Posts that I especially recommend today: Monday, October 5, 2020

• Here Is a Video of Fauci Explaining in January 2020 That Asymptomatic Transmission Is NEVER the Driver of Outbreaks by Marko Marjanović from Anti-Empire.

• Combating The Virus: Mass Unemployment is Not the Solution by Prof Michel Chossudovsky from Global Research.

• “It’s Poor People and Young People Who Are Paying the Cost of the Lockdown,” Says Stanford Professor by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and John C. A. Manley from Global Research. 

• 6 Wikileaks Revelations Expose Corporate Abuse at Expense of People and Planet by Jeremy Loffredo from Children's Health Defense.

• How a Police State Starts by Scotsman Craig Murray, who has been reporting on the British kangaroo court trying Julian Assange, from his weblog.
  

Ecuador Expected to Extradite Assange to US, Lawyer Says

Click here to access article from TeleSur. (I thank an activist for alerting me to this report.)

“I believe that [Washington, London and Quito] have reached some agreement and that is exactly why the special protocol [on home rules] was introduced... to accelerate the process of ending his asylum and hand him over to the United Kingdom authorities," Poveda said Thursday.

Being Julian Assange

Click here to access article by Suzie Dawson from Consortium News.

Dawson excoriates the attempts to discredit and ignore the valuable contributions that Julian Assange has made to protect whistleblowers and to reveal the truth about the Empire's foreign policies. And then she shames us and all who have turned their backs on Assange in his hour of desperate need. I didn't read all of this huge article, but it looks like a comprehensive defense of Assange and a ringing call for support of his liberty.

At the crux of the issue is a battle of authenticity versus falsehood, on a spectrum. With most of us sandwiched somewhere in between and WikiLeaks front and centre. Because WikiLeaks is the last available vestige of verifiable, unadulterated public truth.

That is why they are hated by those who fear the revelations WikiLeaks facilitates and why WikiLeaks’ public reputation is desecrated every day. It is why their every pillar of support is systematically undermined and why Julian Assange is being ever so slowly murdered in front of our eyes.

We, the people, are the last line of their defence. Part of protecting WikiLeaks – and ultimately ourselves – is to understand the relentless nature of the psyops employed against them; that the hardships inflicted upon them by the enemies of human progress are not just reputational or financial but physical; that for those waging this thankless war of truth on our behalf, this is a matter of life or death.

And that is why we must push back.

That is why we must tell the truth about them.

Recommended articles for 4/2/2018

• The Persecution Of Assange Proves Him Right by Caitlin Johnstone from The Greanville Post.

• Mass Deception and the Prelude to World War by Colin Todhunter (a British blogger) from Global Research. 

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

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

• It’s Not Russia, America’s Unspoken Program of “Political Assassinations” by Eric Sommer from Global Research.

Recommended articles for 3/29/2018

• Amnesty International: Trumpeting for War… Again by Paul de Rooij from CounterPunch. (Thanks go to an activist reader for recommending this.)

• Ecuador cuts off Julian Assange’s access to the outside world by Mike Head from World Socialist Web Site.

• China taking the long road to solve the petro-yuan puzzle by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times.

• You Know The U.S. is Losing, We’re Willing to Talk by Tom Luongo from his website Gold Goats n Guns.

Getting Julian Assange: The Untold Story

Click here to access article by John Pilger from TeleSur. 

For almost seven years, this epic miscarriage of justice has been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. There are few precedents. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the U.S. threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, and to the principle of free speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious. I would call it anti-journalism.

This vendetta against Julian Assange, along with their treatment of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, illustrates the extreme importance that Empire directors place on preventing any information that exposes their many criminal activities. But this is only part of the story. 

Corporate media, which capitalists own and control, have been used to purvey a countless number of fake news reports, self-serving propaganda, and poorly done investigative reports of "terrorist" incidents. The two together, that is, the persecution of alternative sources of information together with their propaganda use of corporate media indicate that the ruling class directors of the capitalist Empire regard the monopoly of information as a top priority to prevent their subjects from interfering in their plans of world hegemony and extracting the last ounce of wealth from the Earth.

The WikiLeaks revelations and the crimes of US imperialism

Click here to access article by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site.

The WikiLeaks documents expose the United States as the world’s greatest “rogue state” and “cyber criminal.” The monstrous US espionage network, paid for with hundreds of billions in tax dollars, uses diplomatic posts to hide its activities from its “allies,” spies on world leaders, organizes kidnappings and assassinations and aims to influence or overturn elections all over the world.

Assange: Clinton is a cog for Goldman Sachs & the Saudis

Click here to access the transcript of a 24:53m interview conducted by Australian journalist John Pilger with Julian Assange, a founder of Wikileaks and a political refugee from Empire persecution, who has been trapped at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over four years. In the interview Assange draws on his vast knowledge of the intercepted emails to inform his insightful comments about the funding of ISIS, American deep state politics, and some details about his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Clinton can't patch these WikiLeaks

Click here if you wish to access this post by cartoonist Steve Benson directly from The Arizona Republic.

 Hillary Clinton has a leak she can't seem to fix.

The worst kind of leak. WikiLeaks.

The hacker group released its ninth -- yes, ninth -- batch of stolen emails Sunday from Clinton campaign staffers discussing things like how to appeal to black voters and deal with the media. [Unfortunately this post did not provide a link to the Wikileaks release. Here is a post that provides a summary and a link to the Wikileaks post.]

If they're authentic -- Team Clinton questions whether some pieces have been doctored -- they're mostly embarrassing, not the kind of stuff that would end a campaign. Still, the steady stream of insider info has deluged Clinton, stealing some of the spotlight from Donald Trump's troubles.

What do you think?

Washington moves to silence WikiLeaks

Click here to access article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.

The US-led Empire is waging a massive and comprehensive propaganda war against its own populations, and sources like Wikileaks must be destroyed or access to their information severely restricted in order for the Empire's war-mongers to be successful in their pursuit of profits and domination throughout the world.

Because truth is the enemy of the Empire and Julian Assange and Wikileaks have been exposing so many of the Empire's lies and evil deeds, Assange and Wikileaks have become one of many of the Empire's list of enemies to be eliminated. Auken reports in this article the extent to which they have gone to silence him and Wikileaks, and their efforts to smear the many released embarrassing emails as contaminated by the nefarious machinations of Russia, another top enemy of theirs. He smells an odor of desperation in their efforts at suppressing reports of the Empire's war crimes, their ongoing theft of the wealth created by working people in the US and throughout the world, and the corrupt functioning of what is supposed to be a democratic system of rule.

The use of such tactics is a measure of how terrified the US ruling class has become in the face of growing mass hostility to both major political parties and their two abhorrent candidates. Their fear is that the relentless exposure of the inner workings of a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich is robbing the existing political setup of what little legitimacy it had left within the population, and creating the conditions for a political radicalization within the working class and social upheavals, whoever is elected on November 8.

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

Click here to access article by Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept. 

Greenwald provides a useful guide to all the methods used by the secret services of the ruling capitalist class to deal with anyone or group that threatens their interests of wealth and power, and the system that supplies them with both. He bases his report on the many secret documents that Snowden secured, and given to Greenwald.

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

The Michael Hastings Wreck–Video Evidence Only Deepens the Mystery

Click here to access article by Michael Krikorian and David J. Krajicek from WhoWhatWhy.

There are a number of facts about the "accident" that don't add up. In addition, Los Angeles police handling of the event raised some suspicions. These facts plus the fact that the victim was an investigative journalist who wrote articles not pleasing to the shadow government suggests another possibility. Unfortunately, the video evidence the authors refer to is not included in the article.

Also, view this report on a San Diego TV station which provides some other details and perspectives:

Freedom of the Press Foundation Publishes Leaked Audio of Bradley Manning’s Statement

Click here to access article by Trevor Timm and Rainey Reitman from Freedom of the Press Foundation..

 Manning is currently undergoing a series of pre-trial hearings in preparation for an expected Army trial (court martial) in June of this year. 

In the current hearing he was finally able to explain his motives for leaking information about US military's war crimes in Iraq and other related information. While aggressively pursuing the maximum charge of "aiding and abetting the enemy", for which he could be sentenced to death, the US government has been severely restricting freedom of information about his treatment and coverage of these pre-trial hearings. 

...more than two years after their release, the information provided by Manning is used every day by journalists and historians in major publications are the world [sic] to enlighten and inform the public, both in the United States and around the world. In a time when the extent and reach of U.S. government secrecy is unprecedented, and there are credible reports that the government has abused its secrecy and classification systems to cover up numerous illegal and unconstitutional activities, Manning’s actions should be seen as an overdue sliver of sunlight into an overly secret system rather than as a basis for a prosecution seeking decades of imprisonment.

This article provides the leaked full audio testimony of his statement in the hearing on February 28th. You can also read the unofficial complete transcript provided by his support group, Free Bradley Manning. I recommend this briefer excerpt of his testimony in the following 5:08m video provided by Laura Poitras.



See also Daniel Ellsberg's article regarding Manning's testimony from Huffington Post.

Ecuador Shields Assange from the Revengeful Empire

Click here to access article by Nil Nidandrov from Strategic Culture Foundation.

The author provides some details that I have never seen before regarding the women who brought charges against Assange for sexual misconduct. He alleges that Assange was set up for this legal debacle by the CIA. There is no way to check the accuracy of his information, but it seems logically plausible. I have had similar suspicions from the start of the campaign against Assange by the US government. In any case, he provides a lot of other interesting details about this subject.

Another excellent source of information that appears to be very credible is from the Australian Broadcasting Company. This is a 46:00m video presentation which reviews the entire case. After viewing this video, Nidandrov's allegations about a CIA setup seem less plausible given the sequence of events portrayed in the video.

People can still contribute to WikiLeaks in order to support transparency of information about government operations.

The Saga of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks, to be put to ballad and film

Click here to access article by William Blum from his blog. 

In Bladley's own words:

"If you had free reign over classified networks ... and you saw incredible things, awful things ... things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC ... what would you do? ... God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. ... I want people to see the truth ... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." 

Without credit card donations, WikiLeaks facing funding crisis

Click here to access article by Mark Seibel from McClatchy Newspapers. 

Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.  [from WikiLeaks website]

This article requires action instead of commentary.

Al Jazeera director resigns amidst ‘US intelligence links’ row

Click here to access article by Joseph Fitsanakis from IntelNews.

Wikileaks strikes again! The people of Wikileaks have outed another journalist-shill of the Empire, a senior executive of Al Jazeera!

The senior executive of the Middle East’s most recognizable news television network has resigned following revelations that he met with American intelligence officials and complied with their requests to alter the content of news reports.

Global - Guardian journalist negligently disclosed Cablegate passwords

Click here to access article which is a Wikileaks Editorial.

Guardian investigations editor, David Leigh, recklessly, and without gaining our approval, knowingly disclosed the decryption passwords in a book published by the Guardian. Leigh states the book was rushed forward to be written in three weeks—the rights were then sold to Hollywood.

It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media, the propaganda organ of the ruling global capitalist class, manages this event. So far, they have ignored it. But, I'm sure, that they are still  formulating plans on how to turn the event into blaming Wikileaks.

A Pulled Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down

Click here to access article by Ryan Chittum from Columbia Journalism Review.

This article illustrates why WikiLeaks is such a problem for the US ruling class. The leaks reveal to US citizens the dirty details of the ongoing class war against all working people everywhere. The targeted group in this example are Haitian workers.

Two years ago, Haiti unanimously passed a law sharply raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. That doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but it was two and a half times the then-minimum of 24 cents an hour.

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved.

WikiLeaks Demonstrates Where Citizens Must Apply Pressure to Advance Media Reform and Justice

Click here to access article by Kevin Gosztola from OpEd News.

This is a summary report of the conference held in Boston over the weekend called National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) put on by Free Press.

It's clear to me that we are in the midst of a raging class war and WikiLeaks is on the front-lines. Because mainstream journalists act as gatekeepers of information for the Empire, information is used to manipulate working people to comply with capitalist authorities and always results in more oppression. That is precisely why we must counter this insidious method of control over our lives.

When it comes to journalism and public media, WikiLeaks shows how professional journalists in the corporate or Beltway media find themselves to be part of an elite class. They think citizens need them to understand and process current events and the political issues of the day. They find they should be deciding what to cover and what to leak and should cooperate with government when making decisions on coverage and leaks. Their worst fear is an organization like WikiLeaks that levels the playing field and challenges their "gatekeeper" role in society by publishing previously secret information for the public to read and cover on their own blog. They do not want citizen journalists to become as credible as they have historically been because then they might have to confront their allegiance and fealty to power. They do not want to be held accountable for failing to engage in the investigative journalism Americans should expect from the press.

So far, we are losing the class war and time is running out for us to win it. Essentially, I think it is now time to man the barricades, metaphorically speaking, or we, our children, and grandchildren can look forward to a nightmarish dystopia characterized by endless wars, greater extreme wealth and poverty, climate change related conditions of famine and extreme weather, and environmental devastation.