ABOVE IMAGE: CASS SUNSTEIN AT THE AMERICAN ACADEMY, BERLIN.

In recent years it has become quite obvious that the US government and Deep State, in collaboration with mainstream media outlets and a number of corporate/Internet entities, are now blanketing the American people with blatantly deceptive propaganda and a vastly coordinated online censorship and information control agenda. This post will delve into the methods employed from 2011 onwards and will examine various aspects of this government/elitist campaign to control the minds and perceptions of the American people, as well as citizens of other western countries.

This “Full Spectrum Dominance” propaganda/censorship front is being conducted in the following manner:

1)  Manipulation of website comment sections via paid government operatives

2) Manipulation of online forums via infiltration of moderators and administrators

3) Reverse psychological projection techniques, including McCarthyism tactics and blame shifting

4) Establishment of controlled opposition groups and websites

5) Mass media coordination in collusion with an obvious government/elitists agenda

6) Use of advanced Deep State software tools to coordinate propaganda campaigns

7) Reverse psychological techniques focused on a specific government targeted adversary (in this case – Russia)

8) Monitoring of online groups that are in opposition to the government/elitists agenda

9) Labeling and discrediting of online news sites, groups and individuals that are in opposition to the government agenda, as “fake groups”

10) Manufacturing of ‘evidence’ in coordination with government selected propaganda approval outlets, thus allowing for plausible deniability (Snopes, Factcheck, Politifact, Stopfake, Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, Aleppo Media Center, Bellingcat)

11) Massive increases in funding to US government propaganda dissemination outlets (Broadcasting Board of Governors, RFE)

12) Utilization of leading social media networking sites (Facebook) to censor information, relegate certain sites to obscurity and cater to pro-government propaganda

13) Manipulation of search engine algorithms to produce results that are favorable to the governments agenda (Google, Yahoo)

14) Coordination with Internet giants to conduct operations that are favorable to the governments agenda

15) Infiltration of mass media corporations, online social media sites and Internet search engines that vastly affect public perception.

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Who is the “US Information Czar” behind this “Full Spectrum Dominance” agenda?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ass Robert Sunstein (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics, who was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012. For 27 years, Sunstein taught at the University of Chicago Law School. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School.

On January 7, 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sunstein would be named to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). That news generated controversy among progressive legal scholars and environmentalists. Sunstein’s confirmation was long blocked because of controversy over allegations about his political and academic views. On September 9, 2009, the Senate voted for cloture on Sunstein’s nomination as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management and Budget.

Sunstein (right) enjoying the perks of being among the privileged elites dictating the fate of humanity—by artifice and deception. Life is good.

Sunstein’s 2006 book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, explores methods for aggregating information; it contains discussions of prediction markets, open-source software, and wikis. His 2001 book, Republic.com, argued that the Internet may weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon known as cyberbalkanization. He recanted many of the views expressed in the book before his confirmation as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in order to receive Senate confirmation.

Sunstein co-authored Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008) with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. Nudge discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. Thaler and Sunstein argue that people often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself.

Sunstein (along with his coauthor Richard Thaler) has elaborated the theory of libertarian paternalism. In arguing for this theory, he counsels thinkers/academics/politicians to embrace the findings of behavioral economics as applied to law, maintaining freedom of choice while also steering people’s decisions in directions that will make their lives go better. With Thaler, he coined the term “choice architect.”

Conspiracy Theories” and government infiltration

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]unstein co-authored a 2008 paper with Adrian Vermeule, titled “Conspiracy Theories,” dealing with the risks and possible government responses to conspiracy theories resulting from “cascades” of faulty information within groups that may ultimately lead to violence. In this article they wrote, “The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be.” They go on to propose that, “the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups”,[35] where they suggest, among other tactics, “Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”[35] They refer, several times, to groups that promote the view that the US Government was responsible or complicit in the September 11 attacks as “extremist groups.”

The authors declare that there are five hypothetical responses a government can take toward conspiracy theories: “We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help.” However, the authors advocate that each “instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).”

Sunstein and Vermeule also analyze the practice of recruiting “nongovernmental officials”; they suggest that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” further warning that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.“[35] Sunstein and Vermeule argue that the practice of enlisting non-government officials, “might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.” This position has been criticized by some commentators[36][37] who argue that it would violate prohibitions on government propaganda aimed at domestic citizens.[38] Sunstein and Vermeule’s proposed infiltrations have also been met by sharply critical scholarly critiques.

WeAreChange confronts the “US Information Czar” in 2012…..

Published on May 1, 2012
In a rare public appearance, The Obama Administration’s Information Czar Cass Sunstein gave a lecture at the NYU Law School in NYC yesterday, prompting Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange to attend. Watch as Luke confronts Sunstein multiple times on an academic paper he co-authored back in 2008 entitled “Conspiracy Theories” in which he called for cognitive infiltration of conspiracy groups by the government

Little known fact: Cass Sunstein is married to Samantha Powers (the US Ambassador to the United Nations) and the two of them worked on Obama’s 2008 election campaign. She was a senior advisor to Obama’s transition team along with Zbigniew Brzezinski who orchestrated the Grand Chessboard Strategy using Georgia and Ukraine against Russia.

IMI- Analysis – Understanding the Grand Chessboard – leading German Think Tank

[dropcap]Z[/dropcap]bigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand current and future U.S., EU and NATO policy. Brzezinski had in mind two countries or regions in particular: “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Brzezinski argued further that there was an imperative need to gain control of the southern Caucasus, i.e. Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, on Russia’s southern flank.

http://www.imi-online.de/2009/01/01/imperial-geopolitics/

S. Power

Sunstein

The complicit and corrupt establishment media joins in the fray to cloud the waters on behalf of Sunstein….

Cass Sunstein’s Cognitive Infiltration Exposed

An example of how government infiltration works:

Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media – Guardian UK

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries”.

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The video below highlights a software tool utilized by Ntrepid, the company mentioned in the Guardian article above….. (Note that all information in the software is in English and focused on propaganda to support the coup in Ukraine – also note that the Guardian article stipulates Ntrepids contract was for the near east and far east countries only. Thus, it is safe to assume that Ntrepid is receiving tax payer money to feed propaganda to the American people instead of doing what the Guardian article and original contract stipulates).

Ntrepid’s ‘Tartan” software product allows the Deep State discovery of key influential posters in online groups

 

Now lets take a look at how the Full Spectrum Dominance agenda is being carried out most recently across Facebook, the world’s most popular social network. The following Guardian UK article provides a basic breakdown on newly implemented government affiliated propaganda control measures:

Facebook to begin flagging fake news in response to mounting criticism

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/15/facebook-flag-fake-news-fact-check

Excerpt:

Disputed articles will be marked with the help of users and outside fact checkers amid widespread criticism that fake news influenced the US election. Facebook will begin flagging fake news stories with the help of users and outside fact checkers, the company announced on Thursday, responding to a torrent of criticism over fake news during the US election. Readers will be able to alert Facebook to possible fake news stories, which the social media behemoth will then send to outside fact-checking organizations to verify. Facebook is working with five fact-checking organizations – ABC News, AP, FactCheck.org, Politifact and Snopes – to launch the initiative. If enough of Facebook’s users report a story as fake, the social network will pass it onto these third parties to scrutinize.

If a story is deemed to fail the fact check, it will be publicly flagged as “disputed by 3rd party fact-checkers” whenever it appears on the social network. Users will be able to click on a link to understand why it’s disputed. If a Facebook user then still want to share the story, they’ll get another warning about its reliability. Disputed stories also may appear lower in the newsfeed, said Facebook.

Another change being rolled out identifies stories that are being shared more by people who have only read the headline than by people who have actually clicked on them and read the text. “We’ve found that if reading an article makes people significantly less likely to share it, that may be a sign that a story has misled people in some way,” the company said.

More at link above…..

We are also seeing Search Engine giant Google implementing restrictive Ad Sense monetization measures for You Tube sites that do not toe the official government/establishment narrative line. Example here (volume warning):

 

Below we see an example of Google working together with al-Jazeera (Qatar) and Hillary Clinton’s team to implement the Alphabet tool to help conduct regime change in Syria via propaganda and information dissemination. Wikileaks revealed the activity in 2015:

WikiLeaks reveals Hillary, Google, al Jazeera all conspiring against Syria.

http://truepublica.org.uk/global/google-able-effect-regime-change-appears/

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast week truepublica reported that four months ago, Google created a new holding company called Alphabet and that Eric Schmidt the new Executive Chairman of Alphabet, and therefore Google had decided to accept the offer of leading the Pentagon advisory board with a view to “bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the US military.” We questioned the ethics and moral judgement of both Schmidt and Google in joining forces with the biggest killing machine in modern times, certainly since the world wars.

We pointed to the meeting between Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange back in 2011, supposedly organised to discuss a book Schmidt was writing who was unexpectedly accompanied by a Jared Cohen. Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State Department in 2010. He had been a slick ideas guy at two U.S. administrations, known to be something of a courtier from the world of policy think tanks sympathetic to US foreign policy. He was a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton.

Assange asserts that Schmidt was acting directly on behalf of Washington with a documented relationship that put him close to President Obama and Clinton and as Assange puts it: “Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and “corporate responsibility” work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s “director of regime change.”

The following video reveals what Google advocated using the Alphabet software tool against Syria::

 

In the following very recent Reuters article (dated December 21, 2016) it is revealed that the US government will soon establish a “Global Engagement Center” that will track online activities of people that the government deems are “spreading false stories”.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-disinformation-analysis-idUSKBN1492PA

Excerpt:

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]linton Watts, a security consultant, former FBI agent and a fellow at the nonprofit Foreign Policy Research Institute, said the U.S. government no longer has an organization, such as the U.S. Information Agency, that provided counter-narratives during the Cold War. He said that most major Russian disinformation campaigns in the United States and Europe have started at Russian-government funded media outlets, such as RT television or Sputnik News, before being amplified on Twitter by others.

Watts said it was urgent for the U.S. government to build the capability to track what is happening online and dispute false stories. “Those two things need to be done immediately,” Watts said. “You have to have a public statement or it leads to conspiracy theories.” A defense spending pill passed this month calls for the State Department to establish a “Global Engagement Center” to take on some of that work, but similar efforts to counter less sophisticated Islamic State narratives have fallen short.

James Lewis, a cyber security expert at the Center for Strategic & International Studies who has worked for the departments of State and Commerce and the U.S. military, said Washington needed to move beyond antiquated notions of projecting influence if it hoped to catch up with Russia. “They have RT and all we know how to do is send a carrier battle group,” Lewis said. “We’re going to be stuck until we find a way deal with that.”

Watts, who said he has tracked tens of thousands of pro-Russia Twitter handles since 2014, believes many of the most effective stories stoke fear of war or other calamities or promote a narrative of corrupt Western politicians, media and other elites. Obama has asked spy agencies to deliver an analysis of Russian meddling in the election that will include discussion of propaganda operations, Office of the Director of National Intelligence General Counsel Robert Litt told Reuters.

Much more at link above…..

 

In the post election 2016 atmosphere, a crackdown on sites that did not follow the government line was rolled out by the US Deep State utilizing their flagship propaganda tool The Washington Post and an untraceable recently formed group calling themselves PropOrNot. The near entirety of the US and UK alternative media were placed on a PropOrNot list along wth a number of Russian news sites. Any site that exposed US corruption and/or media collusion during the election 2016 process was placed on the list. The list has now been disseminated to Facebook, Google and other Internet giants, as well as government authorized “fact checkers’  to limit the ability of these sites to influence public thought.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/whos-behind-propornots-blacklist-of-news-websites/5560970  – by Pam Martens

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/05/wpost-wont-retract-mccarthyistic-smear/  – by Norman Solomon

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/11/27/washington-posts-fake-news-guilt/ – by Robert Parry

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/06/media-complicity-is-key-to-blacklisting-websites/ – by Norman Solomon

The US government has also been deliberating as to whether or not to enact government measures directly against sites that have been placed on the PropOrNot list, therefore stifling free speech and creating fear of reprisals for sites and individuals producing information that does not suit the governments interests. Paradoxically, all of the government techniques being employed are completely un-American. They are in complete contrast to the First Amendment………..as they abridge the freedom of speech.

Constitution of United States of America 1789

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

The following 2015 Guardian UK article highlights how service personnel of western countries are officially on Facebook and other sites influencing the governments agenda.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/31/british-army-facebook-warriors-77th-brigade

The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age. The 77th Brigade, to be based in Hermitage, near Newbury, in Berkshire, will be about 1,500-strong and formed of units drawn from across the army. It will formally come into being in April.

The brigade will be responsible for what is described as non-lethal warfare. Both the Israeli and US army already engage heavily in psychological operations. Against a background of 24-hour news, smartphones and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, the force will attempt to control the narrative.

More at link….

Israel also utilizes paid government propaganda disseminators:

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-students-get-2000-spread-state-propaganda-facebook

Israeli students to get $2,000 to spread state propaganda on Facebook

Ali Abunimah 4 January 2012

The National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS) has become a full-time partner in the Israeli government’s efforts to spread its propaganda online and on college campuses around the world.

NUIS has launched a program to pay Israeli university students $2,000 to spread pro-Israel propaganda online for 5 hours per week from the “comfort of home.” The union is also partnering with Israel’s Jewish Agency to send Israeli students as missionaries to spread propaganda in other countries, for which they will also receive a stipend.

The project seeks to take advantage of the fact that “Many students in Israel master the Internet and are proficient at using the Internet and social networking and various sites and are required to write and express themselves in English.” The paid scholarship will allow them to get training and then work from home for five hours per week for a year to “refute” what it calls “misinformation” about Israel on social networking sites.

More at link……

So where is all this “Full Spectrum Dominance” which uses McCarthy tactics, red-baiting and Russia as a ruse leading to? Answer: A controlled future….one that matches the desires of the global elite and the corrupt establishment/Deep State  that rules over all of us.

2nd TruthStream video explains new Facebook blocks and verifications with images.

For more information on how the US government carries out psychological information warfare, see here:

https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-PsyOpsTactics.pdf

https://publicintelligence.net/restricted-u-s-army-psyops-manual/

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ABOVE IMAGE: IN REALITY, HILLARY AND HER GANG HAVE A LOT OF EXPLAINING TO DO. BUT DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH. SHE’S UNLIKELY TO SEE ANY SERIOUS PROSECUTIONS.

BY DAVE LINDORFF

Photo by Veni | CC BY 2.0
The incredible group-think that has seen the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, President Obama, the Clinton campaign and most of the corporate media braying that Vladimir Putin scandalously upended American democracy and threw the election to his favored candidate Donald Trump is based on a ludicrous premise. That premise: that the election went Trump’s way because several tens of thousands of voters in a few states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — switched away from Clinton to Trump because of an alleged (and factually unproven) Russian “hack” of Democratic National Committee and of Hillary campaign chair John Podesta’s emails.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda?

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ABOVE IMAGE: Michael Morrel, a prominent player in the pro-Clinton wing of the CIA, and part-time propagandist on CBS.

The Russians are coming! Once again, the structural bias of the American news media in favor of the ‘official version’ turns them into a propaganda tool. Intelligence sources point out Russian interference in recent elections. However, WikiLeaks-related sources say the Democratic Party’s mail leak was the working of a whistleblower within that institution.

“Experts point out…”, “Specialists agree…”, “There is a consensus among intelligence agencies …” While the plot’s been cooking for several months now, it was the DNC leaks and Hillary Clinton’s subsequent defeat against Donald Trump what finally put the ‘serious’ press, mainly the Washington Post and the New York Times, working in its propagandistic role: ‘the Russians are trying to destroy American democracy’, they say.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a key tool of the US executive, was created in 1947 and has since been involved in well over a dozen coups, attempted assassinations, and a long list of covert operations around the world. However, this record does not seem to matter to the American corporate press, which continues uncritically channeling its official statements.

Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Goulart in Brazil, Allende in Chile, are just some of the leaders in the long list of CIA successful hits. Where it did not operate directly, as in Iraq in 2003, the CIA fabricated intelligence information indispensable to justify military aggression, with the dire consequences already known to the world.

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The disinformation plague hits home

It was inevitable, and now they have brought it home: A substantial segment of the intel community, which openly supported Hillary, doesn’t like Trump, and little more than a month away from January the 20th, intelligence reports, full of circumstantial evidence and ‘official’ opinions, have already caused the New York Times to begin comparing the alleged incursion of Russian hackers into the Democratic mailing servers with Watergate, the incident that saw Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House in 1972. The was not too difficult to accomplish as these two major US newspapers had been acting literally as cheerleaders for Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign.

However, indications that this is all about the working of a whistleblower, probably within the Democratic Party, and not an army of Russian hackers, seems more convincing:

I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they’re certainly not Russians, he’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; they are two different things. If what the CIA says is true, and their statements refer to people they know is related to the Russian state, they would arrest someone if he was inside the United States … (who) has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers or extraditing Hackers. They just do not have any knowledge.

(CIA Concludes Russia Interfered to Help Trump Win Election, the Guardian, 12/10/16)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his insistence on involving the Russians was at first useful to divert attention from the incriminating contents of John Podesta’s and DNC’s mails, but now we see it mutate into something far more dangerous, with monolithic support from mass media, as every time their masters smell blood, the New York Times and the Washington Post soon dedicate front pages to it and the world’s corporate media simply goes along. But where is this going?

As Craig Murray points out, when the media speak of ‘credible’ sources, and all this Russian charade is based on this supposedly blind trust in American officials, what it is saying is that they are establishment sources,for whom presenting solid evidence has been always optional. We say “supposedly blind trust” because many of these media misinformers do not believe for a second what they are reporting, but they do it nonetheless. It’s not so much a question of “trusting” the government, as a matter of protecting and advancing their careers while marching in lockstep with the rest of the conformist pack.

In a statement to the Daily Mail, Murray, a former United Kingdom ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he was the one to receive the documents from a Democratic Party employee in Washington, after the boycott suffered by Bernie Sanders in the primaries, which ended in the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and caused the condemnation by many operatives and sympathizers of the Democratic Party.

This kind of renewal of the 50’s McCarthyism was carried out on several fronts, one of vital importance being referred to the alarm regarding the proliferation of ‘false news’. The Washington Post published an article on November 24, citing the findings of an organization called Propornot, an anonymous group that drew up a list of 200 media devoted to ‘Russian propaganda’ and ‘false news’.

Propornot’s analysis against these media was made using a methodology that would embarrass even the laziest of school boys, since no real association was necessary with the Russian State: they simply incorporated the vast majority of alternative journalism blogs that had something critical to say about US foreign policy, which generated the univocal rejection of both mainstream and independent journalism and a later clarifying —but woefully inadequate—note by the WP.

When the media that ‘set the agenda’, such as the Washington Post, The New York Times or CNN, publish an article, the world’s media follows obediently. What we observe, in short, in all these cases, is a transmission of information based on a questionable concept of authority, not facts.

Let us remember Iraq. At the inaugural rally of President George W. Bush’s (January 30, 2001) the issue of removing Saddam Hussein was put at the top of the list, as recalled by former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill:

It was about finding a way to do it. The president said, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’

That’s where the CIA comes in. The American anthropologist David Price has studied the agency for two decades and agrees with former agent Philip Agee that the CIA is, “the secret police of American capitalism.” In addition, he believes that Trump is embracing political allies that would point to a strengthening of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to the detriment of the CIA.

An interesting month awaits us.

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ABOVE IMAGE: CBS THIS MORNING, TGP screengrab

COMMENTARY BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

CBS This Morning
James Baker says Rex Tillerson will be “excellent secretary of state”

CBS This Morning

Published on Dec 14, 2016

James Baker served as secretary of state in the first Bush White House during the First Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also worked as treasury secretary and chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan. Baker, a friend of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, explains why he has “great confidence” in the secretary of state nominee, and why he is “not worried” about his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

COMMENTARY
James Baker, a Texas “aristocrat”, and former secretary of state under George H.W. Bush, is a smooth liar. Here he competently tells a few more, but on the whole his interview proves clearly disappointing to his disinformer hosts who fail in their attempt to make him say something compromising or negative about Exxon’s Rex Tillerson. Keep in mind that we are not cheering for Tillerson here, as filthy a member of the ruling class as they come, simply underscoring the appalling and criminal hypocrisy of the US establishment in general, and especially one of its visible instruments, the corporate media, currently overwhelmingly allied with Hillary and her Democratic party crooks.

Trump’s unexpected election, and now his controversial nominations, including Tillerson’s, are letting a ray of sunlight into the normally obscure corridors of power and sordid machinations of the Deep State, where at least 2 factions are currently slugging it out for control.

Tillerson is clearly an enemy of the environment, fought dirty to get rid of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, but he’s also an enemy—for strictly business reasons—of any demented confrontation with Russia, an advanced nuclear power. That aspect of his background may inject a measure of sanity in US policy toward Moscow, at least, and begin to dismantle the rabid Neocon vermin, a major threat to peace and humanity—and everything that still lives on the face of the planet. Not to mention the Neocons’ baleful influence as vectors for Zionist influence on US foreign policy across the globe. While Trump is hardly an enemy of Israel, and has said some pretty abject things indicating his willingness to collaborate with Jerusalem, his possible rapprochement with Russia may force him to plot a different trajectory in the Middle East, possibly miles from what the warmongering cabals under Obama and Clinton expected under a Hillary reign.

It’s clear that, given the rottenness of the US political system, there are no free lunches when it comes to the leaders of the “Free World.”

BELOW: Another glaring instance of the malicious mainstream Clinton media in action. Again, bear in mind that all these aggressive questioning would be healthy in a true democracy, but, aside from the fact that they never did anything like this during Obama’s tenure, the motives of these pretend journalists in this case have nothing to do with democratic purposes, or real concern about foreign meddling (which probably both know to be false) and a lot to do with running interference against Trump to facilitate the return to power of the Clinton/Obama wing of the kleptocracy.

Here the notoriously corrupt duo of Norah O’Donnell and Charlie Rose press Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway on Trump Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson’s ties with Vladimir Putin, and the supposedly terrible Russian meddling in the sacrosanct US elections. It’s obvious this is all part of a scheme to block Trump’s accession to power on Jan. 20 under some kind of accusation of being compromised due to “criminal” ties to a foreign power, vote rigging, or similar nonsense.  (See other articles on this topic, especially Michel Chossudovsky’s analyses.)

In the end, whichever wing of the degenerate, rapacious US ruling class emerges as the winner, the American people and the world will be taken to the cleaners and face stormy waters. For a long time now, and made more undeniable by this election, the only choices the current system allows are between which kind of disaster we’d rather see in the White House. Indeed, with Trump, the always cowardly and obtuse “lesser evilism” favored by liberals has run its course.

CBS’ official deck:

Published on Dec 12, 2016

Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, joins “CBS This Morning” to discuss concerns about leading Secretary of State pick, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, and his to Russian President Vladimir Putin. She also defends Mr. Trump’s pushback against the CIA for saying Russia interfered in the U.S. election in his favor.

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What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda?

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=By= Edward Curtin

“The song ‘Political World’ could have been triggered by current events.  There was a heated presidential race underway …. But I had no interest in politics as an art form….The political world in the song is more of an underworld….With the song I thought I might have broken through to something.  It was like you wake up from a deep and drugged slumber and somebody strikes a little silver gong and you come to your senses.”   Bob Dylan, Chronicles

We live in dark times when the prison gates of seeming hopelessness clang shut around us.  Endless U.S. led and sponsored wars, a New Cold War, nuclear threats, economic exploitation, oligarchical rule, government spying, drone killings, loss of civil liberties, terrorism, ecological degradation, etc. – the list is long and depressing.

Awareness of a deep state hidden behind the marionette theatre of conventional politics has grown, even as the puppet show of electoral distractions garners the headlines.  Readers of the alternative media learn the truth of government conspiracies involving assassinations – JFK, MLK, RFK, et al. – and countless other evil deeds without cessation. Excellent writers uncover and analyze the machinations of those responsible.  Anger and frustration mount as people listen to a litany of bad news and propaganda spewed out by the mainstream corporate media.  It is easy to be overwhelmed and disheartened.

Despite the mute despair and apathy that fill the air, hope is needed to carry on and resist these destructive forces.  Sometimes in such a dark time the eye begins to see and the ear hears hope in unexpected places.  Doing so necessitates a bit of a sideways move to discover pockets of resistance hiding in the shadows.  There are torches of illumination in the underworld, but we need to come to our senses to get there.

“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious.  There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.”  Carl Jung

If you’ve ever played music or basketball, fell dizzyingly in love, or lapsed into a spell writing words or being engrossed in a passionate pursuit, you’ll easily grasp what follows.  But maybe these specific experiences aren’t necessary.  You’ve lived, you’re alive, and you can hear the pitter-patter beat of your dribbling heart.  That’s probably plenty. You know the game can be a roller-coaster ride with all its ups and downs, and when it ends you will have won or lost something, exactly what being of the essence.

Rhythm, melody, and movement: from these life is born and sustained.  They are also integral to sports and art – music, writing, painting, sculpture, dance, etc. – even when they are apparently absent.

Tall Walking Figure by Alberto Giacometti. (Credit: Billy Liar.)

If, for example, one looks at Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, Tall Walking Figure, its immobility implies movement.  Such paradoxical inclusiveness pertains to still-life painting as well.  While seemingly immobile, and defined by some as dead life, such paintings are encompassed by the presence of the absence of movement and change, the essence of all living things.  To grasp the paradoxical nature of art – and life – one must approach them as an artist and see the wholeness in broken pieces.  “Everything is broken,” Bob Dylan sings, “take a deep breath, feel like you’re choking.”

“Life is the best play of all.”   Sophie Michel, a 7 year-old musician

I think it is fair to say that living is the ultimate art and as the artists of our lives our medium is time and space.  And that it is in sound that time and space are epitomized.  Musical sounds carry us through time and space in a reverberating vital impulse.  Music brings us to our senses. Being emotional, it sets us in motion.  We are moved.

Sports, as the etymology of the word suggests (desporter – to divert), is a diversion from something.  Sports involve us in movement through time and space to an unnecessary goal where someone wins and someone losses.  In sports we choose to overcome superfluous obstacles for fun and for deeper reasons we may not realize.  Sports only matter because they don’t.

“What we play is life.”    Louis Armstrong

A few years ago my friends and I were playing in basketball tournaments for men over fifty and we qualified for the Senior Olympics at the University of Pittsburgh.  We acquired a sponsor, a local funeral home that made warm-up jerseys for us.  Being used to dealing with bodies at rest, these comedians knew we were a bunch of aging hoopsters intent on keeping our bodies in motion for as long as we could.  So they had shirts made with that up-beat and adolescent cliché printed on the front, “Basketball is Life.”   Lest we forgot, and being in the trade of taking bodies at rest to the underworld, on the back they had printed “Leave the Rest to Us: Flynn and Dagnoli Funeral Home.”

Most of us found the juxtaposition hilarious (including one funny Irishman who ended up dead at the funeral home), but one teammate found it disturbing, which gave the rest of us additional sardonic laughs.  Sex and death and one’s ongoing vitality are the stuff of uneasy laughter in the locker rooms of aging men.  It’s a place for essentials.

“He was like a great singer with a style all his own, a pacing that was different, a flair for the unusual.”   Chick Hearn, play-by-play announcer for The Los Angeles Lakers about Pete Maravich

I was reminded of this as I was rereading bits of Bob Dylan’s fascinating and poetic memoir, Chronicles: Volume I, and came upon his recounting of hearing of the news of the death of “Pistol” Pete Maravich, the greatest scorer in college basketball history and a magician without par on the court.  It was January 5, 1988.

My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to
talk and drink coffee.  The radio was playing and morn-
ing news was on.  I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich,
the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in
Pasadena, just fell over and never got up.  I’d seen Maravich
play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New
Orleans Jazz.  He was something to see – mop of brown hair,
floppy socks – the holy terror of the basketball world – high
flyin’ – magician of the court.  The night I saw him he dribbled
the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket –
dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass
and caught his own pass.  He was fantastic.  Scored something
like thirty-eight points.  He could have played blind.  Pistol Pete
hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of
as forgotten.  I hadn’t forgotten about him, though.  Some people
seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like
they didn’t fade away at all.

Dylan has the poet’s touch, of course, a hyperbolic sense of the fantastic that draws you into his magical web in the pursuit of deeper truth.  In ways he’s like the Latin American magical realist writers who move from fact to dream to the fantastic in a puff of wind.

He goes on to write that after hearing the news of Pistol Pete’s sad death playing pickup basketball, he started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day, and in the days that followed song after song flowed from his pen.  The news of one creative spirit’s death gave birth to another creative spirit’s gift to life.  (I am reminded of Shakespeare writing Hamlet after his father’s death.) “It’s like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them …. The wind could never blow it out of my head.  This song was a good thing to have.  On a song like this, there’s no end to things.”

One can hear echoes of Hemingway, another artist obsessed with death, in those last few sentences.  Unlike Hemingway, however, Dylan’s focus on death is in the service of life and hope. For him there is no end, while Hemingway is all ending – nada, nada, nada – nothing, nothing, nothing – “it was all a nothing and a man was nothing too,” he writes in his haunting story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”  Dylan’s focus on the shadow of death is seen within the light of life – todo – all or everything. The darkness is there but is encompassed by the light.  Nada within todo. As he told the AARP magazine last year in a fascinating interview, he’s been singing about death since he’s been twelve.  And out of that singing – year after year for fifty plus years and counting – he has found and expressed the light of hope.

Bob Dylan (Credit: Moderate Voice)

Dylan is our Emerson.  His artistic philosophy has always been about movement in space and time through song.  Always moving, always restless, always seeking a way back home through song, even when, or perhaps because, there are no directions.  “An artist has got to be careful never to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere,” he’s said.  “You always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming and as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll be alright.”

Sounds like living, right.

Sounds like Emerson, also.  “Life only avails, not the having lived.  Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.  Thus one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes.”

It was about ten years ago when we traveled to that Senior Basketball Olympics at the University of Pittsburgh.  We drew many uneasy smiles as we paraded around with the backs of our shirts announcing the services of the men who take us to the underworld.   We won a few games and lost others; were eliminated and left for home disappointed, some of us more than others, depending on each man’s competitive fire to defeat the foe.  Like all athletes, losing felt like a small death.  Even small deaths are hard to swallow, however, especially when knowing how way leads on to way and you doubt you will ever come back.  As evening was darkening the Amish countryside, we departed east through country roads in silence, each lost in his interior monologue on the journey ahead.  Playing low on the radio, from my back seat I could barely make out Dylan singing, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

Two years ago there was a short Grantland documentary, “The Finish Line,” about Steve Nash, the latest Pistol Pete.  An uncanny player, Nash was battling injuries and age, and the documentary shows him pondering whether or not to retire or continue his rehabilitation and attempt a comeback.  In the opening scene Nash goes out with his dog into the shadowy pre-dawn where he muses on his dilemma.  His words are hypnotic.  “I feel,” he said, “that there’s something that I can’t quite put my finger on that – I don’t know – I feel that it’s blocking me  or I can see it out of the corner of my mind’s eye, or it’s like this dark presence ….is it the truth that I’m done?”

Hobbled by a nerve injury that severely limited his movement, he played a few more games and retired within a year.  Like Pete Maravich, he had brought an infectious joy to his playing, but he left without fulfilling his dream of winning an NBA championship.  Of his retirement he said, “It’s bittersweet.  I already miss the game deeply, but I’m also really excited to learn to do something else.”  Unlike many athletes, Nash was moving on; his “dark presence” wasn’t a final death but a step on the road to a hard rebirth.  It was a Dylanesque restless farewell: “And though the line is cut/It ain’t quite the end/I‘ll just bid farewell till we meet again.”

“A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true.  They’re like strange countries that you have to enter.  You can write a song anywhere …. It helps to be moving.  Sometimes people who have the greatest talent for writing songs never write any because they are not moving.”    Bob Dylan, Chronicles

Dylan has long been accused of abandoning his youthful idealism and protest music.  I think this is a bum rap.  He was never a protester, though his songs became anthems of the civil rights and anti-war movements.  There is no doubt that those songs were inspirational and gave people hope to carry on the good fight.  But in turning in a more oblique and circumspect musical direction, following his need to change as the spirit of inspiration moved him, Dylan’s songs have come to inspire in a new way. You know his sympathies lie with the oppressed and downtrodden, but he doesn’t shout it.  A listener has to catch his drift. If you go to the music, and dip into his various stylistic changes over the decades, you will find a consistency of themes.  He deals with essentials like all great poets.  Nothing is excluded.  His work is paradoxical.  Yes, he’s been singing about death since twelve, but it has always been countered by life and rebirth.  There is joy and sadness; faith and doubt; happiness and suffering; injustice and justice; romance and its discontents; despair and hope.  His music possesses a bit of a Taoist quality mixed with a Biblical sensibility conveyed by a hopelessly romantic American.  He has fused his themes into an incantatory delivery that casts a moving spell of hope upon the listener.  He is nothing if not a spiritual spell-binder; similar in many ways to that other quintessential American – the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, whose best work was a poetic quest for an inspired salvific poetry.

If the listener is expecting an argument, a thesis, inductive reasoning, or a didactic approach from Dylan, he is out of luck, and rather than be inspired he will be disappointed.  This is art, not theory, and art of a special kind since Dylan is an artist at war with his art.  His songs demand that the listener’s mind and spirit be moving as the spirit of creative inspiration moved Dylan.  A close listening will force one to jump from verse to verse – to shoot the gulf – since there are no bridges to cross, no connecting links.  The sound carries you over and keeps you moving forward. If you’re not moving, you’ll miss the meaning.

“A bird does not sing because it has an answer.  It sings because it has a song.” Chinese Proverb

So if the world is getting you down and all the news is bad to your ears, don’t lose hope.  Step to the side, out of the glare of the sun, the blare of the headlines where lies and fears shout in our ears and echo down our days like a repetitive nightmare.  Give Dylan a listen.  As he has said of spiritual songs, “They brought me down to earth and they lifted me up all in the same moment.”  His songs have the same paradoxical power because he excludes nothing. That is why they are truthful.

It is fitting that his latest album, “Shadows in the Night,” comprised of ten beloved old ballads sung by Frank Sinatra, from “The Night We Called it a Day” to “Some Enchanted Evening,” has him changing again, going back to go forward.  He is full of surprises, which any child will tell you bring joy because surprises and change are the core of living.  To change this crazed world, we must change and find hope and joy along the way.  Repetition will kill us.  Dylan’s artistic metamorphoses and ingenious song writing offer offbeat sources of hope.  Just listen.

Having been compared to Frank Sinatra with these songs, he’s said, “You must be joking.  To be mentioned in the same breath as him must be some sort of high compliment.  As far as touching him goes, nobody touches him.  Not me or anyone else …. But he never went away.  All those things we thought were here to stay, they did go away.  But he never did.”  Sinatra, like Pistol Pete, didn’t fade away because he too inspired Dylan to inspire us to hope and carry on.  If it feels dark and night-like to you, move sideways into the shadows.  Look away and you’ll see the light.

Or if you like basketball or dancing, like to move to the beat, listen to Dylan singing “Hurricane,” a long narrative song about the framing of the boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter.  It will get your blood flowing, your passions riled, and your body moving.  It’s perfect for practicing all the dribbling tricks Pistol Pete performed.  I thought of using it at the Senior Olympics, but the beat seemed a little too rapid and excitable for the over fifty AARP crowd.  The shirts were sending an undertaking message that I didn’t want made real.  Hope is one thing, but traveling too fast is another.  Anyway, one of my teammates was in swift pursuit of a woman there whom he described as a twin of his ideal woman – Pamela Anderson.  He didn’t need any more excitement.

Edward Curtin is a  writer who teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and has published widely.

Note to Commenters
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We apologize for this inconvenience.

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