Crisis
(GFC) when the very people who brought the system to the brink, made billions off the dodge for their banks and millions for
themselves, bankrupted hundreds of thousands of American families, were called upon by the U.S. government to fix up the mess, and
to all intents given a blank cheque to so do.
That the U.S. is at even greater risk now of economic
implosion is something few serious pundits would dispute, and a testament to the effectiveness of the snow-job perpetrated upon Americans
regarding the causes, the impact, and the implications of the 2008 meltdown going forward.
In most cases, one accepts almost by definition such disconnects (read: hidden agendas) are the rule rather than the exception,
hence the multi-billion foundation -- and global reach and impact -- of the propaganda business. This in itself is a key indicator
as to why organisations place so much importance on this aspect of managing their affairs.
At the very least, once corporations saw how the psychology of persuasion could be leveraged to manipulate consumers and politicians
saw the same with the citizenry and even its own workers, the growth of the industry was assured.
As Riefenstahl noted during her chinwag with Pilger after he asked if those embracing the "submissive void" included the liberal,
educated bourgeoisie? " Everyone ," she said.
By way of underscoring her point, she added enigmatically: 'Propaganda always wins if you allow it'.
Greg Maybury is a freelance writer based in Perth, Australia. His main areas of interest are American history and politics
in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military, and geopolitical affairs. For 5 years he has regularly
contributed to a diverse range of news and opinion sites, including OpEd News, The Greanville Post, Consortium News, Dandelion Salad,
Global Research, Dissident Voice, OffGuardian, Contra Corner, International Policy Digest, the Hampton Institute, and others.
nottheonly1
This brilliant essay is proof of the reflective nature of the Universe. The worse the propaganda and oppression becomes, the greater
the likelihood such an essay will be written.
Such is the sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used today -- afforded increasingly by 'computational
propaganda' via automated scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and algorithms and the like, along with the barely veiled
censorship and information gatekeeping practised by Google and Facebook and other tech behemoths -- it's become one of the
most troubling aspects of the technological/social media revolution.
Very rarely can one experience such a degree of vindication. My moniker 'nottheonly1' has received more meaning with this precise
depiction of the long history of the manipulation of the masses. Recent events have destroyed but all of my confidence that there
might be a peaceful way out of this massive dilemma. Due to this sophistication in controlling the narrative, it has now become
apparent that we have arrived at a moment in time where total lawlessness reigns. 'Lawlessness' in this case means the loss of
common law and the use of code law to create ever new restrictions for free speech and liberty at large.
Over the last weeks, comments written on other discussion boards have unleashed a degree of character defamation and ridicule
for the most obvious crimes perpetrated on the masses through propaganda. In this unholy union of constant propaganda via main
stream 'media' with the character defamation by so called 'trolls' – which are actually virtual assassins of those who write the
truth – the ability of the population, or parts thereof to connect with, or search for like minded people is utterly destroyed.
This assault on the online community has devastating consequences. Those who have come into the cross hairs of the unintelligence
agencies will but turn away from the internet. Leaving behind an ocean of online propaganda and fake information. Few are now
the web sites on which it is possible to voice one's personal take on the status quo.
There is one word that describes these kind of activities precisely: traitor. Those who engage in the character defamation
of commenters, or authors per se, are traitors to humanity. They betray the collective consciousness with their poisonous attacks
of those who work for a sea change of the status quo. The owner class has all game pieces positioned. The fact that Julian Assange
is not only a free man, but still without a Nobel price for peace, while war criminals are recipients, shows just how much the
march into absolute totalitarianism has progressed. Bernays hated the masses and offered his 'services' to manipulate them often
for free.
Even though there are more solutions than problems, the time has come where meaningful participation in the search for such
solution has been made unbearable. It is therefore that a certain fatalism has developed – from resignation to the acceptance
of the status quo as being inevitable. Ancient wisdom has created a proverb that states 'This too, will pass'. While that is a
given, there are still enough Human Beings around that are determined to make a difference. To this group I count the author of
this marvelous, albeit depressing essay. Thank you more that words can express. And thank you, OffGuardian for being one of the
last remaining places where discourse is possible.
Really great post! Thanks. I'm part of the way through reading Alex Carey's book: "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate
Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty," referenced in this article. I've learned more about the obviously verifiable history of
U.S. corporate propaganda in the first four chapters than I learned gaining a "minor" in history in 1974 (not surprisingly I can
now clearly see). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in just how pervasive, entrenched and long-standing are the
propaganda systems shaping public perception, thought and behavior in America and the West.
Norcal
Wow Greg Maybury great essay, congratulations. This quote is brilliant, I've never see it before, "For Carey, the following conclusion
was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from
propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' "
Too, Rodger Ailes was the man credited with educating Nixon up as how to "use" the TV media, and Ailes never looked back as
he manipulated media at will. Thank you!
nondimenticare
That is also one of the basic theses of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech.
vexarb
I read in 'Guns, Germs and Steel' about Homo Sapiens and his domesticated animals. Apparently we got on best in places where we
could find animals that are very like us: sheep, cattle, horses and other herd animals which instinctively follow their Leader.
I think our cousins the chimpanzee are much the same; both species must have inherited this common trait from some pre-chimpanzee
ancestor who had found great survival value in passing on the sheeple trait to their progeny. As have the sheep themselves.
By the way, has anybody observed sheeple behaviour in ants and bees? For instance, quietly following a Leader ant to their
doom, or noisily ganging up to mob a worker bee that the Queen does not like?
I'd say the elites are both for and against. Competing factions.
It's clear that many are interested in overturning democracy, whilst others want to exploit it.
The average grunt on the street is in the fire, regardless of the pan chosen by the elites.
It attests inventiveness and vicious amorality of neoliberals, who now promote the idea that criticizing neoliberalism and removing
Democratic party in the USA and Labor Party in the UK from clutches of Clintonism//Brairism is inherently Anti-Semitic ;-)
Israel lobby wants to extent the anti-Semitism smear to any critique of Israel. which is of course standard dirty trick in witch
hunts like neo-McCarthyism.
Notable quotes:
"... This, of course, is compounded by the over-amplifying of anti-Semitism by the media and the alacrity with which it has been taken up by Corbyn opponents, including hypocrites who floated "rootless cosmopolitan" criticisms of Ed Miliband when it suited just a few years ago. ..."
"... The resolution of the anti-Semitism crisis then is not a matter of compromise -- for each side the issue will only go away with the complete crushing and driving out of the party of the other. ..."
"... A good analysis. But, it emphasizes the point I made in the previous post, which is that, the right are currently engaged in an all out push to remove Corbyn and crush the left with the same old bureaucratic means. Whatever else Williamson may or may not be guilty of, his point that the leadership have facilitated this situation by their continual appeasement of the right is absolutely valid. Its that he is being attacked for, not anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Coming on the day when the FT have a column seriously positing that criticizing capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic, it seems to me that dancing on the head of a pin ..."
"... As many of the comments on your blog on Williamson attest, the salient feature of this - well, call it witch-hunt for the sake of argument - is the double standards where we have to be whiter than white, whilst no account whatsoever is taken of the most egregious racism elsewhere. ..."
"... The other nonsense that has grown up is that it is only those that suffer any form of discrimination who can define what that discrimination is, i.e. only Jews can define anti-Semitism, only black people can define racism against them, only women can define discrimination against women. ..."
"... That then assumes that the members of each of these groups are themselves homogeneous, and agreed in such definitions. In reality, it means that dominant elements, i.e. those connected to the ruling class and ruling ideas get to make those determinations. ..."
"... If we look at anti-Semitism, for example, it is quite clear that there is no agreement amongst Jews on what constitutes anti-Semitism. The JVL, certainly have a different definition than the JLM. ..."
"... Secker wrote a piece in the Morning Star last year comparing claims of anti-Semitism within Labour to the story of the emperor's new clothes. ..."
"... Given that the actual data, even allowing for all of the spurious and mischievous accusations of anti-Semitism in the party, made by right-wing enemies of the the party, and particularly of Corbyn and his supporters, amounts to only 0.1% of the membership, and given that of these, 40% were straight away found to be accusations against people who were not even LP members, with a further 20%, being found to have absolutely no evidence to back them, its quite possible that individual members of the LP, have never seen any instance of it. ..."
"... Take out all those mischievous and malicious allegations made in order to whip up the hysteria, so as to to damage the party, by its enemies, and you arrive at a figure of only 400 potential cases, out of a membership of 600,000, which is 1 member in 1500. ..."
"... In fact, based upon the actual facts, as opposed to the fiction and factional hysteria that is being whipped up by right-wing opponents of Corbyn and the party, and by supporters of Zionism for their own narrow political reasons, the chances are about 14: that you will never see any even potential instance of anti-Semitism, even on the narrow definition that the party has now imposed upon itself, which comes pretty close if not entirely to identifying anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, or even just criticism of the current Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu. ..."
"... In the US, Jewish groups that have long been ardent defenders of Israel have more recently come out to criticize the regime of Netanyahu, and the actions of the Israeli state. The main defenders of Zionism, besides the actual Zionists themselves, appear to be people like the AWL, who for whatever reason hitched their wagon to Zionist ideology some time ago, ..."
"... Just because the only case of stabbing I have witnessed was more than 50 years ago, does not, and should not lead me to think that knife crime was worse 50 years ago than it is today. The actual data would seem to suggest that cases of anti-Semitism were greater in the LP in previous times than they are currently, contrary to what the media and those with factional motives would have us believe. ..."
"... The apparent level of anti-semitism in Labour is a modern phenomenon turbo-charged and amplified by social media. People have their views reinforced within their bunkers where anti-Israeli memes become anti-Zionist and then become anti-Semitic. It is much easier to send an anonymous email than a letter. ..."
"... I wouldn't trust Lansman on this issue, any more than on many others. Lansman abolished democracy, to the extent it existed to begin with, by turning it into his personal fiefdom, reminiscent of the activities of Hyndman and the SDF. His position on anti-Semitism, and fighting the witch-hunt, and of appeasing the Blair-right's as they attacked Corbyn, has been appalling throughout. ..."
"... Having abolished any democracy in Momentum, which he now runs as its CEO, he also appears to want Corbyn to do the same thing with the Labour Party, abolishing its internal democratic procedures, and putting himself personally in charge of those disciplinary measures ..."
"... Its notable that, yesterday, when the Welsh Labour Grass Roots organisation came out to call for Williamson's suspension to be reversed, Kinnock and other Blair-rights immediately called for an investigation into them, ..."
"... This truly is reaching into the realms of McCarthyism, where you are found guilty not just of witchcraft, but of consorting with witches, or even having an opinion as to whether an individual charged with witchcraft is guilty, or even the extent to which the number of witches amongst might be exaggerated. ..."
"... It's not a factually accurate description of global political realities, because Israel does not control the US, if that is what the image is intended to imply. But, the message, is thereby anti-Israeli state, not anti-Semitic. It could only be considered anti-Semitic, if in fact you are a Zionist and claim that Israel and Jews are are interchangeable terms, which they are not. ..."
"... If we replace Zionism with Toryism, and Jew with British, the situation becomes fairly clear. If the we show the British state as being controlled by Tories, who implement their ideology of Toryism, in what way would criticism of the British state, under the control of such Tories, or criticism of Tories be the equivalent of British people as a whole? ..."
"... The hope of a Two-State Solution disappeared long ago, and was never credible. It simply allows Zionists to proclaim they are in favour of it, whilst doing everything to make it practically impossible, such as extending West Bank Settlements. The solution must flow from a struggle for democratic rights for Israeli Arabs, and for a right for all Arabs in occupied territories to be extended the same rights as any other Israeli, including the right to vote, and send representatives to the Knesset. As I argued thirty years ago, the longer-term solution is a Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine, guaranteeing democratic rights to all, as part of building a wider Federal Republic of MENA. ..."
"... Jim Denham: imperialist lackey and sycophant turned Witch hunter in chief ..."
"... Let us be very clear about what this witch hunt is about, it is about purging from public life any credible and effective opposition to Israel in particular and more generally opposition to the imperialist barbarians of the imperialist core. It is about driving from universities, social media and intellectual life any form of opposition to the interests of the imperialists. ..."
"... A UN report has concluded that Israel deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of protesting civilians, including children and disabled people and it shot 20,000+ people (yes 20,000+!). The UN says this likely a war crime. Why are the noble defenders of the Palestinian cause in the dock and not notorious Palestinian haters like Jim Denham? ..."
"... These attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, repeated in all of the most aggressive imperialist countries, are simply a proxy attack on the Palestinian people themselves. ..."
"... Jim Denham's comment here illustrates the problem entirely. The picture he has linked to shows an alien symbiote having attached itself to the face of the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty here represents the US. The symbiote has on its back the Israeli Flag, and likewise, thereby represents the state of Israel. The picture therefore, represents the well-worn, and clearly factually wrong meme that Israel controls the US. ..."
"... But, as a Zionist organisation, the AWL and its members cannot distinguish between the state of Israel and Jews, so they cannot distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel, and criticism if Jews. For them, as for the Zionist ideology of the state of Israel, which is most clearly manifest in the ideology of its current political leadership, in the form of the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, with the recent introduction of blatantly racist laws that discriminate even more openly against not Jewish Israeli citizens, and with his willingness to try to keep his corrupt regime in office by going into coalition with an avowedly Neo-Nazi party that until recent times was considered beyond the pale, even by most Zionists, the term Zionism is synonymous with the term Jew. So, any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel is for them immediately equated with anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Once again Jim Denham reefuses to engage in rational debate, and again resorts instead to his assumption that Israel = Jews, as well as his crude attempts at a typical Stalinist amalgam, to conflate the views of his opponents with some hate figure. ..."
"... Again Jim Denham makes the conflation of Israel and Jews explicit when he says, "This image also plays on the tired and disgraceful antisemitic 'conspiracy theory' trope of undue Israeli (Jewish) influence on world affairs." ..."
"... The way that the right are using anti-Zionism as the equivalent for anti-Semitism, and the appeasement of that attack has led them to widen the scope of that attack. As Labour List reports , right-wing Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh, is now claiming that to be anti-capitalist is also to be "anti-Semitic". The idea was put forward also by former Blair-right spin doctor, John McTernan, who wrote an article in the FT to that same effect ..."
"... As the right-wing extend their witch-hunt against socialists in the LP to claim that Marxists are necessarily misogynist, as well as anti-Semitic – and the same logic presented by McDonagh, McTernon, and Phillips would presumably mean that the Left must also be xenophobic, homophobic, anti- Green, and many other charges they want to throw into the mix – it will be interesting to see whether and to what extent the AWL, join them in that assault, in the same way they have done in their promotion of Zionism. ..."
The problem, however, is because this is overlaid by factional struggle ...
This, of course, is compounded by the over-amplifying of anti-Semitism by the media and the alacrity with which it has been taken
up by Corbyn opponents, including hypocrites who floated "rootless cosmopolitan" criticisms of Ed Miliband when it suited just a
few years ago.
Here's the thing. Just because your opponents take up an issue, some times cynically and in bad faith. and use it to inflict as
much damage as they can does not mean the problem is fictitious.
Precisely because they can point to Facebook groups full of useful fools, and Twitter accounts with Corbyn-supporting hashtags
acting as if the Israel lobby and "Zionists" are the only active force in British politics, this is the stuff that makes the attacks
effective and trashes the standing of the party in the eyes of many Jews and the community's allies and friends.
The institutional anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is, therefore, somewhat different to the kind you find in other institutions.
It is sustained by the battle for the party, a grim battlefront in a zero sum game of entrenched position vs entrenched position.
As such, whatever the leadership do, whatever new processes the General Secretary introduces for one side it will never be enough
because, as far as many of them concerned, the leadership are politically illegitimate; and for the other it's a sop and capitulation.
The resolution of the anti-Semitism crisis then is not a matter of compromise -- for each side the issue will only go away
with the complete crushing and driving out of the party of the other. A situation that can only poison the well further, and
guarantee anti-Semitism won't honestly and comprehensively be confronted.
A good analysis. But, it emphasizes the point I made in the previous post, which is that, the right are currently engaged
in an all out push to remove Corbyn and crush the left with the same old bureaucratic means. Whatever else Williamson may or may
not be guilty of, his point that the leadership have facilitated this situation by their continual appeasement of the right is
absolutely valid. Its that he is being attacked for, not anti-Semitism.
It is first necessary to close ranks, and defeat the assault of the Right. As Marr said to Blair this morning, had Prescott
announced he was forming a separate group, and was establishing his own witch-hunting bureaucratic apparatus in the party, Blair
would have sacked him immediately - actually not so easy as the Deputy is elected. But the thrust is valid. Unless Corbyn deals
with Watson, the Right will roll over the Left, despite the huge disparity in numbers.
Again it comes down to whether Corbyn is up for that task, or whether we need a leadership of the left with a bit more backbone
to see it through.
I'm afraid this IS due to the "intersectionality" cult, whereby certain groups are always privileged and wrong, and some are always
oppressed and right. Jews are, according to this "analysis", the uber-privileged and uber-white.
We've heard several times that according to "intersectionality" that it's impossible to be racist against white people because
racism requires both prejudice and power, and white people are by definition powerful. Therefore, anti-Semitism is dismissed because
it can't be a thing because Jews are all-powerful and even more oppressive than other whites.
Those who don't subscribe to all of these beliefs are nevertheless tinged with them, which is why people who aren't staunch
antisemites will nevertheless fail to take anti-Semitism seriously.
Coming on the day when the FT have a column seriously positing that criticizing capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic, it
seems to me that dancing on the head of a pin about whether the 'careless' anti-Semitism you've described means the party
is institutionally anti-Semitic is rather missing the point. (OK, the column is by John McTernan, but the FT gave him column inches
to argue that case, and I guess they didn't mean it as the satire it most certainly is.)
As many of the comments on your
blog on Williamson attest, the salient feature of this - well, call it witch-hunt for the sake of argument - is the double standards
where we have to be whiter than white, whilst no account whatsoever is taken of the most egregious racism elsewhere. We live
in society: we can never, ever be that whiter than white - especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine, which is so full of contradictions
and traps for the unwary (e.g. the position of the Israeli state claiming to speak for all Jewry around the world, in the way
that the Board of Deputies position themselves as speaking for all British Jews - neither close to being true, but small wonder
that opponents of what they do and stand for take that universality at face value.)
The fight we need to take up is to compare and contrast just how pro-active the current party is against anti-Semitism in its
constitution and machinery with the glaring absence of such elsewhere, and to present a positive picture of what we are doing,
rather than mumbling apologetically into our beards. We need to take the fight to the rigged system at the same time as being
unstinting in rooting out the troubling stuff.
The other nonsense that has grown up is that it is only those that suffer any form of discrimination who can define what that
discrimination is, i.e. only Jews can define anti-Semitism, only black people can define racism against them, only women can define
discrimination against women.
That then assumes that the members of each of these groups are themselves homogeneous, and agreed in such definitions.
In reality, it means that dominant elements, i.e. those connected to the ruling class and ruling ideas get to make those determinations.
If we look at anti-Semitism, for example, it is quite clear that there is no agreement amongst Jews on what constitutes
anti-Semitism. The JVL, certainly have a different definition than the JLM.
But, just rationally, the concept that only those discriminated against get to define the discrimination is bonkers. Suppose
you come from Somalia or some other country that practices FGM, you could argue that it is part of your cultural heritage, and
that anyone seeking to prevent you from undertaking this barbaric practice was thereby racist, on your self-definition of what
that discrimination against you amounts to. Or Saudis might argue that it is racist to argue against their practice of lopping
off women's heads, or stoning them to death for adultery, including having been raped, etc.
The JVL come pretty close to arguing that there is *no* anti-Semitism in the Labour party (Jenny Manson, for instance, says she's
never witnessed any)and Glyn Secker wrote a piece in the Morning Star last year comparing claims of anti-Semitism within Labour
to the story of the emperor's new clothes.
Given that the actual data, even allowing for all of the spurious and mischievous accusations of anti-Semitism in the party,
made by right-wing enemies of the the party, and particularly of Corbyn and his supporters, amounts to only 0.1% of the membership,
and given that of these, 40% were straight away found to be accusations against people who were not even LP members, with a further
20%, being found to have absolutely no evidence to back them, its quite possible that individual members of the LP, have never
seen any instance of it.
Take out all those mischievous and malicious allegations made in order to whip up the hysteria, so as to to damage the
party, by its enemies, and you arrive at a figure of only 400 potential cases, out of a membership of 600,000, which is 1 member
in 1500. If the average branch size if 100 active members, it means on average there is one potential case of anti-Semitism
in every 15 branches. So, if you are a member in any of the other 14 branches, you would never see that one potential case of
anti-Semitism.
In fact, based upon the actual facts, as opposed to the fiction and factional hysteria that is being whipped up by right-wing
opponents of Corbyn and the party, and by supporters of Zionism for their own narrow political reasons, the chances are about
14: that you will never see any even potential instance of anti-Semitism, even on the narrow definition that the party has now
imposed upon itself, which comes pretty close if not entirely to identifying anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, or even just criticism
of the current Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu.
In the US, Jewish groups that have long been ardent defenders of Israel have more recently come out to criticize the regime
of Netanyahu, and the actions of the Israeli state. The main defenders of Zionism, besides the actual Zionists themselves, appear
to be people like the AWL, who for whatever reason hitched their wagon to Zionist ideology some time ago, probably in their
usual knee-jerk reaction of putting a plus sign wherever the SWP put a minus. Having done so, and as a result of the bureaucratic
centrist nature of the sect, they find themselves now having to follow through on the position they adopted on the basis of the
"practical politics" - opportunism - as it dictated itself to them at the time.
If, and probably more likely when, they change position, it will come as with all their previous changes of position with the
assertion that "nothing has changed", as when after claiming a few years ago that the LP was a stinking corpse - as they ridiculously
stood their own candidates in elections with the inevitable result - and the next minute proclaimed themselves as its most ardent
militants, as they sought to use their sharp elbows to gain positions on Momentum's leading bodies!
Incidentally, on the question of "observance", the only time I have seen someone get stabbed, is more than 50 years ago, when
I was at school. I've seen plenty of other violent stuff in the intervening period, for example, people getting glassed, people
having wrought iron tables smashed over their heads. My sister, who is several years older than me, and was out bopping during
the days of the Teddy Boys, saw more people getting slashed, in the 1950's, because the flick knife was the Ted's favoured weapon.
But, that doesn't mean that I disbelieve the media when it talks about the current spate of knife crimes. Its just that, however,
terrible such crimes are for those that suffer or witness them, and no matter how much the media that has to sensationalise every
story, for its own commercial purposes, talks about an epidemic or a knife crime crisis, the number of knife crimes per head of
population is extremely small.
The chances that 999 out of 1,000 of us will never be the victim of, or witness knife crime does not mean it doesn't exist.
But, those that then claim that the 999 out of 1,000 of us who say we have not seen it, must be somehow being dishonest, are not
dealing with the facts, and are simply fuelling a moral panic.
When some phenomena is statistically insignificant, which 1 in 1,500 cases, is, and when as with many such phenomena there
is no normal distribution of the occurrence of such cases - for example, knife crime will tend to be concentrated in particular
areas - trying to present any kind of rational analysis based upon personal observation is a mug's game.
Just because the only case of stabbing I have witnessed was more than 50 years ago, does not, and should not lead me to
think that knife crime was worse 50 years ago than it is today. The actual data would seem to suggest that cases of anti-Semitism
were greater in the LP in previous times than they are currently, contrary to what the media and those with factional motives
would have us believe. It is certainly thec ase that anti-Semitism is a bigger problem in the Tory party, and other right-wing
organisations than it is in the LP, again not that you would know that from the reporting of it, or from the attitude of certain
factional sects, such as the AWL.
Labour has 'much larger' group of antisemitic members which Corbyn has failed to deal with, Momentum founder warns
By Rob Merrick Deputy Political Editor The Independent, Monday 25 February 2019 16:10 |
Labour has "a much larger" group of antisemitic members than it recognises which Jeremy Corbyn has failed to "deal with", Momentum
founder Jon Lansman has warned.
The Labour leader's long-standing ally said "conspiracy theorists" had infiltrated the party – a consequence of its huge surge
in membership in recent years.
Mr Lansman stopped short of backing the call from Tom Watson, Labour's deputy leader, for Mr Corbyn to take personal charge
of the antisemitism complaints dogging Labour.
But he said: "I do think we have a major problem and it always seems to me that we underestimate the scale of it. I think it
is a widespread problem.
"I think it is now obvious that we have a much larger number of people with hardcore antisemitic opinions which, unfortunately,
is polluting the atmosphere in a lot of constituency parties and in particular online. We have to deal with these people."
The apparent level of anti-semitism in Labour is a modern phenomenon turbo-charged and amplified by social media. People
have their views reinforced within their bunkers where anti-Israeli memes become anti-Zionist and then become anti-Semitic. It
is much easier to send an anonymous email than a letter.
History is very much the tale of new technology transforming the potential of human behaviour and beliefs, and one of the oldest
beliefs ("the blood libel") is anti-Semitism.
This is how Labour has changed - ie, the rise of Corbyn has coincided with the ubiquity of this technology. In fact, arguably
the rise of Corbyn was aided by it.
Corbyn's nuanced position on Israel/Palestine gives permission to social media extremists.
The rest is history.
Incidentally, this is why you are less likely to confront anti-Semitism in real-life while the internet may be awash with it
- there are the real and virtual identities which only occasionally bleed into each other.
Which is true and which is not? We might wonder if technology has evolved ahead of human adaptation - the "real world" filters
that govern apparently "real" behaviour missing.
I'm sure even certain posters here are less bananas in "real life" than their online comments might suggest!
I wouldn't trust Lansman on this issue, any more than on many others. Lansman abolished democracy, to the extent it existed
to begin with, by turning it into his personal fiefdom, reminiscent of the activities of Hyndman and the SDF. His position on
anti-Semitism, and fighting the witch-hunt, and of appeasing the Blair-right's as they attacked Corbyn, has been appalling throughout.
Having abolished any democracy in Momentum, which he now runs as its CEO, he also appears to want Corbyn to do the same thing
with the Labour Party, abolishing its internal democratic procedures, and putting himself personally in charge of those disciplinary
measures. That truly would be the actions of a Bonapartist. That Tom Watson is prepared to do that, as he sets himself up in a
situation of dual power, to confront Corbyn is no surprise that anyone who even remotely considers themselves a part of the Left
should support should a move is a disgrace. Perhaps no surprise that the AWL supporters of Zionism, and the witch-hunt, appear
to be doing so, then.
Its notable that, yesterday, when the Welsh Labour Grass Roots organisation came out to call for Williamson's suspension to
be reversed, Kinnock and other Blair-rights immediately called for an investigation into them, and for its Secretary who sits
on Labour's NEC to also be suspended, for interfering in an ongoing investigation! So, why did those same Blair-rights not call
for the suspension of Watson, who immediately demanded Williamson's suspension, and withdrawal of the whip, before any investigation,
or indeed of Hodge and others who on a daily basis go to the media to sally forth about cases that are under investigation, or
waiting for investigation.
This truly is reaching into the realms of McCarthyism, where you are found guilty not just of witchcraft, but of consorting
with witches, or even having an opinion as to whether an individual charged with witchcraft is guilty, or even the extent to which
the number of witches amongst might be exaggerated.
Jim Denham's comment is a case in point. How much more "anti-Semitism" exists? What is the factual basis of the statement,
as opposed to click bait headline. Even if the actual extent is 100% more than the data so far presented, that would mean that
potentially 1 in 750 LP members might be guilty of some form of anti-Semitism. Its hardly an epidemic, or institutional anti-Semitism,
and far less than exists in the Tory Party, which is also infected by Islamaphobia, misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia.
In fact, its probably much less than you would find in the BBC, Sky or other establishment institutions. Anti-Semitism exists,
and is a problem, but that does not mean it is not being used by Labour's enemies or the proponents of Zionism for their own political
ends. The real conspiracy theorists are those that try to present anti-Semitism as a conspiracy based upon infiltration of the
LP, the same people who presented the support for Corbyn from 300,000 new members as really just being a case of far left entryism,
by Trots.
This is a meme, taken from Incog Man, a far-right site. It was posted with positive endorsement by a Labour member, Kayla Bibby,
a delegate to conference in fact:
Bibby subsequently received only a formal warning, with Thomas Gardiner of Labour's Governance and Legal Unit (what used to
be the Compliance Unit), saying it was only anti-Israel, and not anti-Semitic.
Not only could a Labour member post something obviously anti-Semitic, it was not deemed to be so by the Compliance Unit. I
bet we all know people who would agree.
It's not a factually accurate description of global political realities, because Israel does not control the US, if that is
what the image is intended to imply. But, the message, is thereby anti-Israeli state, not anti-Semitic. It could only be considered
anti-Semitic, if in fact you are a Zionist and claim that Israel and Jews are are interchangeable terms, which they are not.
In fact, there are probably not an inconsiderable number of Jews, who think that the state of Israel does exercise undue influence
over US policy, and certainly it seems to be the case that, in the US, more liberal Jewish groups, seem to think that one reason
that the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, in Israel, was so supportive of Trump, and we see the same support for Trump amongst
Zionists in Britain, is at least in part due to the fact that Obama had been distancing the US from its historical uncritical
support for Israel.
If we replace Zionism with Toryism, and Jew with British, the situation becomes fairly clear. If the we show the British
state as being controlled by Tories, who implement their ideology of Toryism, in what way would criticism of the British state,
under the control of such Tories, or criticism of Tories be the equivalent of British people as a whole?
Clearly it wouldn't, because there are a majority of British people who oppose Toryism, and thereby oppose the actions of the
British state under the control of the Tories. A nationalist, or racist might want to equate the nation state with the whole of
its people, but the people who are doing that here, by interpreting criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism, are the
Zionists themselves, and their apologists, because they seek thereby to delegitimize any criticism of the state of Israel and
Zionism by equating it with anti-Semitism.
That in effect makes the Zionists themselves, and their apologists anti-Semites, because in adopting this equation of Jewishness
with being Zionist, and with Israel, they make all Jews thereby responsible for the actions of Zionism and of the state of Israel!
The problem for the AWL, and its members like Jim Denham, on this issue comes down to this. Until thirty years ago, the organisation,
under its previous names, was an ardent defender of the ideas and traditions of Jim Cannon. Cannon's "The Struggle for a Proletarian
Party" was required reading for all of its members. Then, in an about face, the organisation overnight collapsed into what Trotsky
called "the petit-bourgeois Third Camp", and so became ardent defenders of the enemies of Cannon, the petit-bourgeois Third Camp
of Burnham- Shachtman. That kind of wild zig-zag is typical of bureaucratic-centrist organisations, which is what the AWL is.
As part of this collapse into the petit-bourgeois Third Camp, and the moralistic politics it is based upon, the AWL also adopted
the ideas of Third Campists like Al Glotzer, in relation to Israel and Zionism, as opposed to the position of Mandel, which represented
a continuation of the ideas of Cannon and Trotsky. I set this out in a short blog post 12 years ago
Glotzer and the Jews as Special
, after the AWL had repeatedly censored it appearing on their website in response to an article setting out Glotzer's position.
Having committed themselves to the reactionary Zionist ideology that essentially underpins Glotzer's stance - the same thing
idea of having lost faith in the working-class, and so having to rely on the bourgeois state, or "progressive imperialism" to
accomplish the tasks of the working-class, is behind the AWL's support for NATo's war against Serbia, Iraq, Libya etc., but is
also behind the politics of other Third Campists such as the SWP, that instead look to other larger forces, such as reactionary
"anti-imperialist" states to carry forward its moral agenda - the AWL are left now trying to defend their position of support
for the creation of a racist, expansionist state in Israel, as the inevitable consequences of that venture unfold.
For a Marxist, it is not at all difficult to say that the establishment of the state of Israel is one that we should not have
supported at the time, because it would lead to the kind of consequences we see today, and yet, to say, 75 years on from the creation
of that state, it is an established fact, and trying to unwind history, by calling for the destruction of that state would have
even more calamitous consequences for the global working-class. It is quite easy for a Marx to say that the current nature of
the Israeli state, as a racist Zionist state, based, like almost no other state in the world on a confessional basis, i.e. of
being a Jewish state, a state for Jews in preference to every other ethnic/religious group flows from the ideology, and nature
of its creation. But, then to argue that the answer to that is not a destruction of the state of Israel, which could only be done
on the bones of millions of Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, but is to wage a working-class based struggle against that
racist foundation upon which the state has been founded, and that struggle is one that must unite Jews and Arabs alike. In fact,
the position of palestinians today is a mirror image of that of the Jews 75 years ago.
The hope of a Two-State Solution disappeared long ago, and was never credible. It simply allows Zionists to proclaim they are
in favour of it, whilst doing everything to make it practically impossible, such as extending West Bank Settlements. The solution
must flow from a struggle for democratic rights for Israeli Arabs, and for a right for all Arabs in occupied territories to be
extended the same rights as any other Israeli, including the right to vote, and send representatives to the Knesset. As I argued
thirty years ago, the longer-term solution is a Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine, guaranteeing democratic rights to all,
as part of building a wider Federal Republic of MENA.
Jim Denham: imperialist lackey and sycophant turned Witch hunter in chief
Let us be very clear about what this witch hunt is about, it is about purging from public life any credible and effective
opposition to Israel in particular and more generally opposition to the imperialist barbarians of the imperialist core. It is
about driving from universities, social media and intellectual life any form of opposition to the interests of the imperialists.
This is nothing but authoritarianism in action, censorship of political opponents and the closing down of any credible definition
of free speech.
In other words this is something any leftist worth half an atom would be fighting against with all their energies.
But what do we find, pathetic pro war pro imperialists leftists and post modern liberals joining the witch hunt.
Meanwhile in the real world:
A UN report has concluded that Israel deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of protesting civilians, including children
and disabled people and it shot 20,000+ people (yes 20,000+!). The UN says this likely a war crime. Why are the noble defenders
of the Palestinian cause in the dock and not notorious Palestinian haters like Jim Denham?
How can anyone on the left get away with supporting and providing ideological cover for Israel How can any leftist allow a
socialist movement to be sabotaged by the Israel state and its army of appalling immoral apologists?
These attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, repeated in all of the most aggressive imperialist countries, are simply a
proxy attack on the Palestinian people themselves.
Jim Denham's comment here illustrates the problem entirely. The picture he has linked to shows an alien symbiote having attached
itself to the face of the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty here represents the US. The symbiote has on its back the Israeli
Flag, and likewise, thereby represents the state of Israel. The picture therefore, represents the well-worn, and clearly factually
wrong meme that Israel controls the US.
But, as a Zionist organisation, the AWL and its members cannot distinguish between the state of Israel and Jews, so they
cannot distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel, and criticism if Jews. For them, as for the Zionist ideology of the
state of Israel, which is most clearly manifest in the ideology of its current political leadership, in the form of the Bonapartist
regime of Netanyahu, with the recent introduction of blatantly racist laws that discriminate even more openly against not Jewish
Israeli citizens, and with his willingness to try to keep his corrupt regime in office by going into coalition with an avowedly
Neo-Nazi party that until recent times was considered beyond the pale, even by most Zionists, the term Zionism is synonymous with
the term Jew. So, any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel is for them immediately equated with anti-Semitism.
It is what leads such Zionists to then also insist on their right to determine who is a Jew or not. The AWL do that with all
those Jews, such as the JVL, who refuse to accept the AWL's definition of anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism. Its like the old saw that
the definition of a Scot is someone who wears a kilt, and when asked about Jock McTavish, from Arbroath, who does not wear a kilt,
the reply comes back, then he cannot really be a Scot!
The Zionists insists on defining anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, and thereby closing down debate. Jim Denham does that most
clearly here, in his refusal to debate the actual substantive points. It is typical of the attitude of the AWL, in general which
long since gave up trying to defend its bourgeois liberal, opportunist politics by rational debate, and instead turned to bureaucratic
censorship, and ill-tempered invective.
Once again Jim Denham reefuses to engage in rational debate, and again resorts instead to his assumption that Israel = Jews,
as well as his crude attempts at a typical Stalinist amalgam, to conflate the views of his opponents with some hate figure.
Again Jim Denham makes the conflation of Israel and Jews explicit when he says, "This image also plays on the tired and
disgraceful antisemitic 'conspiracy theory' trope of undue Israeli (Jewish) influence on world affairs."
The conflation of equating Israel with the term Jew flows directly from the Zionist ideology that underpins the Israeli State,
but which also adopted by the AWL, and its members like Jim Denham. It thereby effectively denies statehood to non-Jewish Israeli
citizens, making them non-persons, erasing them from history, in the same way that Jim Denham has sought to do in diminishing
if not entirely denying the genocides against other ethnic groups such as Native North Americans, Australian and New Zealand aboriginals
etc., as a result of his Zionist privileging of the specific genocide against Jews in the Holocaust.
It is the same kind of racism, of course, that is applied by the BNP and other white nationalists, who seek to portray Britain
as being a nation for white Britons, and thereby deny other Britons the right to consider themselves really British. Every socialist,
can understand the racist nature of that ideology when it is applied to Britain, and elsewhere, but the AWL, and its members,
like Jim Denham, deny it when it is applied to Israel, which they want to treat as being different to every other state on the
planet, in defence of their Zionist ideology that privileges Israeli Jews over others, and by extension equates the term Jew with
the term Israel.
Its most extreme version comes with the fascists that Netanyahu has now gone into alliance with, whose ideology states that
God only put gentiels on the Earth to be slaves and serve the needs of Jews, as the chosen people! It means that they see the
place of non-Jewish Israelis in those terms, as being allowed to remain in Israel only on that subservient basis. This is the
ideology that the AWL is now logically tied to, in having adopted Zionism as the answer to the problems of Jewish workers rather
than socialism.
And, of course, the extension of that principle for other Zionists is illustrated in their support for fascists like Orban
in Hungary, who wants to adopt a similar nationalist ideology of keeping Hungary, and other "white" European nations exclusively
for "whites", in the same way that Zionists want to keep Israel exclusively for Jews.
It is a sorry state when socialists have degenerated to such an extent that not only do they fail to distinguish between nationalist
ideology and socialist ideology by adopting nationalist solutions to workers problems such as "nationalisation", by the capitalist
state, but where, in adopting such reactionary nationalist ideology, the logic of their position drives them to supporting the
idea that nation states should be exclusively for particular ethnic groups, such as Israel for the Jews, Hungary for white Christians
and so on.
The way that the right are using anti-Zionism as the equivalent for anti-Semitism, and the appeasement of that attack has
led them to widen the scope of that attack. As
Labour
List reports , right-wing Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh, is now claiming that to be anti-capitalist is also to be "anti-Semitic".
The idea was put forward also by former Blair-right spin doctor, John McTernan,
who wrote an article in the FT to that
same effect
Channelling Jim Denham, McTernan writes,
"As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out, anti-Semitic tropes share three elements: money or finance is always in the
mix; an acknowledged cleverness that is also seen as conniving; and, power -- particularly a power to manipulate more powerful
entities.
All of these feature in the criticism of Israel and the so-called Israel lobby. They can be easily moulded into a critique
of capitalism, too."
The line of argument was illustrated to me some weeks ago, in a comment I received in relation to an article I wrote about
Marx's analysis of fictitious capital,
as part of my critique of Paul Mason's Postcapitalism . The commenter, argued that Marx's analysis of fictitious capital appeared
to be simply Marx blaming bankers and money lenders, for which read Jews, for the world's ills, and was thereby simply an expression
of the well-known fact that Marx was a self-hating Jew, much as the AWL, describe all those other Jews that do not share their
commitment to |Zionism. The commenter as evidence of this provided a link to a literary critique of Marx's
On The Jewish Question
, which is cited as proving that Marx was an anti-semite.
In fact, I pointed out that in nothing that Marx had written about fictitious capital, or what I had written describing Marx's
analysis of fictitious capital are bankers discussed, let alone Jewish bankers. The anonymous commenter, has, in fact, since deleted
their comments, meaning that my responses to them were also deleted.
But, this is the way this right-wing witch-hunt proceeds, by throwing a net to catch whatever they can trawl in, and at the very
least sowing the seeds of doubt as they require those being attacked to respond to their wild accusations. It means that any statement
can be framed to mean that there is some subtext beneath the actual words and pictures that is somehow anti-Semitic, if only you
know the relevant coda to unlock the true meaning, and anyone who doubts the meaning being placed upon it, is thereby a defender
of the anti-Semitic message. As with the attacks on Momentum, and the initial surge of membership supporting Corbyn, it is always
phrased in dark conspiratorial language, about unseen forces being behind what is seen on the surface. So, we were supposed to
believe that a few hundred Trots in Britain somehow morphed into 300,000 new LP members! But, Momentum now having shown that it
is a tame part of the establishment, is even able to recruit McTernan himself as a member.
The appeasement as with all witch-hunts only provokes the witch-hunters to widen the scope of their activities. The AWL, which
was at the forefront of helping the witch-hunters with their shameful support for the witch-hunting of Jackie Walker, was repaid
by having their own members expelled too, and having right-wing Labour MP's appear on TV, to characterise the AWL themselves as
"anti-Semites", despite their well-known Zionist politics. Yet, oddly, the AWL seem to consider that a price worth paying, as
their advocacy of Zionism seems to trump any other consideration for them in their politics.
It didn't take long for my comment of yesterday to be proved correct. Today we learn that Jess Phillips has claimed that Marxism
is necessarily misogynist, because it places class oppression above all else, and so now claims that as well as the Left in the
party being anti-Semitic, it is also misogynist. The attack of the Right, as I said yesterday will spread ever wider on this irrational
basis, using all of the usual conspiratorial language that such witch-hunts have always adopted. Rather like a Dan Brown novel,
it will imply that there are dark (Marxist) forces at work, of which Corbyn is the head of the coven (or even worse that some
unseen Dark Overlord is really standing behind Corbyn, who is only its representative on Earth (i.e. in the LP).
It will suggest that these dark forces do not speak openly, but only in codes and symbols that have to be unlocked by the forces
of Light, who like Jim Denham, can look into the minds of men and women, and see what is really going inside.
I actually found that despite the anonymous Zionist commenter to my article on Medium having deleted their comments, my replies
to them, were in fact still floating around
here
,
here , and
here .
As the right-wing extend their witch-hunt against socialists in the LP to claim that Marxists are necessarily misogynist,
as well as anti-Semitic – and the same logic presented by McDonagh, McTernon, and Phillips would presumably mean that the Left
must also be xenophobic, homophobic, anti- Green, and many other charges they want to throw into the mix – it will be interesting
to see whether and to what extent the AWL, join them in that assault, in the same way they have done in their promotion of Zionism.
The Democrats are considered "Moderate republicans" and have been for a number of years. So
the moderate moderate democrats are effectively republicans. Just like the so-called
centre-left here, are establishment right-wing.
"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than
for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." -Matthew 19:24
That either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren might be considered left-wing is a mark of
how skewed American politics is. Where the hell's the center!? And who decided, anyway?
When asked where the phrase "from each according to his abilities, to each according to
his needs" came from by a 2002 survey conducted by Columbia Law School, over 66% of Americans
said the US Constitution.
CNN retained control of what issues were addressed and when rather than the candidates, so
the "clash" between the "moderate" and "progressive" wings of the party was largely
orchestrated by the network. Given the number of candidates involved and the structure of
what passes for debate during these spectacles they're largely a waste of time.
The inevitable question in any US election is can the candidates really change anything? for
all of the squealing about Trump he hasn't managed to do anything except give the rich a tax
cut.
The out of control military spending, the growing void between those born rich and those
born poor, the further consolidation of Corporate power...all seems to go unchecked
regardless of the rhetoric of any President
Watch an interview with Corruptus Maximus from the 1980s or early 90s. He was always a dick
and a narcissist, but he was articulate and able to speak in full sentences and follow a
conversation. He can't do any of that now. Little Donnie Dumbass is the poster boy for
cognitive decline.
Some people think the notion that Trump is a Kremlin spy is rather fanciful.
But if you look more closely, all the evidence is there.
He once got drunk on a bottle of vodka
before he became a teetotaller.
He often wears a red tie.
He was once seen attending a film performance of "War And Peace."
And (a dead giveaway) he has been seen talking to Putin and actually shaking his hand.
And if all that isn't conclusive evidence that he's a Kremlin spy, then I don't know what is.
Over the last two years, a different, in some ways unrecognizable Larry Summers has been appearing in newspaper editorial pages.
More circumspect in tone, this humbler Summers has been arguing that economic opportunities in the developing world are slowing,
and that the already rich economies are finding it hard to get out of the crisis. Barring some kind of breakthrough, Summers says,
an era of slow growth is here to stay.
In Summers's recent writings, this sombre conclusion has often been paired with a surprising political goal: advocating for a
"responsible nationalism". Now he argues that politicians must recognise that "the basic responsibility of government is to maximise
the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good".
One curious thing about the pro-globalisation consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, and its collapse in recent years, is how closely
the cycle resembles a previous era. Pursuing free trade has always produced displacement and inequality – and political chaos, populism
and retrenchment to go with it. Every time the social consequences of free trade are overlooked, political backlash follows. But
free trade is only one of many forms that economic integration can take. History seems to suggest, however, that it might be the
most destabilising one.
... ... ...
The international systems that chastened figures such as Keynes helped produce in the next few years – especially the Bretton
Woods agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) – set the terms under which the new wave of globalisation
would take place.
The key to the system's viability, in Rodrik's view, was its flexibility – something absent from contemporary globalisation,
with its one-size-fits-all model of capitalism. Bretton Woods stabilised exchange rates by pegging the dollar loosely to gold, and
other currencies to the dollar. Gatt consisted of rules governing free trade – negotiated by participating countries in a series
of multinational "rounds" – that left many areas of the world economy, such as agriculture, untouched or unaddressed. "Gatt's purpose
was never to maximise free trade," Rodrik writes. "It was to achieve the maximum amount of trade compatible with different nations
doing their own thing. In that respect, the institution proved spectacularly successful."
Partly because Gatt was not always dogmatic about free trade, it allowed most countries to figure out their own economic objectives,
within a somewhat international ambit. When nations contravened the agreement's terms on specific areas of national interest, they
found that it "contained loopholes wide enough for an elephant to pass", in Rodrik's words. If a nation wanted to protect its steel
industry, for example, it could claim "injury" under the rules of Gatt and raise tariffs to discourage steel imports: "an abomination
from the standpoint of free trade". These were useful for countries that were recovering from the war and needed to build up their
own industries via tariffs – duties imposed on particular imports. Meanwhile, from 1948 to 1990, world trade grew at an annual average
of nearly 7% – faster than the post-communist years, which we think of as the high point of globalisation. "If there was a golden
era of globalisation," Rodrik has written, "this was it."
Gatt, however, failed to cover many of the countries in the developing world. These countries eventually created their own system,
the United Nations conference on trade and development (UNCTAD). Under this rubric, many countries – especially in Latin America,
the Middle East, Africa and Asia – adopted a policy of protecting homegrown industries by replacing imports with domestically produced
goods. It worked poorly in some places – India and Argentina, for example, where the trade barriers were too high, resulting in
factories that cost more to set up than the value of the goods they produced – but remarkably well in others, such as east Asia,
much of Latin America and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where homegrown industries did spring up. Though many later economists and
commentators would dismiss the achievements of this model, it theoretically fit Larry Summers's recent rubric on globalisation:
"the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global
good."
The critical turning point – away from this system of trade balanced against national protections – came in the 1980s. Flagging
growth and high inflation in the west, along with growing competition from Japan, opened the way for a political transformation.
The elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seminal, putting free-market radicals in charge of two of the world's
five biggest economies and ushering in an era of "hyperglobalisation". In the new political climate, economies with large public
sectors and strong governments within the global capitalist system were no longer seen as aids to the system's functioning, but
impediments to it.
Not only did these ideologies take hold in the US and the UK; they seized international institutions as well. Gatt renamed itself
as the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the new rules the body negotiated began to cut more deeply into national policies. Its
international trade rules sometimes undermined national legislation. The WTO's appellate court intervened relentlessly in member
nations' tax, environmental and regulatory policies, including those of the United States: the US's fuel emissions standards were
judged to discriminate against imported gasoline, and its
ban on imported shrimp caught without turtle-excluding
devices was overturned. If national health and safety regulations were stricter than WTO rules necessitated, they could only
remain in place if they were shown to have "scientific justification".
The purest version of hyperglobalisation was tried out in Latin America in the 1980s. Known as the "Washington consensus", this
model usually involved loans from the IMF that were contingent on those countries lowering trade barriers and privatising many of
their nationally held industries. Well into the 1990s, economists were proclaiming the indisputable benefits of openness. In an
influential 1995 paper, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner wrote: "We find no cases to support the frequent worry that a country might
open and yet fail to grow."
But the Washington consensus was bad for business: most countries did worse than before. Growth faltered, and citizens across
Latin America revolted against attempted privatisations of water and gas. In Argentina, which followed the Washington consensus
to the letter, a grave crisis resulted in
2002 , precipitating an economic collapse and massive street protests that forced out the government that had pursued privatising
reforms. Argentina's revolt presaged a left-populist upsurge across the continent: from 1999 to 2007, leftwing leaders and parties
took power in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them campaigning against the Washington consensus on globalisation.
These revolts were a preview of the backlash of today.
Rodrik – perhaps the contemporary economist whose views have been most amply vindicated by recent events – was himself a beneficiary
of protectionism in Turkey. His father's ballpoint pen company was sheltered under tariffs, and achieved enough success to allow
Rodrik to attend Harvard in the 1970s as an undergraduate. This personal understanding of the mixed nature of economic success may
be one of the reasons why his work runs against the broad consensus of mainstream economics writing on globalisation.
"I never felt that my ideas were out of the mainstream," Rodrik told me recently. Instead, it was that the mainstream had lost
touch with the diversity of opinions and methods that already existed within economics. "The economics profession is strange in
that the more you move away from the seminar room to the public domain, the more the nuances get lost, especially on issues of trade."
He lamented the fact that while, in the classroom, the models of trade discuss losers and winners, and, as a result, the necessity
of policies of redistribution, in practice, an "arrogance and hubris" had led many economists to ignore these implications. "Rather
than speaking truth to power, so to speak, many economists became cheerleaders for globalisation."
In his 2011 book The Globalization Paradox
, Rodrik concluded that "we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalisation." The
results of the 2016 elections and referendums provide ample testimony of the justness of the thesis, with millions voting to push
back, for better or for worse, against the campaigns and institutions that promised more globalisation. "I'm not at all surprised
by the backlash," Rodrik told me. "Really, nobody should have been surprised."
But what, in any case, would "more globalisation" look like? For the same economists and writers who have started to rethink
their commitments to greater integration, it doesn't mean quite what it did in the early 2000s. It's not only the discourse that's
changed: globalisation itself has changed, developing into a more chaotic and unequal system than many economists predicted. The
benefits of globalisation have been largely concentrated in a handful of Asian countries. And even in those countries, the good
times may be running out.
Statistics from Global Inequality
, a 2016 book by the development economist Branko Milanović, indicate that in relative terms the greatest benefits of globalisation
have accrued to a rising "emerging middle class", based preponderantly in China. But the cons are there, too: in absolute terms,
the largest gains have gone to what is commonly called "the 1%" – half of whom are based in the US. Economist Richard Baldwin has
shown in his recent book, The Great Convergence, that nearly all of the gains from globalisation have been concentrated in six countries.
Barring some political catastrophe, in which rightwing populism continued to gain, and in which globalisation would be the least
of our problems – Wolf admitted that he was "not at all sure" that this could be ruled out – globalisation was always going to slow;
in fact, it already has. One reason, says Wolf, was that "a very, very large proportion of the gains from globalisation – by no
means all – have been exploited. We have a more open world economy to trade than we've ever had before." Citing The Great Convergence,
Wolf noted that supply chains have already expanded, and that future developments, such as automation and the use of robots, looked
to undermine the promise of a growing industrial workforce. Today, the political priorities were less about trade and more about
the challenge of retraining workers , as technology renders old jobs obsolete and transforms the world of work.
Rodrik, too, believes that globalisation, whether reduced or increased, is unlikely to produce the kind of economic effects it
once did. For him, this slowdown has something to do with what he calls "premature deindustrialisation". In the past, the simplest
model of globalisation suggested that rich countries would gradually become "service economies", while emerging economies picked
up the industrial burden. Yet recent statistics show the world as a whole is deindustrialising. Countries that one would have expected
to have more industrial potential are going through the stages of automation more quickly than previously developed countries did,
and thereby failing to develop the broad industrial workforce seen as a key to shared prosperity.
For both Rodrik and Wolf, the political reaction to globalisation bore possibilities of deep uncertainty. "I really have found
it very difficult to decide whether what we're living through is a blip, or a fundamental and profound transformation of the world
– at least as significant as the one that brought about the first world war and the Russian revolution," Wolf told me. He cited
his agreement with economists such as Summers that shifting away from the earlier emphasis on globalisation had now become a political
priority; that to pursue still greater liberalisation was like showing "a red rag to a bull" in terms of what it might do to the
already compromised political stability of the western world.
Rodrik pointed to a belated emphasis, both among political figures and economists, on the necessity of compensating those displaced
by globalisation with retraining and more robust welfare states. But pro-free-traders had a history of cutting compensation: Bill
Clinton passed Nafta, but failed to expand safety nets. "The issue is that the people are rightly not trusting the centrists who
are now promising compensation," Rodrik said. "One reason that Hillary Clinton didn't get any traction with those people is that
she didn't have any credibility."
Rodrik felt that economics commentary failed to register the gravity of the situation: that there were increasingly few avenues
for global growth, and that much of the damage done by globalisation – economic and political – is irreversible. "There is a sense
that we're at a turning point," he said. "There's a lot more thinking about what can be done. There's a renewed emphasis on compensation
– which, you know, I think has come rather late."
"... Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor: They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the benefits of the social contract and common good. ..."
"... Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable. ..."
"... At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes. ..."
"... The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords" have a harder time kicking them around. ..."
Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor:
They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and
financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the
benefits of the social contract and common good.
Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism
is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to
accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling
elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either
exploit or consider disposable.
At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have
taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology
which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes.
The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They
don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords"
have a harder time kicking them around.
Once you understand this about the cheap-labor
conservatives, the real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Remember,
cheap-labour conservatives believe in social hierarchy and privilege, so the only prosperity
they want is limited to them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits those who
work for an hourly wage.
You also need to remember that voting the coalition out, which you need to do, will not
necessarily give you a neoliberal free zone; Labor needs to shed some the dogma as well.
@Fissile
I've seen that before. Although hardly an anarcho-capitalist, my uncle in Australia; a music
teacher in a private school would alway rail against unions and so-called union-power at
every opportunity. The moment his job came under threat, he'd signed up for membership
forthwith.
"... Friedrich von Hayek, one of the creed's most revered economic gurus, spent his productive years railing against government old age pension and medical insurance schemes. When he became old and infirm, he signed on for both social security and medicare. ..."
Friedrich von Hayek, one of the creed's most revered economic gurus, spent his productive
years railing against government old age pension and medical insurance schemes. When he
became old and infirm, he signed on for both social security and medicare.
Love it. When push comes to shove all those ideologies and beliefs crumble into the dust of
practical needs. Another individual who cloaked the self-interest of the rich and
powerful into some kind of spurious ideology.
George wrote a rather good article about Von
Hayek a few years ago I seem to remember.
Indeed! I attended a public lecture by Thomas Frank (former young conservative-now left
wing) at the LSE, and he was even describing Tea Party Placards, reading: (paraphrase)
'government get your hands off my Medicare'!
"... Republicanism and true Christianity are mutually exclusive. There is nothing for them to quote. Sharing your wealth? Giving to the poor? Egalitarianism? Loving your neighbour? The Good Samaritan? ..."
"... Best to pretend that Christianity is about extreme right wing economic policy (and fascist social mores), even though it is the opposite. ..."
"... And Tea Partiers like Ayn Rand? The most anti-Christian and anti-American lunatic you can find? The corporate agenda and Wall Street interests trump everything else. No news there. ..."
"... A lot of these people describe themselves as Christian, makes you wonder which part of Jesus' message they loved more, the part that said the poor should rot without help, or the part where he said violence was justified and the chasing of wealth is to be lauded. ..."
It never stops to amaze me how the American Republican Right claims to be Christian. Have you
noticed that they NEVER quote the words of Jesus Christ? I don't blame them,
Republicanism and true Christianity are mutually exclusive. There is nothing for them to
quote. Sharing your wealth? Giving to the poor? Egalitarianism? Loving your neighbour? The
Good Samaritan?
Dirty words all. Best to pretend that Christianity is about extreme right wing
economic policy (and fascist social mores), even though it is the opposite.
If Jesus came to the US today, he would not like Republicans and they would not like him.
Santorum, Palin, Limbaugh etc. would strap him to the electric chair and pull the lever if
they could, no doubt.
And Tea Partiers like Ayn Rand? The most anti-Christian and anti-American lunatic you
can find? The corporate agenda and Wall Street interests trump everything else. No news
there.
The most bizarre aspect of the rights infatuation with Ayn Rand is that she was an
ardent Atheist who's beliefs are diametrically opposite to those of Jesus & the
Bible.
A lot of these people describe themselves as Christian, makes you wonder which part of
Jesus' message they loved more, the part that said the poor should rot without help, or the
part where he said violence was justified and the chasing of wealth is to be lauded.
"the only way you're gonna be able to sleep at night (and go to heaven in the afterlife) is
to believe that the system has some moral justification based on the laws of nature"
I think this is one of the drivers in the shift from Catholicism to Protestanism,
especially in Northern Europe.
For Medieval Catholics everyone was where God had put them, so the rich were rich and the
poor poor as part of Gods plan, and anyone trying to change it was going against God.
Which is handy if you are a Baron or Bishop living the high life surrounded my thousands of
starving peasants (having armed retainers also helped).
Come the industrial revolution and the rise of the business and trade classes that's not so
appealing, so now God rewards the virtuous and hard working, who naturally rise to the
top.
George Monbiot is right: Rand was probably a female sociopath...
Notable quotes:
"... Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax. ..."
"... Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year. ..."
"... the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress. ..."
"... It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments. ..."
"... the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan , former head of the US Federal Reserve. ..."
"... As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system". ..."
"... Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history. ..."
Her
psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into
their doormats Comments
1,227 Illustration by Daniel Pudles I t has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the
postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and
compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated
power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the
belief system constructed by Ayn Rand , who died 30 years ago today, has never
been more popular or influential.
Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her
novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she
explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure
self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She
described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to
assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role
for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or
transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.
Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government
intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The
millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with
the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness,
by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt .
The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and
fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that
all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for
instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a
civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife "who believed that she had the
right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing".
Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and
greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss
shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was
to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans,
according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of
copies every year.
Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her
to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and
"Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague
anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the
broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the
Republicans in Congress.
Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people who have never read
it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new
demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering,
jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy,
attacking efforts to make the word a kinder place.
It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is
crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they
are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from
a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this
movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and
expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires' doormats. I wonder
how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of
her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against
both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her
belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.
But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy: as Adam Curtis's BBC
documentary showed last year, the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan , former head of
the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he
co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal
. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no
need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as
"the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking is the unexcelled
protector of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients
guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains,
is a "superlatively moral system".
Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for
the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and
the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already
documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history.
Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous admission that it was Rand
who persuaded him that "capitalism is not only efficient and practical but also moral", he
mentioned her in his memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and
this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence that even today
Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced his partial admission of failure to
Congress.
Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the Atlantic continues to demand
the rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go
down, the ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.
I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that
towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security.
In case nobody mentioned this book before, which is relevant to the theme:
These submerged policies, Mettler shows, obscure the role of government and
exaggerate that of the market. As a result, citizens are unaware not only of the benefits
they receive, but of the massive advantages given to powerful interests, such as insurance
companies and the financial industry. Neither do they realize that the policies of the
submerged state shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans, exacerbating
inequality.
"... If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to legitimise itself. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. ..."
"... Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. ..."
"... Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices, they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know there would be socialism. ..."
"... This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is, neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t totalitarianism. ..."
"... It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal. ..."
"... However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes that Hayek railed against. ..."
The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a
radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have
been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to
legitimise itself.
Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist
ideologies and an order of market feudalism.
In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath
discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt.
The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a
medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue.
Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become
synonymous with nationhood. A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of
democracy.
The final restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no
separate market and state, just a totalitarian market state.
Yes, the EU is an ordoliberal institution - the state imposing rules on the market from
without. Thus, it is not the chief danger. The takeover of 5G, and therefore our entire
economy and industry, by Huawei - now that would be a loss of state sovereignty. But because
Huawei is nominally a corporation, people do not think about is a form of governmental
bureaucracy, but if powerful enough that is exactly what it is.
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the
imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version
of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the
laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state
are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version
called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate
from 'the market'?
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How
to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are
doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing.
Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of
capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping
its implementation.
Neoliberalism allows with impunity pesticide businesses to apply high risk toxic pesticides
everywhere seriously affecting the health of children, everyone as well as poisoning the
biosphere and all its biodiversity. This freedom has gone far too far and is totally
unacceptable and these chemicals should be banished immediately.
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of
anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left
(Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will
Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of
control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives.
Also, the work
of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving
into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.
Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the
state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so
we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise
we'll hang back and let you do what you want'.
Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state
is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices,
they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know
there would be socialism.
This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of
government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is,
neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state
based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t
totalitarianism.
Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals
are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their
preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification
of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively
measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not
lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been
enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical
(market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make
them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no
relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are
measured, with absurd results.
It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that
neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of
understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to
universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were
Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to
the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand
neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.
However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to
economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any
other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic
irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes
that Hayek railed against.
Taking a long view it was very astute and cleverly conceived plan to to present
counter-revolution as revolution; progress as regress; the new order 1980- (i.e.,
neoliberalism) was cool, and the old order 1945-1975 (welfare-capitalism) was fuddy-duddy.
Thus:
Capital controls = fuddy duddy Capital Account liberalisation = cool Worker's
Rights = fuddy duddy Flexible Labour markets = cool World Peace -- fuddy duddy War = Cool
National Sovereignty = fuddy duddy Globalization = Cool Social Mobility = fuddy duddy
Inequality = cool Respect for elections/referenda = fuddy-duddy Flexible referenda/elections
= cool Social solidarity = fuddy-duddy Rampant nihilistic invidualism = cool Respect for
human rights and the UN International Law = fuddy-duddy Blatant Imperialism = cool
And so the agenda goes on. Counter-revolution qua revolution
The US is closer to war with Iran
than it has been since the Bush years, or perhaps ever. And Bolton is largely to blame
But Bolton is on a fast track, seemingly aware that Trump's time in office may be limited.' Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters Donald
Trump's national security adviser John Bolton wants the United States to go to war with
Iran .
And everything that the Trump administration has done over its Iran policy, particularly since Bolton became Trump's top foreign
policy adviser in April of 2018, must be viewed through this lens, including the alarming US military posturing in the Middle East
of the past two weeks.
Just after one month on the job, Bolton
gave Trump
the final push he needed to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement, which at the time was (and still is, for now) successfully
boxing in Iran's nuclear program and blocking all pathways for Iran to build a bomb. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
– as the Iran deal is formally known – was the biggest obstacle to Bolton's drive for a regime change war, because it eliminated
a helpful pretext that served so useful to sell the war in Iraq 17 years ago.
Since walking away from the deal, the Trump administration has claimed that with a "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, it
can achieve a "better deal" that magically turns Iran into a Jeffersonian democracy bowing to every and any American wish. But this
has always been a fantastically bad-faith argument meant to obscure the actual goal (regime change) and provide cover for the incremental
steps – the crushing sanctions, bellicose rhetoric, and antagonizing military maneuvers – that have now put the United States closer
to war with Iran than it has been since at least the latter half of the Bush administration, or perhaps ever.
In his White House statement 10 days ago announcing (an already pre-planned) carrier and bomber deployment to the Middle East,
Bolton cited "a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings" from Iran to justify the bolstered US military presence.
But multiple sources who have seen the same intelligence have since
said
that Bolton and the Trump administration blew it "out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually
was". Even a British general operating in the region pushed back this week,
saying he has seen no evidence of an increased Iranian threat.
What's even more worrying is that Bolton knows what he's doing. He's "a
seasoned bureaucratic infighter
who has the skills to press forcefully for his views" – and he has a long history of using those skills to undermine American
diplomacy and work toward killing arms control agreements.
As a senior official in the George W Bush administration,
he played key role
in the collapse of the Agreed Framework, the Clinton-era deal that froze North Korea's plutonium nuclear program (the North Koreans
tested their first bomb four years later).
He said
he "felt like a kid on Christmas day" after he orchestrated the US withdrawal from the international criminal court in 2002.
And now as a senior official in the Trump administration, he
pushed
for the US to withdrawal from a crucial nuclear arms treaty with Russia.
While it's unclear how much of a role he played in scuttling Trump's negotiations with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi last year, he publicly
called for the so-called
"Libya model" with the North Koreans (in other words, regime change by force). Just months before joining the administration, he
tried to make the
legal case for a preventive war against Pyongyang. And if you think he cares about the aftermath of war with North Korea, he
doesn't. Bolton was reportedly
"unmoved" by a presentation during his time in the Bush administration of the catastrophic consequences of such a war. "I don't
do war. I do policy," he said then.
So far, Bolton has been successful in moving the United States toward his desired outcome with Iran – if getting the Pentagon
to draw up plans to send
120,000 US troops to the region to confront Iran is any indication. There are hopeful signs that we can avoid war, as US officials
and our European allies, seemingly alarmed by what Bolton is up to, are
sounding the alarm about
the Trump administration skewing intelligence on Iran.
But Bolton is on a fast track, seemingly aware that Trump's time in office may be limited. The question, ultimately, is whether
the president can stick to his instincts of avoiding more military conflict, or acquiesce to a man hellbent on boxing him into a
corner with no way out other than war with Iran.
Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as National Security Editor at ThinkProgress
...what motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that
own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and
think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them
to systematically stigmatize, marginalize, criminalize, deplatform, demonetize, and otherwise eliminate any type of speech they
deem to be "Russian disinformation," or "extremist content," or a "conspiracy theory," or simply too "dangerous," "divisive,"
or "confusing" to circulate among the general public?
No see? That makes no sense. That's just an example of the type of fascist disinformation these Putin-Nazi disinformationists
are trying to spread to confuse us to the point where we can't even concentrate long enough to think anymore, or parse the meaningless
jargon-laden nonsense they're trying to deceive us with, and just devolve into these Pavlovian imbeciles conditioned to respond
to specific trigger words, like "extremist," "terrorist," "fascist," "populist," "anti-Semitic," "Russians," "hackers," and whatever
other emotional stimuli we are being trained to instantly recognize and robotically react to like circus animals.
Or I don't know, maybe it isn't. I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say. Probably they've already got to me. I'd better get
back down into my anti-disinformation bunker, pull up The Guardian , or The Washington Post , or Der Spiegel
on my child-proof computer, and immerse myself in some objective journalism, before the Putin-Nazi spywhale makes its way up the
Landwehrkanal, takes control of what's left of my mind, and forces me into going out and trying to vote for Hitler or something.
I recommend you do the same, and I'll see you when this nightmare over.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published
by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel,
ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy,
Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or
consentfactory.org .
Mon 29 Apr 2019 01.55 EDT Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian
navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force.
1 week ago
The whale was the secret intermediary between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. The messages were transmitted during weekly 'Whales-R-Us'
peer support sessions. It's ironic it turns up now, after Mr. Mueller's report has already been issued.
1 week ago (Edited)
I'm pretty sure "Nessie" is a mobile underwater propoganda base used by the Russians since the time of the Bolshevic revolution.
Originally, it was merely a base to hide the Reds operating on the outskirts of the Capitalist capitol of London. Scotland was
the perfect hiding place.
Now however, it's outfitted with the most sophisticated internet hacking equipment, AI technology so advanced it can
alter your political ideology just by selling you a mailorder slavic blow-up doll.
Taking a long view it was very astute and cleverly conceived plan to to present
counter-revolution as revolution; progress as regress; the new order 1980- (i.e.,
neoliberalism) was cool, and the old order 1945-1975 (welfare-capitalism) was fuddy-duddy.
Thus:
Capital controls = fuddy duddy
Capital Account liberalisation = cool
Worker’s Rights = fuddy duddy
Flexible Labour markets = cool
World Peace – fuddy duddy
War = Cool
National Sovereignty = fuddy duddy
Globalization = Cool
Social Mobility = fuddy duddy
Inequality = cool
Respect for elections/referenda = fuddy-duddy
Flexible referenda/elections = cool
Social solidarity = fuddy-duddy
Rampant nihilistic invidualism = cool
Respect for human rights and the UN International Law = fuddy-duddy
Blatant Imperialism = cool
And so the agenda goes on. Counter-revolution qua revolution
... Consider what it says about the state of America's political system that in the
left party, the presumptive frontrunner for the presidential nomination did not think
twice about kicking off his campaign with a fundraiser hosted
by the founder of a union-busting law firm, days before appearing at a major union-hosted
rally. And why should he? He gets the money, and then he gets the union support.
...I am not mad at Joe Biden. He is a type. His type is "The Old Way of Doing Things." Now
that he is in the race, his type is represented. He rounds out the field. Now, Democratic
voters truly have the entire buffet of choices, from "True Leftist Insurgent" to "Bland,
Winning Young Résumé-Polisher" to "Indistinguishable Ambitious Congresspersons"
to "The Same Old Kind of White Guy As Always".
This just in! The Independent reports a beluga whale seen in Norway was put there for
military purposes ( not porpoises) by the Russian Navy. They know because it had a tag on it
saying Equipment of St Petersburg, in English?
"One of the more important revelations in former Justice Department Special Counsel Robert
Mueller's report on the 2016 election is the close working relationship Bannon established
with Prince. Sensing fertile political ground for their far-right beliefs, Bannon and Prince
have established, under the aegis of their professed Catholicism, a movement that threatens
both the current pope and the European Union."
Try googling "could Emmanuel Macron be the antichrist?"
Yeah, I remember Trump's healthcare "policy". It was a great, really, really great. The best
healthcare ever. Repeal and replace. Obamacare is failing, it has failed, it's a huge
failure, but Trump will do better. We were going to have the best healthcare in the world...
I guess he's just to distracted by building that wall he's not building. Or, golf.
Russian research team which claimed to have detected signs of intelligent life in Washington has now discovered the life there
not to be quite so intelligent after all.
A Russian spokesman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our Moscow science correspondent -- who also wishes to remain anonymous
-- that the Washington atmosphere has been poisoned by huge clouds of putrid hot air belching from the corporate media. He explained
that such a hostile environment makes it almost impossible for intelligent life to survive, let alone evolve a sustainable culture.
The Russian team believes there may still be small pockets of intelligent life elsewhere on the North American continent but without
the necessary conditions they need to thrive they are destined to disappear without trace.
Speaking off the record, the Russian spokesman, who asked us not to disclose his identity, added that hopes of finding intelligent
life in London, Paris, Berlin and other Western European locations, where it might be expected to flourish, are fading fast. Though
it is believed intelligent life once existed in Occiental Europe, an atmosphere suitable for the maintenance of such life has all
but evaporated.
"... The opposite of a neoliberal economic agenda isn't a progressive economic agenda, but democratic re-engagement. Neoliberalism taught us that "there is no alternative" to cutting taxes, cutting services and letting the banks treat us as they see fit. But of course not even the Coalition believes that any more. These days they proudly subsidise their friends and regulate their enemies in order to reshape Australia in their preferred form. ..."
"... While the hypocrisy is staggering, at least voters can now see that politics, and elections, matter. Having been told for decades that it was "global markets" that shaped our society, it's now clear that it is actually the likes of Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott who decide whether we get new coal mines or power stations. Luckily, millions of voters now realise that if it's OK to subsidise new coal mines, there's no reason we can't subsidise renewables instead. ..."
"... So, what to nationalise? What new machinery of state should we build first? Should we create a national anti-corruption watchdog, replace the productivity commission with a national interest commission, or abolish the failed network of finance sector regulators and build a new one from scratch? ..."
"... The death of neoliberalism means we can finally have a national debate about the size and role of government, and the shape of the economy and society we want to build. ..."
"... class warfare (by the rich against the 99%, though I should not need to say that) is still very much alive. ..."
"... The rise of nationalism is indeed worrying situation.. but its clear that mass discontent is driving a 'shift' away from the status quo and that opportunists of every creed are all trying to get in on the action.. ..."
"... the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is population growth and lack of natural resources and meaningful 'employment' .. which self serving politicians are exploiting via playing the fear card and creating further division in society in order to embrace and increase their own power. Further more, no one, it seems, has any valid answers as regards resolving the division and creating a path forward.. thereby making more conflict an inevitability. ..."
"... Like Octopus, the globalists have every one of their eight legs in a different pot of gold. On their arms, suction cups maintain an iron grip. Trying to pull those suckers out, leaves us raw and bleeding. To release their grip, without hurting ourselves, we must aim for the brain. ..."
"... Murdoch's media empire has arms in every Democracy on earth. As his poisonous ink spread across our lands, we wallowed in the dark. ..."
"... The Oil and Coal Tycoons have arms in every black hole on earth. As their suckers pull black gold from the land beneath our feet, we choke on the air we breathe. ..."
"... The Financial Tyrants have arms in our buildings, factories, farms and homes. Their suckers stripped our pockets bare and we ran out of money. ..."
"... The False Prophets spread their arms into our private lives. Their suckers turned our modest, humble faiths into global empires filled with mega-churches, televangelists, jet-setting preachers and evangelical armies Hell bent on disruption and destruction. ..."
"... Neoliberalism may be dead but the former Trotskyites who invented it are still alive and they still have an agenda. ..."
"... Neo Liberalism was a project cooked up back in the late 1970s by the Capital owning classes & enacted by successive govts of "right" or "left" ever since. They feared the growing power of the working & middle classes which they felt threatened their own power & wealth. So they set out to destroy any ability of the working class to organise & to gut the middle class. ..."
"... Key to this was decoupling wages from productivity & forcing us all into debt peonage. Deregulation of the financial markets & the globalization of capital markets, disastorous multilateral trade deals & off shoring jobs, slashing state social programmes, Union busting laws all part of the plan. All covered with a lie that we live in meritocracies & the "best & brightest" are in charge. The result has been evermore riches funneled to the wealthiest few percent & a wealth gap bigger than that of the gilded age ..."
"... The majority press are so organised around the idea that neoliberalism in the sense captured economically and to some extent socially as construed in the article above; ..."
"... Rumours of neoliberalism's death have been somewhat exaggerated. Its been on life support provided by the LNP since John Howard and there are still a few market fundamentalists lurking in the ranks of the ALP, just waiting for their chance to do New Labor MkII in memory of Paul Keating. ..."
"... Neoliberalism's lasting legacy will not be the ludicrous economic programs, privatizations and deregulation, those can all be rolled back if some party would grow a spine. The real damage was caused by the aping of the US and UK's cult of individual responsibility, the atomizing effects of neoliberal anti-social policy and demonization of collective action including unionism. ..."
The opposite of a neoliberal economic agenda isn't a progressive economic agenda, but
democratic re-engagement. Neoliberalism taught us that "there is no alternative" to cutting
taxes, cutting services and letting the banks treat us as they see fit. But of course not even
the Coalition believes that any more. These days they proudly subsidise their friends and
regulate their enemies in order to reshape Australia in their preferred form.
While the hypocrisy is staggering, at least voters can now see that politics, and elections,
matter. Having been told for decades that it was "global markets" that shaped our society, it's
now clear that it is actually the likes of Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott who decide whether we
get new coal mines or power stations. Luckily, millions of voters now realise that if it's OK
to subsidise new coal mines, there's no reason we can't subsidise renewables instead.
Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world Read more
The parliament is filling with people of all political persuasions who, if nothing else,
decry the neoliberal agenda to shrink our government and our national vision. While there's
obviously quite a distance between MPs who want to build the nation, one new coal mine at a
time, and those who want to fill our cities with renewable energy, the whole purpose of
democracy is to settle such disputes at the ballot box.
So, what to nationalise? What new machinery of state should we build first? Should we create
a national anti-corruption watchdog, replace the productivity commission with a national
interest commission, or abolish the failed network of finance sector regulators and build a new
one from scratch?
... ... ...
The death of neoliberalism means we can finally have a national debate about the size and
role of government, and the shape of the economy and society we want to build. But we need to
do more than talk about tax and regulation. Australia is one of the oldest parliamentary
democracies in the world, and we once helped lead the world in the design of democratic
institutions and the creation of an open democratic culture. Let's not allow the legacy of
neoliberalism to be a cynical belief that there is no point repairing and rebuilding the
democratic institutions that ensure not just our economy thrives, but our society as well. A
quick look around the world provides clear evidence that there really are a lot of
alternatives.
Richard Denniss is chief economist for the Australia Institute
Mmmm, well, class warfare (by the rich against the 99%, though I should not need to say that)
is still very much alive.
Globalisation-driven financial deregulation was commenced here by Hawke Labor from 1983 as
a Laberal facade for the Australian chapter of the transnational ruling class policy of
self-enrichment. It was sold to the aspirationals as the ever-popular This Will Make You Rich
- as ever-rising house prices did, for home-owners then (paid for now through housing
unaffordability for their descendants). Then, transnational capital was able to loot both
aspirationals' productivity gains (easily 10% of GDP) plus usurious interest from the
borrowings made by the said aspirationals (easily 6% of GDP) to keep up with the Joneses.
Now, it loots 90% of all increases in GDP, leaving just 10% in crumbs from the filthy rich
man's table for 15 million workers to share.
We don't notice as much as we should, because the mainstream (mainly but not only Murdoch)
media is very good at persuading us - then and now - that there is nothing to see. It is a
tool of that transnational class, its role being to manufacture our consent to our own
exploitation. Thus they play the man because it is politically easier than open demands that
the public be robbed. In the case of penalty rates, thus adopting the obvious hypocrisy of
which "The Australian" accuses Shorten. Or they play the woman, in the case of the ferocious,
relentless media vilification of Julia Gillard and Gillard Labor – five years after the
demonization of Gillard Labor's Great Big New (Carbon) Tax, the need for one is now almost
universally accepted. Or they play the players, hence a focus on Dutton's challenge that
pretends that he has meaningful policies.
Labor's class traitors clearly intended to aggressively apply the standard neoliberal
model – look at how it helps their careers after politics (ask Anna Blight)! Shorten is
not working to promote some progressive agenda, he is doing as little as possible, and
expects to simply be voted into The Lodge as a committed servant of transnational
capitalism.
I stopped voting 40 years ago because the voting system is mathematically rigged to favor
the duopoly. Until a large number of minor parties can share their preferences and beat the
majors, which is now starting to happen. This is not just voting for a good representative,
but voting against the corrupt parties. A minority government should lead to proper debate in
parliament. More women will lead to lower levels of testosterone fuelled sledging and better
communication. A "Coalition of Representative Independents" could form government in the
future, leading by consensus and constantly listening to the community.
The rise of nationalism is indeed worrying situation.. but its clear that mass discontent is
driving a 'shift' away from the status quo and that opportunists of every creed are all
trying to get in on the action..
The big nut to crack is HOW do we collectively find sane and
honest leadership ? A huge part of the problem is the ongoing trend of disdain for government
in favor of embracing private monopolies as the be all and end all for solving the ongoing
societal rift. .. which has created a centralization of wealth and the power that that wealth
yields.. allied to the fact that huge swaths of the population in EVERY nation were hiding
when the brains were allocated.. and hence are very easy to dupe..
the elephant in the room
that no one wants to discuss is population growth and lack of natural resources and
meaningful 'employment' .. which self serving politicians are exploiting via playing the fear
card and creating further division in society in order to embrace and increase their own
power. Further more, no one, it seems, has any valid answers as regards resolving the
division and creating a path forward.. thereby making more conflict an inevitability.
Like Octopus, the globalists have every one of their eight legs in a different pot of gold.
On their arms, suction cups maintain an iron grip. Trying to pull those suckers out, leaves
us raw and bleeding. To release their grip, without hurting ourselves, we must aim for the
brain.
Murdoch's media empire has arms in every Democracy on earth. As his poisonous ink spread
across our lands, we wallowed in the dark.
The Oil and Coal Tycoons have arms in every black hole on earth. As their suckers pull
black gold from the land beneath our feet, we choke on the air we breathe.
The Financial Tyrants have arms in our buildings, factories, farms and homes. Their
suckers stripped our pockets bare and we ran out of money.
The False Prophets spread their arms into our private lives. Their suckers turned our
modest, humble faiths into global empires filled with mega-churches, televangelists,
jet-setting preachers and evangelical armies Hell bent on disruption and destruction.
Denniss offers us the cure! Start thinking fresh and new and starve the globalists to
death. They fed us BS, we ate BS and now we are mal-nourished. We need good, healthy
ideas.
Land. Infrastructure. Time.
Time - "WE" increased productivity and the globalists stole the rewards. Time to increase
our FREE time. 32 hours is the NEW full time. Pay us full time wages, give us full time
benefits, and reduce our work days by 20% and suddenly we have 20% more jobs. As the incomes
of billionaires drop, the money in circulation will increase. We are the job creators - not
globalists.
21st Century Infrastructure is about healthy human beings - not the effing economy. Think
healthcare, education, senior care and child care. If we find out you have sent your money
off-shore, your local taxes will increase by ten. So please, do, send your money off-shore -
our cities and towns would love to increase taxes on your stores, offices and real estate by
ten.
No more caps on taxes. If you are a citizen, you pay social taxes on every dime you get.
In America you will be paying 15.3% of every dollar to social security. That's $153,000.00 a
year for every million dollars you take out of our economy.
Land is not something you put in a museum, lock away in a vault, or wear on your neck.
Think fresh and new. If you own land, you are responsible for meeting community rules.
No more empty, weed filled lots allowed. If you have empty land, you better put in a nice
garden, pretty trees and walkways or we will do it for you and employ "eminent-domain" on
your bank accounts to pay for it.
No more empty buildings. If you own an empty building you will put it to good use, or we
will do it for you - and keep the profits to fund our local governments, schools, hospitals,
and senior/child care centers.
No more slumlords allowed. We have basic standards, for everyone. If we catch you renting
a slum to anyone, we will make repairs for you, and if you do not pay the bill, we will put a
lien on your building and wait until you sell it to pay ourselves back.
We do not trust you big-box types anymore. If you want to build your mega-store in our
cities, towns or communities, you must, first, deposit the entire cost of tearing it down,
and landscaping a park, or playground when you leave. While you stay, we will invest your
deposit in index funds and assure ourselves enough money down the road.
Sorry you BIG guys and gals, but you will find our countries are very expensive places for
you to invest. We put our families, our neighborhoods and our lives first.
However - and it's a big however - there is a very real danger that at the next election
the libs will again win by default due to the fact that many traditional labour voters are
defecting to the greens instead. Sadly, LNP supporters are a lot less likely to vote green.
Our best hope is to wipe the LNP out at the next election by voting labour, and then at the
election after that establishing the greens in opposition. It is unfortunatly unlikely to
happen at the next election....and I just hope that voters in certain seats understand that
by voting for the greens they might be in fact unwittingly handing the reins back to the
least green party of all: the LNP.
Neo Liberalism was a project cooked up back in the late 1970s by the Capital owning classes
& enacted by successive govts of "right" or "left" ever since. They feared the growing
power of the working & middle classes which they felt threatened their own power &
wealth. So they set out to destroy any ability of the working class to organise & to gut
the middle class.
Key to this was decoupling wages from productivity & forcing us all
into debt peonage. Deregulation of the financial markets & the globalization of capital
markets, disastorous multilateral trade deals & off shoring jobs, slashing state social
programmes, Union busting laws all part of the plan. All covered with a lie that we live in
meritocracies & the "best & brightest" are in charge. The result has been evermore
riches funneled to the wealthiest few percent & a wealth gap bigger than that of the
gilded age
The majority press are so organised around the idea that neoliberalism in the sense captured
economically and to some extent socially as construed in the article above; as normal and
natural that nothing can be done. As the system folds we see in its place Brexit, neoconservatism, Trump.
This is not new found freedom or Liberatarianism but a post liberal
world where decency and open mindedness and open nuanced debate take a a back seat to
populism and demagoguery.
The whole purpose of Anglophone liberal democracy has been twofold: 1. to establish and
protect private property rights and 2. TO guarantee some individual liberties. Guess who
benefits from the enshrinement of private property rights as absolute? Big owners, and you
know who they are. ... Individual tights are just not that sacred, summon the latest
bogeyman, and they can be shrunken or tossed.
Neoliberalism, the economic stablemate of big religion's Prosperity Evangelism cult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
.
Dual streams of bull shit to confuse the citizens while the Country's immense wealth is
stolen.
It seems there's been a turning point recently though in the ideas of neoliberalism, as
pointed out by Denniss that suddenly it's okay for all and sundry to talk about nationalising
industries and infrastructure. It will probably take a couple of decades to turn things
around in practical ways. And there are surely plenty of powerful supporters of the ideas of
neoliberalism still around.
Is neo-liberalism really dead or is it wishful thinking?
If neo-liberalism really is on the decline in Australia, all i can say is bravo to Australia,
use this opportunity to build a stronger government and regain the terrain that was lost
during the TINA (there is no alternative) years.
Here in Canada neo-liberalism is stronger than ever, maybe because of the proximity to the
cancerous tumor at the south, so when i read this article, i did it with a bit of skepticism
but also with a bit of envy and a bit of hope for the future.
Neoliberalism is *not* dead, and it is counter-productive to claim that it is. It is clearly
the driver of what passes for policy by the LNP government. Just as trickle-down economics
remains as the basis of the government's economic actions.
It will look like it's dead when back bone services and infrastructure utilities are returned
to public ownership.
Those things are not fit for market style private ownership for a few big reasons:
They are by their nature natural monopolies (so a market private ownership won't work and
will rapidly creep up prices of reduced service precisely because they not in a natural
market context.
These core services and utilities are mega scale operations beyond a natural market ROI
value.
These core sovereign services and utilities, are nation critical to the national economy
and political stability. The last thing we want to do is hand that sovereign power over to
private control.
Australia is a very fortunate country. It enjoys national sovereignty, unshackled by
crippling bonds to anything like the neoliberal EU. It is thus able to concentrate on solving
its own issues.
Great article. Must say that we do have more than one vote per electorate. They're called
preference votes. Kerryn Phelps get 23% of the primary PLUS a heap of preferences! But a
proportional system would change a whole lot of results
Firstly we are not in America. America is a basket case and has been since, well, forever.
Secondly the so called "housing crisis" is a simple consequence of a growing population.
In the 1950s there were just 8m people in Australia, there 10m in the 1960s and 12m in the
1970s. And, no, neo-liebralism didn't cause the growing population. People having sex and
living longer caused the growing population. It is therefore all the more remarkable that we
have actually built enough houses to house a population which has doubled in size.
Thirdly, in the last 30 years 1 billion people have been lifted out of poverty. When you
talk about huge, unprecedented, un-fucking-believable levels of poverty, super-massive
inequality, dissatisfaction (Really? This is now a measure?), unemployment/sub-employment and
casualization, collapse (collapse?) of public services, high(er) costs of living.....do you
think you're being a little overly dramatic?
Do you really think it all comes to back to one silly economic theory?
Nothing to do with the reality of automation, globalisation, growing populations and the
realities of living in 2018 rather than 1978?
Are voters around the world going hard against Neoliberalism? (I note it's now a
capitalised term).
In the US they voted for a billionaire who blamed immigrants for people's problems while
promising tax and spending cuts.....sounds like an even more extreme version of
neo-liberlaism to me.
In Britain they voted for Brexit to....oh that's right....kick out immigrants and burn
"red tape".
In Brazil, yep, more neo-liberalism on steroids.
In fact, looking around the world it's actually the far right which are seizing power.
And this is the issue with the obsessive preoccupation with community decline. It feeds
directly into the hands of fascism and the far right.
I'm not saying things are perfect. I would prefer to see much more government investment.
The only way we'll get that is to educate ourselves about how government finances work so
that we're not frightened off by talk of deficits.
However, by laying this all on the door of one rather silly economic theory is to ignore
that economics is nothing without human beings. It is human beings who are responsible for
all of the good and bad in the world. No theory is going change that. If the world is the way
it is it's because humans made it like this.
The "deterioration of the environment"? We did that not neo-liberalism .....
In answer to the headline article question, yes WE citizens should collectively strive to
think radically, bigger and better than the existing status quo.
PAY CITIZENS TO VOTE!
We must bypass the vested interests and create a new system which encourages active,
regular participation in democracy.... lest we wake up one day and realise too late that, by
stealth and citizen apathy, the plutocrats and their corporate fascist servants have usurped
our nation state, corrupted our law and weakened our institutions, to such a point that our
individual rights are permanently crushed.
Change is coming, like it or not. This century - there is great risk to society that
advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics and lifespan enhancing
genetic engineering will be used by ultra-rich plutocrats to make the vast majority of
humanity redundant (within a couple of generations).
Citizens should advocate for DIRECT DEMOCRACY in which citizens are PAID on a per vote per
issue basis (subject to verification checks that support the rewarding of effort- citizens
should be asked to first demonstrate that they have made effort to obtain sufficient
knowledge on a particular topic, prior to being rewarded for their service of voting. Such a
process can be opt-in, those who want to be paid, work to do so by learning about the
governance issue which is to be voted upon. In this way, a minimum wage can be obtained by
direct citizen participation in the governance of communities and our nation). We have the
technologies TODAY to undertake open-ledger, smart-phone enabled, digital/postal voting on a
per issue basis... which can be funded by EFFECTIVE taxation on large multinational
corporations and ultra-wealthy (foreign) shareholders. Citizen will is needed to influence
change - the major political parties did not want a Federal ICAC and they certainly will not
support paid direct citizen democracy unless voters overwhelming demand it.
Citizens already accept that politicians are paid to vote (and frequently "rewarded" for
their "service" to large corporations and wealthy (foreign) shareholders by unethical,
corrupt means). Thus, in principle, why can society not collectively accept direct payment to
citizens for their individual vote upon an issue? Why do citizens continue to accept
archaic systems of democracy which have clearly FAILED to meet the needs of our population in
the 21st century?
Citizens are not sufficiently politically engaged in democracy and their civic
responsibilities BECAUSE they are not incentivised to do so and because they are economic
slaves without the luxury of time to sort through deliberate overload of disinformation,
distortion, distraction and deception. Citizens are struggling to obtain objective
understanding and to think critically because these crucial functions of democracy are
innately discouraged by our existing 20th century economy (that is, slaves are busy support
the systems of plutocrats in order that they may live, ants to a queen).
We must advocate for change in the systems of democracy which are failing our communities,
our nation, our planet. For too long, plutocrats and their servants have maintained control
over economic slaves and the vast majority of the population because citizens have accepted
the status quo of being governed by the powerful.
Technology has permanently changed our species. We must all collectively act before innate
human greed, lust for power and fear of loss of control (by the wealthy few) lead the
majority on an irrational path toward destruction - using the very technologies which helped
set us free from the natural world!
In answer to the headline article question, yes WE citizens should collectively strive to
think radically, bigger and better than the existing status quo. PAY CITIZENS TO VOTE!
We must bypass the vested interests and create a new system which encourages active,
regular participation in democracy.... lest we wake up one day and realise too late that, by
stealth and citizen apathy, the plutocrats and their corporate fascist servants have usurped
our nation state, corrupted our law and weakened our institutions, to such a point that our
individual rights are permanently crushed.
Change is coming, like it or not. This century - there is great risk to society that
advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics and lifespan enhancing
genetic engineering will be used by ultra-rich plutocrats to make the vast majority of
humanity redundant (within a couple of generations).
Citizens should advocate for DIRECT DEMOCRACY in which citizens are PAID on a per vote per
issue basis (subject to verification checks that support the rewarding of effort- citizens
should be asked to first demonstrate that they have made effort to obtain sufficient
knowledge on a particular topic, prior to being rewarded for their service of voting. Such a
process can be opt-in, those who want to be paid, work to do so by learning about the
governance issue which is to be voted upon. In this way, a minimum wage can be obtained by
direct citizen participation in the governance of communities and our nation). We have the
technologies TODAY to undertake open-ledger, smart-phone enabled, digital/postal voting on a
per issue basis... which can be funded by EFFECTIVE taxation on large multinational
corporations and ultra-wealthy (foreign) shareholders. Citizen will is needed to influence
change - the major political parties did not want a Federal ICAC and they certainly will not
support paid direct citizen democracy unless voters overwhelming demand it.
Citizens already accept that politicians are paid to vote (and frequently "rewarded" for
their "service" to large corporations and wealthy (foreign) shareholders by unethical,
corrupt means). Thus, in principle, why can society not collectively accept direct payment to
citizens for their individual vote upon an issue? Why do citizens continue to accept
archaic systems of democracy which have clearly FAILED to meet the needs of our population in
the 21st century?
Citizens are not sufficiently politically engaged in democracy and their civic
responsibilities BECAUSE they are not incentivised to do so and because they are economic
slaves without the luxury of time to sort through deliberate overload of disinformation,
distortion, distraction and deception. Citizens are struggling to obtain objective
understanding and to think critically because these crucial functions of democracy are
innately discouraged by our existing 20th century economy (that is, slaves are busy support
the systems of plutocrats in order that they may live, ants to a queen).
We must advocate for change in the systems of democracy which are failing our communities,
our nation, our planet. For too long, plutocrats and their servants have maintained control
over economic slaves and the vast majority of the population because citizens have accepted
the status quo of being governed by the powerful.
Technology has permanently changed our species. We must all collectively act before innate
human greed, lust for power and fear of loss of control (by the wealthy few) lead the
majority on an irrational path toward destruction - using the very technologies which helped
set us free from the natural world!
Richard went off the rails in his opening sentence: "The opposite of a neoliberal economic
agenda isn't a progressive economic agenda, but democratic re-engagement."
I say this because economically misinformed democratic engagement is a shackle around
democracy, at best, if not fatal to democracy. And the biggest and most fundamental
misinformation, spouted every bit as much by ALP and Greens as the Libs, is that we must
strive for a "sustainable surplus".
As Richard rightly observes, "Neoliberalism taught us that "there is no alternative" to
cutting taxes, cutting services and letting the banks treat us as they see fit. But of course
not even the Coalition believes that any more." But that doesn't stop them, or Labor, or the
Greens from guaranteeing the continuance of the neoliberal cut & privatise mania by
insisting that they believe in "budget repair" and "return to surplus" - an insistence which
their economically illiterate or misled supporters accept. If you believe in the obviously
ridiculous necessity for a currency issuer to run balanced budgets, you are forced into
invalid neoliberal thinking, into accepting a false "necessity" for cuts and privatisations,
or economy-sedating taxation increases.
Rumours of neoliberalism's death have been somewhat exaggerated. Its been on life support
provided by the LNP since John Howard and there are still a few market fundamentalists
lurking in the ranks of the ALP, just waiting for their chance to do New Labor MkII in memory
of Paul Keating.
Neoliberalism's lasting legacy will not be the ludicrous economic programs, privatizations
and deregulation, those can all be rolled back if some party would grow a spine. The
real damage was caused by the aping of the US and UK's cult of individual responsibility, the
atomizing effects of neoliberal anti-social policy and demonization of collective action
including unionism.
All of which have hastened the atrophy of our democracy.
First things first lets get rid of the neo-liberal national dinosaurs still wallowing in
parliament unaware of the mass extinction awaiting them in March next year. At the same time
vote in a minority Labor government with enough independent cross benchers, including a
preponderance of Greens to keep the bastards honest.
Then just maybe we can start looking at the wider project of repairing Australian society
and democracy while we try and reverse the near-decade of damage the LNP have done with their
dangerous pro-fossil fuel stance, their insane climate change denial and hypocritical big
business friendly economic policies.
The irony is that it's simple. It's the Heath Robinson contraptions that the economic
priesthood for the plutocracy snow us with that are complicated, that turn us off economic
thinking because they are impenetrable and make no sense. The simplicity comes from
accepting the blinding obvious truth, once you think about it. The federal government is the
monopoly issuer of the AUD. The rest of the world are users, not issuers. Its "budgets" are
not our budgets. Nothing like them. Kind of the opposite. Its surpluses are the economy's
deficits. Its deficits are the economy's surpluses.
The key question is how strong is Maduro support within Venezuela? When oil is in stake,
imperial powers usually take gloves off pretty quickly.
All this rhetoric of Eric Zuesse does not answer the key question: does Maduro movement
propose sustainable alternative to neoliberalism in Venezuela and has unwavering support of armed
forces and population in view of this externally driven aggression? Because if the model is
unsustainable (iether for internal or external reasons -- presence of neoliberal 3000 pound
guerilla on the continent) it will eventually be crushed. What is the plan and what Maduro is
trying to built? Left government in several other countries of LA were recently deposed by openly
neoliberal puppets: Argentina and Brazil are two recent examples.
"Progressive regimes" all run into problems in economics (which are given due to neocolonial
nature of the current World order) which in turn creates social problems and the precondition for
neoliberal coup d'état sponsored from Washington. So there is a Neoliberal Catch 22 for all countries who want to
excape dependence on the USA: neoliberals new order guarantee that economic condition of peripheral countries do not improve; that
creates social discontent that allows to propose population a neoliberal carrot -- elect a neoliberal leader and your standard of
living "soon" will be like in the USA. neoliberal coup d'état can now succeed. Further impoverishing follows but it is
too late -- the train has left the station.
While convention to to more extreme
version of neoliberalism does not solve the problems in economics (Argentina here is nice example
of "What happens next after neoliberals came back to power") and impoverishment of population is
given. But at the same time the civil war is prevented and the support of the USA guarantee a
certain period of political stability.
In other words this struggle is about alternatives to neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal
governments have a huge handicap in a form of the USA presence on the continent. It looks like
Canada is just another neoliberal puppet of the USA in this game/
Notable quotes:
"... Venezuelan soldiers have blocked the crossing ahead of a delivery arranged by opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who has declared himself interim president ..."
Today, we have been joined by our Lima Group partners, from Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Saint Lucia.
We have also been joined in our conversations with our partners from other countries, for
this Lima Group ministerial meeting. These include Ecuador, the European Union, France,
Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States."
She, along with U.S. President Donald Trump, had, all along, been the actual leaders of this
international diplomatic effort, to violate
the Venezuelan Constitution blatantly , so as to perpetrate the coup in Venezuela. Her active effort to replace Venezuela's Government began with her formation of the Lima
Group, nearly two years ago.
Canada's Ottawa Citizen headlined on 19 August 2017,
"Choosing Danger" , and their reporter Peter Hum interviewed Canada's Ambassador to
Venezuela, Ben Rowswell, who was then retiring from the post. Rowswell said that Venezuelans
who wanted an overthrow of their Government would continue to have the full support of Canada's
Government : "'I think that some of them were sort of anxious that it (the
embassy's support for human rights and democracy in Venezuela) might not
continue after I left,' Rowswell said. 'I don't think they have anything to worry
about because Minister (of Foreign Affairs Chrystia) Freeland has Venezuela way at the top
of her priority list.'"
Maybe it wasn't yet at the top of Trump's list, but it was at the top of hers. And she and
Trump together chose whom to
replace Venezuela's President, Nicholas Maduro, by: Juan Guaido . Guaido had secretly
courted other Latin American leaders for this, just as Freeland had already done, by means of
her secretly forming the Lima Group.
On 25 January 2019, the AP bannered "AP
Exclusive: Anti-Maduro coalition grew from secret talks" and reported that the man who now
claims to be Venezuela's legitimate President (though he had never even run for that post),
Juan Guaido, had secretly visited foreign countries in order to win their blessings for what he
was planning:
In mid-December, Guaido quietly traveled to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to
brief officials on the opposition's strategy of mass demonstrations to coincide with Maduro's
expected swearing-in for a second term on Jan. 10 in the face of widespread international
condemnation, according to exiled former Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma, an ally.
Playing a key role behind the scenes was Lima Group member Canada, whose Foreign Minister
Chrystia Freeland spoke to Guaido [9 January 2019] the night before Maduro's swearing-in
ceremony [on 10 January 2019] to offer her government's support should he confront the
socialist leader [Maduro], the Canadian official said. Also active was Colombia, which
shares a border with Venezuela and has received more than two million migrants fleeing economic
chaos, along with Peru and Brazil's new far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
To leave Venezuela, he sneaked across the lawless border with Colombia, so as not to raise
suspicions among immigration officials who sometimes harass opposition figures at the airport
and bar them from traveling abroad, said a different anti-government leader, speaking on
condition of anonymity to discuss security arrangements.
During the last days in office of Canada's Ambassador to Venezuela Rowswell, U.S. President
Donald Trump went public with his overt threat to invade Venezuela. On 11 August 2017,
McClatchy's Miami Herald bannered "Trump
was making friends in Latin America -- before he raised Venezuela 'military option'" , and
Patricia Mazzei reported that "President Donald Trump's unexpected
suggestion Friday that he might rely on military force to deal with Venezuela's pressing
political crisis was an astonishing statement that strained not only credulity but also the
White House's hard-won new friendships in Latin America."
Even a spokesperson from the Atlantic Council (which is the main PR agency for NATO) was
quoted as saying that "U.S. diplomats, after weeks of carefully building the groundwork for
a collective international response, suddenly find their efforts completely undercut by a
ridiculously over the top and anachronistic assertion. It makes us look imperialistic and
old-time. This is not how the U.S. has behaved in decades!" However, Peru's Foreign
Minister, Ricardo Luna, was just as eager for a coup in Venezuela as were Trump and
Freeland.
On 26 October 2017,
Peru's Gestion TV reported that Luna was the co-chair of the meeting of the Lima Group in
Toronto, which Freeland chaired, and that (as translated into English here) "Luna added that
the objective of the meeting of the Group of Lima 'is to create a propitious situation' so that
the regime of Nicolás Maduro 'feels obligated to negotiate' not only an exit to the
crisis, 'but also an exit to his own regime'."
This gang was going to make Maduro an offer that he couldn't refuse. So, the Lima Group,
which was founded by Luna and by Freeland, was taking the initiative as much and as boldly as
Trump was, regardless of what NATO might think about it. The topic of that news-report, and its
headline, was "Peru proposes Grupo de Lima to involve the UN to face the Venezuelan
crisis." Four days later, Freeland and Luna met privately at the U.N., in New York, with
the Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.
Inner City
Press reported that"The title of the meeting is 'the situation in Venezuela and efforts
by regional organizations to resolve the crisis per Chapter VIII of the UN Charter' [see it
here ] and the briefer will be not USG [Under Secretary General] Jeffrey Feltman but his
Assistant, ASG [Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs] Miroslav Jenca."
Jeffrey Feltman was the person who, in the secretly recorded 27 January 2014
phone-conversation in which U.S. President Barack Obama's agent, Victoria Nuland -- planning
and overseeing the February 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected President
-- instructed the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, that, after Ukraine's President is ousted,
Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk was to be appointed as Ukraine's 'interim' leader as the new Prime
Minister, to replace the President. She also
said :
"I talked to Jeff Feltman this morning; he had a new name for the UN guy Robert Serry.
He's now gotten both Serry and Ban ki-Moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or
Tuesday. That would be great, I think, to help glue this thing, and to have the UN help glue
it, and, you know, fuck the EU."
So, the still Under Secretary General of the U.N, Mr. Feltman, is still America's fixer
there, who "glues" whatever the U.S. President orders the U.N. to do, and his Assistant was
filling in for him that day. Therefore, if Trump and Freeland turn out to be as successful as
Obama was, then the U.N. will "glue" the outcome. Chrystia Freeland happens also to be a friend
of Victoria Nuland, and a passionate supporter of her coup in Ukraine.
... ... ...
Of course, the man whom the U.S. and Canadian regimes and the Lima Group are trying to
install as Venezuela's President, Juan Guaido, had been well-groomed for that job, but not by
political and electoral experience, of which he has almost none, but by his foreign sponsors.
On 29 January 2019 the Gray Zone Project bannered
"The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela's Coup
Leader" , and their two star investigative journalists, Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal,
opened: "Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington's
elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at
the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization."
This report also noted that "The 'real work' began two years later, in 2007, when
Guaidó graduated from Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved to
Washington, DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George
Washington University, under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia,
one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive
director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [and the IMF is a central part the operation
that's described in John Perkins's now-classic Confessions of an Economic Hit Man] who spent
more than a decade working in the Venezuelan energy sector, under the old oligarchic regime
that was ousted by Chávez."
Moreover, "Stratfor and CANVAS – key advisors of Guaidó and his
anti-government cadre – devised a shockingly cynical plan to drive a dagger through the
heart of the Bolivarian revolution. The scheme hinged on a 70% collapse of the country's
electrical system by as early as April 2010." Etc. This is how 'democracy' now functions.
It's not democracy -- it is fascism. The euphemisms for it are "neoliberalism" and
"neoconservatism."
Regardless of whether or not the Trump-Freeland-Luna program for Venezuela succeeds,
democracy and human rights won't be advanced by it; but, if it succeeds, the fortunes of
US-and-allied billionaires will be . It's part of their global
privatization program .
Sidebar: If you want to understand what was the historical
context where Inner City Press reported that
"The title of the meeting is 'the situation in Venezuela and efforts by regional
organizations to resolve the crisis per Chapter VIII of the UN Charter'" ; then Luk Van Langenhove has
summarized that context , by saying:
Few invocations of Chapter VIII's provisions were made during the cold war period. But
when the bipolar world system collapsed and spawned new global security threats, the
explosion of local and regional armed conflicts provoked a renewed interest in regional
organizations and their role in the maintenance of regional peace and security. The United
Nations was forced to acknowledge its inability to solely bear the responsibility for
providing peace and security worldwide."
So, "during the cold war period," this provision of the UN Charter remained virtually
inactive. Then, suddenly, after 1991, when the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw
Pact military alliance to counter America's NATO military alliance, all ended (with
no concessions being made on the American side ), America could no longer use 'communism'
as a 'justification' to invade or perpetrate coups against foreign governments that were
friendly toward or else allied with Russia.
So, now, this provision of the U.N.'s Charter became activated by the U.S. and its
allies, in order to be able to say that The West's coups and invasions aren't actually to
build-out the U.S. empire, but are instead for (in the terms of this part of the U.N.'s
Charter) "the maintenance of international peace and security" -- so as to 'authorize' coups
and international invasions by the U.S. and its vassal nations, such as are the members of
NATO.
This is what U.S. President G.H.W. Bush had in mind to rely upon, when he told the leaders
of the U.S. regime's vassal states, secretly at Camp David, on the night of 24 February 1990,
that the 'Cold War' would now continue secretly on the U.S.-allied side, against Russia and
against any nation's leaders (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and
Viktor Yanukovych) that aren't hostile toward Russia, by Bush's saying then to them, that no
compromise must ever be allowed "with Moscow," because
"To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn't."
In other words, whereas the U.N. had been set up by FDR to evolve ultimately into the global
democratic federation of nation-states -- a democratic world-government -- so as to become the
sole possessor of control over all strategic weaponry, and thus to become the democratic
republic of the entire world authorized to settle international disputes peacefully, the
subterranean Nazis and other fascists whom U.S. President Truman and the Bilderberg group
represented, were determined that the U.S. and its vassal nations would ultimately become the
dictatorship over all nations, the entire world. That's what Ukraine, and now Venezuela, and
many other U.S. coups and invasions, are -- and have been -- really about. It's about the
'peace' of the graveyard, NOT any democracy, anywhere at all.
That's their dream. They want to monopolize the corruption everywhere, not to end it,
anywhere. And that's why they distort and blatantly lie about
Venezuela's democratic constitution now , just as they did about Ukraine's
democratic constitution in February 2014. It's, essentially, a lawless international gang
of billionaire thugs. It is the international
Deep State . It consists of the under 2,000 people who are international billionaires in
the U.S. and secondarily in the U.S.-allied countries, and of those billionaires' millions of
hirees.
585 of those under-2,000 are Americans .
But the wealthiest person on the planet isn't even listed on any of the standard lists of
billionaires, and
he is the King of Saudi Arabia . That person is the U.S. aristocracy's #1 international
ally, because ever since the 1970s when gold no longer backed the U.S. dollar but instead oil
did, that person's decisions have enabled the U.S. dollar to continue as being the world's
reserve currency, no matter how big the U.S. economy's trade deficits are, and no matter how
high the U.S. Government's fiscal deficits are.
Below those billionaires (and trillionaire), and below their millions of hirees, are the
billions of serfs; and, below those, at the very bottom, are the approximately 40 million slaves , and the many
millions imprisoned -- virtually all of whom have extremely low (if any) net worth at all,
since slavery and imprisonment are, in the real world, only for the very poor, not at all for
the international gangsters, except for a very few exceptions (such as, perhaps, "El
Chapo").
The billionaires command, and the governments obey; that's 'democracy', and it's 'the rule
of law', today. Everything to the contrary is propaganda, such as that what Trump-Freeland-Luna
want for Venezuela is to decrease corruption and to increase democracy and human rights.
At least the more blatant fascist John Bolton was honest when
he said on January 28th : "It will make a big difference to the United States
economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities
in Venezuela." But he would have been lots more honest if he had acknowledged, instead,
that "It will make a big difference to the United States billionaires economically if we
could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in
Venezuela."
This is all that the fascists ever really cared about. Mussolini called it "corporationism."
Now, decades in the wake of the Allies' supposed 'victory against fascism' -- against the Axis
powers -- in WW II, we all (at least the realists) are acknowledging that we clearly are
staring in the face the raw fact that fascism has finally won, or at least very nearly totally
won, in the world.
Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, died; but their ideological followers today rule the world,
and FDR would be turning in his grave.
Unfortunately the Orange one is being wagged again by those who are most seriously plotting his demise and
over reach in Venezuela may be just as much part of the plan as it was in pushing him into launching an attack
on Syria. It is true that the global elites are at a loss what to do, as the fracturing of the global
oligarchies is proving Marx right . capitalist are just a band of warring brothers [brigands, robbers, pirates
– all!]. As there is no serious ideological threat to their hegemony at the moment they fight amongst
themselves with imperial designs.
The threat to the imperium is the chaos which ensues when the elite power struggles fracture their hegemony
and an uncontrollable uprising ensues. Who shapes that revolution will be central to this. Where it will come
from is not evident yet but let's hope it's a grass roots one!
Yes, they will never stop. Just think of this brand-new propaganda lie of Maduro allegedly preventing aid
shipment to come into Venezuela. See BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47143492 : "Venezuelan soldiers have blocked the crossing
ahead of a delivery arranged by opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who has declared himself
interim president".
Notice the word "ahead" in this sentence. This word
appears because there was never a "delivery" (truck) with aid shipment at the bridge!
The Venezuelan government ("Maduro") blocked the bridge only because of war-threatening Columbia and USA.
If you want to send aid shipment to Venezuela you can send as much as you want anytime. Of course you have to
respect the regulations of the custom (like in every other country!). But that's all!
Whets foul with this story?
Well, this aid "delivery" cannot have been collected in Colombia – and thus being taken away from the
people of Colombia, who are much poorer than the people of Venezuela. So it would have to come from other
country (USA, Europe, China, Japan). And then you would not land this aid shipment in Columbia (a harbour, an
airport), drive it, in hot-humid air, through half of Colombia to the border crossing bridge of Cúcuta. Then
cross the bridge and then drive it through half of Venezuela!
Instead aid shipments for Venezuela would be landed directly in Venezuela – in an Venezuelan harbour or
airport.
There was one leading US politician whose name escapes me for the moment. When Chavez was
president, he complained bitterly that Venezuela's oil wealth was being squandered on things
like healthcare, education, literacy and welfare. It could have been given instead to hard
pressed Wall Street fund managers in bigger bonuses. He wasn't being ironic.
This was true in 2015 for Syria. Now this is true for Venezuela... So one can expect iether chemical attack opposition from Madura
government or "Snipergate" in EuroMaydan style. Or may some some more sophisticated, more nasty "false flag" operation in British style
like Skripal poisoning.
It will be interesting if Madura manage to survive despite the pressute...
Notable quotes:
"... Sorry but you're wrong. The funding a training of rebel forces by the west has done exactly what is was intended to do, mainly destabilise an entire region, sell billions in extra arms, introduce extra anti-terrorism laws in the west, create more fear and panic, then destabilise Europe through the mass-migration. This was the plan and it worked! ..."
"... To the great disappointment of those of us who voted for Obama, the first time out of hope for change, and the second time out of fear for someone even worse, he is a weak and chameleonic leader whose policies are determined by the strongest willed person in the room. Recall that he was also "talked into" bombing Libya! ..."
"... This isn't Bay of Pigs; its a bloated military trying to figure out what to do with its extra cash. Financially, it doesn't matter if the program is a failure. The cost is minuscule for the budget they have. ..."
"... Bush reached the Oval Office not because he was bright, for indeed he was not, he reached the Oval Office because he was dumb enough not to realise he was clearly easily manipulated, believed in neoliberalism and was rich and rich backers and a rich Dad. ..."
"... In Iran, we have a saying which says; take off a Mullah's turban and you will find the words "Made in England" stamped on his head. ..."
"... ISIS/ISIL is a creation of the US in an attempt to remove Assad. The long-term goal being to isolate Iran before going in there for the natural resources. ..."
"... The White House statement specifically refers to the "Syrian opposition". That's the term we use to describe anti-government forces. This recruitment and training programme has gone awry because the people originally recruited would have been anti-Assad. Now the Obama administration has tried to change the same people to fighting to ISIS instead. No wonder there's only "four to five" left. This is one big fustercluck! ..."
"... The CIA has probably been the greatest destabalising force in the world since the second world war and seem like more a subsidiary of the weapons trade than a government department. ..."
Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before and expect
better results the next time?
As pretty much everyone who was paying attention predicted, the $500m program to train and arm "moderate"
Syrian rebels is an unmitigated, Bay of Pigs-style disaster, with the head of US central command
admitting to Congress this week that the year-old
program now only has "four or five" rebels fighting inside Syria, with dozens
more killed or captured.
Even more bizarre, the White House is
claiming little to do with it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest attempted to distance Obama from the program, claiming that
it was actually the president's "critics" who "were wrong." The
New York Times reported, "In effect, Mr Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to
combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment."
This bizarre "I was peer pressured into sending more weapons into the Middle East" argument by the president is possibly the most
blatant example of blame shifting in recent memory, since he had every opportunity to speak out against it, or veto the bill. Instead,
this is what
Obama said at the time: "I am pleased that Congress...have now voted to support a key element of our strategy: our plan to train
and equip the opposition in Syria."
But besides the fact that he clearly did support the policy at the time, it's ridiculous for another reason: years before Congress
approved the $500m program to arm the Syrian rebels, the CIA had been running its own separate Syrian rebel-arming program since
at least 2012. It was
reported prominently by the New York Times
at the time and approved by the president.
In fact, just before Congress voted, Senator Tom Udall
told Secretary of State
John Kerry, who was testifying in front of the foreign relations committee, "Everybody's well aware there's been a covert operation,
operating in the region to train forces, moderate forces, to go into Syria and to be out there, that we've been doing this the last
two years." In true Orwellian fashion, Kerry responded
at the time: "I
hate to do this. But I can't confirm or deny whatever that's been written about and I can't really go into any kind of possible program."
Also conveniently ignored by Congress and those advocating for arming the rebels was a
classified
study the CIA did at the time showing that arming rebel factions against sitting governments almost always ends in disaster or
tragedy.
You'd think whether or not the current weapons-running program was effective – or whether any similar program ever was – would
have been a key factor in the debate. But alas, the CIA program is never mentioned, not by politicians, and not by journalists. It's
just been conveniently forgotten.
It is true that perhaps the best advocate for why we never should've armed the Syrian rebels to begin with came from President
Obama himself. He told the
New Yorker in early 2014 that "you have an opposition that is disorganized, ill-equipped, ill-trained and is self-divided. All
of that is on top of some of the sectarian divisions." Critically,
he cited that same above-mentioned
classified study:
Very early in this process, I actually asked the CIA to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency
in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn't come up with much.
He didn't mention the CIA's already-active weapons-running program. Why he didn't stick to his guns since he supposedly was weary
of getting the US military involved in yet another quagmire
it could not get out of is beyond anyone's comprehension. Instead, he supported Congress's measure to create yet another program
that sent even more weapons to the war-torn region.
Per usual, Republicans are taking the entirely wrong lessons from this disaster, arguing that if only there was more force then
everything would've worked out. Marco Rubio exclaimed
during the GOP presidential debate on Wednesday that if we armed the rebels earlier – like he allegedly wanted, before
voting against arming them when he had the chance – then the program would've worked out. Like seemingly everyone else in this
debate, Rubio has decided to ignore the actual facts.
Sadly, instead of a debate about whether we should continue sending weapons to the Middle East at all, we'll probably hear arguments
that we should double down in Syria in the coming days and get US troops more cemented into a war we can call our own (that still
to this day has not been authorized by Congress). There are already reports that there are
US special operations forces on the ground in Syria
now, assisting Kurdish forces who are also fighting Isis.
When the vicious and tragic cycle will end is anyone's guess. But all signs point to: not anytime soon.
Oliver2014 19 Sep 2015 21:27
" Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before and
expect better results the next time? "
Because the US doesn't understand the culture of the people it meddles with.
The US goes in with a messianic belief in the righteousness of its objective. This objective is framed in naive terms to convince
itself and the people that it's motives are benevolent - such as "we must fight communism" or "we will bring democracy to Iraq"
or "Saddam Hussein is an evil man who uses chemical weapons on his own people and hence must be ousted" or "Assad is an evil man
who is fighting a civil war with his own people".
As a superpower it feels compelled to interfere in conflicts lest it be seen as impotent. When it does not interfere, as in
WW2, things do indeed get out of control. So it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.
The CIA did not understand Afghan history of fighting off invaders when it was arming the Mujaheddin and that after the Soviets
were defeated it would perceive the Americans as invaders and not as liberators who were there to bring them democracy and teach
them that growing poppy was bad. (Like alcohol in the 1930s, a national addiction problem cannot be solved on the supply side
- as the CIA and DEA learnt in South America.)
Bush Sr. was right when he left Saddam alone after bloodying his nose for invading Kuwait because he understood that Saddam
was playing a vital Tito-esque role in keeping his country and the neighborhood in check. He had no WMDs but wanted his adversaries
in the region to believe otherwise. If Saddam were alive today we wouldn't have an Iraq problem, an ISIS problem, an Iran problem
and a Syria problem.
Smedley Butler 19 Sep 2015 21:12
"Why he didn't stick to his guns since he supposedly was weary of getting the US military involved in yet another quagmire
it could not get out of is beyond anyone's comprehension."
Maybe it's because he hasn't stuck to his guns on anything during the entire time he's been President. He always takes the
path of least resistance, the easy way out, and a "conservative-lite" position that tries to satisfy everyone and actually satisfies
no one.
What an utter disappointment.
DavidEG 19 Sep 2015 20:01
The Machiavellian machinations of the empire become less relevant with every passing day. It's Europeans now who are eating
sweet fruits of "mission accomplished". And they may rebel, and kick out last remnants of their "unity", and sacred NATO alliance
alongside.
PamelaKatz AndyMcCarthy 19 Sep 2015 18:33
Obama said the US would take 10,000 Syrian refugees. When I heard this, I thought surely a zero must be missing from this figure.
And what no one has publicly mentioned is the immigration process for these few will require at least a year of investigative
background checks.
PamelaKatz jvillain 19 Sep 2015 18:15
The largest manufacturers and global distributors of weaponry are the US, the UK, France, Russia and China, in that order.......
also known as the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council. One should read the UN Charter, which states the purpose and
parameters for forming this international organization. The word 'irony' comes to mind.
ID108738 19 Sep 2015 17:36
Saddam Hussein was a friend while he gassed the Iranians, then he invaded Kuwait; as long as Bin Laden fought the Russians,
he was tolerated and funded; now there's Syria. The only thing needed to take the strategy to new levels of idiocy was a compliant
nincompoop as prime minister in Britain. Will they ever learn?
Toi Jon 19 Sep 2015 17:27
The US understands how to create a market for their military hardware industry but has never understood how their interference
in the Middle East creates mass human misery.
Samantha Stevens 19 Sep 2015 17:09
Quite simply the US is breaking international law by doing this. Every time they do it the world ends up with another shit
storm. If they cannot behave responsibly they should be removed from the security council of the UN. Same goes for the Russians
and any other power abusing their position.
Syria may not have been the epitome of humanity before being destabilised but it is certainly worse now. The same is true of Iraq.
In fact have the US successfully overturned any government they deem un-American (LOL) without it leading to a civil war?
Andy Freeman 19 Sep 2015 17:06
Sorry but you're wrong. The funding a training of rebel forces by the west has done exactly what is was intended to do,
mainly destabilise an entire region, sell billions in extra arms, introduce extra anti-terrorism laws in the west, create more
fear and panic, then destabilise Europe through the mass-migration. This was the plan and it worked!
People will call for a solution, the solution will be tighter integration in Europe, the abolition of national governments,
the removal of cash to stop payments to "terrorists", more draconian spying laws, less from and eventually compulsory registration
and ID for all Europeans.
Meanwhile, we'll have a few more false flag attacks supposedly caused by the refugees and more fear in the news. Open your
eyes
Laurie Calhoun 19 Sep 2015 16:49
"Why he didn't stick to his guns..." Not the most felicitous metaphor in this case, but here is the answer to your question:
To the great disappointment of those of us who voted for Obama, the first time out of hope for change, and the second time
out of fear for someone even worse, he is a weak and chameleonic leader whose policies are determined by the strongest willed
person in the room. Recall that he was also "talked into" bombing Libya!
Sad but true. For more details on how this works, read Daniel Klaidman's book Kill or Capture: The war on terror and the soul
of the Obama presidency.
after the libya disaster the US should have abandoned plans for regim change in syria.
and the US missed a golden opportunity to recitfy what had already become a syria disaster by allowing turkey and the ludicrous
SNC to so thoroughly undermine the Geneva talks.
The U.S and U.K's commitment should be to those in Iraq. Secure, rebuild and invest in helping that Nation come with the
best solution to a, rid itself of ISIS, b, be able to stay that way, c have a government that is inclusive to the needs of
the Sunni's, Shia's and Kurds
Just as I thought that you can not surpass yourself in writing stupid comments, and you are immediately reassured me.
Thus, the US and the UK spent nearly ten years in Iraq and failed to make any of this what you write, but but the whole mess practically
they themselves have created. And now you're saying that if the US and UK troops returned again to Iraq they will be able to fix
everything that they had previously screwed and to create an "inclusive society" of Iraq. So, if the US and UK troops set foot
again on the soil of Iraq, it will be the strongest reason for Iraqi Sunnis to reject the inclusion in the Iraqi society. Iraqi
officials themselves are aware of this very well, and for that reason they are the first to oppose such an intervention.
BAGHDAD - Iraq's prime minister strongly rejected the idea of the U.S. or other nations sending ground forces to his country
to help fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, saying Wednesday that foreign troops are "out of the question."...
Al-Abadi, a Shiite lawmaker who faces the enormous task of trying to hold Iraq together as a vast array of forces threaten
to rip it apart, welcomed the emerging international effort, but stressed that he sees no need for other nations to send troops
to help fight ISIS.
"Not only is it not necessary," he said, "We don't want them. We won't allow them. Full stop."
"The only contribution the American forces or the international coalition is going to help us with is from the sky," al-Abadi
said. "We are not giving any blank check to the international coalition to hit any target in Iraq."
He said that the Iraqi military will choose and approve targets, and that the U.S. will not take action without consulting
with Baghdad first. Failure to do so, he warned, risks causing civilian casualties like in Pakistan and Yemen, where the U.S.
has conducted drone strikes for years.
Well, Well, whether i notice here distrust even of Iraqi Shiites toward the US Air Force. On the other hand, they want to strengthen
friendship with neighboring governments in Syria and Iran: ;
Al-Abadi,
however, said that Iraq doesn't have the luxury of testy relations with Damascus, and instead pushed for some sort of coordination.
"We cannot afford to fight our neighbor, even if we disagree on many things," al-Abadi said. "We don't want to enter into
problems with them. For us sovereignty of Syria is very important." The two countries, both of which are allies of Iran, appear
to already be coordinating on some level, and Iraq's national security adviser met Tuesday with Assad in the Syrian capital,
where the two agreed to strengthen cooperation in fighting "terrorism," according to Syria's state news agency.
The U.S. hopes to pull together a broad coalition to help defeat the extremist group, but has ruled out cooperating with
neighboring Iran or Syria, both of which also view ISIS as a threat. Both countries were excluded from a conference this week
in Paris that brought the U.S., France and other allies together to discuss how to address the militant threat.
Al-Abadi said that excluding Damascus and Tehran was counterproductive.
So, it is obvious that the Iraqi government is not against inclusion, but they're for such inclusion, which will exclude the US
and UK of interfering in their internal affairs. I think it is a good step towards reconciliation with their Sunni brothers because
they also seem to support such a thing. And if they managed to do it, maybe Ukrainians will also draw some lesson from it and
be able to reconcile with their brothers Russians.
Ieuan ytrewq 19 Sep 2015 14:04
ytrewq said: "USSR and China supplied a lot of support and material to N. Vietnam."
Very true.
However the Viet Minh were formed and initially supplied by OSS (later called the CIA) forces from the US. In fact Ho Chi Min
had a naive hope that the US would support him in his struggle against foreign occupation of the country after the war (French
colonialism) and made several appeals to President Truman for help (all of which were ignored).
Instead of which, the US supported the French, so Ho asked around and got help from the Russians and Chinese. The rest we know.
marginline AndyMcCarthy 19 Sep 2015 13:54
The UK and France [...], they destroyed Libya.
The causality of which led to an Islamic terror attack on June 26th, 2015 ten kilometers north of the city of Sousse, Tunisia,
where thirty-eight people; thirty of whom were British - were murdered.
sashasmirnoff JoJo McJoJo 19 Sep 2015 13:40
The US is always wrong, and always responsible for every bad thing that happens on Earth.
They are always wrong, and are indeed responsible for almost every geopolitical disaster, usually a result of overthrowing
governments and installing their own tyrant, or else leaving a vacuum that Islamists fill.
Zaarth 19 Sep 2015 13:34
This $500m program cost less than 0.1% of the US annual defense budget. When you're dealing with sums of money as obscenely
large as the US spends on its military, its inevitable that huge quantities will be wasted because you've passed the point where
there's worthwhile things to spend it on. This isn't Bay of Pigs; its a bloated military trying to figure out what to do with
its extra cash. Financially, it doesn't matter if the program is a failure. The cost is minuscule for the budget they have.
In recent years the right has been very concerned with balancing the national budget and shrinking debt. They're willing to
cut spending for social programs and research, but god forbid you take money away from the military. It just wouldn't be patriotic.
marginline -> GeneralMittens 19 Sep 2015 13:14
Great summary GeneralMittens. You have expressed in layman's terms the facts eluded to by journalist Mehdi Hasan when he quantified
the depth of the strategic disaster the Iraq war actually was – or, as the Conservative minister Kenneth Clarke put it back in
a 2013 BBC radio discussion...
the most disastrous foreign policy decision of my lifetime [ ] worse than Suez
The invasion and occupation of Iraq undermined the moral standing of the western powers; empowered Iran and its proxies; heightened
the threat from al-Qaeda at home and abroad; and sent a clear signal to 'rogue' regimes that the best (the only?) means of deterring
a preemptive, US-led attack was to acquire weapons of mass destruction. [ ] Iraq has been destroyed and hundreds of thousands
of innocent people have lost their lives, as the direct result of an unnecessary, unprovoked war that, according to the former
chief justice Lord Bingham, was a...
serious violation of international law
This leads me to the conclusion and I apologies for flogging this dead horse yet again BUT...why are Bush and Bliar not being
detained at The Hague?
Ieuan 19 Sep 2015 12:45
" I actually asked the CIA to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually
worked out well."
Well, they (the OSS at the time) supplied arms and training to the Viet Minh. When they were fighting the Japanese. Which worked
out well, when they were only fighting the Japanese.
But when they used their expertise (and the arms they had left over) to carry on fighting the French, and later the Americans
themselves, it worked out very well for the Viet Minh, not so well for the French and Americans.
GangZhouEsq 19 Sep 2015 12:27
The first President Bush, who decided not to topple President Saddam Hussein after routing his military forces out of Kuwait,
and instead to leave him in power for the sake of the Middle East stability is, in retrospect, probably the wisest foreign policy
decision ever made by the 41st President, thanks not only to his own personal judgment but also to his foreign policy aides' wisdom.
Though it is now too late for the son to learn from his father, it is still not too late for the present administration to learn
a thing or two from the former senior President Bush.
twoheadednightingale 19 Sep 2015 12:25
Nice to read an article coming at the war from this angle, seems like people are finally starting to question the effectiveness
US foreign policy - ie bombing for peace. However the article is fairly nieve in places - like who actually believes the president
of the US has control over all its intelligence agencies? JFK told the world in april '61, not long after the CIA had set him
up over the bay of pigs and months before being assassinated exactly that. So enough of the 'blame the president' bullshit, it
doesn't get to the root of the problem
GangZhouEsq 19 Sep 2015 12:17
The last major armament, including heavy guns, tanks and armored personnel carriers, as sent by the United States to the now
notoriously incompetent Iraqi military forces is now reportedly in the hands of ISIS after these US-trained Iraqi military personnel
simply abandoned their posts of defense and deserted for their own dear lives, thus leaving the centuries-old, formerly safe haven
of Mosul for Iraqi Christians to the mercy of ISIS. See "60 Minutes", Sunday, September 13, 2015, "Iraq's Christians", at
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/iraqs-christians-the-shooting-at-chardon-high-king-of-crossfit.
pfox33 19 Sep 2015 12:04
The fact that Putin is coming to Assad's aid is a game-changer that the US was unprepared for. For one thing, it's highlighted
how inconsequential US efforts to bolster "moderate" rebels and degrade ISIS capabilities have been.
From the time it was reported that the Russians were upgrading an airbase at Latakia to the time that it was reported that
they had dispatched helicopters and jets and that the Syrians had started to take the fight to ISIS in Raqqah and Palmyra was
only a matter of weeks. The CIA's program, after a year, had produced five soldiers at a cost of 500 million.
Previously the US had free reign over Syrian skies as did Israel who would bomb what they deemed to be convoys of military
supplies for Hezbollah. Things aren't so free and easy now with the Russians in town. And both the Americans and Israelis now
realize they have to check in with them before them they make sorties over northern Syria.
It's fairly obvious, to me anyway, that the US and Israel's only endgame was the fall of Assad and that ISIS had their tacit
approval. Assad's good relations with Iran and Hezbollah meant he was a marked man. Putin, as is his wont, has complicated their
plans and the results are yet to be seen.
BradfordChild TastySalmon 19 Sep 2015 11:58
"Iraq, Libya, Syria. What do/did these countries have in common? Unfriendly leaders who want nothing to do with the US."
Actually, Gaddafi had shown an interest in engaging with the West-- happened under Bush, but was never really followed up on.
Still, it was headed in a more positive direction until Obama rather arbitrarily decided that Gaddafi had to go.
The real net effect of US intervention in the Middle East has been to destabilize Europe.
Tony Page bravo7490 19 Sep 2015 11:32
I would agree but, as a former intelligence professional, I'd remind you that there's always a story behind the story. Not
that it's a "good" story! But more must be going on there...
ByThePeople 19 Sep 2015 11:12
"Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before and
expect better results the next time?"
It depends on how you define better. To think that these ops take place with the intent to solve an issue is naive, they don't.
You state yourself that the CIA freely admits it's never worked.
The reason the United States funds and arms groups in the Middle East is that 9 times out of 10, these same groups are then
later labeled 'terrorists' and a new US war campaign is justified.
It's not about solving problems - unless the problem being solved is: How do we create more opportunities to half-ass justify
engaging in another war effort so the US coffers can be continuously raped.
Iraq is the perfect example of succeeding in achieving this goal. Years before the Iraq war ever began, US war planners knew
that a power vacuum, attracting the likes of Al-Qaeda and or ISIS would subsequently result. Thus, providing a for a second war,
derived from the first seemingly pointless invasion. The Iraq plan worked fabulously as not only did the newly created enemy materialize,
they also became a much more formidable enemy once they conveniently came into possession of all the military equipment we let
behind.
Point is, they wouldn't continue implementing all these operations if the goal wasn't being achieved.
I will add too - McCain and Co. clamored so hard to arm the al-Assad opposition McCain might as well have claimed that if we
did not, then America would be blown up in its entirety in 48 hours the same as all the other fear mongering done in a effort
to continue the war efforts. Who knows, maybe he did, I try not to listen to him anymore - he needs to be put out to pasture.
TastySalmon 19 Sep 2015 11:10
Iraq, Libya, Syria. What do/did these countries have in common? Unfriendly leaders who want nothing to do with the US.
To suggest that funding radicals to overthrow these governments is a "whoops" or something that will never work is completely
wrong. The plan has worked exactly as planned: destabilize the region by promoting dissent, covertly arm and fund "rebels" through
back-channels (Saudi, UAE, Turkey, etc.), create a new boogeyman (ISIS), and reforge alliances with enemies (AQ) who will then
turn on us again in the future.
The goal is to flatten Syria, and it seems to be working out very well. When you consider what the ultimate outcome will be,
it starts becoming fairly clear: push Russia into a corner militarily and economically, open new LNG pipelines, appease allied
caliphates, and put billions of dollars into the pockets of the wealthiest people.
Their policy is chaotic and consists of repeating the same thing over and over again hoping to get different results, which
is, as we all know, the definition of madness.
I think the problem may well be the bloated MIC in the US. Too many strategic game plans for to many, often contradictory ends.
There are no doubt there are intelligence analysts in the US MIC who have a genuine interest in collecting actual information
and present it honestly. The numerous leaks show us this.
The problem is, this often good information, once it's been spun through political/economic vested interests, think tanks,
cold war jar head imperialists and so forth, it (foreign policy) ends up complete fubar.
To the point where, as you rightly say imo, their foreign policy looks like nothing more than "malicious wily manipulators,
deliberately buggering up the world to make money out of the consequences."
david wright 19 Sep 2015 10:49
For a full century now, from the Balfour Declaration and the secret Sykes-Picot arrangement, the currently-top 'Western' dog
(UK; then US) has been meddling and futzing around in the Middle East, notionally in someone's 'National Interest.'
Oil, access to Empire (route to India etc) and 'national prestige' have been the usual excuses. The result has been unmitigated
disaster.
Ignoring everything up to Gulf 1 (1991) we've a quarter century century of determined scoring of own-goals. This shows no sign
of changing. This is a helter-skelter race to destruction, greatly presently aided and abetted by Asad. So far, it's lasted two-and-a-half
times longer than the combined lengths of both World Wars.
One conclusion is that by any rational assessment, we don't deserve to 'win', whatever that would constitute, any more than
did one side or the other in the 16th -17th century's European religious wars. An equally rational assessment is that we neither
have, nor can. The final rational conclusion, that we find a way to disengage - remarkably simply, by stopping doing all the things
we have been - is a fence refused by the relevant horses - again, mainly US and (as very eager, jr partner indeed) UK.All apart
from the monstrous outcomes for the people in the region, we destabilize our own security then make things worse by tightening
our own internal 'security' at the expense of civil liberties. This gives away, at no gain, the slow and scrabbling accretion
of these, over centuries. And Cameron and co remain sufficiently delusional to want to keep on bombing, but whatever toys they
have, whatever seems a good idea on the day. How can we win? the war isn't on 'terror', but ion logic. Ours. |Neither the US nor
UK governments have ever shown much interest in the fates of the millions of people their casual actions have ended, or made hell.
Of the multiple ironies (shall I count the ways?) attending all this is that Saddam, while a murderous thug, and no friend to
his own people, was doing for us, for free, what we've been unable to do for ourselves - keep Iraq al-Quaida free. AS to his murderous
propensities, clearly far fewer of his people (alone) would have been killed had we not intervened, than we have directly or indirectly
killed. Much of this stems from the fact that during the same recent period (1991 on) there has been no effective counter to Western
power and inclination, which has simply projectile-vomited its baneful influence. Ironic too that the reason we armed and greatly
helped create al-Quaida was to destabilize Russia by getting it bogged down in Afghanistan. Thus the only real fear which limited
US action, was removed when that policy was successful. We removed the brakes as the train was beginning to accelerate down the
incline. Wheeee!
teaandchocolate smifee 19 Sep 2015 10:47
Bush reached the Oval Office not because he was bright, for indeed he was not, he reached the Oval Office because he was
dumb enough not to realise he was clearly easily manipulated, believed in neoliberalism and was rich and rich backers and a rich
Dad.
As to "not having a serious mark against his name", forgive me if I laugh hysterically while crying with pain.
The least said about the moron Reagan and his jolly pal Thatcher the better. Oh how well their unregulated market shenanigans
have turned out.
Crackpots the lot of them.
LethShibbo AndyMcCarthy 19 Sep 2015 10:35
Doing nothing and minding your own business is kinda the same thing.
And the civil war in Syria isn't purely a result of what happened in neighbouring Iraq.
What you're essentially saying is 'America, you've started this fire. Now let it burn.'
pansapians DrDrug 19 Sep 2015 10:28
Well of course ISIS were miffed that the U.S. was paying lip service to not arming ISIS. If you think there was ever any serious
difference between the FSA and ISIS then I hear that the Queen having to sell Buckingham palace due to losses gambling on corgi
races and I can get you a good deal for a cash sale
IrateHarry Havingalavrov 19 Sep 2015 10:17
Make Iraq work first..
ROFLMFAO...
Iraq has been so thoroughly screwed over by the UKUSA clusterfuck, there is no chance of it working ever again.
AndyMcCarthy LethShibbo 19 Sep 2015 10:12
Sorry, the US doesn't HAVE to make a choice, do nothing or bomb. All the US needs to do is mind it's own business.
We wouldn't be having this refugee crises if the US hadn't invaded Iraq.
Tomasgolfer 19 Sep 2015 10:10
For a little insight, see "The Red Line and the Rat Line", by Seymour M. Hersh. Published in the
London Review of Books
The US (and the UK and France for that matter) has been openly arming and training the "rebels". The US had a vote in congress
to openly do just that last year. Covertly, they've been doing it since 2012, again this has been well reported and admitted to.
The problem for the US is their so called "moderates" don't exist. They either switch allegiance once back in Syria or end
up captured or killed just as quickly.
Your user name seems somewhat of a parody.
ArtofLies richardoxford 19 Sep 2015 10:00
How does that compute ?
it computes once one answers this slightly naive question from the article
Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before
and expect better results the next time?
surely at some point people have to realise that chaos is the result the US is looking for.
IrateHarry 19 Sep 2015 09:56
Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East
Because that is the backbone business of America - making and selling deadly weapons. Deadlier the better, and no matter whom
they are supplied to. If foreign governments don't buy, does not matter, just supply it to "rebels", and they will be paid for
by the tax payers across the west (not just the American ones, NATO has been set up as the mechanism to tap into European tax
payers as well).
The rest of the bullshit like democracy, freedom, etc are marketeers' crap.
No wonder there's only "four to five" left. This is one big fustercluck!
There was a report in the NY Times last year by a reporter who was kidnapped by the FSA (his mission was to find them and find
out who they were) and handed straight over to Al-Nusra. Twice. He was imprisoned and tortured by them.
In his revealing report, talking of the couple of days he spent back with the "FSA", his release having been negotiated by
the west, he asked the "FSA" fighters about the training they received from the US in Jordan. The reporter put it to the fighters
that the training was to fight AN/IS. Their response? "We lied to the Americans about that".
The WSJ also recently reported that the CIA mission to arm/train "moderates/FSA" had gone totally tits up. Most of them reported
as defecting to one of the number of more extreme groups, some having been captured or killed.
It's been clear for about 2 years now that these so called "moderates" only exist in the deluded minds of western policy makers.
JacobHowarth MushyP8 19 Sep 2015 09:51
ISIS do not control that large a number of people. Many Kurds are fleeing because of IS, that's true, but for the most part
the civil war is a horror show from both sides and Syrians are - rightly - getting the hell out of there.
Or are all of those 'taking advantage of the opportunity to move to Europeans [sic] countries' proposing to do so by going
to Lebanon and Jordan?
The suspiciously unasked questions as to motives of all parties at Benghazi, by all twelve (12) members of the Select Committee,
suggests collaboration to question Hillary Clinton to make her appear responsible only for bungling security and rescue, for the
sole purpose of diverting attention from Hillary Clinton's role in the CIA and the CIA operative Ambassador Stevens' arming of
terrorists. The obvious question to ask would have gone to motives: "What activities were Stevens and the CIA engaged in, when
they were attacked at Benghazi?"
GreenRevolution 19 Sep 2015 09:10
The use of religion(Islam specifically) in politics was first employed by the British in the Middle East in the early parts
of the 20th century. In Iran, we have a saying which says; take off a Mullah's turban and you will find the words "Made in
England" stamped on his head.
nnedjo 19 Sep 2015 09:09
Even more bizarre, the White House is claiming little to do with it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest attempted to distance
Obama from the program, claiming that it was actually the president's "critics" who "were wrong."
Yes, it seems that it has become a tradition of US presidents to boast with the fact that "they do not interfere much in their
own job".
For example, in the last campaign for the GOP candidate for the US president, Jeb Bush defended his brother George for a false
pretext for war in Iraq in the form of non-existent WMD, claiming that everyone else would bring the same decision on the start
of the war, if the same false intelligence would be presented to him.
Thus, the president of the United States can not be held accountable for its decisions if the CIA deliver him false intelligence,
or deliberately conceal the true intelligence. On the other hand, since no one has heard of any person from the CIA which is held
responsible for the wrong war in Iraq, it turns out that nobody is responsible for this war.
And, to us, mere mortals, it remains only to conclude that the most powerful war machine in the world moves "without a driver",
or maybe it is "driven by some automatic pilot".
So, how tragic it is, and yet we can not help laughing. :-)
mikiencolor 19 Sep 2015 09:06
It was obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense from the beginning that the "moderate" rebel training programme would be an
utter disaster. But if the lessons you are taking is that nothing should be done at all, I'd submit you are taking the wrong lessons
from the debacle. Doing nothing at all would have condemned tens of thousands more to genocide. Doing something saved thousands
of Yezidi and saved Rojava.
Wherever the Kurds have been supported they have proved capable, trustworthy and have created functional civil societies. To
broadly and undiscerningly dismiss "sending weapons to the Middle East" is disingenuous. Something must be done, and things can
be done to help rather than harm if there is a sensible policy maker, and doing nothing certainly can be more immoral and evil
than doing something - as I thought we'd learned from Nazi Germany.
The reality is one that neither right wing nor left wing hardliners are willing to face: the Sunni Arab jihadis are the source
of most of the problems and the reason is entirely to do with their noxious genocidal and imperialistic ideology and culture.
They are a source of instability, enmity and fear, and not just in the Middle East either. And they are being supported and bankrolled
by Western allies in the Gulf. The world is a big place with many peoples and ways of thought, and many disagreements - but we
nearly all of us seem able to find a way to coexist in this new globalised technological human civilisation. The jihadis are a
barbarian throwback, a movement of violent primitivists. There is no place for jihadism in the future and they are a threat to
everyone in the world.
ID0020237 -> teaandchocolate 19 Sep 2015 09:01
Insanity I believe, not madness, but what's the difference. The CIA may get it right, but after political interference and
manipulation, they change their conclusions. We've seen this with the Iraq debacle and elsewhere. Just as political interference
in military operations, Viet Nam for example, causes imminent failure, so it is with intelligence ignored.
GeneralMittens 19 Sep 2015 09:01
So basically America invades and bombs the shit out of everywhere and the europeans have to clean up the mess and deal with
the resulting refugee crisis?
At some point America should be held accountable for their actions in the middle east. Whether thats taking their fair share
of refugees from syria or footing the bill for this clusterfuck.
At the very least, other countries should stop enabling their warmongering.
LittleGhost 19 Sep 2015 08:58
US foreign policy in the ME proves Einstein's maxim
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
GreenRevolution 19 Sep 2015 08:57
It has been 14 years since 911 and Bush's so called "war on terror". Not only barbaric wahabi terror has not been defeated
it has grown its barbarism to magnitudes unimaginable previously. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been allowed to arm them
to the teeth by the very states who claim to be waging "war on terror". Since Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are close allies
of the west and one is a member of NATO, it follows that the west is in fact arming the wahabi terrorists who have turned the
Middle East into a wasteland murdering and looting at will. Millions are now refugees, countries laid to waste and yet Mr Kerry
and Hammond talk as if they have done such magnificent jobs and Russian involvement would only "complicate" things.
teaandchocolate 19 Sep 2015 08:56
I don't think they have the brightest people working in the CIA and the military in the USA. They are probably bullies, relics
from the Cold War, jar-heads, devout 6000-year-old-world Christians, neocons and fruitcakes. Their policy is chaotic and consists
of repeating the same thing over and over again hoping to get different results, which is, as we all know, the definition of madness.
smifee 19 Sep 2015 08:52
To be honest, I don't see any confusion.
Obama comes across as a (comparatively) humane person, and I am sure that his personal preference would be for there to be
no violence in the middle east. As President of the USA, however, he has to set aside his personal preferences and act in the
wider interests of his country.
The US set out to realign the political make up of the middle east. No doubt, they want to make sure Islam will never again
be able attack US interests.
Successive Administrations have controlled the funding and arming of various factions within the Middle East to ensure that
Muslims kill each other and weaken social structures. The US will fill the ensuing political vacuum and economic waste-land with
local leaders loyal to 'freedom, democracy and the American Way'. The next Administration will continue to stoke up the violence,
and the one after, and the one after that until the US is satisfied it has achieved its objective.
It seems almost all of us have to contain our personal views if we want to succeed in our place of work. Even the P of the
USA.
GoldMoney -> celloswiss 19 Sep 2015 08:51
True, in a democracy, moderates don't need bombs and assault weapons.
Consider this - how would you feel if foreign governments were arming and funding the IRA in Northern Ireland?
What if foreign governments recognised the IRA as a legitimate opposition to the Belfast government and gave them bombs to
take over the country?
MichaelGuess 19 Sep 2015 08:46
Who are the real terrorists, the group that bombs indiscriminately, the group that sells arms to both sides, the group that's
lies to its "coalition" partners, the group that spies on all its friends, the group that is happy to be starting wars everywhere
and then blame other parties for their lack of support.
These are the real terrorists.
MushyP8 19 Sep 2015 08:46
ISIS/ISIL is a creation of the US in an attempt to remove Assad. The long-term goal being to isolate Iran before going
in there for the natural resources.
Assad won 89% of the vote in a 74% turnout, how many world leaders have 65% of the population supporting them, hence why Assad
hasn't fallen. Naturally the US refuted this alongside its lapdogs, the EU and the UK, as it disproves all the propaganda they've
been feeding the west. RT news did an interview with Assad which was very insightful.
Putin seems to be the only one who's got his head screwed on in this situation, which is of course leading to hissy fits by
the US because he's proving a stumbling block. More nations need to get behind Putin and Assad, although of course the US wont.
GoldMoney DrDrug 19 Sep 2015 07:52
Moderates do, when the simple act of protesting against the mutilation of children detained by the states secret police
are met with a volley of snipers.
No such evidence has been bought to the UN security council. Even the chemical attack that the media claimed from day one was
Assad's forces doing turned out to be IS rebels actions. The two human rights groups operating in Syria are western funded NGO's
- hardly a neutral point of view given the US's long stated aim of removing Assad (even before 2011).
geedeesee 19 Sep 2015 07:25
This $500 million from June 2014 was for recruiting Syrian rebels seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad - not to fight
iSIS.
The White House said at the time:
"This funding request would build on the administration's longstanding efforts to empower the moderate Syrian opposition,
both civilian and armed, and will enable the Department of Defense to increase our support to vetted elements of the armed
opposition."
The White House statement specifically refers to the "Syrian opposition". That's the term we use to describe anti-government
forces. This recruitment and training programme has gone awry because the people originally recruited would have been anti-Assad.
Now the Obama administration has tried to change the same people to fighting to ISIS instead. No wonder there's only "four to
five" left. This is one big fustercluck!
kingcreosote 19 Sep 2015 07:12
The CIA has probably been the greatest destabalising force in the world since the second world war and seem like more a
subsidiary of the weapons trade than a government department.
Taming of financial oligarchy and restoration of the job market at the expense of outsourcing and offshoring is required in the
USA and gradually getting support. At least a return to key elements of the New Deal should be in the cards. But Clinton wing of Dems
is beong redemption. They are Wall Street puddles. all of the them.
Issues like Medicare for All, Free College, Restoring Glass Steagall, Ending Citizen's United/Campaign finance reform, federal jobs
guarantee, criminal justice reform, all poll extremely well among the american populace
If even such a neoliberal pro globalization, corporations controlled media source as Guardian views centrist neoliberal Democrats
like Booker unelectable, the situation in the next elections might be interesting.
Notable quotes:
"... Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin ..."
"... 2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy. ..."
In their rhetoric and policy advocacy, this trio has been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic
party. Booker ,
Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare.
Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice)
and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders' single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college
tuition for most Americans.
But outward appearances aren't everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late -- on
Wall Street. According to
CNBC , all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone's Jonathan
Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.
Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which
just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and
Gillibrand weren't far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and
other powerful executives.
When CNBC's story about
Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support
for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take "no corporate Pac money". But what's most telling isn't
that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street's money, it's that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn't take
their contributions, she's signaling that she's just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus
their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional
coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.
Unfortunately the Orange one is being wagged again by those who are most seriously plotting his demise and over reach in Venezuela may be just as much part of the plan as it was in pushing him into launching an attack on Syria. It is true that the global elites are at a loss what to do, as the fracturing of the global oligarchies is proving Marx right . capitalist are just a band of warring brothers [brigands, robbers, pirates – all!]. As there is no serious ideological threat to their hegemony at the moment they fight amongst themselves with imperial designs.
The threat to the imperium is the chaos which ensues when the elite power struggles fracture their hegemony and an uncontrollable uprising ensues. Who shapes that revolution will be central to this. Where it will come from is not evident yet but let's hope it's a grass roots one!