If Western Media Were Honest About Russia

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If Western Media Were Honest About Russia:

Today’s Caitlin Johnstone article has been replaced with a statement from the Editorial Board of the National News Conglomerate, your trusted source for real news and authorized opinions. Obey.

Well, this is awkward.

Many of our readers have been pointing out the recent revelations that some rather significant falsehoods have been knowingly advanced by the British government about Russia and promoted uncritically by trusted media outlets of the western world. Following said revelations, there have been some attempts by the Foreign Office and those same media outlets to cover up said falsehoods.

Rather than double down and risk making a bad situation worse, we here at National News Conglomerate have decided to come clean with our readers about exactly what’s going on with this whole Russia kerfuffle.

It should here be noted that after typing the preceding paragraph, we here at the NNC Editorial Board have spent the last six and a half hours sitting around the conference room table chewing on our erasers and checking our Twitter notifications, not quite sure how to continue. This is the first time we’ve ever tried being honest with our readers about this stuff, and it’s just weird for everyone. We are sure you can relate.

So here’s the thing, see: it isn’t our job to tell you the truth. Large media corporations like ours are all owned by powerful billionaires, all of whom have a vested interest in preserving the establishment upon which they have built their massive kingdoms. Those billionaires hire executives to direct their media empires who are loyal to establishment interests, those executives in turn hire editors who are loyal to establishment interests, and those editors hire journalists who are loyal to establishment interests, effectively creating an environment wherein the only way to get ahead is to unquestioningly advance whatever narratives are being advanced by western intelligence/defense agencies and their plutocratic allies.

At this point in history, this means helping to advance a very aggressive agenda against the Russian government in the US and its client states.

A 2017 Department of Defense Risk Assessment by the US Army Strategic Studies Institute says that the US empire is in what it calls “post-primacy” and may currently be on its way out the door.

“In brief,” the assessment reads, “the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing. Consequently, the United States’ role in and approach to the world may be fundamentally changing as well.”

So when we told you, for example, that Russia was the only government with a motive to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter, we weren’t being entirely honest. The international allied intelligence and defense agencies of the western empire have every motive in the world to manufacture international support for sanctions and hawkish agendas which disrupt disobedient governments. In fact, the western alliance has far more motive to stage such an attack and frame Russia for it than Russia has for attempting to assassinate an ex-spy who has been strategically irrelevant for years.

This is also true of the alleged hacking of the DNC in the US and all the other Russia stories we’ve been circulating. We’ve been reporting these allegations as though they are unquestionable facts for many months now despite the complete absence of the sort of evidence you suckers should be demanding in a post-Iraq invasion world, when really the US-centralized empire stands far more to gain by them than Russia does. The western world is becoming increasingly galvanized against Russia and will soon be poised to collectively sanction Putin’s rogue state right off the world stage, leaving nations like China, Iran and Syria far more exposed to subversion and sabotage.

We’re writing all this not because we’ve suddenly become a bunch of peace-loving flower children, but because we think we guardians of the western empire are ready to enter into a more mature relationship with you, the public. Instead of trying to deceive you into consenting to CIA-hatched agendas with fairy tales about Kremlin agents under every bed and “won’t someone think of the children” hogwash, we’re just going to be honest with you about what war and aggression needs to happen in order for this empire to continue.

I mean, think about a world where the US no longer dominates the world using the carrot of military alliance and the stick of military demolition? Anything could happen! The Russia-China tandem will become more powerful and capable of enacting its agendas throughout the world, and then in a couple of decades, who knows? Those Yellow Hordes we’ve been warning you about for the last century could show up on your shores any minute!

So here’s what we are asking from you, our readers, in an attitude of mutual respect: let us do what we need to do, and don’t make a fuss. We might need to kill a few million Koreans and Middle Easterners and flirt with nuclear confrontation a bit. We’ll have to tighten up on free speech and increase our surveillance programs to make sure we keep domestic dissent under control, and to be honest we’ll probably need to have a world war with Russia, China and whatever other governments take their side… but if you don’t let us do that, the bad guys will win!

So just play along, okay? Let us have our proxy wars and cold war escalations, give us the surveillance and censorship and black site torture programs we’ve been trying to manipulate you into giving us, and this will all be over before you know it. Then we’ll control the whole world at long last, and there will be no mischievous governments or alternative media or thought crimes interfering in the maturation of our beneficent relationship with the unwashed masses.

Because let’s be honest, it’s not like you really have a choice anyway. If you don’t play along we’ll just be forced to brutalize your psyches with even more aggressive psyops while still doing what we want behind your backs. We will get our wars, we will get our internet censorship, we will get our social engineering projects, we will succeed in hoarding all the money to ourselves to deprive you of power and political influence while you suffer and die. And you slaves will learn your place.

So don’t ruin this for us, understand?

Thank you in advance,

The NNC Editorial Board

__________________

Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing my daily articles is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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About the Author

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

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U.S. Runs Headscarf Campaign Against Iran

Dispatches from Moon of Alabama

U.S. Runs Headscarf Campaign Against Iran
Your tax dollars at work.

created a new “mission center” for attacking Iran:

The Iran Mission Center will bring together analysts, operations personnel and specialists from across the CIA to bring to bear the range of the agency’s capabilities, including covert action, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The first visible results of the new center’s work was the hijacking of economic protests in Iran at the end of last year. The slogans and symbols used and the specific western media support lets one assume that exile MEK terrorists and monarchist organizations were involved in the affair. The demonstrations immediately turned violent and lost all public backing. They petered out, as predicted, within a few days.

On December 28, the very same day the demonstrations started, this picture made the rounds:

A woman in Tehran defied the law by taking off her headscarf. The pictures and a video showed that people around mostly ignored the stunt. Only after the photo made the rounds in “western” media, was the woman taken in for questioning but later released. The picture and video was first posted by @masihpooyan:

The start for the demonstrations and the posting of this campaign picture on the very same day was likely not just a coincidence. The campaign to induce women in Iran to take off their mandatory scarf has been an on-and-off western influence operations since at least 2014. It had been dormant for a while until the very same day regular demonstrations over legitimate economic issues were turned into anti-government riots.

The anti-scarf campaign is run by Masih Alinejad who works for Voice of America‘s (anti-)Iranian TV program and other U.S. “regime change” media outlets.

The woman is an interesting asset. Her real name is Masoumeh Alinejad but she uses Masih, the Persian language word for “anointed” or “Messiah”, as her artist name. She is now 41 years old and lives in New York. She got first noticed as a rabble rousing journalist in Iran. According to a 2009 New Yorker portrait:

Alinejad was a known quantity; in 2005, she was expelled from covering the parliament after she disclosed the salaries of populist deputies who had falsely claimed to have taken pay cuts.

She worked for the Iranian newspaper Etemad-e Melli which was financed by Mehdi Karroubi. (In June 2009 Karroubi lost the Iranian presidential election against Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Karroubi started the Green “color revolution” protests claiming election fraud even though all available pre- and post-election surveys confirmed Ahmedinejad’s win. Mehdi Karroubi has since been under house arrest.)

According to Time magazine Alinejad “spent much of 2007 in London studying English”. In 2008 Etemad-e Melli published a slander piece of hers against then President Ahmedinejad. She compared his voters to starving fish waiting for bread crumbs. It was soon retracted and Karroubi publicly apologized for it. By then “she had been invited to study English for a year at Oxford”, according to the New Yorker. She used that time to make contact with U.S. officials. She wrote a letter requesting an interview with U.S. President Obama:

An official at the U.S. Embassy in London agreed to forward the letter to Washington, and invited her to the Embassy for a meeting. The political officer she met with had a thick file that held all the available English-language press clippings about her. But his manner was “respectful,” she recalls. “He said, ‘We know who you are. You are a tough lady.’”

Her file and the interview must have satisfied the “political officer”. Soon after that she received a visa for the United States. Her Wikipedia entry adds:

She was interviewed by VOA, which was shown together with parts of the videos she had made, called ‘A Storm of Fresh Air.’ In 2010 she and a group of Iranian writers and intellectuals established ‘Iran Neda’ foundation. After the presidential election in Iran in 2009, she published a novel called ‘A Green Date’. Alinejad graduated in 2011 with a degree in Communications, Media and Culture from Oxford Brookes University.

She has been working for Voice of America since at least 2013 from London as part of the VoA Farsi language show OnTen.

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]er Oxford public relations degree is truly justified. Since 2011 the Guardian quoted or mentioned her some 35 times! That must be a record. Wikipedia names the Iranian-British Bloomberg writer Kambiz Foroohar as her spouse. His Twitter account retweets and promotes his wife’s campaign.

In 2014 Alinejad moved to New York and started her first campaign against a public law in Iran which makes it compulsory for women to cover their hair in public. The my stealthy freedom web and social media campaign was supposed to incite women in Iran to take pictures of themselves in public but without a scarf. It was heavily propagandized in various western media. In 2015 she received a prize from the notorious Zionist lobby organization UN Watch. The latest item posted on the first headscarf campaign website is from September 6 2015. It has since been dormant.

several times that she was slandered by Iranian media. I have seen no evidence for that claim but would not be astonished to find that an agent working for a foreign government, which is openly attempting to overthrow the Iranian political system, is somewhat disliked in that country.

Since 2015 Alinejad has her own show Tablet on VoA Farsi announced as the “15-min prime time show” that would be “focuses on cultural and social issues involving young people in Iran and the United States.” Public contracts show that she receives $85.600 per annum from the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors. The BBG is running U.S. influence media like Voice of America in English and foreign languages. It is officially controlled by the U.S. State Department.

In February 2017 Alinejad publicly lauded the French right wing candidate Marie Le Pen for refusing to wear a head scarf while visiting a religious official in Lebanon. She changed her post after being criticized for pandering to far right Islamophobia.

Her public anti-head scarf campaign, dormant since September 2015, was revived via a public relations push in May 2017. It was renamed from “My Stealthy Freedom” to “White Wednesday” The BBC posted a marketing piece about it.

BBC PROPAGANDA. ALWAYS HAPPY TO HELP ITS AMERICAN COUSINS. Using the hashtag #whitewednesdays, citizens have been posting pictures and videos of themselves wearing white headscarves or pieces of white clothing as symbols of protest. The idea is the brainchild of Masih Alinejad, founder of My Stealthy Freedom, an online movement opposed to the mandatory dress code. The BBC picture carries the following caption: “Women are wearing white and discarding headscarves in protest against Iran’s dress code.”

Newsweek also published a PR write up. Both pieces claim that the campaign received a great social media response but its official announcement on Facebook shows only 1,400 likes and 316 shares. That is a very meager response. The Reuters PR rewrite says:

Western media cheerfully amplify Alinejad’s sleazy work. This photo caption reads: “Some of the videos, which are subtitled by volunteers, have several hundred shares on the My Stealthy Freedom Facebook page that has more than a million followers.”

Everyone should know by now that the number of followers is not a valid measure. Followers can be bought by the 10,000nds for small money. A video I recently posted on Twitter about U.S. soldiers shooting an Afghan truck driver was retweeted (shared) 900 times, more often than the videos of that greatly promoted anti-scarf campaign. How relevant then can that campaign be?

The main Facebook page of the campaign has some 2,800 “Timeline photos” but only a dozen of those are of women taking off their scarfs in public. The real response in Iran for the campaign is thus completely insignificant. Over the last days some six of probably 50 million women in the Islamic Republic have allegedly taken part in it. The marketing noise in the “western” media about the campaign is in reverse proportion to its effect in Iran.

Ms. Alinejad opposes the political system in Iran. She is working for the U.S. government and runs public relations campaigns which are designed to (a.) defame the Islamic Republic in the “west” and to (b.) raise internal dissent in Iran. The defaming part is working well but the campaign seems to have little response in Iran itself. That is not astonishing. Under the last two presidents social restrictions in Iran have been gradually lifted. [Update: As several people have noted in the comments the authorities in Tehran are no longer prosecuting the lack of a headscarf, but the law that makes them mandatory is still on the books.] The foreign driven anti-head scarf campaign only helps hardliners who see it as undue western influence and call for harsh measures against people falling for it. The campaign is not in the interest of the women in Iran:

“Iranian women have decades of experience in organizing in Iran for change. It is when their movement has been politicized by western feminists, especially those tied to the right, that the situation becomes more dire for them on the ground,” Bajoghli told Newsweek.

All of the above is public information and just a few clicks away. But U.S. media still try to hide the U.S. government connection. The New York Times just published a piece about one of those few Iranian women who reacted to the campaign. Thomas Erdbrink, the Times correspondent in Tehran, writes:

The first protest in December took place on a Wednesday and seemed connected to the White Wednesday campaign, an initiative by Masih Alinejad, an exiled Iranian journalist and activist living in the United States. Ms. Alinejad has reached out to Iranian women on Persian-language satellite television …

There are probably 150 Persian language satellite TV stations. At no point does Erdbrink explain that the TV station Alinejad is working for is the U.S. government financed and controlled VoA Farsi. Nowhere does the NYT piece mention U.S. government influence. Instead we get this:

Hard-liners say that foreign intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, have been nurturing protests in Iran
…
The hard-liners have not provided proof to back up their claims.

Erdbrink of course knows that Alinejad is working for VoA. That fact alone evidently confirms that the campaign is driven by a U.S. agency which is specifically tasked to manipulate people in foreign countries. Over the last three years Masih Alinejad has received at least $230,000 in BBG/U.S. government contracts while running her campaign. To then claim that “hard-liners have not provided proof” for their claims of foreign government influence is just laughable. The proof is there for anyone to see.

A Newsweek piece from early January uses a similar obfuscation. It refers to Masih Alinejad as “an Iranian women’s rights activist” without mentioning at all that it is her daily well paid job to create anti-Iranian propaganda on behalf of the U.S. government.

Voice of America has only a small viewership in Iran. The VoA campaign is mostly run on Twitter and Facebook which are both not available in Iran. It can hardly have any significant impact within the country. It is certainly less than its hundreds of mentions in western media let one assume. But it helps to foster a hostile atmosphere in the “western” public against the government and political structure of Iran.

The historian Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi sees an additional, deeper motive for this campaign:

Whatever one’s stance, it’s hard to avoid [the conclusion that resistances to mandatory hijab in Iran are fetishised in Western coverage because they impose upon such struggles a certain self-image of Western civilisation as “enlightened” and the “saviour of brown women from brown men”.

Another Iranian, not yet working for a U.S. propaganda outlet, posted this response to the anti-scarf campaign:

Are there any “enlightened saviors” who will sponsor his campaign against the mandatory wearing of pants?

Posted by b on January 30, 2018 at 01:12 PM | Permalink

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Organizing resistance to Internet censorship

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WSWS

Streamed live on Jan 16, 2018

On January 16, 2018, the World Socialist Web Site livestreamed a discussion on Internet censorship, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and WSWS International Editorial Board Chairperson David North. WSWS reporter Andre Damon moderated the discussion.

The webinar explored the political context of the efforts to censor the Internet and abolish net neutrality, examine the pretexts used to justify the suppression of free speech (i.e., “fake news”), and discuss political strategies to defend democratic rights. Hedges and North also fielded questions from on-line listeners. The webinar was streamed live by the WSWS on YouTube and Facebook on Tuesday, January 16 at 7:00 pm EST (midnight in London, 1:00am in Berlin, 3:00am in Moscow and 11:00 am January 17 in Sydney. Full Time Zone Conversions).

• Chris Hedges is the host of RT’s On Contact and a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He presently writes a weekly column for Truthdig, an on-line magazine based in Los Angeles. Hedges is also the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Hedges has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Thus Spake Oprah As The New York Times Spots UFOs Over The Comb Over Empire

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The hucksters in younger years.

I remember my first impression of the Reality Television program American Idol. I cringed at the thought, what if, a young Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, or the members of The Clash had been forced to have their talents appraised by the sort of shallow celebrities, supercilious moderators, and gallery of lowest common denominator-giddy cretins attendant to the hype-driven fare.

Yet now, there is serious talk among abjectly unserious people that the next presidential election might pit a billionaire, Reality Television grifter versus a billionaire, Reality Television grifter. All hail, The President of the United States Of Reality Television.

Oprah Winfrey is and has been since her entrance into the US mass media hologram one of the capitalist elite’s most effective propagandists. By intention, her New Age snake oil-peddling patter never connects capitalist exploitation as the dominant source of individual suffering. Of course not. Oprah is a US American huckster in the model of Norman Vincent Peale.

She retails in the con job that a paucity of positive thinking — in essence, personal failings — is the source of individual angst, alienation, anomie, and suffering in general under the neoliberal order. Yet there is hope, she confides. A positive change in attitude will shift the course of one’s destiny. Thereby, she steers her rapt adherents away from the shedding of internalised, capitalist engendered false consciousness, and, on a cultural basis, the paradigmatic shift required to steer humankind away from ecological catastrophe.

It should go without saying that me-first-er Oprah, the obscenely wealthy virgin queen of the neoliberal order, would become a prominent promulgator of me-too myopia and its bourgeois feminist refusal to connect capitalist exploitation of any and all aspects of human life imposed by her fellow members of capitalism’s criminal class. Wealth inequity and wage and debt slavery are forms of predation. Yet notice this dominant and guiding feature of the mindset, a given since the rise of the Weltanschauung in the Western, Christian imagination: Oprah’s breed of Calvinist crusader animus, as a rule, will be incurred when the human genitals can be blamed as a key source of human misery.

Collectively, according to its gospel, we wretches can start the slog back from our exile within the sin-ridden precincts sprawling east of Eden, if only we scour away the denizens of darkness by a devotion to the purifying gospel of positivity. Resultantly, sinners will become doubt-cleansed devotees of a quasi-religious order, a righteous order in which its canticles and catechisms will vanquish all negative thoughts and untoward inclinations. Redemption and rebirth will be bestowed by the cultivation of a right-thinking, true believer aura thereby a variable pentecost of prosperity will descend upon the keepers of the faith. Never question the degradations of capitalism; instead, keep your eye on the prize of careerist success, a given and deserved destiny for the right thinking but a perpetual rebuke to those possessed by the imps of negativity and the demons of carnality.

Oprah preaches a Gospel Of Redemption. Yet, in ways both explicit and implicit, she urges her followers to attempt to adapt to an economic system that is irredeemable.

She retails Horatio Alger bunkum to a soul sick audience inhabiting a planet taxed to the point of ecological catastrophe. The old verities have ossified. Levels of discontent and despair, mirroring rates of greenhouse emission engendered methane feedback loops, are increasing at exponential rates. Yet Oprah continues shilling reality-veiling palliatives to a populace languishing in depression, drug dependency, and an addiction to manic forms of distraction.

Oprah preaches a Gospel Of Redemption. Yet, in ways both explicit and implicit, she urges her followers to attempt to adapt to an economic system that is irredeemable. She retails Horatio Alger bunkum to a soul sick audience inhabiting a planet taxed to the point of ecological catastrophe.

At this point, I request readers bear with me for a moment until I arrive at my point by means of a series of digressive, rhetorical tropes, both anecdotal and collective in form. Recently, on Facebook, I have witnessed, hovering on my newsfeed, a proliferation of recent New York Times pieces addressing seemingly tabloid fodder and 1950s B movie plot lines, bearing headlines such as:

“2 Navy Airmen and an Object That 'Accelerated Like Nothing I've Ever Seen’”

“Glowing auras and 'black money': The Pentagon's mysterious UFO program”

“U.F.O.s: Is This All There Is?”

When I posted a (humorous) take on the subject on my Facebook page, both the number of and emotional charged nature of responses to the post was striking, even by the less than decorous to outright bughouse standards of social media.

The post read as follows:

“We are not alone. And we should be embarrassed. No species with a scintilla of common sense and common decency should be carrying on in this manner in the public (albeit cosmic) sphere.

“OK aliens, we've had a few bad millennia...I mean, who hasn't. You went and caught us with our guards down. But we promise we will clean up for company real nice. Never mind that space junk orbiting our front yard and the fact we keep up our planet like a trailer court inhabited by methheads.

“We promise we will clean up for company. Is there perhaps a rehab planet that our entire population can be checked into in order to work some shit out? The other living things on our planet would be forever grateful for any help you can offer.

“You don't happen to possess any galactic range super weapons, do you? Because, to paraphrase an insight by the alien genius Flannery O'Connor, we could be a good species if someone was there to fire a super weapon at us, twenty four-seven.”

https://www.facebook.com/phil.rockstroh/posts/1808938205806559?pnref=story

I cannot speak for other writers but when reportage of events, or even humorous goof-takes on the situation, as was the case with my Facebook post, prove highly provocative, my curiosity is piqued. A hidden door to a room of the collective unconscious has swung open.

It is not my intention in this essay to either advocate for the existence of UFOs or express skepticism. My theme involves the public’s yearning for a paradigmatic shift, a crucial rearrangement of cultural verities.

When I examine my own reactions to UFO phenomenon, I discover I am drawn to and find inspiration in the mystery of it all and its attendant ineffable quality. Carl Jung viewed UFO phenomenon as a collectively manifesting apprehension of an emerging aeon. At present, the New York Times and other keepers of accepted opinion are signalling a sea change in regard to cultural narrative and prevailing mythos.

Given the fact that a radical shift in cultural, economic and political systems of belief must come to pass if the human race is going to survive the catastrophic effects of capitalism-inflicted Anthropocene Epoch. Is it possible UFO narratives augur the arrival of an incipient mythos? Withal, when the numinous comes into play all manner of responses are evoked, from the mindlessly reactionary to the outré, before psychical integration and eventual acceptance occurs.

Then there is the following, insofar as, recent phenomenon that has evoke an upwelling of passion: the consternation, the bandying of ridicule, and the general agitation of Democrats and liberals in regard to the revelations pertaining to The Oval Office-squatting Orange Beast Of A Billion Tweets and his inner circle chronicled in Michael Wolff’s inflammatory, fly-on-the-wall book.

Yet somehow amid the ensuing snark extravaganza evinced by Democratic partisans, a fact remains unnoticed: Only Democrats could manage to be beaten by, and to this day, cannot manage to create a viable resistance against this klavern of inept arrivistes and noxious buffoons, who, according to Wolff’s book, fully expected to lose and were flat out gobsmacked by the election results, and have yet to recover from the reversal of fortune inflicted by their victory.

Moreover, this aspect of Trump’s ascendancy is shunted from the duopolist dynamic and the narrow, acceptable discourse of political and media elites: Trump’s pathetic dye job, fake tan, and combover mirror the US empire. Its decline and deterioration simply cannot be covered up by the desperate application of cosmetic measures. Therefore, let's term the US -- the Combover Empire. We should view Trump as not only an emblem but a catalyst of the decline and ultimate demise of the neoliberal capitalist order. He is its scion, now passed into decrepitude.

Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey are axiomatic of a perishing paradigm, while UFOs, albeit our projections upon the phenomenon not their actual, unknown nature, mirror a collective yearning for a transformation of the stultifying and destructive nature of political and cultural realities. Contemplate how hard evidence of intelligent life outside of our tiny sphere of existence would shatter dogmatic thought and petrified perceptions. It comes down to this: Collective myopia and mass media facilitated superficiality must give way to a larger sense of vision and a deeper understanding of the human species’ place among the order of earthly life or paradigm’s end will prove to be humankind’s perishing.

About the Author

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Parting shot—a word from the editors

The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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It’s Time to Nationalize the Internet

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By Julianne Tveten, Black Agenda Report

“Private network providers prioritize only those they expect to provide a return on investment.”

Defying widespread popular objection, on December 14 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to repeal net neutrality. The principle regulates broadband as a utility, thus forbidding cable companies and Internet service providers (ISPs) from throttling, blocking or otherwise discriminating against online traffic. While net neutrality was only enacted in early 2015, it swiftly proved a key component of an open Internet.

Private network providers prioritize only those they expect to provide a return on investment, thus excluding poor and sparsely populated areas.

While the assault on net neutrality is formidable, it’s not without formal opposition. The Republican-helmed FCC’s two Democrat Commissioners, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel, have censured the decision and urged dissent. A number of state attorneys general—including those in New York, California, and Illinois—have vowed to sue the FCC over the ruling. Congressional Democrats, shepherded by Mass. Sen. Ed Markey, plan to file legislation to reverse the repeal.

“The transition to corporate stewardship has stratified the digital landscape and isolated disenfranchised populations.”

Relying on such reactive regulatory appeals to herald the fight for a fair Internet, however, won’t guarantee one. The FCC’s revocation of net neutrality isn’t a call to merely restore the technocratic 2015 rules, but to reclaim the Internet as a public good to which all have the right to access.

The Internet was initially a product of public spending. The U.S. Defense Department first conceived it in the 1960s, following a period of feverish technological competition with the Soviet Union. By the early 1990s, the government ceded control of the Internet to the private sector, which had the putative capacity to host its rapid growth. Since then, the transition to corporate stewardship has stratified the digital landscape and isolated disenfranchised populations.

Consider the monopolization of ISPs. Because different network providers, such as AT&T and Comcast, sell broadband to discrete geographic regions with little overlap, they have immense power to manipulate speeds and charge prohibitively expensive rates. Comcast, the nation’s largest private broadband provider, is notorious for overcharging its users and stifling speeds. Users and politicians alike echo these concerns for other ISPs on a seemingly regular basis, rendering the telecom industry one of the country’s most reviled.

“The FCC’s revocation of net neutrality isn’t a call to merely restore the technocratic 2015 rules, but to reclaim the Internet as a public good to which all have the right to access.”

Such profiteering tactics have disproportionately affected low-income and rural communities. ISPs have long redlined these demographic groups, creating what’s commonly known as the “digital divide.” Thirty-nine percent of Americans lack access to service fast enough to meet the federal definition of broadband. More than 50 percent of adults with household incomes below $30,000 have home broadband—a problem plaguing users of color most acutely. In contrast, internet access is near-universal for households with an annual income of $100,000 or more.

The reason for such chasms is simple: Private network providers prioritize only those they expect to provide a return on investment, thus excluding poor and sparsely populated areas.

Previously, the government has intervened, requiring telecoms to proffer discounted service to low-income areas. These initiatives, however, have fallen short. In 2016, AT&T introduced low-cost regional broadband for Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) users, an FCC-mandated condition of its merger with DirecTV. To receive the service, users had to live in neighborhoods that could accommodate a minimum speed of three megabits per second (Mbps). The significant number of people whose addresses didn’t meet that criteria, meanwhile, were forced to either pay full price or forego access. (The National Digital Inclusion Alliance detailed the company’s egregious redlining of impoverished communities in Cleveland.)

“Thirty-nine percent of Americans lack access to service fast enough to meet the federal definition of broadband.”

Chattanooga, Tennessee, has seen more success in addressing redlining. Since 2010, the city has offered public broadband via its municipal power organization, Electric Power Board (EPB). The project has become a rousing success: At half the price, its service is approximately 85 percent faster than that of Comcast, the region’s primary ISP prior to EPB’s inception. Coupled with a discounted program for low-income residents, Chattanooga’s publicly run broadband reaches about 82,000 residents—more than half of the area’s Internet users—and is only expected to grow.

Chattanooga’s achievements have radiated to other locales. More than 450 communities have introduced publicly-owned broadband. And more than 110 communities in 24 states have access to publicly owned networks with one gigabit-per-second (Gbps) service. (AT&T, for example, has yet to introduce speeds this high.) Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant proposed a pilot project in 2015 and has recently urged her city to invest in municipal broadband. Hawaii congressperson Kaniela Ing is drafting a bill for publicly-owned Internet for the state legislature to consider next year. In November, residents of Fort Collins, Colo. voted to authorize the city to build municipal broadband infrastructure.

“More than 450 communities have introduced publicly-owned broadband.”

The Fort Collins vote reveals a widening aperture between public needs and corporate ISPs’ interests. The state of Colorado—among others—prohibits cities from building municipal broadband infrastructure. In many cases, such prohibitions can be traced to telecom-sponsored legislators. Yet in Colorado, 31 counties have protested the strictures such lobbying has produced, and it’s likely that other state residents, if given the opportunity to weigh in, won’t be far behind.

City-operated networks have the power to increase speeds, decrease costs and broaden availability. Yet restoring public broadband ownership can’t be a piecemeal municipal effort, as hordes of communities will continue to be neglected. Rather, public ownership must be won on a national level to eradicate ISP lobbying and monopolies, and corporate ISPs themselves, thus guaranteeing universal access.

The potential absence of net neutrality is simply a symptom of an unfettered free market—the corollary to decades of privatized network providers’ free rein to overcharge and underserve. Advocating for the preservation of net neutrality is necessary, but it won’t suffice if equitable internet access is to be achieved. Under such high stakes, it’s time to regain the digital infrastructure that could have—and always should have—been ours.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julianne Tveten writes about the intersection of the technology industry and socioeconomic issues. Her work has appeared in Current Affairs, The Outline, Motherboard, and Hazlitt, among others. This article previously appeared in Portside and In These Times .

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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