by Andrew Levine

To the dismay of Democratic Party apparatchiks, the plutocrats behind them, and corporate media, New Hampshire Democrats struck a mighty blow at Hillary Clinton and at Clintonism (Democratic Party-style neoliberalism and liberal imperialism) last Tuesday. Bernie Sanders beat her by twenty-two percentage points in the New Hampshire primary.

Hillary is down, but far from out.

One factor to watch is that with Donald Trump’s way to the GOP nomination now seemingly secure, the corporate money that would normally go to the Republican candidate could find a way into her already well-stuffed coffers. Trump and Ted Cruz are non-starters, and the other Republican candidates are sure losers too. Hillary may therefore be the best (least bad) option for Republican donors.

Marco Rubio tanked. I knew this would happen, but I am surprised at how quickly his bubble burst. Now it is John Kasich’s turn to carry the ball for the GOP establishment. How long will that last? Maybe for the duration; he is certainly reactionary enough. But he is a loser, like all the others – in his case because, through no fault of his own, the poor man was born without a personality.

Republican donors are not exactly brain surgeons, as people used to say before Ben Carson shot that old saw to hell, and they have a knack for flushing their money down the toilet. Think of all the Geld Sheldon Adelson squandered on Newt Gingrich. But Kasich is no prize. The “billionaire class” understands this well. Therefore, don’t count on many donors throwing their money away on him.

It is more likely that Hillary will benefit from their largesse.

However, thanks to countless small donations, the Sanders campaign has more than enough money to carry on. But if a lot of Republican donors decide to save their own hides by letting Hillary service them, this could change.

Whether it does or not, Bernie will still have the Democratic Party against him.

With the South Carolina primary looming, the Party’s movers and shakers have now gotten the Congressional Black Caucus PAC to rally African Americans to the Clintonite cause. We’ll soon know how much juice that wing of the Party establishment still has.

What is already clear is that this is just the beginning. Establishment Democrats have lots of artillery in reserve; and, to hold fast to their Clintonite course, they won’t be shy about using all they’ve got.

Sanders knows it too. He famously said, even as the dust in New Hampshire was still settling, to expect “them” to throw the kitchen sink at him. He didn’t quite say that, by “them,” he meant the Democratic Party establishment – Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others of their ilk. If that is not what he had in mind, it ought to have been.

If Mike Bloomberg enters the race as an independent, the Republican wing of the donor class will have someone to fund who is more to their liking than Hillary; they will have one of their own. I hope he does run – not just because it will keep some money out of Hillary’s hands, but also because it will be yet another nail in the coffin of the GOP.

Republican voters, two-thirds of them anyway, wouldn’t give Bloomberg the time of day because, by their lights, he is even worse than Clinton on matters they care about –gun control, abortion rights, global warming, gay rights, restrictions on self-destructive and anti-social behavior, and so on. Worst of all, as Ted Cruz said of Trump, Bloomberg embodies “New York values.”

Most people who live in the Northeast don’t quite grasp how, to many Americans living in other parts of the country, “New York” means “Jew”; I know I didn’t until I spent time in Wisconsin. Evangelicals and other right-wingers love Zionism as much as the ethnic cleansers in the Occupied West Bank do, but they don’t much care for Jews or New York values.

In any case, Bloomberg is basically a manager, a technocrat, whom no one could actually enthuse over, even if he is the Republican establishment’s last best hope. Republican “moderates,’ the few who are left, could support him, but no one else would. If it comes to that, though, a Bloomberg campaign could still do the GOP in.

Thanks to Trump, the Republican Party’s cultural contradictions have already brought the Party to its breaking point; the addition of Bloomberg to the mix could deliver its coup de grace.

None of this matters for the outcome of the election; the Republicans have already lost that. But it does matter for the War on Clintonism, because, for that project to advance, it is crucial now that Hillary lose decisively.

This is why what the country needs now is two, three many New Hampshire primaries.

Sanders is still all about civility – demonstrating yet again how private virtues can be political vices. But militant anti-Clintonites, in or out of the Sanders campaign, can be less kind and gentle.

If Bernie wants to broaden his base, bringing African Americans and Latinos into the fold, through the force of ideas and arguments alone, more power to him. But there is no reason why anti-Clintonite militants need to pull their punches on his account.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ocking it to Hillary is harder than might appear because , like the Donald (though less skillfully), she goes whichever way the wind is blowing. This is, and always has been, the Clinton style.

A demagog of considerable skill, Bill Clinton made shameless lies and opportunism sound like principled positions. [CC BY-NC by ericadamaustin]

Hillary is therefore now trying hard to squeeze into Bernie’s space. Her concession speech in New Hampshire sounded almost as if Sanders had written it. But this is a losing strategy. She can fool some of the people all of the time, but she cannot run away from her record.

And so, the first order of business now, for all good women and men, should be to bring that record to light, and to rub Hillary’s nose in it.

There are transcripts of the talks for which she received hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop – six hundred thousand, reportedly, from Goldman Sachs alone. Now is the time to insist that those transcripts be made public. Based on what is already known about them, it is a good bet that Hillary’s newly concocted “populist” persona would have a hard time surviving that blast of light.

There is also the Clinton record in the nineties – on black male incarceration, on “ending welfare as we know it,” and so on. And there is the utter servility of the Clinton administration to Wall Street for all the years of husband Bill’s presidency.

Strictly speaking, most of this is on Bill’s shoulders, not Hillary’s.

But her role in the years when her husband was putting into practice what Ronald Reagan could only dream of, the behind the scenes work she seems to have done, was the only basis there was for justifying parachuting the First Lady into New York State to run for the Senate in 2000. Her duties as an official wife were hardly basis enough; and the few non-wifely projects she attempted early on in her husband’s first term — health care reform, for example – ended disastrously.

So it was as an unelected co-President that the “experience” of which she and her apologists boast came to be acquired. She cannot have it both ways. She may not have been the more culpable of the two Clintons twenty-five year ago, but, if she wants to add her First Lady days to her résumé, she owns what her husband did.

There is another consideration too that bears deeply on the most asinine of all the pro-Hillary arguments now being bandied about: the idea that she is an ace “pragmatist,” a genius at getting things done.

She did get things done – not so much as First Lady or in the Senate, where her accomplishments were few and far between, but as Secretary of State. However, nearly all of her vaunted accomplishments, there and elsewhere, were deleterious.

The truth is out there; it has been from Day One. But judging from what voters say, it still hasn’t registered. Hillary can thank corporate media for that.

***

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he focus of most media outlets in the United States that reach a mass audience has always been local, not global. This is one reason why Americans know little and care less about the world. It isn’t all the fault of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Most Americans know little about Canada too, and less still about Mexico.

In election years, the problem is worse than usual because the horse race sucks up all the air in the room.

Meanwhile, there is a world out there. Don’t expect the cable news networks to tell Americans much about it, however. Those who are curious have to scour the Internet, read foreign newspapers, or watch French, German or Russian news channels (on cable or satellite) to know what is going on.

The other day, tired of looking at talking heads going on about Marco Rubio’s debate performance, I tuned into France-24 to learn that important political news actually was unfolding — in Haiti and along Turkey’s southern border.

Hillary’s – and Barack Obama’s – footprints are all over these and other tragedies in process, so it would not be out of line, even for election obsessed media in the United States, to pay heed. But, of course, they don’t.

They don’t even report on the horse race well. With the New Hampshire vote looming, France-24 sent someone to cover a Trump rally. She got it about right. She told viewers to imagine a used car salesman leading a meeting of the National Front. Rachel Maddow couldn’t have said it better – though she would have taken ten times as long to make the point and viewers would have had to endure a dozen commercials waiting for her to get around to it.

Therefore, forget about “liberal media”; they are useless.

But Wikileaks isn’t useless.

There are so many awful things that the Obama administration has done that its persecution of whistleblowers and others who embarrass the President and the Clinton State Department pale in importance.

But for spreading the word about Hillary’s cluelessness and incompetence, the world cannot be reminded often enough about what Obama and Clinton et. al. have done to, among others, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and, of course, Julian Assange.

Assange, who has never been charged with any crime, was accused in Sweden, on dubious grounds, of refusing to use a condom during sexual intercourse. Even if true, this would not be an actionable offense in the United States or the United Kingdom or in most other countries.

But the Swedes provided a good enough pretext for the United States to get Sweden to demand Assange’s extradition from the UK, where he was living at the time the accusations were made, so that he could be questioned in Sweden, and then be forwarded on to the Land of the Free, where he would likely be tried for espionage on charges that could carry the death penalty.

Because tiny Ecuador had the courage to come to his rescue, Assange was given asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which he has been unable to leave, except on pain of arrest, since August 2012.

A week ago, the United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that his detention is arbitrary, according to the prevailing legal standard; and that he should be free to leave the embassy, with “his physical integrity and freedom of movement respected.” They also concluded that he had “an enforceable right to compensation.”

However, in defiance of international law, both Britain and Sweden, under pressure from the United States, have so far refused to abide by the Working Group’s decision. The main culprit behind this outrage is, of course, President Obama, but this insult to the rule of law has Hillary Clinton’s imprint all over it.

How wonderful – and deliciously ironic — it would therefore be if State Department memos already released by Wikileaks, and others still in its possession, were mined for evidence of Clinton’s ineptitude.

Her embarrassment would not erase the harm she has done to Assange and to countless others around the world, but it just might put the issue of her vaunted competence in a different light in the minds of American voters. What a boon this could be to the United States and to the world!

There is probably no one on earth whose purported ability to get things done, as opposed to blundering along incompetently, could more easily be exposed.

Haiti would be a place to look; Turkey too. But there is not anywhere in the world where her untimely and clueless interventions have not done more harm than good. There is no more egregious misconception in American politics today than the myth of Hillary Clinton’s “pragmatism” and diplomatic savvy.

The time is past due that this nonsense be exposed and defeated; so that an informed electorate can see to it that Hillary Clinton is soundly defeated in the primary contests to come; and that Clintonism is dealt a mighty blow.

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press)

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

Noblesse n’oblige—
Julian Fellowes’ dubious tears for a morally suspect social order
Downton Abbey is a hidebound reactionary’s wet dream concretized on television, albeit with a peeling high-brow patina…

The British are especially apt to deplore what is irretrievably lost, namely their power over 1/5^th of the globe. Instead of which they are very cleverly now re-creating a quite phantasmagorical image of superior moral rectitude, much of which is part of imperial justification like US exceptionalism. Having long been considered the ruffians of Europe, their war-like might and business acumen and ruthlessness (after all Napoleon, and no slouch he, called them the grocers of Europe) permeated into their colonies which is preserved till today. (The Brits were one of the first caste-bound aristocracies to allow for the entry of commercial fortunes into their ranks—a phenomenon that could be seen as some sort of “regressive meritocracy” system. All the thick pretenses aside, money talks loud in the British way of things.)

In that vein their television dramas are laudatores actis of a society that brought forth in Victorian times the horrid deprivation of much of their population as correctly described by Dickens.

The ownership of land, which was always a measure of wealth, prevented what the French Revolution created, the very idea of private property, promptly annexed by the manufacturing owning classes. Deprived by legislation of their Commons, land which was at the disposal of everyone, indigent peasants looked for employment in the increasingly huge estates that the income from colonial exploitation and the indentured rural workers created. These were in fact if not in name like the Roman latifundia where the slaves created the wealth for their owners. With the male primogeniture system that earmarked the feudal systems in Europe came the result that younger sons and daughters had to find work with the aristocracy. This created especially in England with the wealth from their colonies, enormous households serving a small coterie of owners, who held to their own set of rituals and behavior. Coupled with what was considered to be an elitist and very educated form of English, it easily excluded those who were not part of “society,” i.e. a privileged and equestrian group (still very much in force today even though entirely without its previous glory).

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ostalgia for former power and exclusion of lesser humans is now expressed in the many television dramas like Upstairs, Downstairs which tried to gloss over the humiliation and exploitation with a markedly hypocritical talent, showing a ‘refined’ upstairs sensitivity with a glorified downstairs nobility, both of which are fake. The treacherousness of the upper classes who know no loyalty except to their survival is beautifully illustrated in the movie The Remains of the Day, which is an exception, like the equally quite superb depiction of betrayal in the movie the Glorious 39, but, well, as I say, they are the exceptions. What we have now in the television medium are what the editor very aptly described as aristo-voyeurism, a type of nefarious peepshows designed to show that elites are also people with ‘normal’ reactions and feelings. Their fictional benevolence and rectitude equals the virtuousness of their servants and flunkies. In that manner, wittingly or not, these television shows are a clever tool for bolstering the status quo as they convey that with hard work and ‘duty’ one can attain the serenity, self assurance and benefits of the reigning elite.

The British class system in films and television, in the postwar.

Pride & Prejudice, an Austen romantic novel written in the Napoleonic era, was made into a blockbuster TV series by BBC in 1995. P&P remains an insightful portrait of class mores in the upper reaches of British society, as witnessed by a perceptive member of the lower landed gentry. The book, however, is a reaffirmation of upper class rule, depicted as flawed, but ultimately just.

P&P: The Bennet girls. Their climb to fortune and happiness via marriage to rich men supposedly sitting in the upper pegs of English society is at the center of Austen's plot.

The horrid inequality of British society was well depicted in Dickens' novels, among which Oliver Twist stands out as one of the most eloquent. (Barney Clark, as Twist, in one of the book's many film versions). Dickens, however, often gave his novels happy endings.

With superb performances by Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, The Remains of the Day (1993) presented an absorbing portrait of the British gentry in the pre WW2 period, including their widespread support for fascism. The novel and film also examined the misplaced trust and acceptance of the aristocratic order by the servants.

Tunes of Glory (1960), a film adaptation of the James Kennaway novel, directed by Ronald Neame, examined the British class system through the prism of officer conflict in a Scottish regiment. Alec Guinness as Jock Sinclair, and John Mills as new commanding officer Basil Barrow, starred, with Dennis Price, Kay Walsh, Susanna York, and Gordon Jackson in key supporting roles.

In Jack Clayton's powerful drama Room at the Top (1959), Laurence Harvey had to choose between his true love for a married woman (Simone Signoret) and a golden future with the besotted daughter of an industrialist. The 1960's was a period of British neorealism, with excellent offerings looking at working / ruling class life and the many obstacles in the path of social advancement.

The present and possibly most intrusive assertion of this myth, a veritable cultural fungus irresponsibly disseminated in America by PBS, is the haughty British soap opera Downturn Blarney, sorry, we mean, Downton Abbey, a vehicle that uses the faux château of the ancient Herbert family as its main stage.

The series mastermind, sometime actor and author Julian Fellows, himself a member of the aristocracy, albeit with some trepidation.

The concoction is so full of calculated deceit and so steeped in pretension that one hardly knows where to begin. Lordy lordy, the writer Fellowes has a hate/love relationship with his betters (at least as he sees them) and also a hardly hidden contempt for the poor souls who had to service these dolts out of simple poverty. England never had a revolution, per se, despite its bloody civil wars in which the very same class who finally hijacked the French revolution managed to take power and commit regicide a full half century before their gallic counterparts. The Restoration notwithstanding, bourgeois power, now entrenched in parliament, was never fully relinquished, especially when one monarch after another, despite savvy courtiers, proved altogether inept at holding back the forces of modernity. 

That said, one seeks answers for the relative ease with which the British masses fell back into the nobility trap after tasting an admittedly flawed but more egalitarian republicanism. Perhaps brute force, entrenched traditions, a fragile self-image and very clever propaganda by the ‘upper classes’ made the slaves consent once again to be exploited and heartily despised. But like the Stockholm syndrome or at least pretended to be so by Fellowes, they adored their masters and did everything to please them instead of coshing them over their snotty heads like they smartly once did in France.

Mr Carson, the Butler. “Plus royaliste que le Roi.”

One of the most tragicomic and despicable figures in the pantheon of classist society is doubtless the servant who makes it his business to climb the greasy pole by displaying more loyalty to the interests of his “betters” than they themselves can muster.  Thus Fellowes in DA has constructed a poor butler who is plus royaliste que le roi, a man who has no doubts about his sacred duty to keep the rest of the underground grovelers in line while the above ground crowd indulges in silly games and in pseudo-problems. (Raffish communists, having no respect for genteel manners, accurately depicted these characters as “running dogs of capitalism.” Of course, while the label may strike some as a bit too harsh, it is 100% precise, even if, in general, the capitalist running canines perform many other duties well beyond and more critical to the well-being of the privileged than running a household, things like serving as foreign policy advisors (think Kissinger, Condi Rice, etc.) for example, or as bemedalled henchmen, or, as working lordship baron Fellowes does, as a clever propagandist.)

Speaking of the tinseled crowd upstairs, nobody in this moving-picture photo romanza is believable, from the holier-than-thou Mrs.Crawley to the grumpy old drama queen Violet Grantham played by Dame Maggie Smith, who acting the dowager behaves more like an upper-middle class British bourgeois snob (and probably reflects Fellowes’ own attitude rather closely) regaling us with snide comments that a Victorian / Edwardian aristocrat would surely might have found beneath her dignity to make. The only one who really comes across as believable is Lady Sybille, who is therefore mercilessly offed in the script. Americans who luckily never had to cope with the likes of Grantham and his worthless family (although far too many American plebs lacking in self-dignity are willing to bow and scrape before the native industrial royalty, the spectacle of celebrities kissing the rump of egotist Doanld Trump in The Apprentice is quite telling), view this photo novella as amusing and as an accurate insight into the lives of these ci-devant bollixes, the Creepy-Crawleys. As the conservative but brilliant writer Shakespeare said: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”, a Machiavellian thought much appreciated by elites but a dire warning to those who would think otherwise.

BELOW: Some remedial views of what it meant to serve in these grand establishments, by direct witnesses and descendants of servitor class. 

APPENDIX

Who owns Britain today?
You’ll be surprised.  Click on the bar below and find out.

WHO OWNS THE UNITED KINGDOM? THAT IS THE QUESTION.

Look who owns Britain: A third of the country STILL belongs to the aristocracy

---

By TAMARA COHEN FOR THE DAILY MAIL \ UPDATED: 10 November 2010

---

More than a third of Britain’s land is still in the hands of a tiny group of aristocrats, according to the most extensive ownership survey in nearly 140 years. In a shock to those who believed the landed gentry were a dying breed, blue-blooded owners still control vast swathes of the country within their inherited estates. A group of 36,000 individuals – only 0.6 per cent of the population – own 50 per cent of rural land.

Do click to examine to max. resolution.

Their assets account for 20million out of Britain’s 60million acres of land, and the researchers estimate that the vast majority is actually owned by a wealthy core of just 1,200 aristocrats and their relatives. [For reference: In a nation as small as Britain, these folks control a surface as big as three Belgiums.—Eds]

Life is good: The Duke of Westminster. This laddie has a property portfolio totalling around £6billion

The top ten individual biggest owners control a staggering total of more than a million acres between them.  These figures have been uncovered by the ‘Who Owns Britain?’ report by Country Life Magazine, thought to be the most extensive survey of its type undertaken since 1872. The top private landowner, not just in Britain but Europe, is the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury, whose four sumptuous estates cover 240,000 acres in England and Scotland.  But while his land is the most vast, it is not the most valuable, as the net worth depends on how much is farmland, as well as the value of the property and sporting and heritage activities on it.

The most valuable land belongs to Number 4 on the list, the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor Estate, worth a whopping ­£6billion, takes in the wealthiest areas of London, including ­Belgravia and Mayfair.  Second on the list of the most land owned is Scottish magnate the Duke of Atholl.  His 145,700 acres have pushed Prince Charles, who as Duke of Cornwall has 133,000 acres, into third place on the list of individual owners. Yet all are dwarfed by the incredible reach of corporate land-ownership, which barely existed 100 years ago.  As the biggest 19th-century landowners such as the Church have been sidelined by economic and social changes, their land has been snapped up by the state, charities and the private sector.  More than 2.5million acres – 4 per cent of the country – is in the hands of the Government-run Forestry Commission, which the Coalition plans to privatise.

Second on the list is the fast-expanding National Trust, with 630,000 acres. Most of the report’s information has been uncovered only in the past five years after a registration campaign targeting huge landowners who had previously avoided disclosing their assets.

The report’s author, Kevin Cahill, who has been researching land ownership for ten years, told the Daily Mail: ‘A small minority still own a huge amount of Britain’s land and what surprises many people is that over the last 100 years, not a lot has changed. ‘For the rich the pursuit of land is as important as it’s ever been. They receive subsidies and most of their assets are held in trust, avoiding inheritance tax. ‘The biggest change in land ownership in the past 100 years is that people who live in cities now finance the countryside whereas it used to be the other way around.’ Read the full report in Country Life, on sale today.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

DISPATCH FROM BEIJING
=WITH=
Jeff J. Brown

For explanation of graphic see box at end of article (Image by Xinhuanet)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o usher in the Chinese New Year of the Monkey 2016, Xi Jinping has produced a 3-minute cartoon hip hop video, which has gone viral across the country. Why? Because it announces his presidential platform for the rest of his 10-year term, through 2023:

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTQ2MzQwMjU5Ng==.html?from=s1.8-1-1.2

Xi Jinping and the CPC really understand their citizens and how to communicate Party propaganda to them. Can you think of any Western leader, who would put out cartoon videos like this? Xi has released several of them, all wildly popular with the masses, and having the world’s largest 3G and 4G networks, he and the Party have what marketers call “reach”.

While he released these “Four Comprehensives” a year ago, for Chinese New Year 2015 of the Ram, up to now they have gotten almost zero traction in the national press. They were in the media deep freeze until this week. Xi and the CPC have obviously decided that now is the time to go full Monty, as it were, to the Chinese people. Why? Because last year, a month before Xi’s announcement of his Four Comprehensives, the CPC launched its “12 Virtues of Communism” campaign. Having saturated the country with this, for a year now, it would appear that Xi is ready to take center stage. It is truly his philosophical legacy for China’s posterity. He also probably wanted more time to reform the CPC and the PLA, before coming out in a big way with a mantra tied directly to his name. He has more than taken care of Party and military affairs, so now, it’s time to step into the people’s limelight.

This national CPC campaign, what I like to call the “12 Virtues of Communism”, has been saturating Chinese signage and media, for the last 13 months. Most do not include Xi’s image, but in the last few months, this new version came out, probably as a subtle way to segue into his Four Comprehensives campaign. This poster is right outside our apartment building in Beijing, inside one of many display cases used for Party propaganda. A landlord improvidentially glued an ad to rent his apartment out, the remains of which can still be seen on the right. Posting his contact phone numbers, I’m sure he got an earful from our neighborhood service committee. At least he was thoughtful enough not to cover up the President’s picture! (Image by Jeff J. Brown)

This new campaign has deep historical relevance, not only for the Chinese, but for the world. Chinese Republic-era (1911-1925) President Sun Yat-Sen offered his Three Principles of the People and the Five-Yuan Constitution. After liberation in 1949, Mao Zedong had many of these national platforms, often numbered. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping developed his Deng Xiaoping Thought. Presidents Jiang Zemin contributed his Three Represents to China’s development, then Hu Jintao established his Scientific Development Concept. At each stage, these broad, philosophical visions for the Chinese people have been voted by the National People’s Congress to be included in China’s constitution.

Now, after being in power for three years, President Xi Jinping has decided to put his mission statement for the Chinese people on center stage, calling it the Four Comprehensives. They are:

1. To develop a moderately prosperous society.
2. (Continue) to deepen reforms.
3. Govern the country by the rule of law.
4. Strictly govern the Communist Party of China (CPC)

In the cute hip hop video, each Comprehensive is tagged with a particular theme. To develop a moderately prosperous society is “the goal”. Deepening reforms is “the driving force”, to govern China by the rule of law is “the safeguard”, and to strictly govern the CPC is “the key”. The spinning white Rubik’s cube shows these.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat is so significant about Xi’s stamp on Chinese history is that it is a total rebuke of Western values, which will of course be denied, ignored or misrepresented behind the Great Western Firewall. In the first case, Xi is rejecting the capitalist mantra that it is everyone’s divine right to get filthy rich, regardless of the externalities and suffering foisted on others. Before you shout “gotcha”, that Deng Xiaoping famously said, “To get rich is glorious…”, the West conveniently did not publish how he finished that phrase with, “… and it must be broadly shared by the masses”. Many, if not most Chinese, out of self-interest, have also forgotten Deng’s rejoinder. Thus, President Xi is reaffirming the Chinese Dream’s communist values of social and economic equality.

The West is all about reforms in countries it wants to control and exploit: privatization, unpayable IMF and World Bank projects to force defaults, in order to steal public property at ten cents on the dollar; reduced tariffs to destroy local, integrated industries and agriculture, so the targeted people end up enslaved to mono-exports of manufactured goods and commodities – products the West wants to buy on the cheap.

But that is not the kind of reforms Xi Jinping has in mind. Contrary to Western propaganda, the Chinese people live in a communist country, which means they own the means of production. Thus, there is no private real estate in China, not one square millimeter. All of the banks are owned by the people and China’s treasury prints its own money. The entire media and press industry is people-owned. All the phone companies, airlines, railroads and utilities are people-owned. Every key industrial sector is dominated by people-owned businesses. More and more of them are joining the Fortune 500 Biggest Corporation List and they are some of world’s most profitable concerns. China still very astutely and slowly changes tariffs, so that Chinese businesses can get established, with many of them, public and private, establishing themselves as national and international champions.

President Xi and the CPC know that Western, neoliberal reforms are a gigantic Trojan horse to wreck and then exploit China’s economy and people, as well as to destroy communist rule. Thus, Xi Jinping, by invoking the deepening of reforms, bluntly means they will be implemented fully within the framework of China’s communist economic system, on their terms and for the benefit of the vast majority of the people – not Wall Street, Western banks and corporations.

Since becoming president, Xi has come out full force against the West’s phony “universal values”, “human rights” and “pluralistic democracy”. He and the CPC know that these have been and continue to be battering rams to destroy national governments and install stooge leaders, who open the floodgates to Western colonialism. One only has to look at places like the Ukraine, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Honduras, Guatemala, Hong Kong and too many others to list, to see why the Chinese people are not only fighting for their freedom, but for their livelihood and lives. Xi’s administration openly scorns the West’s well-worn, but sadly successful color revolution playbook, and like Russia and India, has passed strict laws against foreign “non-governmental” organizations (NGOs). These countries have called this evil for what it is. They are nothing more than CIA/MI6/DGSE/BND fronts, to overthrow countries that are not prostituted, Western client states.

So President Xi is calling BS on Western hypocrisy and telling his people that their nation will be governed the Chinese way: rule of law via the democratic dictatorship of the people, as is fully defined in the country’s constitution.

No other national leader has done more to reform the world’s second largest political party, the CPC, than Xi Jinping. Hundreds of thousands of members have been investigated, at every level of power, and have been censured, fined, ejected, imprisoned, or a combination thereof. China’s successful Sky Net police program has repatriated more than 1,000 international fugitives, including many Party members, as well as repatriating $500 billion in ill-gotten gains. Since every member of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is a CPC member, Xi has radically modernized the nation’s military, something Deng could only partially achieve, and which Jiang and Hu ignored. Most importantly, Xi and his administration are achieving their ultimate goal: change members’ behavior to stop corruption before it even occurs.

Xi fully understands that China’s freedom from Western exploitation, its successful, independent economic and geopolitical policies, and the never ending fight against the West trying to contain and destroy China, all depends on the Communist Party of China governing the country. President Xi is also keenly aware that the legitimacy of the CPC and the PLA, which harks back to China’s millennial Heavenly Mandate, is only as solid as the support that the Chinese masses afford it. Lose the Heavenly Mandate and China will be turned into a continent sized Ukraine. Xi realizes that the people’s support depends on them knowing that CPC members are patriotic, hardworking and selfless, not selfish and self-serving. Thus, President Xi and his administration continue to aggressively pursue the greedy in the CPC, PLA and more recently, among the country’s private sector one percent, in the name of China’s independence and freedom.

Not since Mao Zedong, with his many fiery, anti-capitalist campaigns, has a Chinese leader so forcefully called on his people to fight the good fight, against Western racism and colonialism. Xi Jinping’s Four Comprehensives will be added to China’s constitution and the world as we know it will never be the same, as China and its allies, including Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Latin America’s ALBA and others, seek a different, more noble path for humanity, versus the imperial West.

As you read about China in the fog of mainstream media propaganda, behind the Great Western Firewall, stay smart about the real China, past and present. This blog’s many articles and interviews are a great place to start. Being a correctly informed citizen, maybe you can help convince your government of its folly of setting the stage for a hot war with the People’s Republic China (and Russia). That’s where the West is heading. Otherwise, we will all be big time losers.

Only one week after Xi’s cute hip hop video went viral, rolling out his historical Four Comprehensives, the Chinese people are being informed of the good news. Here are Xi’s Four Comprehensives affixed to a bridge, at a busy intersection in Beijing. (Image by Jeff J. Brown) 

Jeff J. Brown—TGP’s Beijing correspondent— is the author of 44 Days  (2013), Reflections in Sinoland – Musings and Anecdotes from the Belly of the New Century Beast (summer 2015), and Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). He is currently writing an historical fiction, Red Letters – The Diaries of Xi Jinping, due out in 2016. Jeff is commissioned to write monthly articles for The Saker  and The Greanville Post, touching on all things China, and the international political & cultural scene

He is a member of The Anthill, a collective of authors who write about China, and also submits articles on Oped News and Firedog Lake. His articles have been published by Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Unz, Alternative News Network and many other websites. He has also been a guest on Press TV, Truth Jihad, Daily Coin, Shadow of Truth, Wall St. for Main St. and KFCF Radio 88.1 in Fresno, California.

Jeff also podcasts and conducts interviews himself on 44 Days Radio Sinoland and can be heard at SoundCloud, Stitcher Radio and iTunes.

In China, he has been a speaker at TEDx, the Bookworm Literary Festival, the Capital M Literary Festival, the Hutong, as well as being featured in an 18-part series of interviews on Radio Beijing AM774, with former BBC journalist, Bruce Connolly. He has guest lectured at international schools in Beijing and Tianjin.

Jeff grew up in the heartland of the United States, Oklahoma, and graduated from Oklahoma State University. He went to Brazil while in graduate school at Purdue University, to seek his fortune, which whet his appetite for traveling the globe. This helped inspire him to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia in 1980 and he lived and worked in Africa, the Middle East, China and Europe for the next 21 years. All the while, he mastered Portuguese, Arabic, French and Mandarin, while traveling to over 85 countries. He then returned to America for nine years, whereupon he moved back to China in 2010. He currently lives in Beijing with his wife, where he writes, while being a school teacher in an international school. Jeff is a dual national French-American.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

44 DAYS RADIO SINOLAND OR DIRECTLY ON THE GREANVILLE POST

CBS anchor Scott Pelley: One of the overpaid “media brands” in the US market of commodified presstitutes.

DETOXIFY YOUR MIND. LEARN TO RECOGNIZE THE SYNTAX OF IMPERIALIST DISINFORMATION.
Just offering a record of their atrocious lies. Study and collect for future reference.

Compilations and running commentary by Patrice Greanville

The American network CBS (Calumny Broadcasting System) is at it all the time, planting lies in the minds of a largely clueless public, and so are its sisters at home and abroad, including NBC, ABC, BBC, FOX News, and even the supposedly more ideologically neutral PBS (which has been rightfully nicknamed, the “Petroleum Broadcasting System”. Guess why.) PBS’ famed and wrongly admired news show, The Newshour, is an excellent example of liberaloid disinformation at its sanctimonious best. (See The Political Function of PBS, by Alex Cockburn). Note that these propaganda memes against opponents of the empire go on for years, even decades, until the goal is accomplished: the total demonization of a nation and its leaders, with the tacit implication that righteous America has the moral right to intervene by any means necessary to re-establish “freedom and democracy”. Yes, the sacred duty to intervene “for the good of the people and the world.” This is the insalubrious, arch-hypocritical project these overpaid presstitutes are involved in, along with the less visible producers, editors, and naturally media owners—sitting comfortably at the apex of the American power pyramid and pulling the strings. Note how the propaganda memes used against Pres. Assad and Syria have been running pretty much the same since 2011, the possible point of inception for the effort to destabilize Syria in accord with the decisions of the American-led supranational deep state.

CBS Evening News

Published on Feb 8, 2016

With the help of Russian airstrikes, the Assad dictatorship in Syria is close to surrounding the rebel (sic) stronghold of Aleppo. Meanwhile, refugees of the war continue to face obstacles in their search for a safe haven. Holly Williams reports from Turkey.

Published on Feb 9, 2012

“In Syria, dictator Bashar al-Assad’s forces have surrounded the city of Homs – the center of the 11-month rebellion. Clarissa Ward reports from inside Syria where life has become a cycle of funerals and gun battles…” Yada Yada Yada. All lies. And Clarissa Ward, the field correspondent, is notorious for her eager participation in these media ambushes. 

Below: A CBS affiliate sings the same tune in Atlanta.

Published on Feb 8, 2012

In Syria, there has been no let-up in President Bashar al-Assad’s attacks on his own people. His military has killed more than 5,000 people in 11 months. Clarissa Ward reports from the frontlines with rebels fighting to overthrow the 40-year Assad dictatorship.

Published on Feb 7, 2012

The Assad government has banned independent (sic) reporting within Syria But CBS News’ Clarissa Ward was able to sneak in and spend time with the rebels fighting to overthrow the regime.

Published on Dec 6, 2011

CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward was able to sneak inside Syria to lift the open the veil of secrecy placed on the country. She provides an inside look at what the band of former Syrian soldiers who have taken up arms against the dictator’s regime. 

The Daily Beast 

• Dateline MEDIA  08.08.12 
  

You’re Worth How Much? TV Anchors, by the Numbers

Cooper. Sawyer. Blitzer. They have multimillion-dollar contracts and perfect hair. But which newsmakers deliver the most bang for their boss’s bucks? We do the math.

For all the buzz about how much television news anchors earn these days—Matt Lauer recently made waves after reportedly signing a $25 million–a–year contract with NBC—a more important question often remains unanswered: are any of these enormous paychecks, in fact, worth it?

To try to answer the question, The Daily Beast divided the individual salaries of some of the top talking heads by the number of viewers their shows bring in. By looking at how much these guys earn per viewer, we hoped to get a sense of who’s delivering to their network bosses the most bang for the buck.

Of course, TV news stars don’t make it a habit of publicly disclosing their salaries. So we first looked for media reports about what each makes, and then ran those numbers by industry sources. Audience figures are based on Nielsen ratings for the week of July 16 for network shows, and July 16 itself for cable.

The results were surprising. For example, while the overall numbers might indicate that networks pay more than cable, on a per-viewer basis, that’s not always true. ABC’s World News anchor Diane Sawyer makes $12 million to Anderson Cooper’s $11 million. But with roughly 608,000 people tuning into CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, the anchor is one of the highest paid on TV, pulling in more than $18 per viewer. Considering Sawyer has an audience of 7.32 million, she seems like a relative steal for ABC, at $1.63 per viewer.

By some measures, MSNBC appears to be more generous with its staff than network sister NBC—especially if you’re a man. Joe Scarborough, of Morning Joe, earns $4 million and has an audience of 367,000, which comes to $10.89 per viewer. In contrast, even at $25 million, Matt Lauer is only costing NBC $5.88 per viewer, considering the Today show’s audience of 4.2 million. 

In general, on both network and cable, women are still paid less than men; if you’re in doubt, check out Today cohost Savannah Guthrie’s reported salary—at less than 50 cents per viewer, she’s a relative bargain for NBC. Among the networks, generally considered more august than their rabble-rousing cable cousins, the exception is ABC, which pays its women more than the men. CBS is a close, penny-pinching second, and CNBC wins the thrifty award for cable.

Dan Gross and Paula Froelich dissect anchors’ salaries.

ABC and CNBC didn’t return calls seeking comment. Fox, NBC, CNN, and CBS declined to comment, as did MSNBC, though a spokeswoman for that network said our salary estimates were “wildly inaccurate.”

Industry experts say viewers—or potential viewers—are just part of the calculation that goes into salaries. The value of an anchor also depends on how much advertising can be sold against his or her show, for example. While the size of the audience plays into that, so do the demographics. A show might only attract a few hundred thousand viewers, but if those viewers are relatively well off, the show can command a premium for coveted ad spots. Advertisers also pay a big premium for younger audiences. Anchors who deliver the 18-to-35 or 25-to-54 age range are compensated accordingly, especially since the news audience tends to skew older. Networks, more so than cable, also compensate their anchors in part for being available to fly around the world when a big story breaks or a disaster takes place.

Television’s anchor salaries aren’t “much different from the movie business,” says Derek Baine, a senior analyst at SNL Kagan, a media-consulting firm. “It’s supply and demand—their agents check the market and try to drum up competition to make it seem as if that person has other options to go elsewhere.”

Indeed, anchors are increasingly one-person brands, and the bigger that brand’s star power, the more likely they are to land big interviews and specials, which can be syndicated and rake in huge profits above and beyond their regular programs.

“Look at Matt Lauer—is he worth it?” says Stephen Battaglio, the TV Guide business editor who edits the annual salary issue for the magazine. “Matt is central to [Today]—if he left, ratings would plummet and NBC would lose at least $100-125 million in ad revenue. His salary generates the ratings and audience that will keep advertisers paying what they do.”

Same with a guy like Brian Williams, who “brings stature, and physically represents NBC,” says Battaglio. “There are some intangibles there as well. People who deliver the news for you, the personalities you’ve developed over the years, they become your brand and there is a value that can’t always be quantified …This is built up over time—stature, connection, relationship with the audience. It’s an investment.”

THE WEST’S GREAT WAR AGAINST RUSSIA
Syria, the Ukraine, and other battlefields are just proxy conflicts. The object is the destruction of Russia as an independent power.

Putin’s Aleppo Gamble Pays Off

by MIKE WHITNEY, UNZ REVIEW