By Patrick J Buchanan / Antiwar.com

Our leader had another terrifying secret document, “made in Germany by Hitler’s government. …

“It is a plan to abolish all existing religions – Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish alike. … In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an international Nazi Church…

“In the place of the Bible, the words of ‘Mein Kampf’ will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols – the swastika and the naked sword. … A god of blood and iron will take the place of the God of love and mercy.”

The source of these astounding secret Nazi plans?

They were forgeries by British agents in New York operating under William Stephenson, Churchill’s “Man Called Intrepid,” whose assignment was to do whatever necessary to bring the U.S. into Britain’s war.

Though still very much a capitalist, FDR had a far more democratic vision for the world than current Western leaders.

FDR began his address by describing two German submarine attacks on U.S. destroyers Greer and Kearny, the later of which had been torpedoed with a loss of 11 American lives.

Said FDR: “We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot.”

The truth: Greer and Kearny had been tracking German subs for British planes dropping depth charges.

It was FDR who desperately wanted war with Germany, while, for all his crimes, Hitler desperately wanted to avoid war with the United States.

Said Cong. Clare Boothe Luce, FDR “lied us into war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it.”

By late 1941, most Americans still wanted to stay out of the war. They believed “lying British propaganda” about Belgian babies being tossed around on German bayonets had sucked us into World War I, from which the British Empire had benefited mightily.

What brings these episodes to mind is the wave of indignation sweeping this capital over “fake news” allegedly created by Vladimir Putin’s old KGB comrades, and regurgitated by U.S. individuals, websites and magazines that are anti-interventionist and anti-war.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman says the “propaganda and disinformation threat” against America is real, and we must “counter and combat it.” Congress is working up a $160 million State Department program.

Now, Americans should be on guard against “fake news” and foreign meddling in U.S. elections.

Yet it is often our own allies, like the Brits, and our own leaders who mislead and lie us into unnecessary wars. And is not meddling in the internal affairs, including the elections, of regimes we do not like, pretty much the job description of the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy?

History suggests it is our own War Party that bears watching.

Consider Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Who misled, deceived, and lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the “fake news” that sucked us into one of our country’s greatest strategic blunders?

Who lied for years about an Iranian nuclear weapons program, which almost dragged us into a war, before all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies debunked that propaganda in 2007 and 2011?

Yet, there are those, here and abroad, who insist that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program. Their goal: war with Iran.

Were we told the whole truth about the August 1964 incident involving North Vietnamese gunboats and U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy, which stampeded Congress into voting a near-unanimous resolution that led us into an eight-year war in Southeast Asia?

One can go back deeper into American history.

Cong. Abe Lincoln disbelieved in President Polk’s claim that the Mexican army had crossed the Rio Grande and “shed American blood upon American soil.” In his “spot” resolution, Lincoln demanded to know the exact spot where the atrocity had occurred that resulted in a U.S. army marching to Mexico City and relieving Mexico of half of her country.

Was Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt telling us the truth when he said of our blasted battleship in Havana harbor, “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards”?

No one ever proved that the Spanish caused the explosion.

Yet America got out of his war what T.R. wanted – Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, an empire of our own.

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

So said Winston Churchill, the grandmaster of fake news.

COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM

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By the constant administration of lies, the media puppeteers manufacture wars, protect the super-wealthy, and destroy democracy.

 WE COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT ANY BETTER. SO WE DID NOT TRY. As many of our readers know, The Greanville Post is also on this infamous McCarthyite black list being pushed by The Washington Post and other mainstream media. Under the circumstances, considering the abject moral caliber of the accusers, we regard it, as Margaret Kimberley says, an  honorable roll. Thus, except for the fact that TGP is not edited by African Americans, everything that our comrade Margaret says in her fine essay applies to us, too, including the fact that TGP and BAR are probably among the least financially secure of the entire lot.—PG

By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Obama is doing whatever he can to drum up support for the endless wars and regime change policies he ultimately failed to solidify.”

Black Agenda Report has always been dedicated to truth telling. Conversely, truth is a scarce commodity in the corporate media. They are wholly dependent on powerful people and institutions and that means they must tell lies on a constant basis. Because BAR provides analysis from a black left perspective we must wade through their falsehoods in our attempt to make sense of the world.

BAR’s commitment has not gone unnoticed. Our team is proud to be on a list of outlets accused of being purveyors of Russian government propaganda. The website Is It Propaganda or Not [3] suddenly appeared in August of this year. No one owns up to having created it but that mystery is frankly unimportant. The site is clearly doing the work of the Democratic Party, which unsuccessfully used charges of Russian interference in American politics in the recent presidential election.

Is It Propaganda or Not is a sad attempt to continue a losing effort in the waning months of the Obama administration. The United States brooks no opposition anywhere in the world. Russia’s determination to uphold its right to self-determination made it an enemy of the voracious American appetite for control of resources and governments. When Barack Obama often said that America was the indispensable nation he meant it. George W. Bush was less eloquent when he declared “you’re either with us or against us.” Obama said the same thing as he cajoled and bullied nations to join the American imperialist effort or be run over.

“Our team is proud to be on a list of outlets accused of being purveyors of Russian government propaganda.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he president harps on “fake news [4]” out of desperation. He hopes to continue his imperialist legacy right up until January 20, 2017 when Donald Trump becomes president. Actually, he wants to make the case for it after Trump takes over. Obama is doing whatever he can to drum up support for the endless wars and regime change policies he ultimately failed to solidify. Trump got enough votes to claim electoral victory in part because no one except dead ender Democrats are buying what Obama is selling.

Instigating a coup in Ukraine certainly struck a blow in the 25-year long American effort at Russian subjugation and/or regime change. But Ukraine is now a shell of its former self, broke and suffering from a deadly civil war. Syria limps along after the United States, NATO, gulf monarchies and Turkey thought they could carve it up easily. It isn’t surprising that the BAR team or anyone else who called out the scoundrels would themselves be targets of official wrath, no matter how foolishly carried out.

The creation of this list is a bizarre effort to keep Donald Trump from making good on some of his campaign promises. It isn’t clear if he will act to improve relations with Russia or put an end to regime change. He also says that America should “grab the oil” but any mention of ditching years of foreign policy orthodoxy is considered a heresy that must be stamped out.

“The Democrats want the presidency so they can cut deals with Republicans and curry favor with elites around the world.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he foolishness of the Is It Propaganda or Not stunt shows why the Democratic Party has been consigned to loser status. It isn’t interested in being a political party at all. It is a gigantic marketing scheme meant to keep fearful progressives in line. The Democrats want the presidency so they can cut deals with Republicans and curry favor with elites around the world. They can’t even be bothered to campaign around the country and casually allowed Republicans to take control of state after state without even bothering to compete. All the while they convince their rank and file that they are the indispensable party in the shameless duopoly.

It is a sad spectacle to see progressives who were once champions of dialogue between nations follow the line of smear mongering and Russophobia. Now that they failed to drag Hillary Clinton to victory they are adrift with only transparent ploys to make their case. The worst fake news comes from their own mouths as they have officially reached a point of failing to fool all of the people all of the time.

“They compete to act as scribes for presidents.”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f you are reading this column you already know that the corporate media tell lies for a living. They compete to act as scribes for presidents. If a president says that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction they help make the case for war. If the next president claims a right to “protect” that destroys Libya they march right along and extol the virtues of war crimes. If another nation refuses to allow itself to be victimized its leader is called a modern day Hitler who interferes in American elections. The history of American interference in elections around the world is a long sad tale that would make for a good expose. Unfortunately the people who act as White House scribes have no interest in reporting any facts. They are content to curry favor and have access to people who can make or break their careers. 

Black Agenda Report and the other sites on the Democratic Party’s list are in fact the best sources of news in the country. We do not carry water for Republicans or Democrats. We are consistent in our opposition to neo-liberalism, mass incarceration, police murder, racial and other oppressions and to foreign intervention. We were never impressed with Barack Obama or the other black faces in high places. We afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Those standards put us on the honor roll of news and prove ourselves worthy of your time and attention.

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/bar_targeted_as_russian_tool

Links

[1] http://blackagendareport.com/bar_targeted_as_russian_tool

[2] http://blackagendareport.com/taxonomy/term/6940

[3] http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html

[4] http://www.blackagendareport.com/obama_false_narratives_fake_news

[5] http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/

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

By DAVE LINDORFF

 Photo above by Jedimentat44 | CC BY 2.0 / Crossposted at Counterpunch, first iteration

The article in question, headlined US Propaganda Campaign to Demonize Russia in Full Gear over One-Sided Dutch/Aussie Report on Flight 17 Downing, called out the Dutch “investigation” into that horrific shoot-down of a fully-loaded Malaysian jumbo jet over war-torn eastern Ukraine in 2013, pointing out that the prosecutors and investigators involved refused to accept any radar or transmission monitoring evidence offered by Russia or by separatist rebels in the region, using instead only evidence provided by the Ukrainian intelligence service and government — this despite the fact that both Ukraine and Russia possessed quantities of the BUK missile and mobile launchers that were known to have been involved in the downing of the plane, and should thus both be potential suspects in the case. I also noted that as reported by noted former AP investigative reporter Robert Parry on his own Consortium News site (also on the Washington Post’s hit list of Russian propaganda sites), and by retired CIA Senior Analyst Ray McGovern, the Dutch investigators never asked for nor received any satellite surveillance photos or NSA transcripts of relevant telecommunications concerning the shoot-down from the US, though such evidence certainly exists.

And remember, this is happening not because of the election of Donald Trump — the guy the Russians supposedly manipulated gullible American voters into putting into the White House. Rather, pretty evidently, it’s happening because some leading Democratic Party hacks, and the very clearly pro-Hillary Clinton Washington Post, are trying to divert the blame for Clinton’s stunning loss to Trump not on the Democratic Party’s and Clinton’s epic failure to connect with the working class voters they both long since abandoned, but on the alternative media that helped expose not just Clinton’s and the Democratic Establishment’s corruption, but the ugly reality of US militarism and foreign policy that both Clinton and the Democratic Party so enthusiastically back.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Washington Post article, written by Craig Timberg — surely either one of the most credulous and lazy journalists working in a major US news organization (and that’s really an accomplishment!), or a duplicitous propagandist for the US government posing as a journalist at the Post — relied upon only two sources for his dramatic “exposé” purporting to prove that a massive Russian propaganda campaign had surreptitiously attempted to undermine (perhaps successfully!) the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and to throw the race to Donald Trump, at the same time undermining US foreign policy and faith in the US government while elevating the reputation of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both sources are falsely described by Timberg as being “two teams of independent researchers.” The assumption we clearly are meant to have is that these organizations have no institutional bias.

In fact, the first of these sources, the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), turns out to be a hoary relic of the Cold War founded in 1955 by Robert Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian emigré and passionate anti-Communist. It has continued its anti-Russian propaganda stance since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 2002 death of its founder and now boasts on its board of trustees jailbait like former Reagan National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, a key player in the Reagan-era Iran Contra scandal who pleaded guilty to four counts of lying to Congress but was pardoned by President Reagan, arch-neocon and Russia-phobe Robert Kagan, a key promoter of the the US invasion or Iraq in 2003, and a whole host of other right-wing anti-Russian fanatics.

Bezos: Master of Amazon and new boss of The Washington Post. Does this tycoon have any idea what his hacks are doing at the paper?

At least FRPI is willing to let people know who it is and who is running the joint. In contrast, the other of Timberg’s sources, PropOrNot, an organization with a website, PropOrNot.com, founded only several months ago, remains totally secret, providing no information on its site about its origins, its funding, its leadership or its staff. And yet Timberg confidently claims its information about Russia’s alleged epic propaganda effort was the result of the painstaking analytical work of these “experts.” In fact Timberg says the organization’s executive director, whom he quotes, asked for and received anonymity along with all his staff because they wanted to “avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”

And the Post’s editors allow him to get away with this gutlessness and lack of transparency.

To get the full picture of how credulous and unprofessional — or willfully biased — Timberg’s editors at the Washington Post (often still considered one of the nation’s top “newspapers of record”), were in not vetting his article, read the Intercept’s article Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist from a New, Hidden and Very Shady Group, which devastatingly eviscerates both PropOrNot and the Post.

Suffice to say that besides allowing Timberg to use as the key source of his article and dramatic media blacklist an anonymous and clearly partisan group, PropOrNot, the Post’s editors also never required their supposedly crack “technology reporter” to even attempt to contact a single editor or journalist at any of the named alleged purveyors or “useful idiots” he was accusing of secretly spreading Russian-sourced “false news.” There’s not even a perfunctory: “Efforts to contact the editors at Counterpunch were unsuccessful” in the entire piece. Timberg and the editors of a paper that once gave us the Watergate story that brought down President Richard Nixon clearly didn’t even consider such basics of journalism important!

As we will see, there may be more than meets the eye to the hiding of PropOrNot’s secret personnel list, though. Bear with me.

I can vouch personally for Timberg’s lack of journalistic principle and reportorial effort.CounterPunch is listed on PropOrNot’s home page as number nine on the PropOrNot.org blacklist, under the headline: “Russian Propaganda Targets All Americans.” PropOrNot conveniently included two links to CounterPunch articles which it indicates make its case for including the site on their list. The first, under the heading “Review Article,” takes the reader to a page of a very similar looking site called ToInformistoInfluence.com and an article headlined: “Russia Useful Idiots Proliferate Russian Propaganda.” Below that snarky headline, the analyst Joel Harding gives a bylined analysis of the article, in which he questions the author’s qualifications to be a self-described part of the American left, since he identifies himself as a socialist, which Harding then tells the reader “isn’t exactly the normal American ‘left’, but the ‘remnants of the Soviet’ left.” Comically, Harding fails to notice that actually the CounterPunch author in this case isn’t even a US resident, but describes himself as a “retired aerospace worker living in British Columbia.”

Clearly this is not someone given to sober expert analysis as characterized by the Post’s Timberg, yet Harding is being cited here as the one declaring CounterPunch to be a Russian propaganda vehicle.

In any event, the reprint that follows Harding’s introduction, written by the Canadian CounterPunch contributor Robert Annis, and headlined “Western Media Propaganda Threatens Peace and Prolongs the Deadly Conflict in Eastern Ukraine,” which ran Sept. 2, reports quite factually, quoting such Western sources as Reuters and the New York Times, that a plurality of Swedes and Finns oppose their respective conservative government’s efforts to join NATO. Annis then goes on to quite accurately write that US reporting on the civil war in eastern Ukraine fails to note that it is Ukrainian forces that are taking aggressive actions towards the separatist regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, not separatists (or Russians) invading the or threatening regions of Ukraine to the west of those two breakaway ethnic-Russian majority provinces.

Nothing in Annis’s article sources Russian information, and there is no evidence that Annis, who clearly identifies himself in his accompanying CounterPunch bio, as a Canadian socialist and as editor of the website The New Cold War: Ukraine and Beyond.

Think about it a moment. If that kind of open identification of the politics of its authors is how CounterPunch operates (and it is), it’s pretty hard to see how anyone, except for the incredibly credulous or disingenuous Timberg and his pathetic sources for his scare story could perceive the magazine as being a secret vehicle for promoting subversive Russian propaganda!

The second link in PropOrNot’s CounterPunch listing is under the heading “Absurd Pro-Russia Content.” This link leads directly to my article! Apparently in the view of the “experts” at PropOrNot, my piece is such blatant propaganda that no introduction and analysis by someone as skilled at detecting hidden bias and Russian perfidy as Harding is even required. I’m guessing it’s my lead, which refers ironically enough to the Pentagon’s own all-too real propaganda campaign aimed at Americans designed to convince them that Russia is an aggressive and existential threat to the United States.

And in fact, while our corporate media don’t talk about it, the US does run a vast propaganda operation, which includes the spawning and spreading of, guess what?, fake news stories! This kind of thing has gone on for years abroad, but since 2001, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, both the Pentagon and the US Information Agency have done away with an earlier ban on spreading such lies posing as news inside the US. Now we’re all fair game for US propaganda, which by the way the mainstream media routinely parrot. (Of course, we were already massively fed false stories by our mainstream media, from WMDs in Hussein’s Iraq to Assad’s chlorine gas attacks in Damascus, from only “moderate” Jihadi rebels being armed and trained in Syria to US hospital bombings like the one in Kunduz, Afghanistan being “accidents,” not deliberate targeting.)

In any event, no effort is made by either PropOrNot or Timberg to show how my article, which is based upon my own opinions and analysis, my own reporting, plus the excellent work of crack investigative journalists like Bob Parry, and experts like Ray McGovern, is either a piece of Russian propaganda, or a parroting of other articles that might be, in Timberg’s view, Russian propaganda.

I wrote an email to Timberg offering to explain to him how as a veteran, award-winning journalist and investigative reporter of 44 year’s experience with four critically reviewed books to my name and five years’ experience as a foreign correspondent for BusinessWeek in Hong Kong and China, I select my stories to report on and to write, so that he might get the proverbial “other side” of his story out to readers. So far, Timberg hasn’t replied to that offer. I’m sure editors at some of the sites expressly named on Timberg’s PropOrNot list — none of whom he apparently bothered to try and contact while cobbling together his article — have done the same.

What it appears we really have here courtesy of Timberg and the Washington Post is a classic piece of McCarthyite red-baiting propaganda, complete with a call for the FBI and US Justice Department to investigate those on the list for possible violation of the US Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act “and other related laws.” Any site that is critical of US foreign policy, who says anything favorable about Russia, or who was critical of Hillary Clinton, is suspected of being a Russian propagandist.

Where things get really serious is that if this Harding character — the guy whose byline appears in the introduction on PropOrNot’s first page of evidence against CounterPunch magazine — is what he appears to be, PropOrNot could actually be a Pentagon funded operation, which would make Timberg’s Washington Post hit piece on alternative news sites particularly outrageous, and his and the Post editors’ keeping of the site’s members and owners names secret a scandal of enormous proportions. Harding, I have discovered through some research on Google, while perhaps not a high-wattage secret propagandist spotter, does appear to be a major figure in PropOrNot — perhaps even its mysterious executive director? He describes himself on his own website as having this interesting background: 35 years “working national security issues,” including enlisted soldier in a Special Forces detachment, followed by a career as a military intel officer, at information operations at the Department of Defense, and organizer of InfowarCon, which hosts meetings on cyberwarfare.

And while some might take some pause at the source, Russia Insider, which describes itself as a media criticism site put out by a “group of expats living in Russia,” the site reports that Joel Harding, a current or retired brigadier general in the US Army and a self-described NATO advisor, heads a “team of dedicated internet trolls,” allegedly on the Pentagon payroll, who “openly libel and harass” journalists and authors whom the ever-vigilant Harding perceives to be Kremlin agents. No wonder PropOrNot wants its members’ identities kept secret!

If any of this stuff is correct, it means that this whole effort to tar the country’s leading alternative news sites and leading independent journalists on left and right as Russian agents working as part of a propaganda conspiracy is really just a gigantic “fake news” story perpetrated by the government, and worse perhaps, the military — with the willing connivance of one of the country’s leading newspapers — an idea that should turn the stomach and infuriate any real American.

And remember, this is happening not because of the election of Donald Trump — the guy the Russians supposedly manipulated gullible American voters into putting into the White House. Rather, pretty evidently, it’s happening because some leading Democratic Party hacks, and the very clearly pro-Hillary Clinton Washington Post, are trying to divert the blame for Clinton’s stunning loss to Trump not on the Democratic Party’s and Clinton’s epic failure to connect with the working class voters they both long since abandoned, but on the alternative media that helped expose not just Clinton’s and the Democratic Establishment’s corruption, but the ugly reality of US militarism and foreign policy that both Clinton and the Democratic Party so enthusiastically back.

And while I’m certainly no purveyor of or “useful idiot” transmitter of “Russian propaganda,” I do plead guilty to being part of that alternative media, which is in the best traditions of American journalism going back to Tom Paine and John Peter Zenger.

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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“People no longer believe the fake “news” and bogus narratives issued by the ruling class and its corporate and military misinformation specialists.”

President Obama traveled to Berlin last week to browbeat Europeans on why they should continue to play junior partners in Washington’s quest for full spectrum global domination, but kept returning to his post-election obsession: the existential threat posed by “fake news” on social media. It was as if the realization had just dawned on the lame duck president, that his own powers to create “facts” and manufacture “news” out of thin air would soon be gone. Without the Clintons in the White House to continue the neoliberal project, history might conclude that the First Black President’s only enduring legacy was…that he was the first Black president.

“Now, Barack, this is the way you do it…”

It’s a question of who gets to decide what’s “fake” or not. Obama fears that what he calls “fake” news begets fake history, which begets the fall of western civilization as the rulers would like people to imagine it. Fake news is a grave danger “in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television,” according to Obama [3]. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” he told the Germans.

It was a magic kind of moment. The legendarily cool and collected Obama had just let out the secret: the ruling class, which he so faithfully serves, has lost control of the social and political narrative, without which it cannot “protect” its wealth, privilege and power.

“When the people come to believe that the president’s narrative is a bunch of ‘propaganda,’ then future Obamas will no longer be able to protect the Lords of Capital from the pitchforkers.”

Was the world’s most powerful individual (until January 20) in despair over Facebook’s failure to erase three or four fictitious, yet ultimately inconsequential, stories from its pages? Of course not. Obama’s problem — and capitalism’s crisis– is that people no longer believe the fake “news” and bogus narratives issued by the ruling class and its corporate and military misinformation specialists. “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” said Obama.

This is the man that told the nation’s assembled bankers, a year after the Greet Meltdown of 2008, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” When the people come to believe that the president and the corporate media’s narrative — that the system can be fixed with a little tinkering — is a bunch of “propaganda,” rather than “serious argument,” then future Obamas will no longer be able to protect the Lords of Capital from the pitchforkers.

Losing control of the narrative is what happened after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, when Black youth stopped listening to Obama’s fictitious sermon that racism is not endemic in America, a fake history that candidate Obama had successfully dispensed in his “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, in 2008.

Obama’s targeted handful of phony social media articles generally favored Donald Trump. But the biggest “fake news” of the recent campaign, promulgated by virtually the entirety of the ruling class ensconced in Hillary Clinton’s Supersized Tent, was that the Russians were scheming to despoil and disrupt the U.S. elections — crimes Americans commit all by themselves every cycle through massive voter purges and other racist conspiracies. To Clinton and Obama’s horror, this McCarthyite deluge of fake anti-Russian news failed to sway the very “Middle Americans” that were thought to be the most belligerent, warlike constituency of all.

“The root of the crisis of credibility, which is really a systemic crisis of legitimacy, lies in the inability of late stage capitalism to offer anything that will stem the steady decline in the mass of people’s living standards and economic security.”

The Big Tent — Wall Street, the national security establishment, and their media – have lost all credibility with the public, and Obama was still shaken by the realization when he traveled to Berlin. Donald Trump and his crowd’s credibility – their ability to weave a believable narrative – was nonexistent from the start among half the country, and will shrink even more over time.

The root of the crisis of credibility, which is really a systemic crisis of legitimacy, lies in the inability of late stage capitalism to offer anything that will stem the steady decline in the mass of people’s living standards and economic security. So deep is the decay, every amelioration of public pain would require the dismantling of capitalist structures of power, which is unacceptable to the rulers.

On the most basic level, the U.S. does not have universal health care because capital has entrenched itself in all aspects of health care delivery. The rulers cannot provide affordable housing because Wall Street has financialized the nation’s land and dwellings. Good jobs at living wages are impossible, as long as corporations are empowered to maintain their carefully crafted international supply chain for manufactured goods – the foundation of corporate globalization. Black America cannot break free of the Mass Black Incarceration State until Black people eject the police, as presently constituted, from their communities, which will also require ejecting the corporate collaborators of the Black Misleadership Class from positions of power. There can be no peace — and no peace “dividend” for Americans – while predatory corporations and cartels dictate U.S. foreign policy. The cycle of decline and repression will continue until corporate power is broken and the banks are nationalized.

The rulers offer nothing, because the system is no longer capable of providing relief to the working and “superfluous” classes (that means most Black folks). They can only spin tales of fantasy and distraction – fake stories and phony narratives.

American “Exceptionalism” is “Manifest Destiny” with Native American genocide and Black slavery blotted out. It is the falsest narrative of all, tailored for imperial conquest and an “end of history” — meaning, the end of everyone’s narrative except the imperialist.  

NOTES
Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/obama_false_narratives_fake_news

Links

[1] http://blackagendareport.com/obama_false_narratives_fake_news

[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/political-economy/capitalism

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/world/europe/obama-angela-merkel-donald-trump.html?_r=0

[4] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

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By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com

Washington Post pushes campaign to censor alternative media

ABOVE: Putin demonised.  The mainstream media as Washington’s propaganda organ. But they don’t do fake news. 

While the Post piece doesn’t link directly to the propornot site – because doing so would’ve exposed its laughably amateurish “methodology” for all to see – Timberg does mention their list of online Boris Badenovs, including not only Antiwar.com but also the Drudge Report, WikiLeaks, David Stockman’s Contra Corner, the Ron Paul Institute, LewRockwell.com, Counterpunch, Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout, and a host of others. These sites, according to the Post, not only promoted a barrage of “fake news” with the aim of defeating Mrs. Clinton, but they did so at the behest of a “centrally-directed” (per propornot) intelligence operation undertaken by the Russians. So what did this “fake news” consist of? Timberg “reports”:

“Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery – including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human ‘trolls,’ and networks of websites and social-media accounts – echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.”

Never mind that it was Hillary Clinton herself who heightened international tensions by threatening military retaliation against the Russians for supposedly unleashing via WikiLeaks a flood of embarrassing emails. In a speech touted as outlining her foreign policy platform, she railed:

“You’ve seen reports. Russia’s hacked into a lot of things. China’s hacked into a lot of things. Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election systems. So, we’ve got to step up our game. Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight to those who go after us.

“As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses.”

According to the “experts” at propornot – granted anonymity by Timberg due to alleged fear of “Russian hackers” – to so much as note this clear threat is to brand oneself as a “Russian agent of influence.”

Americans getting their TV news.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd what about Mrs. Clinton’s health problems – was reporting on this driven by Russian spies embedded in the alternative media? Or was it occasioned by this video, which saw her falling to the ground after leaving the 9/11 ceremony early? Are the folks at propornot and their fans at the Washington Post saying the amateur videographer who took that footage is a Russian secret agent? Were the television networks and other outlets that showed the footage “useful idiots,” to employ a favorite cold war smear revived by propornot? Given their criteria for labeling people agents of the Kremlin, the answer to these questions has to be yes – and now we are falling down the rabbit hole, in a free-fall descent into lunacy.

Propornot’s “criteria” for inclusion on their blacklist is actually an ideological litmus test: if you hold certain views, you’re in the pay of the Kremlin, or else an “unwitting agent” – as former CIA head Mike Morrell said of Trump. If you say anything at all positive about Russia or Putin – or a long list of entities, like China or “radical political parties in the US or Europe” (does this include the GOP?) – it’s a dead giveaway. We’re told to “investigate this by searching for mentions of, for example, ‘russia’, on their site by Googling for ‘site:whateversite.com Russia’, and seeing what comes up.”

If only Sherlock Holmes had had Google at his disposal, those detective stories would’ve been a lot shorter!

The propornot site is filled with complex graphs, and the text is riddled with “scientific”-sounding phrases, but when you get right down to it their “methodology” boils down to this: if you don’t fit within a very narrow range of allowable opinion, either falling off the left edge or the right edge, you’re either a paid Russian troll or else you’re being “manipulated” by forces you don’t understand and don’t want to understand.

Did you cheer on Brexit? You’re Putin’s pawn!

Are you worried about “World War III, nuclear devastation, etc.” instead of being content in the knowledge that their preferred policy – unmitigated hostility toward Russia — would “just result in a Cold War 2 and Russia’s eventual peaceful defeat, like the last time”? Well, then, clearly you’re either on Putin’s payroll, or else you’d like to be.

Other proscribed opinions include: “gold standard nuttery and attacks on the US dollar,” believing “the mainstream media can’t be trusted,” and “anti-‘globalism.’” And to underscore their complete lack of self-awareness, we’re told that additional warning signs of Putinism are “hyperbolic alarmism” and “generally ridiculous over-the-top assertions.”

In their world, it isn’t hyperbolic alarmism to point to ramshackle Russia, with a GDP equal to Spain’s* and a declining military budget that pales before our own, as an existential threat to the West. And if you’re a reporter for the Washington Post, which has destroyed what reputation it had by effectively becoming the house organ of the Democratic National Committee, generally ridiculous overt-the-top assertions, such as those proffered by propornot, are “news.”

The Post piece also cites an article published on the “War On The Rocks” web site (which is exactly what it sounds like). The authors, a triumvirate of neocons, aver that they’ve been “tracking” “Russian propaganda” efforts since 2014, and they’ve concluded that the Grand Goal of the Russkies is to “Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions” – as if this process isn’t occurring naturally due to the depredations of a corrupt and arrogant political class.

Another insidious theme of Russian “active measures” as identified by these geniuses is “Stoking fears over the national debt, attacking institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and attempts to discredit Western financial experts and business leaders.” So we mustn’t talk about the national debt – because to do so brands one as a cog in Putin’s propaganda machine. Gee, based on these criteria, we can only conclude that every vaguely conservative politician running for office in the last decade or so is part of the Vast Russian Conspiracy, not to mention numerous economists.

And that’s not all – not by a long shot. Here’s a list of more Forbidden Topics we’re not supposed to discuss, except maybe in whispers in the privacy of our own homes: “Police brutality, racial tensions, protests, anti-government standoffs, online privacy concerns, and alleged government misconduct are all emphasized [by the Vast Russian Conspiracists – ed.] to magnify their scale and leveraged to undermine the fabric of society.” After all, Russia Today is “emphasizing” these issues – so mum’s the word!

Yes, these people are serious – but why should anyone take them seriously? Why is the Washington Post “reporting” this nonsense – and putting it on the front page, no less? In short, what’s the purpose of this virulent propaganda campaign? After all, Hillary Clinton has been defeated, along with her campaign theme of “A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin.” What does a continuation of this losing mantra hope to accomplish?

The folks at propornot are explicit about their goal: they want the government to step in. They want to close down these “agents of influence.” In their own words, they want the FBI and the Department of Justice to launch “formal investigations” of the sites on their blacklist on the grounds that “the kind of folks who make propaganda for brutal oligarchies are often involved in a wide range of bad business.” They accuse the proprietors of the listed web sites – including us, by the way – of having “violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and other related laws.”

Oh, but they say they want to “avoid McCarthyism”! They just want to shut us down and shut us up.

These people are authoritarians, plain and simple: under the guise of fighting authoritarianism, they seek to ban dissenting views, jail the dissenters, and impose a narrow range of permissible debate on the public discourse. They are dangerous, and they need to be outed and publicly shamed.

To be included on their list of “subversives” is really a badge of honor, and one we here at Antiwar.com wear proudly.

A Special Note: When the War Party takes out after you, you know you’re doing something right. And we’ve been doing it since 1995, in spite of the smears, and the howls of outrage coming from all the Usual Suspects. But we can’t continue to do it – not even for a minute – without your support.
—JR

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

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