Friday, September 22, 2017

Power To the McCarthyite People

Former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power has countered Donald Trump's unhinged performance at the international confab this week with a very unhinged proposal of her own.

Taking a page from the paranoid Trump playbook, this liberal interventionist of the Obama administration penned a New York Times op-ed calling for the construction of a huge, amazing, beautiful wall like the world has never seen before. This wall would consist of stringent monitoring and censorship of whatever independent thought on the Internet that she and some shadow cohort deem to be "fake news" - a/k/a subversive. Suppression is needed, Power writes, because any and all criticism of the Military-Industrial Complex is obviously coming straight out of Russia. Vladimir Putin is secretly feasting upon what she calls "a ripe subset of the population."
While television remains the main source of news for most Americans, viewers today tend to select a network in line with their political preferences. Even more significantly, The Pew Research Center has found that two-thirds of Americans are getting at least some of their news through social media.
After the election, around 84 percent of Americans polled by Pew described themselves as at least somewhat confident in their ability to discern real news from fake. This confidence may be misplaced. (my bold.)
People not fortunate enough to be a member of Samantha Power's Class of Expert Thinkers are too stupid to distinguish proper, American, market-based neoliberal propaganda from other types of propaganda. Therefore she wants to take us back to a mythical time when all good citizens and true strictly adhered to mainstream media. She wants consumers to settle for whatever political discourse the corporate media chooses to slice, dice, marinate, cook up and boil down in a limited smorgasbord of pre-approved information.

We Americans are getting way too fat on way too much unregulated content. And Samantha Power wants our diets to be fair, balanced, vapid, and docility-provoking.

Here's the fake, untrue, paranoid and misleading paragraph in her op-ed that really got me chuckling:
During the Cold War, most Americans received their news and information via mediated platforms. Reporters and editors serving in the role of professional gatekeepers had almost full control over what appeared in the media. A foreign adversary seeking to reach American audiences did not have great options for bypassing these umpires, and Russian dezinformatsia rarely penetrated.
As a former "professional gatekeeper" on both newspapers and radio during the waning days of the Cold War and its aftermath, neither my job description nor that of my editors ever involved watching the wires and news releases coming across our desks for evidence of rampant infestations of dezinformatsia. Our main challenge was in mucking out whole boatloads of domestic political manure, which propagated in mountainous piles of real American press releases and flowed in endless streams of homegrown gobbledygook warning real Americans about such dangers as the Black Panthers lurking on every rooftop, and the Commie plot to sneak fluoride into our drinking water supply.


Revisionist History, Henry Kissinger-Style
  It's odd that, as such a credentialed stickler for academic rigor and especially as a former human rights journalist, Power also fails to mention that before, during,and throughout the Cold War, American newspapers, local radio stations and other independent media were thriving, proliferating and disseminating an almost unbelievable variety of opinion and news on a wide variety of topics. Even the smallest cities published both a morning and afternoon newspaper, and hosted a whole slew of radio stations which broadcast a veritable feast of locally produced spot news and discussion programs.

Maybe Henry Kissinger, that fawning Joe McCarthy critic (he could have done more to fight Communism!) and architect of not a few crimes against humanity himself, got her to revise her worldview when he picked her for a prize which he humbly named after himself.

Sure, the poobahs have always complained, loudly and vociferously, about content they don't like, and they've often threatened (and filed) libel suits. But rarely have they seriously demanded that a publication or a station be shut down, as they are now calling for such outlets as RT to be shut down. They took the First Amendment very literally "in those good old days".

It was with the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, which had mandated broadcasting in the public interest, when local news stations began to be subsumed into such consolidated megaliths as Clear Channel Communications, original home base of hate-monger Rush Limbaugh, among others. Local news went the way of the rotary phone, If there isn't Limbaugh to listen to for hours upon hours every day, there's always the canned feedback of the same top ten hits to keep you bland from Bangor to San Diego.

As John Light writes for the Bill Moyers blog, there are "857 channels, and there's nothing on." 

And it's getting worse during the Trump era. The planned takeover by the right-wing Sinclair family of the Tribune Company will result in one company controlling the local TV news beamed out to 70% of American households.

The waning days of the Cold War were also the waning days of the daily local newspaper. Vulture investors swooped down with a vengeance during the 70s recession, bought up all the financially struggling periodicals they could, downsized them, loaded them up with the debt, and then shuttered them for good at a windfall profit for themselves. If a newspaper was reasonably profitable, it stayed open under new cost-cutting management. I'd suggest that if Samantha Power was so worried about "foreign interference" in our media,  she would have first pointed her finger at Australian mogul Rupert Murdoch, who bought up a whole bunch of US newspapers and broadcast stations, including the last newspaper I ever worked for. As the soon-to-be de facto head of the Republican "Fox News" Party, he proceeded to close all our satellite bureaus and to fire most of the staff. We pre-existing reporters were not only too liberal and muck-rakish, Murdoch also thought that our modest but livable wages were way too high. Also, too many news stories were unfairly interfering with all those garish front page ads for booze and used cars.

So, Earth to Samantha: Russia has nothing to do with the demise of quality print and broadcast media, or the alleged dumbing down of Americans. Corporate greed on a global scale has done that. And the corporations, particularly those which profit mightily from the American war and surveillance state, want to ensure that only their important messages get through to us.

RussiaRussiaRussiaFearFearFearWarWarWarBuyBuyBuyMedicateMedicateMedicate.

The excellent Moon of Alabama blog has a detail-rich, evidence-based  deconstruction of Powers's op-ed, which among its other blatant whoppers, maintains that the Soviets unconscionably infiltrated Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign. The Russians wanted Walter Mondale to win, so thank goodness we dodged that lethal bullet and Reagan went on to successfully entrench the neoliberal mantra - private competition and profit at great public cost - into people's ripe little minds. This, from a top adviser in the Obama administration! I can only surmise that Samantha must have just watched The Manchurian Candidate on TV to get her so inspired and so befuddled.

She despises the lefties, what's left of them, just as much as Joe McCarthy did back in the good old late 40s and early 50s. She wants America to hate again just as eagerly as Donald Trump does. But the special thing that centrist Democrats want us to hate, besides Russia, is a brand-new horrible something called divisiveness:
 In the United States, the vulnerability to foreign influence is exacerbated by divisions within the political establishment. During the Cold War, the larger struggle against communism created a mainstream consensus about what America stood for and against. Today, our society appears to be defined by a particularly vicious form of “partyism” affecting Democrats and Republicans alike. This divisive environment can make the media more susceptible to repeating and amplifying falsehoods.
More nonsense from a self-described historian. All you have to do is watch the Vietnam War documentary currently airing on PBS to remember that Lyndon Johnson demanded that the anti-war raging protests on American streets and on college campuses be exposed as a Kremlin plot. He was very sorry when even J. Edgar Hoover himself couldn't shut down the dissent and come up with evidence of Russian meddling. The war and its critics ended up destroying his presidency.

 The granddaddy of propaganda, Edward Bernays, noted 90 years ago that   divisiveness has always been as all-American as fear itself. The difference nowadays, as I noted above, is the stunning lack of diversity in our consolidated establishment media, now comprised of only six or eight major corporations. In 1928, when Bernays wrote, there were 22,128 specialty periodicals, with most of them enjoying circulations above 100,000 readers.

The diversity of these publications is evident at a glance. Yet they only faintly suggest the multitude of cleavages which exist in our society, and along which flow information and opinion carrying authority to the individual groups....
"Life" satirically expresses the idea in the reply which it represents an American as giving to the Britisher who praises this country for having no upper and lower classes or castes:
"Yeah, all we have is the Four Hundred, the White-Collar Men, Bootleggers, Wall Street Barons, Criminals, the D.A.R., the K.K.K., the Colonial Dames, the Masons, Kiwanis and Rotarians, the K. of C., the Elks, the Censors, the Cognoscenti, the Morons, Heroes like Lindy, the W.C.T.U., Politicians, Menckenites, the Booboisie, Immigrants, Broadcasters, and - the Rich and Poor."
So therefore, methinks that Samantha Power doth protest too much.

For a member of a political party which prides itself so much on "diversity," she certainly seems insanely intent upon limiting America's diverse citizenry to the preferences of one very small core of wealthy donors and Neocon warmongers.

And it was absolutely no surprise to me that the compliant New York Times chose not to allow reader comments to Samantha Powers's special pleading for even more censorship of dissenting, independent voices.

This country is ripe for revolution, or maybe it's already just a ripening corpse, but whatever it is, it's obviously consolidated all the Powers That Be into one massive blob of pulsating delusions.


Blob-o-Mania: Samantha Power Receiving Kissinger Diplomacy Prize


... And now streaming for your nostalgic Orwellian viewing pleasure over an acceptable Internet site, or if you're a real American, through your smart modern two-way TV set:

15 comments:

annenigma said...

We're all VICTIMS of those powerful Russians as they continue the expansion of their empire and global influence. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Identity politics writ large - victimhood. What better individual to rally us together as victims and lead the battle against our Russian enemies than the Queen of Victimhood, Hillary Rodham Clinton?

My Commie comrade spies reported to me that they saw her sneaking into the White House during the night to measure the drapes - again. She was carrying a bottle of something but they said it was too dark to read the label except for the C.

Nonni Muss said...

Samantha Power's husband is kind of the spiritual godfather to the Million Dollar Trolls:

http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/

Pearl said...


http://billmoyers.com/story/donald-trumps-addiction-to-violence/

By Henry Giroux

annenigma said...

That Morgan Freeman video is outrageous. The Blob is getting scared but I don't think anyone else is.

Jamie said...

Excellent piece. Here is another great article on the McCarthyite baby Morgan Freeman and Meathead:

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/23/ctir-s23.html

Ironically Meathead's dad Carl, was persecuted in the first Russia scare:

"The elder Reiner, now 95, had sufficient contact with left-wing figures in Hollywood ... to warrant a visit from two FBI agents in 1954. They inquired about his voting habits and asked, according to Reiner, “Do you know any communists?”

Later, Reiner served as a “front”—someone who took public credit for the writing efforts of figures who were officially unemployable because of their association with the Communist Party—for blacklisted writer Frank Tarloff when Reiner was working on the Dick Van Dyke Show in the early 1960s.

Now his son is taking part in this vile sequel to the McCarthyite anti-Russian hysteria of the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s."

annenigma said...

I miss RT. The local broadcaster took it away this summer.

Karen Garcia said...

@Anne,

I believe you can watch RT shows streamed from their website. Ironically, it airs the Larry King show, which has hosted political guests from across the ideological spectrum. Who would ever have thunk that Neocon John Negroponte,for example,was also a secret Red?

@Jamie,

Had no idea The Meathead was behind this video. After watching it I didn't even have the stomach to research the money behind it. What irony, liberal Mike Stivic turning into Archie Bunker in his old age!

annenigma said...

Re: Morgan Freeman/Committee to Investigate Russia

Yes, actor Rob Reiner, that staunch Hillary Clinton supporter and meathead, is on the Committee. So is the famous perjurer, former chief spook James Clapper. The militarist Max Boot, who was born but not raised in Russia, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, and Charles Sykes, a conservative talking head and NeverTrumper, are the others. No Russian experts need apply.

https://investigaterussia.org/

Judging by the headings under the tabs, the committee should really be named the Committee to Investigate and Remove Trump. No wonder there are no Russian experts on their board. The goal seems to be a putsch of the Trump regime, using fear of *Trumputin, in order to install Clinton to her rightful throne 'by popular demand'. *Cue the angry crowds

Remember what Trump said was Hillary's best quality? She never quits.

Hillary I-Wuz-Robbed! Clinton is waiting in the wings.

Nonni Muss said...

from zerohege:

"As one Al Jazeera journalist who covers Russian affairs pointed out, the advisory board is made up of the following "experts" (in their respective order):

a neocon blogger
a perjurer
wonk with no Russia background
the director of When Harry Met Sally
right-wing talk radio guy

Kate said...

Great post as always from Karen. One thing that interests me with all this Russia stole our election and/or precious democracy - when it comes to all these Russian ads and fake news stuff - has anyone posted representations of these ads or fake news things anywhere? Clearly people were eager to believe whatever the surveillance/intelligence industry wanted to put out there about Trump being a Russian agent and that the election was "hacked" and that the DNC emails again were hacked (not leaked) without any corroborating information - because they just know that the U.S. has never, ever lied about anything and is always straight and true. And maybe my snark is misplaced here as there are actual examples out there of these nefarious ads that swayed so many voters to turn away from HRC - but I haven't seen one anywhere. So, anyhow...that's my question. Has anyone seen any of these "fake news" or Facebook "Russian ads" that all the good liberal loyalists are freaking out about. I'm really curious.

Bill Sprague said...

Just fantastic. I can remember (barely) the days when it used to say, in the upper left corner, "All the news that's fit to print". It doesn't say that anymore and the young don't even seem to know it... Uhm, did it actually ever mean that?

annenigma said...

I haven't seen any examples of the supposed 'Russian ads' but then I'm not on Facebook. I don't know anyone who pays attention to political ads anyway. If/when they ever made ads that were humorous, people might notice, but otherwise the usual negative ads are a yawn. No wonder 'Putin' only spent $100,000, but really, why bother? Hillary was so far in the lead and a sure bet according to everyone in the know, what hope did he have in swaying votes with a mere $100,000 and a 'leak' of some 'hacked' emails from Hillary and her team? I can't wait to see the ads.

Now it's being claimed that the Russians hacked elections systems. So why did Obama insist that wasn't possible? I also recall reading last summer that first one state, Georgia, then several States were complaining about finding evidence of Dept. Homeland Security hacking into their systems. Now there's a whole new twist - it was the Russians. So why didn't we hear that when these hacks were occurring? Was I reading fake news sites then or hearing fake news now? Or were both real because of Russian spoofing DHS and when DHS finally discovered it, they covered it up to avoid undermining confidence in both our system and in them? Things just don't add up. And now there's talk about using paper ballots, yet machines will still be used to count them. Who's undermining the system?

We don't need Russians' help in undermining our 'democracy'. Politicians and their owners have already done that. Did they all miss the Occupy Movement? Or was Occupy a Putin creation too? Did they not learn anything? Americans were in the mood to shake up a rigged system.

The political elite are fooling themselves about how much influence any of their ads have on voters, but since there's so much money in it for so many, that's the game they play. No wonder they got the election so wrong. They live in such a bubble. Actually, buying ads sounds pretty clean if you ask me. Is there a law against it? I doubt it because MONEY. Israel exerts a lot of pressure and influence on every aspect of our 'democracy' and elections and so does Saudi Arabia by generously funding think tanks which set policy. And didn't Bill Clinton collect a ton of dough from the Chinese?

This whole Russia bugaboo over the past 10 months strikes me as being the biggest steaming pile of propaganda I have ever witnessed in my lifetime. I'd expect it from an elected administration, but what's really disturbing is that this has been coming from the professional liars of the Intelligence Community with the usual help from their darlings in the media and of course the usual shady politicians.

The fact that they're unanimous that there's 'no question' about Russian interference despite lack of evidence and while obsessing over fake news is the big tipoff that this is a propaganda campaign. There's 'no question' because no questions are allowed despite no evidence, only innuendo. Let's not forget how they all laughed their asses off at Rep. Keith Ellison when he merely suggested that Trump could win the nomination of his party?

These fools can't handle the truth, then or now.

Kat said...

Hey! I have an idea. Perhaps they could transfer some of this hacking outrage to the Equifax data breach. this is a BFD and I do not see corresponding outrage. This is not the Target or Yahoo data breach. The response from Equifax has been staggeringly bad and it should be news front and center every day.

Kate said...

annenigma - I agree with everything you wrote. The world has gone totally mad. Matters of common sense, questions that have relevance have disappeared entirely from the scene. It's horrifically hilarious to me as I watch the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam (some problems with it, but much that is factual in my opinion) here we have perfect examples of American propaganda, lies, treachery, war crimes - the blatant and self-serving lies of the state in all its glory to behold. And certainly all the elite in government and elsewhere have to watch this program as well - and then turn around and say with a straight face that our government is good - our intelligence agencies are righteous, our wars are just. We just must get people to trust their institutions - wherever did that glorious trust go. Samantha Power writing her insane op-ed for the Times - all in the face of this big deal documentary being shown night after night. The world is upside down to me. Far too many people are gullible and complacent and lack any reasoning skills on any meaningful topic. Thank god for sites like this - and the people who comment on them. My outrage and disgust would have no means of escape if I thought that I and my family were all alone in our perceptions and understanding.

annenigma said...

@Kat

Congress can't act urgently about Equifax because they have to wait for the bribes, I mean donations, to come in from the financial industry. Only then will they know what kind of legislation to craft to protect the credit agencies from lawsuits and other backlash. Forget about protecting us. We're consumers, not citizens.

@Kate

Indeed, everything seems topsy turvy, upside down, and backwards in our society. It's painful to watch all the spin, omissions, and propaganda in the Burns-Novick documentary about Vietnam. I have a hard time falling asleep after watching each episode.

I find it especially galling that in their description of one battle that was a virtual massacre for the Americans, they reported that "every single commanding officer and non-com officer was killed" but failed to mention the problem of FRAGGING! Ironically, the American troops themselves helped bring an end to that war by taking matters into their own hands, but we mustn't go there now. It's a darn good thing those of us who remember those days are still alive and know the real story. Burns and Novick are telling a fairy tale.

"The high number of fragging incidents in the latter years of the Vietnam War was symptomatic of the unpopularity of the war with the American public and the breakdown of discipline in the U.S. Armed Forces. Documented and suspected fragging incidents totaled nearly nine hundred from 1969 to 1972. Fragging has not been as frequent since the Vietnam War ended." [forget Pat Tillman, Afghanistan, 2004?]

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



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