When American Propaganda Attacks

Donald Trump is getting some well-deserved criticism for trying to co-opt the latest school massacre and make it all about himself. To wit: if the FBI wasn't so busy investigating him and his entire extended crime family, they would have heeded the numerous tips and warnings and stopped Nikolas Cruz in his maniacal tracks before he slaughtered 17 innocent people.

If only the mainstream media weren't also co-opting the latest school shooting by making it all about the Attack of the Russian Bots co-opting the latest school shooting!

In its latest front-page scare story designed to manufacture public consent for war on Russia, whose chintzy meddling marketing campaign against our "democracy"  has already been hysterically likened to Pearl Harbor and Nine-Eleven by war profiteers both in and out of government, the New York Times warns that the only thing we have to fear other than fear itself (oh, and assault weapons) are the Russian bots taking over Twitter.

The implicit message to all those disaffected young people complaining that nobody is protecting them is that their anger might be getting unduly stoked by Kremlin hashtags. Think twice before thinking for yourself and marching on Washington and other activist things. Be aware that every time you read about a rally or a march on Facebook or Twitter, it might be fake Russian news designed to divide you and sow your discontent to truly dangerous, foreign levels.

While CNN is moving quickly to co-opt the students of Parkland, Florida by casting the brightest of them in one of their "town hall" spectaculars this week, the Times was shamelessly melding the shooting story with the Russiagate story. Not only are the bloodthirsty, perpetual war-financed cable networks pouncing on the story, the Russian Bot Army is horning in on it.

The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”

Any news event — no matter how tragic — has become fodder to spread inflammatory messages in what is believed to be a far-reaching Russian disinformation campaign. The disinformation comes in various forms: conspiracy videos on YouTube, fake interest groups on Facebook, and armies of bot accounts that can hijack a topic or discussion on Twitter.

 Those automated Twitter accounts have been closely tracked by researchers. Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

You can tell this is propaganda because the Times doesn't inform readers about the powerful plutocrats and corporations that run and bankroll these "research groups." The Alliance for Securing Democracy, as myself and a few others (notably Glenn Greenwald) have written before, is staffed by many of the discredited neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who made the fraudulent case for the US invasion of Iraq. It is funded not only by defense contractors, but likely also by a new State Department initiative called the Center for Global Engagement. Signed into law by President Obama in 2016, the Center is funded by public money and allows for the previously outlawed direct dissemination of propaganda by our own government to us, the citizenry. If the New York Times, whose torrents of Russophobic articles are now so intense that it's impossible to keep up with them all, is not also a beneficiary of this public funding, then they're being cheated out of a multimillion-dollar windfall. 

Is it a coincidence that the CEO of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Laura Rosenberg, arrived at her job direct from Obama's State Department?

As The Nation's Adam Johnson reported in 2017, 

Originally created in March of last year for anti-ISIL messaging, the Global Engagement Center distributes “counter” propaganda, social-media messaging, and original journalistic content. The revamp would—according to the author of the NDAA language Senator Rob Portman’s office—“increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China.”

What isn’t clear is if the Global Engagement Center, with all of its new “authority, resources and mandate,” will be used to target American audiences or pay American journalists. In 2013, Congress repealed major sections of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which had previously instituted a ban on the State Department and related agencies from “propagandizing” directly to Americans. The 2013 changes, which were first reported by the late Michael Hastings in Buzzfeed, led to much confusion at the time as to what the repeal did and didn’t do (some thought it deeply pernicious, others not so much). Subsequent attempts to clear up the current law on targeting Americans haven’t resulted in a clear consensus, a problem that’s becoming increasingly urgent as the US government doubles its efforts to combat the much-publicized Russian propaganda machine.

How doubly ironic, therefore, that President Trump is wondering right out loud why President Obama himself was so sanguine and lackadaisical about this unprecedented Russian attack on our pristine electoral processes. If I had to hazard a guess, it was because the brilliant Obama didn't dream that the protectionist Trump would ever win, and that there would even be a need for an all-out effort to sway American public opinion on Russia as the default enemy du jour. After all, Obama's shtick back then was the "pivot to China" - code for choking off its economic growth via the US oligarchy-serving Trans-Pacific Partnership. Therefore, the US oligarchy has been forced to "pivot" to a new contrived arch-enemy - Russia - to avoid the rise of any more "axes of evil" to threaten the profits and power of the US hegemon.

***

Everything is fair game for domestic attack under the fig leaf of Russian meddling, and that includes the Black Lives Matter movement and other radical, youth-based movements. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller thus dutifully added to his Narrative indictment the juicy bit about Russian trolls orchestrating and advertising rallies by black people against police brutality.

Times columnist Charles Blow dutifully enhanced this scare-narrative in his Monday group-think piece, which included a gratuitous dig at the "lionized social justice hero" Colin Kaepernick - he didn't vote! - as well as implicit criticism of activist-writer Michelle Alexander, whose New Jim Crow Blow huffily described as an "activist bible" for those millions of young black voters who didn't come out in record numbers for either racist presidential candidate and as a result, got us all saddled with the more loathsome and outspoken racist candidate. And Bernie supporter, the rapper Killer Mike? He had the nerve to not support Hillary even after she won the nomination!

It's malcontents and critics like these, Blow not so subtly implies, who created the vacuum necessary for the Russian bots and trolls to swoop in and keep all the black folks home on Election Day.

"There is no way to know how many black people would have settled on the exact same course of action without the interference," Blow concludes. "But what we do now know with absolute certainty is that in making their electoral choices, black folks had unwanted hands on their backs, unethical and illegal ones, nudging them toward an apathy built on anger.What happened in this election wasn’t just a political crime, it was specifically a racialized crime, and the black vote was a central target."

Judging from all the laudatory reader comments, Blow struck a real chord among the mostly white readership. Finally, somebody liberal and black was brave enough to let Kaepernick and Killer Mike and all those uppity Black Lives Matter youths have it. It's red-baiting and race-baiting at its finest. It's the new Democratic Party McCarthyism writ large.

My initial  comment, which made the above critiques, was axed by the Times censors. I had better luck with my second submission, published the following day:

This column strikes me as a veiled insult to young black voters, whom Blow casts as naive enough to be influenced by some truly cheesy Russian ads disseminated by only 90 underpaid trolls.

So easy to scapegoat "Russians" for "amplifying" the domestic discontent here in Exceptional USA. Given that this was the same tactic used by the US political-media complex against protests during the civil rights era and the Vietnam War, I'm kind of surprised it still has such influential staying power - until I remember Joseph Goebbels's maxim for effective propaganda: repeat it over and over and over again, and people will start believing it. The best part of this current Russophobic campaign is that it saves people the trouble of thinking for themselves.

Think about it for a minute. Young black people who didn't vote in the last election because they "felt like" it was no use are effectively being guilt-tripped for refusing to participate in a corrupt system in which the ultra-rich decide who can best represent oligarchic interests. Telling people that they were victims of a racialized crime by Russian trolls deflects attention from the real culprits, the oligarchs who run the place, named Koch, Adelson, Sinclair, and plundering corporations like Exxon-Mobil and six too-big-to fail/jail banks which effectively evicted and impoverished millions of black and brown people.

So hey, look over there at the evil Facebook ad of cartoon Hillary with devil horns punching out Jesus!

This ad, first released among a trove last November, displays "the sophistication" of the Russian influence campaign, according to the Washington Post. 

If this is the mainstream media's idea of sophistication, then we're in far worse trouble than I thought.

Or maybe not: the students currently fighting their own existential battle - their right to not get shot to death - sound a lot more savvy than their doddering elders. Just let Wolf Blitzer and the gang try and tell them it's partly the Russians' fault that one of their classmates snapped, and watch some real sophistication spring into action. I have an optimistic feeling that the students won't be co-opted gently into that premature night of total and permanent darkness and ignorance.

Nothing New Under the Corporate Media Sun

Even though Bernie Sanders now has little to no chance of getting the Democratic nomination, the media are not letting up on him. The fact that he is still campaigning and still railing against the malefactors of great wealth has the malefactors screaming for him to stop, just stop already and be quiet or go away and leave them alone unless it's to help "unify" their private, closed Party.

The latest incident that has them clutching their pearls in elite hysteria was his appearance last week on The Rachel Maddow Show, where he had the effrontery to criticize the corporate-owned media.

Though he speaks truth to power about the shallow, sporting-event, identity politics-driven nature of the coverage, his solution -- for a Democratic Party-financed TV network to counter Fox News propaganda -- had me scratching my head. I sadly suspect that his particular "revolution" is now devolving into a public relations battle between the two big business parties. Why not go whole hog and call for a resurgence of an independent socialist press that is not beholden to advertisers at all? He could have plugged Jacobin, Counterpunch or any of the several genuinely leftist outlets. 

I suppose I quibble. But personally, I wouldn't want Debbie Wasserman Schultz's lunch-hooks anywhere near a new progressive version of Fox.

 MSNBC, for years the unofficial house organ of the DNC and the Obama administration, only recently pivoted to general election coverage. Comcast is not stupid. The "overlords," as Maddow calls them, know a good Donald Trump deal when they see it. There is more advertising value in airing an empty Trump podium or an empty Trump suit for minutes or hours at a time than there is in discussing "issues" or covering a Bernie Sanders rally. 

Since Bernie is still out there, New York Times pundit Paul Krugman continues to falsely equate reactionary Trump supporters with "Bernie Bros," who allegedly are sending harassing Tweets to both himself and the Two Nates (Cohn and Silver) -- the duo who so successfully predicted a near-zero chance for a Trump nomination.

Krugman just can't seem to quit his angry white Bernie straw-dudes, even though the Left actually does include women, older people, and black and brown citizens to boot. The scary socialist trolls are as big on "empirical denial" of "center-left" facts as conservatives!

Although it’s a bit worse when some of those supporters are actual campaign surrogates. Of course, campaigns can’t be held responsible for everything their supporters say, all, we can ask whether Sanders himself is inclined to dismiss inconvenient facts. Well, as you know, I think the answer is yes, on issues ranging from economic projections to the sources of Clinton primary victories.

 I was therefore primed to notice when Sanders declared that Democrats need their own version of Fox News. What does he mean, exactly? Should the proposed network engage in similar factual distortions and outright falsehoods, except this time in the service of progressive goals?

 By the way, it wouldn’t work. Fox caters to an audience of angry old white men; the angry young white guys who would want a left-wing version of this message are fewer in number, have less purchasing power, and anyway don’t get their news from TV. But that’s a side point.

I broke down and wrote a response, because it seems that despite my avowed boycott, I just can't quit the habit of occasionally calling out the Conscience of a Neoliberal:

 Krugman is right. Some on the left, whom he persists in denigrating as "Bernie Bros", are indeed in empirical denial. They have trouble accepting the fact that wealth rules the world, and that the corporate-owned media do not represent the public interest.. They believe in a utopia of debt-free public education, health care for all, a decent job at a decent wage, a secure retirement, a more or less permanent roof over their heads. How silly of the desperate ones to want change today or tomorrow instead of 50 years from now, if even then. How anti-pragmatic of them not to get with the program, and join in the team effort of lambasting Trump and cheerleading Clinton to the finish line.

Why won't they listen to Krugman and former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell, who has already warned them not to make a fuss at the convention of party bigwigs?

What this is really about is a resurgence of socialist ideas, with or without Bernie Sanders. Back in the waning days of the last Gilded Age, vested wealthy interests were terrified of an anti-capitalist muckraker named Upton Sinclair. Getting the Bernie treatment in the NYT and elsewhere is nothing new. Sinclair even went so far as to measure the column inches devoted to plutocrats as opposed to humanitarians to prove his point.

Read "The Brass Check," his exposé of corporate journalism, and you will see that nothing much has changed, except that the media are much more consolidated.

The "facts" still have a well-known money bias.

My comment was inspired by Chapter XXII of Sinclair's book, which begins:

The thesis of this book is that our newspapers do not represent public interests but private interests; they do not represent humanity but property; they value a man, not because he is great, or good, or wise, or useful, but because he is wealthy, or of service to vested wealth. And suppose that you wished to make a test of this thesis, a test of the most rigid scientific - what would you do? You would put up two men, one representing property, the other representing humanity. You would endeavor rigidly to exclude all other factors; you would find one man who represented property to the exclusion of humanity, and you would find another man who represented humanity to the exclusion of property. You would put these two men before the public, having them do the same thing, so far as humanly possible, and then you would keep a record of the newspaper results.

Sinclair, never famous for personal modesty, compared his humanitarian self ("besides Jack London, the most widely known of living American writers throughout the world") to Vincent Astor, whose only claims to fame were first that he was born; second, that he lived on an estate; third, that he married money, and fourth, that he inherited $65 million -- at the time, beating the all-time record for inherited wealth. Sinclair continued,

And now for the action of the two men. It appears that the New York Times, a great organ of world capitalism, in its effort to camouflage its true functions, had resorted to the ancient device of charity, used by the Christian Church ever since it sold out to the Emperor Constantine. Early in December of each year, the Times publishes a list which it calls "One Hundred Neediest Cases" and collects money for these hundred families in distress. The Times never goes into the question of the social system which produces these harrowing cases, nor does it allow anyone else to go into this question; what it does is to present the hundred victims of the system with enough money to preserve them until the following December, so that they may never again enter into competition for mention in the list, and have their miseries exploited by the Times.

That should help answer Bernie's question. Plutocrats don't want you to know about their game, because what they don't want you know could hurt them, very badly. Sinclair self-published his book in 1919, ten years before the oligarchic greed he decried crashed the entire economy. Later, it was the activist pressure of the socialist movement that actually ushered in FDR's New Deal. If they'd had the likes of Hillary Clinton, Paul Krugman and their neoliberal free-market ilk around to lecture the proles and propagandize for the wealthy, who knows? We might never have gotten a national jobs program, publicly funded infrastructure, and Social Security.

The Times still does its annual charity drive as it serially glorifies the extremely wealthy all the year round. Just check out the real estate section on any given day, to see what kind of digs $10 million will buy you. 

 Were it not for real estate magnate Donald Trump's billions, do you really think he could have gleaned all his free front-page publicity from the Times and other outlets? You don't need a scientific study to prove that Trump has gotten more coverage than the Pope, Bernie Sanders and millions of actual poor people combined -- or anyone who can't afford the price of a subscription, let alone the price of a display ad.

Upton Sinclair finished his New York Times take-down with the following humorous anecdote. When he wrote an open letter to Vincent Astor in 1914, asking him to justify his lavish lifestyle when millions of his fellow citizens were starving, only one of the many city papers in circulation at that time published it. That was the New York Call, a small socialist paper. The Gray Lady turned up her nose at such a thing. An attack on capitalism? No way!

Then Astor got wind of the letter, and he answered it. Or, as Sinclair theorized, a shrewd family lawyer or a secretary probably answered it. Astor's reply was offered to every major newspaper, and every major newspaper published it. Most of them, including the Times, splashed it on their front page, with Astor's picture. They wrote glowing accompanying editorials about the magnanimous indignation of the young multimillionaire who deigned to defend himself against those nasty socialist attacks. Astor complained that Sinclair's ideas were "fallacious and impracticable," and that help for the needy would come over time, without the need for radical change. Besides, he sniffed, he'd spoken to experts, and was informed by experts that "the condition of laboring people has greatly improved over the last several generations."

Sound familiar? Upton Sinclair was a Bernie Bro.

And less than two decades later, the whole economic system came crashing down because of oligarchic greed and the media's enablement of it.

I have a feeling we won't have to wait 20 years for the next big "event." For one thing, the earth itself, drowning and burning and melting as it is, just never learned how to get with the incremental, pragmatic program. 

Mother Earth is an impatient Bernie Bro. Pass it on. 

The Times Is the Pits (and the Pendulum)

Edgar Allan Poe, who blended fact and fiction in his dual careers as journalist and horror writer, would have had a field day working at the New York Times.

  For what other reason than fear-mongering would the Times conduct a premature Bernie Sanders burial service right on its most coveted plot? (top left corner of its homepage)

In what macabre liberal pundit Paul Krugman gleefully calls a "premortem," the newspaper has grimly collated several Bernie eulogies from Canned Obituary Central.

However, to avoid any appearance of hackery or complicity, the news ghouls were very careful to use the smarmy passive voice in the headline: "Early Missteps Seen As Drag on Bernie Sanders's Campaign."

The morning after he lost the Nevada caucuses in February, Bernie Sanders held a painful conference call with his top advisers.

Mr. Sanders expressed deep frustration that he had not built a stronger political operation in the state, and then turned to the worrisome situation at hand.

His strategy for capturing the Democratic presidential nomination was based on sweeping all three early-voting states, and he had fallen short, winning only New Hampshire — to the consternation of his wife, Jane.

Actually, he did build a good operation. And he has ended up winning Nevada after all, a factoid which the Times conveniently doesn't see fit to print. The truth might take all the fun of out its exercise in S & M. It might take the fun out the premature burial festivities. It might even relieve the pain from the editorial torture.

So, although Sanders is gaining ground and "campaigning more effectively," he is still the Walking Dead as far as the media establishment is concerned. The subliminal message in the Times article is this: "Don't even bother to come out for the primaries, Wisconsinites and  New Yorkers and Californians. It's over before it's even over."

But to be fair, The Times does have a point when it chides Bernie for not attacking Hillary in the very first debate, when he so gallantly claimed that Americans are "sick and tired of your damned e-mails!" He had been polite to a fault, always careful to criticize the corrupt system rather than the corrupt Clinton machine. And, I suspect they're right when they posit that at the outset, Bernie's main goal had been to spread the social democratic message without seriously expecting to win contests and raise more money than any other presidential candidate in history.

And Cornel West, his surrogate from the Black Left, is right that Sanders should have engaged sooner with Southern black voters.

But the Times is revealing itself as a passive-aggressive propagandist, criticizing Sanders from two separate directions. He's not nearly mean enough. He's way too mean. Reading his political obit reminds me of the Pushmi-Pullyu character from Doctor Doolittle. His critics, their toxic centrism so deeply ingrained, seem to want to have it both ways.

Doctor Krugman the Undertaker, meanwhile, is forging ahead with his own obsessive-compulsive smear campaign against both Bernie and his progressive supporters. He, too, thinks we don't know our brains from our asses. So he pulls and he pushes and achieves diddlysquat for his efforts. 

 As I see it, the Sanders phenomenon always depended on leaving the personal attacks implicit. Sanders supporters have, to a much greater extent than generally acknowledged, been motivated by the perception that Clinton is dishonest, which comes — whether they know it or not — not from her actual behavior but from decades of right-wing smears; but Sanders himself got to play the issue-oriented purist, in effect taking a free ride on other peoples’ character defamation. There was plenty of nastiness from Sanders supporters, but the candidate himself seemed to stay above the fray.

Facts are such troublesome things. It is so much easier to bury someone than to  damn him with even the faintest of praise. Krugman actually sounds like a Grand Inquisitor here, purporting to know the inner workings of the minds of vast numbers of people. Whether we know it or not, our asses-for-brains have been taken over by the Republicans. We are no longer capable of reading books and even thinking for ourselves.

He is sounding more and more like his fake nemesis, David Brooks, all the time. He even indulges in a little liberal colorblind racism with this verbal belch:

But it wasn’t enough, largely because of nonwhite voters. Why have these voters been so pro-Clinton? One reason I haven’t seen laid out, but which I suspect is important, is that  they are more sensitized than most whites to how the disinformation machine works, to how fake scandals get promoted and become part of what “everyone knows.” Not least, they’ve seen the torrent of lies directed at our first African-American president, and have a sense that not everything you hear should be believed.

And now the hidden thoughts of Sanders are coming out in the open, endangering the chances of the Empress of Waiting even when Bernie himself hasn't the faintest chance of survival. Does it get any meaner, more gruesomely political than that?

My published response to Krugman:

I suspect that black and brown people ("non-whites") have a lot more on their plates than honing their sensitivity about the fabled Clinton Disinformation Machine.

Black Agenda Report has run several pieces about the lack of enthusiasm of Blacks for Bernie Sanders. Its leftist writers posit that black voters from the South were settling for Clinton out of sheer terror of what the GOP would do to them. At least Hillary wouldn't go so far as to overturn the Civil Rights Act. She doesn't hold rallies like Trump's, which actually resemble racial cleansing sites more than political rallies. She's a relatively safe bet.

That said, black (or as Krugman euphemizes them, "non-white") voters are not some sort of monolithic block. Northern black voters are supporting Bernie in higher numbers. And that includes Northern black politicians. James Sanders (!) of New York is primarying Hillary supporter Greg Meeks for his seat in Congress, and both Sanderses are giving each other support. So much for Bernie allegedly not caring about down-ticket races.

 Vile as the vast, right wing conspiracy is, the Clintons have always paradoxically thrived on it. It helps to tamp down and delegitimate fact-based criticism of them from the left. That Krugman is now accusing Clinton's progressive critics of enabling the Republicans is the oldest trick in their political grimoire. It's as anti-democratic as the super-delegate system.

The coronation of Hillary is as premature as Bernie's funeral.

 ***

So, contra Krugman and the Times, who is to say where exactly the boundary lies between political life and political death? As Poe wrote in the fictional version of  "The Premature Burial,"

 To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?

The coverage of the endless presidential horse race of death by the Times and other corporate media outlets does indeed seem incomprehensible to us mere mortals.

And then Wisconsin happens. (tomorrow) And that unseen mysterious principle known as the Living Electorate sets in motion those magic pinions, those wizard wheels which have so befuddled the pundits this season.

Unlike most of Poe's fiction,"The Premature Burial"  actually does have a happy ending.

The narrator, used to being declared dead due to a condition called catalepsy, (or in modern times, burial deep within the pages of the Paper of Record) lives in constant fear of being interred alive. And then one night, his fears come true. He has been entombed despite taking what he had thought were all the necessary precautions.(telling the truth to anyone who would listen.)

And then he wakes up. He dreamed he was moribund because he was actually aboard a ship, sleeping in a very cramped space quite similar to a coffin.

My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. "Buchan" I burned. I read no "Night Thoughts"—no fustian about churchyards—no bugaboo tales—such as this. In short, I became a new man, and lived a man's life. From that memorable night, I dismissed forever my charnel apprehensions, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence than the cause.

Hopefully, Bernie and his supporters have already given up reading bugaboo Weird Tales of the Times, so full of the charnel apprehensions of Paul Krugman and the whole banal coven of hack writers.

And hopefully, any new "tone" that Bernie acquires will not be of the politically correct variety being urged upon him by Clinton surrogates, whose own campaign talking points seem to be suffering a cataleptic disorder of their very own. And temper? Bernie has never lacked it. You don't bellow about how sick and tired of the corruption you are without possessing a very healthy temper.