Empire Journalism: Venezuela, the US and John McCain

Click here to access article by an editor of Media Lens. 

This article offers a lot of helpful advice as an antidote to biased and fake information supplied by mainstream (corporate) media.

The US political commentator Michael Parenti once observed that:

'Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for "objectivity". Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.'

Once you understand the truth of that remark, seeing the daily biases and distortions of the corporate media becomes obvious.

Don't Break The Internet: an introduction to an internet watchdog organization

Click here to access a current newsletter issued by the watchdog organization called Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). 

Although their politics are quite conservative compared to mine, EFF is effective as a watchdog organization which wants to preserve access to the internet free of all censorship, and protect the internet that is being increasingly threatened by government regulations and laws. The EFF mission statement is as follows:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows.

If you share their concern, you need to subscribe to their newsletter and maybe donate to help support their activities.

Recommeded articles for Friday, September 7, 2018

• Deep State Refines Hit Job on Trump by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation.

The so-called “Russiagate” charade has failed to oust Trump due to its embarrassing dearth of evidence on alleged collusion with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The wider American public have simply not bought into that drama which has been concocted by political and media elites to nix Trump.

Given the futility of those efforts, the Deep State may have now found at last the effective instrument with which to eliminate Trump from the White House. You enlist a “star journalist” with yesteryear’s Deep State operative experience, get the supposed paper of record to quickly “confirm” the salacious details, and then wait for the desired “administrative coup” to become a popularly demanded reality.

• Seymour Hersh’s Reporter: A life exposing government lies and crimes by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site.

Under the Bush years, it was still permissible within the corporate media to criticize American foreign policy, however few and far between were such voices.

But after Obama’s 2008 victory, the entire American political establishment, including its middle-class “left” wing, embraced military escalation in the Middle East, and the media followed suit.

The criminality, along with the flagrant and filthy lying that tarred the Nixon and Bush administrations, have not only been adopted as standard practice by the whole political establishment, but have been embraced by the media.

Hersh has continued to expose these crimes and lies and because of it has been treated as a pariah in official American politics.

From Widgery to Washington: A Bloody Sunday Family Member’s Perspective on 9/11 by Julieann Campbell from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

The author offers an Irish experience, in which Irish activists finally succeeded to get the British government in 2010 to partially confess their sins regarding the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, to encourage their ongoing efforts to demand that the US government re-examine the evidence regarding the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Recommended articles for Thursday, September 6, 2018

• The Einstein File Exposes the FBI as an Enemy of All the People by Daneil Haiphong from MintPress News.

The Einstein File reminds us that the FBI has always been an enemy of all the people and a tool of the oligarchs that rule the country. It also reminds us that the War on Terror and Russiagate ultimately share a common historical lineage with the “Red Scare” of the 20thcentury. The FBI used the “Red Scare” as justification to harass, murder, infiltrate, detain, and deport “dissidents” that the organization deemed agents of “Communist Russia.” Jerome’s review of Einstein’s file reveals the extent to which the famous scientist was caught in the FBI’s war on dissent. The Hoover-led FBI collected nearly 2,000 pages worth of intelligence on Albert Einstein over two decades of his life, most of which pertained to his affiliations with progressive organizations.

Einstein’s FBI file uncovers the enormous scope of repression experienced not only by Einstein but also a range of political activists and organizations of the period. 

Of course, the FBI like any other government agency and all other institutions (media, entertainment industry, education, etc.) were created by the ancestors of this self-serving capitalist ruling class to protect their system (capitalism) that has over the centuries supplied them with the drugs of profit and power.

• New York Times op-ed by anonymous Trump official gives implicit support for palace coup by Eric London from World Socialist Web Site. At times, I get perverse pleasure out of seeing the internecine battles within the Empire's capitalist religious establishment. It's much like seeing Martin Luther breaking with the Pope of Roman Catholicism and launching the Protestant Reformation. The latter Christian sects collaborated with the rising capitalist class in defeating the feudal authorities (monarchs and the aristocracy) who were supported by the Roman Catholics. Except this where the metaphor breaks down: Trump and his supporters will be rather easily disposed of by the solid core of bankers in today's ruling capitalist class. Trump represents a quixotic historical throwback in the development of American capitalism when industrial barons ruled. (Added to this commentary at 4:15 PM CT.)

Recommended articles and a video for Wednesday, September 5, 2018

• A Diabolic False Flag Empire: A Review of David Ray Griffin’s The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? by Edward Curtin from his blog. 

Curtin reviews a new book by Griffin detailing the many war crimes perpetrated by and for the ruling capitalist class to promote their profits and power throughout the history of the USA. A finally in the end, Curtin, by criticizing Griffin and his reliance on Noam Chomsky's views regarding Kennedy, reveals how difficult it is to determine the truth about so many crimes against humanity under the conditions in which agents of the ruling classes write history. Being an historian nowadays must be a very difficult task: career historians are often forced to compromise their integrity in order to have any kind of career.

• How the administration of the UNO is organising the war by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet. Also Sarah Abed in another article provides evidence that the Empire is using the "humanitarian" weapon, among others, against Syria.

• As social opposition mounts, Silicon Valley and Washington step up internet censorship by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site. 

• The End Of Kings: a video based on writings by Caitlin Johnstone and narrated by her:

   

On Labor Day, Where’s Labor? How Did American Workers Lose Their Power?

Click here to access article by Jon Jeter from Mint Press News. 

The author argues that the dramatic decline in union membership in the post-WWII period has been facilitated by union bureaucrats in cooperation with the capitalist ruling class's racist divide-and-conquer strategy. However there are many other factors involved in the deteriorating number of workers in unions. 

Henry Luce, speaking for the ruling class, announced that the US could seek its own empire after WWII. The US ruling class understood that the war would likely destroy most of the industrial countries. And sure enough, the US fascist capitalists came out of their isolationist woodwork where they were hiding and joined in the plunder of war profits by manufacturing weapons for the numerous belligerents. 

After the war they insured that labor unions were cleansed of radical organizers (the McCarthy period) and passed laws that suppressed the labor movement. Their propaganda machines in Hollywood, corporate media (even in comic books), and in public schools began to crank out themes of the Red (Communist) menace and the need to build up their armed forces. Then there was the Korean War which our masters saw as an opportunity to stop the Red menace and the growing appeal that the Koreans had for their own independence and social justice values. According to William Engdahl in A Century of War, as early as 1958 American capitalists began to take advantage of lower labor costs in Europe and other foreign countries because of their obsession with profits and power and their absence of any concern about the aging industrial infrastructure in the home country

Then there was the Vietnam War in which the military-industrial establishment earned billions of dollars manufacturing war materials that could have been spent to upgrade the domestic economic infrastructure and spent on other social needs like health, education, and welfare for ordinary Americans. 

I myself have argued that our own "educated" upper-middle-class workers were seduced by many rewards provided by the ruling class to aid and abet their imperialist agenda abroad and the suppression domestically of other working people below them. Last, but not least, there has been the takeover of government by the Zionist-inspired neoconservatives who engineered the 9/11 false-flag tragedy and re-energized ordinary Americans for more wars they had planned in the Middle East. 

There are other attempts to explain this phenomenon like in the current book reviewed by Guy Miller entitled On New Terrain: how capital reshaped the battleground of class war by Kim Moody.

An Online Vigil in Defense of Julian Assange With Daniel Ellsberg, Craig Murray, Bill Binney and Ray McGovern

Click here to access article and lengthy (nearly 4 hrs) video posted on ConsortiumNews which was conceived by an international group of people and organized as United in solidarity for Julian Assange. They are rightfully concerned about the whistleblower-in-chief and the ongoing Empire's vendetta against him. 

This is a monumental task for this movement to protect and free Julian Assange from further harassment by agents of the Empire. However, it is evident to me that they are operating with a limited budget: the quality of the recordings, the lack of publicity up to now in alternative news media, and other mishaps. I wish to make clear that I am wholly in support of such actions even though I am offering some criticisms.

I have only listened to the first interview with Bill Binney conducted by New Zealander Suzie Dawson, and thus my commentary mostly applies to him although I think his thoughts are representative of the group as a whole.

Binney, a former employee of the National Security Agency (NSA), the Empire's primary spy agency, expands with his intimate knowledge of the NSA and the threat posed to them by whistleblowers such as Julian Assange. He offers numerous examples of NSA's lies, violations of laws and the Constitution, conspiracies by the NSA to keep Congress from meddling into their criminal affairs of running the Empire, and keeping the public in ignorance about their nefarious activities. However, his remarks only suggest the corruption of government by powerful private agencies and individuals, and the necessity to fight this corruption which he argues is leading to a "totalitarian government". Although at one point he refers to a "deep state", he nowhere expands on the implications of this. 

This ideological position precisely identifies where most of the US educated left exist. Although they might occasionally use words like "deep state", they refuse to believe that the concept refers to anything other than private entities trying to take over what, in their mind, is a genuine democratic government. They simply don't believe that our their (capitalist) government was established as a democratic facade which hides the rule by a class of self-serving owners and made possible by the system their ancestors created called capitalism.

For anything of significance to change in our nation and its Empire requires a rejection of the entire liberal mythology and the recognition of the reality of rule by a self-serving tiny class. I am not referring to the modern sense of liberal, but to the classic liberalism of the self-serving capitalist revolutionaries like John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton that still exists today.  The modern sense of liberalism is simply a deceptive construct to distract people from reality.

I am convinced that only ordinary people who, after suffering so much pain and poverty, finally reject capitalism and take matters in their own hands to establish a system that works for them. This conviction means that "educated" upper-middle class leftists can not alone accomplish any significance change. They are frequently too indoctrinated and compromised by the rewards provided to them by ruling capitalists to risk anything for the establishment of another system. At least I hope that they can free Julian Assange.

Washington Post Covers Up US Meddling in Malaysia

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook. 

One of the world's top analyst of information and propaganda scores again in this exposé of meddling by the Empire in Malaysia's politics. The author has been providing us with this valuable service for a number of years, and always with extensive documentation. Yes, once again, Cartalucci points out how the propaganda agents in the Empire's corporate media actually do what they accuse Russia of doing in the USA.

I can't understand why he is not recognized as a top political analyst by those Americans who want to think for themselves, and that he has not enjoyed a wide following by independent, unbrainwashed readers. Apparently too many people have succumbed to the intellectual passivity that propaganda agents have worked so hard for many years to instill in our "educated" as well as the larger society. Could it be that while many others are only posing as dissidents, he is really doing it?