The Fog of Public Opinion

Nearly half the US population now wants government to censor online "misinformation." And an even greater number of American citizens are totally on board with the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley taking it upon their august selves to censor everything that we see, hear, and read.

At least, that's according to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. But before you conclude that your fellow human beings have suddenly become the victims of an epidemic of  Authoritarian Personality Disorder, a different survey conducted at around the same time found, paradoxically enough, that most Americans also think that the government should do a lot more to rein in the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley.  

People are ambivalent, and confused, and they have been since the dawn of time. So what else is new? 

And polls are definitely skewed. The one just concluding that the American appetite for censorship has increased by a whopping 33 percent in just the past three years is, of course, directly linked to the Covid pandemic and the mixed messaging on vaccine efficacy emanating from both reliable ("scientific") and unreliable ("partisan") sources. Given that the definition of "government" itself is also so skewed along partisan and class lines, the results of this poll are probably unreliable on their face.

 But pollsters gotta poll. How else can our politicians serve the public? How else can our politicians get away with not only doing nothing to make people's lives better, but blaming all the divisive and divided people out there in the hinterland who, stupid as they are, were nonetheless smart enough to vote them into office? 

Manufactured public opinion stalemates are just what the pollster ordered to effectuate legislative gridlock, which in turn only helps the rich to grow richer and the poor to grow not only poorer, but as atomized and isolated and oppressed as is inhumanly possible.

The subliminal message in the recent Pew poll results is that only ignorant right-wingers are against benevolent censorship by the government-tech consortium of thought leaders. Educated liberals supposedly are the ones who want the discourse controlled. Ergo, if you don't like censorship, then it automatically follows that you are a Trump supporter, a Russian asset, a non-woke bigot, or any number of distasteful things you would never be caught dead being.  Everything must be deemed misinformation and disinformation until proven otherwise by a shadowy panel of unnamed experts.

 From the Pew Research Center's synopsis of the pro-censorship poll results:

Partisan views on whether technology companies should take such steps have also grown further apart. Roughly three-quarters of Democrats (76%) now say tech companies should take steps to restrict false information online, even at the risk of limiting information freedoms. A majority of Republicans (61%) express the opposite view – that those freedoms should be protected, even if it means false information can be published online. In 2018, the parties were closer together on this question, though most Democrats still supported action by tech firms.

Corporate Democrats and their acolytes began supporting censorship in droves just as Donald Trump took power and the paranoid Russiagate propaganda franchise dreamed up by the defeated Clinton team took off and infiltrated mainstream media with a vengeance. The ultra-right Republicans later wasted no time in weaponizing Covid, turning both the disease and its preventions and its treatments into another front in the perpetual Culture Wars. These dueling propaganda campaigns are at their cores an intra-oligarchic battle that simultaneously serves to entertain and terrorize the hapless spectators in the stands while effectively keeping their minds off such monstrous scandals as the orchestrated, deliberate, bipartisan lying about the war in Afghanistan.

The alleged majority of  people who want the "government" to stop the bad actors from spreading lies about vaccines and the pandemic should also ponder what late great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone had to say: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

What with climate catastrophes, refugee catastrophes, health catastrophes, is it politically correct to say that government is collapsing, and disaster is already here? Maybe Pew can do another poll to see what people think about that, not to mention ask them what they're smoking these days.

And about that poll purporting to show that increasing numbers of people are craving the censorship drug to keep them feeling safe and secure? Read the fine print about their methodology, and you find that the 11,000-odd respondents are part of a pre-selected American Trends Panel (ATP) who have been recruited ("persuaded") over the years to take part in frequent and very time-consuming public opinion surveys. Although new people are recruited all the time, Pew acknowledges that 

 Another concern is that repeated questioning of the same individuals may yield different results than we would obtain with independent or “fresh” samples. If the same questions are asked repeatedly, respondents may remember their answers and feel some pressure to be consistent over time. The reverse is also a concern, as respondents might become “conditioned” to change their behavior because of questions asked previously. For example, questions about voting might spur them to register to vote. Respondents also become more skilled at answering particular kinds of questions. This may be beneficial in some instances, but to the extent it occurs, the panel results may be different from what would have been obtained from independent samples of people who have not had the practice in responding to surveys. Fortunately, research has detected no meaningful conditioning on the ATP.

So have the people who have been recruited also been subjected to polling to find out whether they've been overly conditioned by polling itself? Remember, there would have been plenty of cross-over between the respondents who wanted more censorship by Big Tech one week, but more reining in of Big Tech just a week or two before. 

I myself was once recruited by a polling outfit during the 2012 presidential campaign between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and I agreed to participate. It took a good half hour of my time. I remember answering "none of the above" to several multiple choice questions which I considered too artificially narrow in scope. I even asked the pollster whether my own ad hoc answers would be accepted. (They would not be.) When I said that I would not be voting for either Obama or Romney but would be casting my vote for Jill Stein, my answer was duly entered as "not voting."

But according to Pew, being subjected to continuous polling not only forces people to clamp down on their previous answers and opinions for the sake of consistency, it also nudges them to get out there and vote for the candidates they were so narrowly asked about!  I guess that makes me a polling failure. I am not an ideal candidate for the ATP Club.

How many people who don't automatically hang up the phone when a pollster invariably calls right in the middle of dinner are just plain lonely and desperate for the sound of another human voice? How many answer because they have a home and a phone in the first place, meaning they are minimally well off, have plenty of disposable time, and don't have to work two or three gigs just to make ends barely meet, and are therefore not much in favor of radical social policies outside of the parameters of the polling questions? How many respondents engage with pollsters just to mess with their heads? 

I don't know, but maybe they can do a poll about it.

Meanwhile, what are all my fellow Sardonickists thinking (or smoking)?

Facebook Follies: Underhanded Down Under

 by Valerie Long Tweedie

What is going on between Australia and Facebook?

As you already probably know, news is very expensive to produce. Research, investigative journalism, and foreign bureaus with "feet on the ground" are expensive to fund. The main source of revenue for newspapers and news outlets is advertising, which has been declining since people have been getting more and more of their news on-line. News organizations that have gone on-line attract advertisers by keeping track of how many people go to their sites for news. But this is not enough.

Sadly, lots of small, local news outlets have had to go out of business and even the bigger ones are having to lay off journalists and other staff. This means the Fourth Estate and an independent media, which is the watchdog of our democracy, is in peril.

Facebook and Google, because they are the biggest beneficiaries of Australians linking news via their sites (FB made .7 BILLION last year off of Australians via advertising revenue but only paid a paltry 2.4% tax), have been asked to negotiate in good faith with the media companies to help offset some of their costs. Google, has done this. Facebook has been very belligerent about it from the start and threatened to cut all of Australia off of the FB platform.

What Facebook actually did on February 18 was block all news links not only coming out of Australia but also all international sources. So someone like me who links to U.S. sites in my FB comments has had all my links blocked. However, what they did that was really egregious was, in their efforts to take on the Australian government in a power play, they became very punitive. They cut off a lot of platforms like the Department of Health - right before we start our vaccine rollout on Monday.

 Why is this important? Because after years of encouraging organisations to use Facebook to distribute important information to the public (from which FB benefits through the gathering of information on all of us and then targeting advertising back to us - for a profit), they cut off a vital source of information on where to go for vaccines and links to places to sign up for vaccines in the middle of a pandemic. They have also blocked sites where people can go to get help if they are being abused or suspect children are being abused. They have blocked weather platforms in the middle of the summer - which means bushfire season in Australia - again, alerts to where fires are and how to avoid them. Cottage business-people like Sally, who has a tiny home hairdressing salon, or the woman who makes Thai food out of her kitchen and takes orders for dinner or community organisations like the local little league groups have all been abruptly cut off.

After giving away a product for "free" - which people have all signed onto - many probably not realising just how much personal information FB has been gathering on them and selling on for a profit - Facebook has suddenly cut them off. Why? Because Facebook wants its users to pressure the government to stop trying to make them contribute to the news media sources they benefit from.

So why should most FB users care if they are only sharing shallow content memes, recipes and pictures of their dogs? Because others are using FB and Google to access and share information in this highly technical world that is often very hard for many people to navigate. We should all care that a company that is acting very monopolistic is flexing its muscle against a very reasonable request from a sovereign nation simply because it doesn't want to share a little bit of the vast wealth it is getting from the citizens of that very sovereign nation.

Right now, Australia is a test case on two fronts. China is flexing its muscle against us - and turning back our products like fresh lobster and lumber at the Chinese ports - because our government has had questions about the origins of Covid 19, spoken out against the corporation Huawei and most importantly, because the Australian government has spoken against China's incursion into the South China Sea region. In the same way, Australia is a test case for how a powerful multinational tech company like Facebook can influence a sovereign country's laws and policies. The reason FB is fighting so hard is because this highly profitable corporation doesn't want other countries with equally stretched media outlets to follow suit. In essence, it doesn't want the gravy train to end. But it isn't just Facebook. Other powerful tech corporations are watching the power game and will also follow suit - as will many multinationals - if Australia blinks. This is why this fight is so important to all of us who want fair and democratic countries.

The question is do we want a democratic government (as imperfect as it is) with politicians we can vote in and out of office making the rules and laws for our country? Or do we want giant for-profit corporations making the rules and laws?

Note: Many of you who read this will ask, "Why is she on Facebook anyway?" I admit, my links to relevant news articles seem out of sync with what most "friends" are posting. These people do seem shallow and naïve in their belief that all will be well if they keep an upbeat attitude.

But how are we to educate others about the important issues if they only get their news from Fox or CNN or Facebook? They can and are being completely cocooned in their echo chambers of friends who are like them. Sometimes I want to give up and quit. And then someone makes a comment that they like what I am posting and that it is informative. I don't think I am changing the world. In fact, I know most people probably see my posts and scroll by. But we who know better, know these are perilous times and if we can reach only one person each, we can together make a difference. When I first found Sardonicky, I was very naïve about politics. I thought the NYT was a great source of accurate information and that my government was pretty much protecting my middle class interests. Over time and because of Karen's essays (and comments in the NYT) and many of the seasoned commenters on this site, I learned what was really happening in the world. The truth is heavy and hard for most people to hear and accepting the truth is a slow process.

Now, having said all that against Facebook. The reality is the Liberal government (The Republicans of Australia) is caving into pressure from the big corporate media in Australia - think Rupert Murdoch. Google has made a deal to pay for content but only with the big players. - Which means the little players are left to struggle along as always. The other issue is just because the big media players are getting millions a year (Murdoch's corporations are getting 30 million a year), there is no guarantee that this money is going to go to journalism. So the fight for truth and justice via the media might be a red herring.

I still come down on the side of thinking we need to limit the power of Facebook. The corporation claims that cutting off non-new platforms like weather, vaccine sites and little ma and pa sites was just a glitch and will be rectified. But this corporation has been threatening to do this for months, and has had months to plan its execution.

I suspect that every step has been calculated.

****

(Valerie Long Tweedie is a teacher living in Adelaide.)

Some Thoughts On the First Amendment

 The First Amendment only prevents the government from censoring speech. It does not require private companies to provide a platform for all comers to exercise their rights to free speech. Twitter, Facebook and other media firms and publishing outlets are well within their legal rights to kick Donald Trump and other bad actors off their platforms.

The danger occurs when these giant media monoliths partner with the government in order to impose this censorship. A case can, in fact, be made that our corporate ultra-consolidated media and and our corporate-captured and owned government are one and the same entity. At the very least, they are partners in the exact same oligarchic enterprise. Ironically, for all the talk of Trump being a fascist, one of the key elements of fascism is the melding of government and corporations. This true coup against democracy long preceded his election to the highest office in the land. In fact, this coup is what enabled his rise to political power in the first place.

Therefore, the expulsion of Donald Trump and his followers from these private platforms, these unaccountable platforms which have forged unhealthily close ties to the CIA and the Democratic Party, might feasibly lead to the silencing of any voice that the "establishment" or the "ruling class" or the "deep state" or whatever you want to call the permanent structure of money and power, decides that it doesn't like.

Never mind the spectre of "trickle-down" censorship. This censorship is already occurring. Google, for one, has been exposed as using its secret algorithm to suppress search results on the Internet. A secretive group calling itself "Prop Or Not" arose in 2016, publishing a list of some hundred blogs and media outlets purported to be under the control of the Kremlin. There's more than one way to suppress content other than imposing outright censorship. There are smear campaigns and intimidation tactics galore to get undesirable voices to shut up, be cancelled or just ignored.

The failed Trump-enabled putsch at the Capitol last week could be just the newest, niftiest incentive that these powerful people need to clamp down on unpopular or "divisive" rhetoric and protest movements in the name of "national security." They clamped down with a vengeance after 9/11, with the Patriot Act. How ironic that Trump cultists' favorite name for themselves is "patriots" who are trying to "take our freedoms back" from the very architects of the Patriot Act.

We have to stay vigilant, especially as it now appears that there are plenty more dirty hands than Donald Trump's involved in last week's massive breach. Latest reports indicate that forces within the Pentagon itself may have been involved, and that it was Congressional leaders who balked at National Guard troops guarding the capital as a preventive measure because of the "bad optics" such militarization of the halls of "democracy" would broadcast.

Even as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moves in a high state of emergency to impeach Trump for a second time for inciting a riot, her lieutenant James Clyburn tamps down expectations for swift justice by calling for a hundred-day delay in sending the lone impeachment article to the Senate for trial. This delay would ostensibly allow President Biden to put the Senate to better use enacting his economic agenda.

We'll soon find out what that agenda will be. Early indications are that conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin will be the party's designated fall guy, or bad cop, for continuing Democratic inaction on a sweeping pandemic relief package. The bright spot is that more and more of us can detect ass-covering whenever we see it.

The key word is vigilance (as opposed to the top-down orchestrated vigilantism in service to a billionaire we saw last week.) We have to keep covering the ass-covering and speaking out like there is no tomorrow. 

If our elected leaders really do care about the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States, they'll emulate FDR, who stopped American fascism right in its tracks in the 1930s with the New Deal legislation.

Give people money. Give people health care. Give people jobs. With their dignity restored, maybe they won't feel so aggrieved and so prone to fall under the spell of another cult leader charlatan like Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the private media companies arrogating to themselves the power to squelch speech should be broken up and the entire Internet should be made a public utility. That way, the entire public and its court system - not the billionaire tech CEOs - would be the final arbiters of the First Amendment.

Oh, and let's also consider restoring the Fairness Doctrine and legislate broadcasting in the public interest.

Tall orders for sure, but why stop at just one solution to the "friendly fascism" that's been operating in this country for most of our lifetimes?

On Being Greenwalded

Glenn Greenwald's beef with The Intercept, it seems to me, has just as much to do with the violation of his contract as it does with his editor censoring or attempting to censor a piece he wrote about the Hunter Biden scandal, a/k/a "Laptopgate."

As a co-founder of the news organization that paid his salary, Greenwald had written a clause into his contract which granted him total editorial independence and immunity from the dreaded blue pencil of any editor. It's the rare journalist indeed who can draw a handsome salary with one hand and not only write freely with the other, but never even have to bodily show up in the newsroom.

The feeble legal defense being proffered by The Intercept editor is that this immunity only applied to his opinion pieces and not to his news pieces. Given that Greenwald has always written with a civil libertarian slant, the line between news and opinion as it pertained to his work has always been on the fuzzy side. His muckraking articles, at least the ones that I've read in the last decade or so, have always had his unabashed, often sarcastic, and righteously indignant persona running right through each and every one of them.

Although I'd immediately plopped The Intercept right on my eclectic "Blog Roll" almost the minute it went live, I recently found myself reading it less and less, as his work began appearing less and less, and as the rest of the site began going more and more mainstream. When his articles did appear, they were relegated to small-font headlines at the bottom of the page. So rather than checking in every day, I started checking in once or twice a week, at most.

Just because Greenwald is now gone from the site, however, doesn't mean I'm going to ban The Intercept from my own blog list. There's already enough cancel culture out there. I still enjoy reading some of their writers, including Ryan Grim and Lee Fang, while giving others a pass. James Risen, whom I used to so admire for his fight against the New York Times for its own censorship of his investigative series on the war crimes of the George W. Bush administration (until Bush was safely re-elected and after Risen had threatened to go public and independent with a book), has now devolved into a Russiagate mouthpiece for the CIA. I would assume that the undoubtedly generous pay package that Risen is getting from billionaire Pierre Omidyar has a lot to do with his pivot to cooperation.

Of course, since Greenwald himself is reportedly a millionaire thanks to his reporting on the Edward Snowden leak, with the Pulitzer and the Oscar that went along with it, he certainly is in no danger of starving. To his credit, he is continuing the good fight along with a precious few other independent journalists who are still publishing and broadcasting on a national and even international level from widely visible platforms.

As a journalist myself, the closest I've ever come to national "recognition" was my decade or so writing reader comments on the New York Times. before new "community" management and a sharp rise in subscriptions after Trump was elected resulted in most of my commentary being suppressed. I finally decided to quit the endeavor when moderators approved one too many comments hysterically accusing me of being a Trump supporter, a single-handed Hillary-defeater, a Russian asset, or all three. 

 McCarthyism has developed an undeniable liberal bias, and it's become all too damaging to way too many people. 

All the journalists who are now so gleefully and maliciously piling on Glenn Greenwald are probably afraid for their own jobs. With just days to go before the presidential election, none of them wants to be viewed or remembered as the writer who gave us four more years of Trump because they either defended Greenwald, or they dared even ask a question about the Biden scandal. To delve into this story, if it doesn't kill their careers outright, will damage their access to the expected Biden administration.

During my own very first reporting job in the late 70s, at an extremely conservative local newspaper (the long-defunct Newburgh, NY Evening News) a Republican named Joan Shapiro was running for mayor in that majority Black city on the racist "law and order" platform that was so popular at the time. One Saturday morning, as I was perusing the previous night's police blotter at the cop shop, I came across the arrest sheet of Shapiro's own teenage son, who'd been busted with a bunch of his buddies in a vandalism spree. I duly wrote up the incident in my usual low-key crime report roundup, and it passed inspection by the weekend editor, who got a pretty good chuckle over the irony of it all.

And then, come Monday morning, all hell broke loose. Since the newspaper had endorsed Shapiro, and its top brass very much shared her paranoid concerns about Black crime, I was in big, big trouble. My male boss informed me that I had done a very mean bitchy thing, reducing a female candidate to tears and deliberately trying to ruin her political career.

Long story short: Joan Shapiro went on to win that election in a landslide as well as a second term. Me? From that day on, until I finally resigned (when the paper was sold and upon being offered the coveted 6 p.m. - 2 a.m. graveyard shift), I  was silently frozen out of big assignments. My offense was that I had violated the unwritten rule which applies to journalists everywhere: Be a crusading muckraker, sure, and win awards for investigative series, and expose the bad guys - but only as long as the bad guys aren't big advertisers. and only as long as the bad guys don't belong to the favored political party, or only as long as they don't belong to the same country club as the boss.

So, yeah, I definitely empathize with Glenn Greenwald. I can also empathize, to a certain very minimal extent, with the fellow journalists who are piling on - or just as bad, staying completely and complicitly silent. The story of "you have to go along to get along" is as old as human civilization itself, and it applies to every profession.

One good thing about writing this blog for the past 10 years is that I can write whatever I want, with total editorial independence. Nobody is going to fire me, although the censorious Google algorithm has certainly buried me, right along with most other independent bloggers and Youtubers from both the right and the left.

Censorship is real. Big Brother is real. So kudos to Glenn Greenwald for sticking to his principles and - to the probable chagrin of his former employer - bringing all that much more attention to political hypocrisy and corruption. I hopes he sues for breach of contract.

In closing, though I have already written to most of you individually with only a few more thank-you notes left to compose, let me express my profound gratitude for the fantastic reader response to my recent fund-raiser.

Above all, please keep the great comments and suggestions coming!

.

Censorship and Narrative Are Incestuous Bedfellows

*Updated below.

I'll admit it. I am a diehard fan of the New York Post. I have been for most of my adult life. Who couldn't be a fan of a tabloid that once famously screamed "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar?"

To be precise, I don't read the Post as much as I scan it. If its scandals and scare headlines do nothing else, they greatly enhance the effects of my first cup of morning coffee. My daily hit of Post is the necessary prelude to seeing what the New York Times is up to. It's also fun to count the hours or days that it takes for the Times to catch up to the Post's scoops on the latest grisly crime or celebrity death.

As I am writing this blog entry at 9 a.m. on Thursday, more than 24 hours have passed since the Post broke the story of Hunter Biden's laptop (fake? hacked? stolen?). And the Times was still not On It. Not that I really expected them to be. No other major publication, as far as I could tell, was touching it at first either.

But what's unsettling is that unlike its fellow Narrators, the Times wasn't even covering the real story - which is that Twitter and Facebook had unilaterally blocked all links to the Post article and had even blocked the accounts of some of the more prominent users promoting it. In the coup de grace, Twitter blocked the entire account of the New York Post itself.

The real story now is not the chronic Hunter Biden mess. The real story is that a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have arrogated to themselves the power to control everything we see and hear. That these billionaires also happen to be the incestuous bedfellows of the so-called Deep State/ a/k/a the Permanent Ruling Class, should be even more cause for alarm.

They are flailing and they are scrambling to explain themselves to the American public. They haven't had time to contrive or peddle the usual Kremlin narrative. They have not been able to tie the Delaware computer repairman - who claims he copied Hunter's hard disk after Hunter apparently was so messed up on drugs that he never claimed or even paid for the repairs to his machine - to Vladimir Putin and his election-meddling. discord-sowing, democracy-destroying army of Internet trolls.

And in their rush to censorship, they have given a great gift to Trump. They really are out to get him, and by extension, his supporters.

I'd given the Post article a cursory skim on Wednesday morning. My skepticism was immediately aroused when the name of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared in connection to it. The Post is openly backing Donald Trump's re-election and digging up Biden scandals by the score. Could it nonetheless be true that Hunter Biden is even more of a scammer and influence peddler than we knew, selling access to his father regardless of whether he could actually produce his father in the flesh?  Is it also possible that Joe Biden lied through his teeth when he denied either knowing what Sonny Boy was up to, or that he'd had his own direct part in the grift? Of course it is. But when weighing whether a piece of journalism is trustworthy or not, you must always look at the sourcing and the context. And that especially goes for the Paper of Record (the Times) and its pro-war propaganda quoting unnamed officials.

Long story short: I took the whole thing with a pebble sized grain of salt. I figured that diehard Trump supporters would promote the story, and that diehard non-Trump supporters would scoff at it, or just ignore it. I never figured that the reading public would be denied the chance to even see it in order to draw their own conclusions. I, personally, didn't find the piece compelling enough to either think about or blog about on Wednesday. 

But here I am on Thursday, blogging about it. And wondering whether this censorship had the Democratic Party's hand on it, or whether Joe Biden himself raised enough of a stink about it to get his Facebook/Twitter CEO/ Deep State donors to help stop its spread. Despite polls that show Biden winning in a landslide, you have to wonder what they might have to hide and fear.

You also have to wonder what the Times has to fear by deliberately not informing its readers about the censorship and the slap in the face to the First Amendment. Then again, they are barely covering Julian Assange's extradition hearing and the dangers to press freedom that the Wikileaks prosecution presents.

The Post debacle is a lot harder to suppress, of course.They call the boomeranging, mushrooming effect that its Biden story has elicited the Streisand Effect, after the phenomenon of Barbra Streisand once drawing outsize attention to the location of her luxury estate through her strident complaints about the tabloid press publicizing the location of her luxury estate.

Tonight's dueling presidential Town Halls are another example of the Censorship Industrial Complex hard at work.  When the privately-run Commission on Presidential Debates decided to cancel the second official debate because a Covid-stricken Trump balked at the event being aired remotely, ABC-Disney agreed to host a solo Town Hall for Biden. A since-recovered (or so we're told) Trump then made a sweet deal with his alma mater, NBC, to headline a similar event for him, at the exact same time and on the exact same date. 

This ratings-driven "Battle of the Presidential Network Stars" is, of course, just the latest blatant example of broadcasting against the public interest. MSNBC star Rachel Maddow, who has become fabulously wealthy off the Trump-Hate/Russiagate Narrative franchise (#Resistance, Inc) is helping her network's ratings immensely by pretend-biting the very hand that feeds her. She is even leading the pack of censorious liberals who are urging people to protest! But what this really means is  that millions more will Tune In to watch even more of Maddow's censorious commentary as she leads the post-game NBC panel manufacturing the outrage.

Maybe some enterprising YouTuber can contrive a split screen image of Biden and Trump talking over one another at their dueling town halls. It would essentially be a repeat of their first Wrestlemania debate.

There is simultaneously not enough choice and too much choice.

 With Halloween approaching, there are literally hundreds of other, better horror movies streaming endlessly out of our smart screens to keep us occupied.

And if that doesn't appeal, don't forget that there is always the horror of our uncensored, day-to-day lives to fall back on, to keep us at least tenuously riveted to reality.

*Update: The New York Times has finally weighed in, via an article time-stamped 11.43 a.m., on the censorship. The Gray Lady can't ignore the uncomfortable fact that Twitter had also suspended the account of the Trump campaign for promoting the Post's Biden story. The Times piece uncritically reports that the campaign's promotion of the Post article violated the social media giant's rule against promoting stolen material.  The Paper of Record thus tacitly gives its own stamp of approval to Twitter's claim that, because Hunter Biden's emails were private and allegedly "hacked," evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens contained therein should be and will be suppressed. This specious rationale for censorship is identical to claims that the Wikileaks revelations about Hillary Clinton's chicanery are suspect on their face -  not because they are not true, but because of the means by which they were obtained. The story that the Clinton emails were hacked by "the Russians" has been repeated so often that it is an article of faith, although it has never been proven.

 It's another sad day for journalism.

Shut Down Reader Comments Sections, Urges Atlantic Council

The American Ruling Class is terrified of losing its iron grip on power, money, people and information. To that end, one of its premier propaganda mills, the Atlantic Council, is calling upon respected news outlets to consider shutting down the "virus" of independent thought in the reader comments sections appended to their articles.

It's right out there in the open. They view ordinary people with opinions as a disease, a scourge that must be wiped out so that billionaires, corporations, military leaders, weapons manufacturers and their partners in political crime can get on with ruling the world and everyone in it.

The Council, already in the forefront of recent censorship efforts related to "fake news" and fomenting conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in elections and infiltration in both right and left-leaning Internet news sites, has just issued another manifesto pressuring establishment news organizations to play even more of a "gatekeeper" role than they are already do.

The defiantly militant title of a recent strategy paper says it all: "Whose Truth? Sovereignty, Disinformation, and Winning the Battle For Trust."

To make its scary point, the piece is preceded by a photograph of Japanese citizens having the gall to protest a US military installation in their country more than 70 years after the end of World War II. If it were not for the Internet, the Japanese would never know that the US was still occupying their country, apparently. 

It is a war of the ruling class against the rest of us, poor befuddled mortals who are so overloaded with choice that our heads are spinning. As author John T. Watts synopsizes a ruling class sovereignty "Challenge" conference held last spring, the masters of the universe must walk a fine line between cracking down on independent thought and dissent and not appear to be cracking down on independent thought and dissent.

  Watts, a former Australian military officer who now "consults" with the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security, bemoans the erosion of public trust in the media, which has dropped a full nine percentage points -- from 52 percent to 43 percent -- in just the past year, along with a 30 percent decrease in trust in government. He blames this not on widening wealth disparity directly caused by policies devised to serve only the interests of the wealthy and corporations at the expense of poor and working people, but on the "partisanship" fomented by disinformation campaigns from unregulated sources.

He also blames Julian Assange and the Wikileaks revelations of war crimes and corruption in high places, and without providing one iota of evidence, ties these leaks directly to Russia. If that weren't enough, too many people trust their "peers" more than they trust the proper authorities. The proles are talking too much among themselves, and the leaders are worried.

"Without shared facts," Watts complains, "society lacks the basis for a rational discourse."

The implication is that minds must therefore be better controlled with the proper, prescribed content from ruling class sources.

While bemoaning the lack of proper local news sources, he does not delve into the reasons why these local news sources have disappeared: the creative destruction of them by media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Gannett, and their ultimate consolidation into only five or six corporate entities. He notes only that this disappearance has created a vacuum being filled by "unqualified" bloggers and "irresponsible" information sites:

Those who  can generate the most attention by playing to the audience's greatest fears, bias, and ignorance will generate more revenue. In this environment - where any individual can generate, modify, or subvert facts for material political gain - there are multi-tiered incentives for individuals and groups around the world to generate misinformation and disinformation for little cost and significant reward. In contrast, truth telling and fact checking are expensive and of arguably less material value. 

Watts could just as well be describing Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. If these media giants aren't ginning up war fever and Russiagate paranoia and big bucks with their reporters and on-air personalities just sitting around a table and interviewing each other rather than gathering information out in the field and talking to regular people, they're inviting government consultants like Watts to join them and hand-wring about how both Donald Trump and those useful Kremlin idiots of the renegade media are going beyond the bounds of good taste. That is, of course, before they take frequent breaks from their discussions to broadcast the latest Donald Trump Nuremberg-style rally or run commercials for oil companies and overpriced drugs.

So what is to be done to draw all those straying eyeballs away from the Internet and back to corporate and weapons industry-sponsored information sites where they belong?

Censorship, censorship, censorship!

It's not enough that Facebook and Google have already agreed to infiltration by thousands of law enforcement and military "gatekeepers" to monitor content in order to keep the minds of the globe sufficiently and pliantly narrow enough to soak up all the approved propaganda.

The self-appointed censors of the Military-Industrial Complex must appeal even more to the greed of such establishment organs as the Times, warning that their failure to disseminate the right propaganda might cause their advertisers to bolt. Therefore, the Atlantic Council is prevailing upon those advertisers themselves to demand more control of the news:

 Advertisers would get greater return on their investment if their message was attached to better quality material that properly engages the reader. Their brand can also suffer harm if it is associated with poor quality or misleading material. By demanding that their advertising is proven to be associated with high quality material, they will eventually realign some of the market forces and shift the incentives of the producers.

Translation: there can never be enough corporate control of our lives. If journalists and editors persist in maintaining the red line between their news and advertising divisions, a line which has always been the hallmark of a free press in democratic societies, the oligarchs will see to it that these noncompliant news organizations fail. Advertisers, not journalists and editors, must determine what is and what is not "high quality material." This is perhaps the most chilling of the Atlantic Council's prescriptions. It is an open threat to the First Amendment.

It gets worse. Watts also considers the readers who comment on articles to be  "diverse threat actors" and as such, establishment news sites should consider completely disabling reader commentary on articles. Too often, independent voices refute the corporate-funded and Pentagon-engendered propaganda on the news pages, or else they add supplementary erudite information (facts) not consistent with the narrow narrative. This outside commentary is becoming unduly influential.

Media producers need to recognize that adversaries are out there and actively seeking to cause harm through their medium.  They have a responsibility to respond to threats and raise awareness of the incidents occurring, both because it is their business to do so and because of a larger duty of care. In doing so, they need to be careful not to 'carry the virus' as one speaker put it. This means they should consider disabling commentary systems - the function of allowing the general public to leave a comment beneath a particular media item.

Adolf Hitler and other fascist demagogues also have used the term "virus" to describe Jews and minorities and perceived outside "threats," which paved the way for their expulsion and eventual extermination. 

And as Andre Damon notes, "What Watts outlines in his document is a vision of a totalitarian social order, where the government, the media, and technology companies are united in suppressing oppositional viewpoints. The most striking element of the document, however, is that it is not describing the future, but contemporary reality. Everything is in the present tense. The machinery of mass censorship has already been built."

Interestingly enough, though, Watts also offers a suggestion that I happen to agree with. Contributors on the op-ed pages and independent outlets should always divulge who they work for and who is paying them -- either before or at the end of their articles. Unfortunately, Watt chooses not to reveal where his own paycheck comes from.

So I will. The funding sources for his work comprise at least 25 foreign governments, including authoritarian regimes on the Arabian peninsula, with millions donated to the Atlantic Council by the genocidal Saudis; bomb and gun and drone manufacturers; the gambling casinos known as banks; private equity parasites; climate-destroying oil companies... in other words, a veritable Who's Who of the ruling oligarchy. Of course, they prefer to call themselves the "Honor Roll," rather than the Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

Please feel free to leave your comments!

It's coming up on the weekend, so nothing is off-topic.

How Corporatism Is Co-Opting Socialism

Have you noticed that more and more corporate media pundits are paying some positive attention to socialism these days? If they can't beat such attractive upstarts as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, they might as well at least pretend to join them in the pre-midterms interim. There'll be plenty of time after November to curb both their enthusiasm and ours.

Color me skeptical, but when neoliberal scribes Paul Krugman and Michael Tomasky write pro-socialist op-eds in the New York Times on the very same day it does tend to send my bullshit detection radar into high alert.

Krugman even took a break from his European bicycle tour vacation to wax rhapsodic about Denmark's social welfare state. It seems like only yesterday when he was waxing funereal about Bernie Sanders's call for single payer health care and free higher education. O.K., so it was more than a year ago, but time flies when millions of desperate people are logically thinking that their time is running out.

Tomasky, editor of the centrist journal "Democracy" and a columnist for the Clinton-supporting Daily Beast (Chelsea Clinton sits on its board of directors) is not so much enthusiastic about socialism as he is worried that capitalistic greed is creating too much socialistic enthusiasm in the great unwashed masses.

So if you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.

Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society. So is a solution to a national drug crisis in which 115 people die every day, as well as a lot of other problems that the capitalism of our era has simply ignored.

I have mixed feelings about this socialism boomlet. It has yet to prove itself politically viable in general elections outside a handful of areas, and by 2021 we could wake up and see that it’s been a disaster for Democrats.

 Mind you, Tomasky mainly has the interests of the plutocrats at heart. His column is an appeal to their alleged altruism and understanding of the lesser people and by no means a list of remedies to ameliorate record inequality. He doesn't go so far as to agitate for single payer health insurance, a living wage, increased Social Security benefits, a federal jobs guarantee or new taxes to fund affordable housing. He only asks that wealthy "thought leaders" care, or more accurately, pretend to care. Otherwise too many leftists might get elected and take away their perks.

Nevertheless, both he and Krugman are being widely praised for saying such pretty, inclusive words. They are good soldiers who will do whatever it takes to get disaffected Democrats to the polls in November.

Meanwhile, since I wanted to find out if socialism is getting even more popular among disaffected young people, I Googled "millennials/socialism/polls" to get some numbers.

Surprisingly or not surprisingly, the very first entry in the Google search results was from a site calling itself "Victims of Communism.Org."

It wants to warn struggling, indebted young people about their deluded thinking. If they persist in wanting guaranteed medical care and other nice things, they might end up in a Stalinesque gulag. Or to be really realistic about it, Maduro's Venezuela!

Unfortunately, Americans are as ignorant of the developing situation in socialist Venezuela as they are of the definition of socialism itself. Six out of every ten Americans surveyed were wholly unfamiliar with Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and the economic crisis and human rights abuses that have occurred under his rule.
So, 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, the majority of the largest generational cohort in America show great enthusiasm for socialism while completely failing to correctly identify its definition when asked or examine its consequences. It gets worse.
Seven in ten Americans drastically underestimate the number of people killed at the hands of communist regimes over the last century. This is unsurprising, given the fact that half of all Millennials say they have never heard of Mao Zedong, a man whose policies killed nearly 60 million people, making him the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century.

 It goes on to equate the neo-Nazi provocateurs at Charlottesville with the anti-fascist protesters "with hammer and sickle flags" despite the fact that the anti-fascists are not members of the Communist Party.

A click on the miniscule link to "Leadership" reveals that, unsurprisingly, the people in charge of Victims of Communism.Org hail from conservative think tanks, the finance industry and the security state. The executive director, Marion Smith, is a Heritage Foundation alumnus. Look for his re-education campaign on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox and other echo-chamber outlets of the corporate propaganda consortium.

Chairman of the Board is Lee Edwards, also of the Heritage Foundation, who cut his own anti-socialistic teeth as director of communications for Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign.

Not that the Victims of Communism organization is totally Republican, of course. Since "bipartisan" is establishment-speak for "noble, altruistic and honest," there is even a congressional Victims of Communism Caucus to more ably represent the interests of unfettered capitalism.

Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) and Dennis Lipinski (D-IL) joined with their GOP colleagues in urging EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to boycott the unveiling of a statue of Karl Marx (a gift from China) in his hometown of Trier, Germany this past May in honor of his 200th birthday. No matter that Marxism was co-opted by such despots as Joseph Stalin in order to do some truly evil things. According to the official US corporate bipartisan consensus, Karl Marx personally was and is responsible for all manner of global evil.

To his credit, Juncker not only ignored the US politicians and right-wing hecklers, he publicly derided them in his speech at the statue's dedication:  

Mr Juncker said: "Anyone would do well in remembering Marx because remembering and understanding are part of securing the future.
"Without memory and thought, without understanding memory, there will not be much for the future.
"Marx isn't responsible for all the atrocities his alleged heirs have to answer for.
"One has to understand Karl Marx from the context of his time and not have prejudices based on hindsight, these judgments shouldn't exist".
He went onto discuss Marx's influence on the European Union, saying that Marx's philosophy taught Europeans that it was the “task of our time” to improve social rights.

No word on whether the Bipartisan moralizers back in the USA will demand that Marx's books be banned as well. But no matter. In the American Land of the Free, Marx is rarely, if ever, taught in institutions of higher learning. And most important of all, curious learners anxious to learn about socialism and polls and young people always have the Google to set them on the right-wing path.

Google, you might remember, has not only given the reactionary website "Victims of Communism" the top spot as a result of this query, it has actively suppressed such leftist groups as the World Socialist Website from its results pages.

Here are the other top hits to the query "socialism/polls/millennials" on Google's front page of results:

"Majority of Millennials Want to Live In Socialist, Communist or Fascist Nation Rather Than Under Capitalism" (Washington Times)  According to the lead, "this troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society."

Sound familiar? Maybe it's because the source of this scare-mongering piece is none other than the above mentioned Marion Smith of the Heritage Foundation. For a guy so concerned about education, he certainly has a parallel agenda of the destruction of public education in the United States. He also has an addiction to false equivalency, the way he equates socialism with fascism.

Third-ranked on the Google search results page is a Chicago Tribune piece titled "Why Are Millennials So Hot on Socialism?" (Hint: they are woefully uneducated, not knowing such uncomfortable factoids as "the forcible removal of ghetto children" from their parents in Denmark... so they can go to school for 25 hours per week!) Also too, the American millennials who favor socialism are the same depraved individuals who believe in birth control and extramarital sex.

It's only until you get halfway down the Google search results page that you get to read more objective and relatively unbiased articles about young people and socialism, which are largely centered around the upset primary victory of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Still, as CNN reported on the recent polling, millennials still like capitalism and free enterprise right along with their newfound enthusiasm for socialism. So all is not lost. As long as there's Google to supplant critical thinking skills and the deep study of history, there's life in the old Oligarchy yet.

So the corporate media will keep their fingers crossed until such time as they can get back to business after the November midterms. They'll keep inviting reactionary shills like Marion Smith on their air to keep the conversation balanced, the concern for the poor as shallow and perfunctory as possible, and the capitalistic cancer in fake remission even as it grows and multiplies under all the concern-controlling and co-optation and snake-oil treatment.

Should Big Brother Be Public or Private?

According to a new Pew poll, Americans hate the idea of the government controlling what they see, hear and read. But they're just fine with Silicon Valley calling the shots over what is and what is not "fake news."

Or so it seems on the surface. You see, the pollsters artificially limited their survey to just those two choices: public control of information vs. private control of information. Respondents were not asked whether they'd prefer no  censorship at all. See the explanatory note at the bottom of the graphic: "Respondents who did not give an answer are not shown." 

The non-answerers appear to have taken a tip from Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener: as a form of protest against bullshit and control, they "preferred not to" to choose between two Big Brothers. So as far as the Pew Charitable Trust is concerned, the refusenicks don't count as desirable authoritarian personalities.

Offering people that third sensible alternative of nobody controlling internet information would not be in keeping with the aims of the Surveillance State. Let's face it: there is no real dichotomy between the nation-state and the corporate social media giants. Silicon Valley is essentially a nation-state in its own right, what with its annual GDP far exceeding that of many sovereign countries.

Therefore, offering people a "choice" between control by the Empires of Twitter, Apple, Google and Facebook, or control by their elected representatives is no choice at all. The oligarch-controlled government and the tech empires are essentially the same parasite, existing only to feast and grow fat off the money and data of the citizen-consumers of America.

Both legislators and social media tycoons will now be able to wave this distorted poll around as proof positive that Americans would dearly love to have all their news consolidated and monitored for their own protection. The only controversy will be which powerful entity can protect us better.

In an effort to keep the truth about the distorted nature of the poll from as many citizen-consumers as possible, the Pew people then proceeded to artificially divide the citizen-consumers of America into the artificial categories of Democrat and Republican. This is the standard fake attempt to make some fake sense out of the "fake news crisis initiative" that's taken precedence over discussion of social policies for the public good.

 It's all about the marketing of fake freedom.

 Majorities of both parties agree that people’s freedom to access and publish information online is a priority over having the government take action to curtail false information in a way that could limit those freedoms (60% of Republicans and Republican leaners say this, as do 57% of Democrats and Democratic leaners). There are partisan differences when it comes to steps from technology companies. A majority of Democrats (60%) favor action by technology companies to restrict misinformation, even if it includes broader information limits online. Republicans, on the other hand, are about equally divided between the two options: 48% favor technology companies taking steps to control misinformation, and 50% favor protecting freedoms.

That Democrats would favor the tech giants controlling and restricting information more so than do Republicans would be kind of surprising, were it not for the Democratic Party's relentless, 18-month-long Russiaphobia campaign. After being raked over the coals by the DNC for publishing anti-Clinton ads from a St. Petersburg troll farm, Facebook has now become penitent enough to hire thousands of security state and law enforcement personnel to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

But luckily for actual democracy, the poll found that younger people of all political persuasions are less likely to accept surveillance by the tech giants than are adults 50 or older, 64% of whom said they'd welcome their news being policed by private overseers. "Only" about half of younger respondents want their information to be so controlled.

Maybe the control-loving youthful half just haven't had enough post-secondary education yet, because most respondents with at least some college oppose outside efforts to curb "fake news" and prefer to make their own decisions about what is true and what is bogus. The less education that people have, the more willing they are to have others higher up the technocratic food chain make their decisions for them.

No wonder there is a war on teachers, kids, and public education. The only freedom that the ruling class racketeers are marketing to an ever more dumbed-down population is the freedom from independent, critical thought. Their method of enslaving people is to offer them them the illusion of autonomy and choice, and then cynically label it "empowerment."

Hillary's Hypocrisy Will Never Cease

Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State once allegedly joked in a cabinet meeting that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should be droned to death for publishing state secrets, has now morphed into her newest role: champion of free speech and press freedoms in the Age of Trump.

For some reason, Clinton was invited to give the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at PEN America's World Festival in New York City on Sunday night. As reported by Sopan Deb of the New York Times,

 She criticized Mr. Trump, not so subtly comparing him to authoritarian leaders who had suppressed journalism in their countries.

“Today, we have a president who seems to reject the role of a free press in our democracy,” she said. “Although obsessed with his own press coverage, he evaluates it based not on whether it provides knowledge or understanding, but solely on whether the daily coverage helps him and hurts his opponents.”

After listing more examples of Mr. Trump’s attacks on the news media, Mrs. Clinton said, “Now given his track record, is it any surprise that, according to the latest round of revelations, he joked about throwing reporters in jail to make them ‘talk’?”

This is highly ironic, given that when Clinton headed the State Department, she operated with a decidedly authoritarian bent herself when it came to the freedom of the press. While calling for a free and open internet abroad, and while praising the Arab Spring and the "Twitter and Facebook revolutions" inspired by Wikileaks, she doubled down on censorship at home. She went so far as to attempt purging Wikileaks from the web after it dumped embarrassing State Department cables for the whole world to see, covering everything from US war crimes and cover-ups to dirty tricks and petty gossip. One particularly cringe-worthy cable detailed how Clinton herself had ordered that all the plastic cups used by foreign diplomats at a U.N. conference be collected for DNA testing.

Meanwhile, her official 2011 Internet Freedom Agenda stated, “the internet has become the public space of the 21st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. . . The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should.”

But as Timothy Garton Ash notes, this agenda simply did not and does not apply when it comes to the exercise of free speech within the United States itself. He calls it the Clinton Paradox:

When WikiLeaks, founded to release publicly significant information not published elsewhere, published information embarrassing to the US government, Clinton helped to co-ordinate action by government, banks and internet service providers to withdraw support from the organization and (unsuccessfully) remove it from the web. Other domestic policies likewise tend away from freedom and towards control. For example, the US Federal Communications Commission has now ruled that mobile devices are not subject to the net neutrality rules that prohibit discrimination of media content based on its source or destination.  Instead, mobile operators, who now control the means through which an increasing number of people go online, can block, throttle, or degrade any kind of content they like.  Most recently, the ominously named E-PARASITE bill was introduced into the US Congress. It stipulates that an internet service provider can be liable for any content or site that it delivers that has a “high probability” of being used for copyright infringement.  Critics of the bill claim that this provision could extend to almost any site that hosts user-generated content.

(Note: thanks in large part to freedom of expression on the internet, the "e-parasite bill" ultimately went down in defeat. But then came the destruction of net neutrality under Trump. Hillary did not address net neutrality during Sunday's "press freedom" speech and refused, as Wikileaks-released emails show, to champion it during her 2016 campaign. )

So it was something of a mystery to me why PEN, an organization of writers devoted to protecting the First Amendment and standing up to government censorship, would have invited Hillary Clinton to deliver their keynote address in the first place. So I went to the PEN website in search of clues. And I immediately got my answer.

It's the anti-Trump #Resistance, stupid! Writer-members have obediently and narrowly channeled their crusade for free self-expression into the vile person of Donald J. Trump, and only Donald J. Trump. He did, after all, just obligingly confirm their worst fears by joking he'd like to put reporters critical of his regime in jail for a couple of days to keep them in line. To be fair to Trump, though, this threat was merely on the say-so of fired FBI Director James Comey, who for his own jokey authoritarian part, also thinks it would be a fine idea to "put some (journalists' and leakers') heads on pikes" in this country if they start talking and writing too un-American. 

So I guess as far as PEN is concerned, the enemy of our enemies (Trump and Comey) is our friend, regardless of whether she would love to silence Wikileaks and jokily kill its founder. No matter that the Obama administration in which Hillary served was dubbed by former New York Times reporter James Risen "the greatest enemy of press freedoms in a generation" and that Barack Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous regimes combined. The PEN blurb heralding Hillary's appearance gushes:

The theme of this year’s Festival—beginning April 16 and comprising more than 60 events across New York City—is Resist and Reimagine. The line-up will draw on global experiences, perspectives, and narratives to help light the way toward surmounting current crises here at home. At a time of unprecedented threats to free speech, open discourse, and the rights of historically marginalized groups​, Secretary Clinton will draw on her experience as the nation’s top diplomat and her ​career in politics​ to underline the centrality of free speech—broadly defined and vociferously defended—in sustaining healthy democracies and vibrant societies. Clinton has shown a life-long commitment to amplifying lesser-heard voices and buttressing safeguards for free expression.

Back in 2011, however, when Hillary Clinton was strenuously engaged in trying to purge Wikileaks from the Internet, and even allegedly calling for death to Assange, the PEN organization was vigorously defending him and his organization, and encouraging media outlets not to bow to government pressure against publishing the released documents. From its statement: 

The Wikileaks issue marks a significant turning point in the evolution of the media and the sometimes conflicting principles of freedom of expression and privacy and security concerns. The culture of increasing secrecy in governments and the rise of new technology will inevitably lead to an increasing number of transparency issues of this sort. PEN International believes it is important to acknowledge that while the leaking of government documents is a crime under U.S laws, the publication of documents by Wikileaks is not a crime. Wikileaks is doing what the media has historically done, the only difference being that the documents have not been edited.
PEN International urges those voicing opinions regarding the Wikileaks debate to adopt a responsible tone, and not to play to the more extreme sections of society. In a world where journalists are regularly physically attacked, imprisoned and killed with impunity, calling for the death of a journalist is irresponsible and deplorable.

Yet only two years later, a survey by the PEN organization revealed that many of its member-writers were feeling so cowed by Edward Snowden's revelations of mass NSA surveillance on US citizens that they had begun to self-censor. 

More than a quarter of the writers reported curtailing their time spent on the Internet and deliberately avoiding writing about and talking about certain topics in email and phone conversations. Another 16 percent admitted to censoring themselves in their articles and books. The majority of respondents thought that their activities were being monitored by the US government. The topics that they reported being afraid to write or talk about included military affairs, the Occupy movement, the Middle East and North Africa, mass incarceration, drug policies, pornography, the study of "certain languages," and criticism of the US government.

Fast forward another four years, and the fear and self-censorship have apparently reached soaring new heights. PEN invites Hillary Clinton, of all people, to lecture professional writers about freedom of speech.

 Arthur Miller must be rolling in his grave. 

 And Julian Assange is still a political prisoner, his own Internet connection completely cut off under pressure from the US government. The Democratic Party is even bizarrely suing him, along with his supposed co-conspirators Trump and Russia, for a "conspiracy" to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and thereby destroy American democracy.

For such a sore loser, Hillary Clinton has certainly turned out to be one hell of a big winner. She keeps right on ticking. And sadly, PEN seems to have become just one more inmate in what Firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher so pithily called the "veal pen."