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."

Taking the Einstein Pledge

It shouldn't take an Einstein to figure out that the ongoing RussiaGate propaganda campaign is, as one wag injudiciously put it recently, a nothing-burger. Nor must you be an Einstein to observe that Hillary Clinton is as much a paranoid liar in her way as Donald Trump is in his. These two characters just can't quit each other, and they want to make sure that we can't quit them not quitting each other either. That is one of our assigned tasks as citizen-consumers in the continuous political spectacle that substitutes for participatory democracy.

Because even otherwise intelligent people are swallowing whole the lie that Vladimir Putin "hacked" the last presidential election and continues to hack our very minds by stirring up dissent against the US establishment, we need a little Einstein, right this very minute. We should Just Say No to any number of the lies we're being fed by the leaders of a crumbling empire. Our survival and our sanity depend on us using more of our little gray cells to cut through all the crap.

From the Black Lives Matter movement, to refusing to honor the flag, to anti-war criticism, to independent thought itself: it seems that everything has become fair game for the 21st Century Inquisition.

You even have to read those handy self-help guides to thinking with a healthy dose of skepticism. My bullshit detector went off when I picked up "The Hacking of the American Mind: the Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains" the other night, and right in the introduction, author Robert Lustig bemoans the Russian "hacking" of John Podesta's emails which, he unquestioningly asserts, were leaked to "humiliate or blackmail" Hillary Clinton, and not to elucidate voters about Democratic Party machinations.

"And similar to the Russian hack of the 2016 election," he goes on, "this plot has been and continues to be executed by private interests with government support."

Hillary Clinton, the failed presidential candidate and the proven instigator of RussiaGate, has now taken the paranoia on the road, wackily telling British and Australian audiences this week that since she lost the election because of Wikileaks' release of Democratic Party and campaign emails, it logically follows that Wikileaks director Julian Assange is a tool of the Kremlin. She stated, moreover, that he has never published any information detrimental to the Kremlin, a baldfaced lie which largely went unchallenged.

She even falsely implied that leaked emails themselves were frauds:

In the interview, Clinton rejected reporter Sarah Ferguson’s proposition that Assange was simply performing a journalist’s role by publishing information.

 "There was a concerted operation between WikiLeaks and Russia and most likely people in the United States to, as I say, weaponize that information, to make up stories, outlandish, often terrible stories that had no basis in fact, no basis even in the emails themselves, but which were used to denigrate me, my campaign, people who supported me, and to help (Donald) Trump,” Clinton said. “WikiLeaks is unfortunately now practically a fully owned subsidiary of Russian intelligence,” she said.

As I've written before, I can personally attest that at least one of the emails in the leaked John Podestra stash is legitimate, because it embeds an article that I wrote, republished by Truthout, and forwarded to John Podesta. I swear on the Bible that I wrote it myself, and that "Russian intelligence" did not force me to write it. The fact that Clinton refuses outright to address the content of the damaging leaked emails, even separate the real from the allegedly fake, is suspect on its very face.

 It should be so easy to simply ignore Hillary Clinton's Russophobic nonsense, just as it should have been so easy to ignore Senator Joe McCarthy's nonsense back in the day - but for the fact that the mass media and Congress are again making sure that the latest official witch-hunt cannot and will not be ignored. RussiaGate has taken on a life of its own. No facts are required, and evidence is purely optional. To doubt is again to be chastised as un-American. 

And using Hillary Clinton's own twisted logic, we might also assume that if Assange is indeed an agent of Putin, then we should also congratulate Mother Russia for instigating the democratic Arab Spring. 

As I wrote in 2012, Hillary grudgingly credited Julian Assange for helping to overthrow Tunisian dictator Zini Ben Abi by publishing some gossipy State Department cables mocking his thievery and corruption. She confided to journalist David Sanger, “I think the openness of the social media, I think WikiLeaks, in great detail, describing the lavishness of the Ben Ali family and cronies was a big douse of gasoline on the smoldering fire.”

Albert Einstein would most certainly have something to say to the mendacious and inconsistent and hypocritical Hillary Clinton and her enablers. The man known for his scientific genius was also a humanist, a socialist, a pacifist, and an early critic of McCarthyism. He called for an end, not only to the witch-hunts of his day, but to all future Congressional investigatory "fishing expedition" committees. He publicly announced his intention to refuse to testify before any such committee if ever called upon to do so. This vow and call to action only inspired the FBI to add even more documents to the 1,427-page surveillance dossier it had been keeping on him for more than two decades. From reading his mail and going through his trash, the government concluded, among other zany subversions, that Einstein was simultaneously a German spy and a Russian spy who was secretly working on a death ray machine in his spare time when he wasn't busy leading a Communist conspiracy to take over Hollywood. And perhaps most suspiciously of all, Einstein was an independent thinker who refused to join a political party.

 The New York Times, then as now ever the faithful establishment mouthpiece, actually took Albert Einstein to task for failing to acquiesce to the Inquisition, and for exercising his right to civil disobedience. "Too wrongs never did add up to one right," the editorial board cleverly tut-tutted at him.

I.F. Stone, the great independent journalist, also would most certainly have something to say to Hillary Clinton and the New York Times and other corporate media giants about their current coordinated campaigns against the "fake news" and "Russian ads" on the Internet and social media. Just because an inquisition is wrapped up in a facade of virtue and truth-seeking doesn't make it right. Inquisitions, even when headed by qualified lawyer-politicians rather than by a demagogue like McCarthy, still have no place in a putative democracy. This isn't Oz. The way to do battle against wicked witch-hunts is not with "good" witch-hunts.

The need for such defiance is illustrated by the objections advanced against it. "One cannot start," the New York Times said, "from the premise that Congressional committees have no right to question teachers and scientists or to seek out subversives wherever they can find them; what is profoundly wrong is the way some of them have been exercising it." The fact is that one cannot start from any other premise without making defeat inevitable....

The New York Times says "An investigation which has no taint of witch-hunting, no bias of anti-intellectualism, no prejudice, no distorted ideas of what is guilt and subversion would be irreproachable." A censorship of such immaculate virtues would be irreproachable, but the Framers of the Bill of Rights thought it safer to rely on free discussion than on the miraculous possibility that the Archangel Gabriel might decide to take the civil service exam for the office of censor."

The current Congressional investigations and op-eds all have an anti-democracy agenda at their very cores. CNN talking head Gloria Borger actually enthused last week that RussiaGate is a solid legitimate effort merely by virtue of it being cooperatively pursued by both Republicans and Democrats. Under this twisted logic, a witch-hunt is a lot like Smuckers preserves: if it's bipartisan, it's just got to be good!

Einstein would, of course, have something to say to CNN and all the establishment media today:

The problem with which the intellectuals of this country are confronted is very serious.The reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a danger from without . .

What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? I can only see the revolutionary way of non-co-operation, in Gandhi’s sense... based on the assertion that it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition.

Instead of simply celebrating the athletes and others who "take a knee" to the pledge to the flag, we should go a step further and follow I.F. Stone's advice "to take the Einstein Pledge and throw down a fundamental challenge to the establishment of an inquisition in America."

And it wouldn't hurt to inject a little disrespectful Einsteinian humor into the equation either. 

Never Let a Serious Manufactured Crisis Go To Waste

While Trump is sending in the military, under cover of humanitarianism, to quell any incipient native unrest on Puerto Rico, his good-thinking critics in Congress are obsessively adhering to their own McCarthyite agenda.

The latest episode in RussiaGate has congress critters criticizing Twitter for, of all things, not taking the whole Cold War resurgence propaganda campaign seriously enough.

Senator Mark Warner, far from grousing to TV cameras that Puerto Rico is being criminally ignored by the White House, and that American citizens are being allowed to die for no good reason other than cruelty and greed, groused that he was very disappointed that Twitter had furnished his witch-hunting intelligence committee with only 200 accounts possibly linked to fake news trolls operating out of the Kremlin.

Never mind that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have in his own pocket the names of 200 subversives acting for Russia right within the US government, people were shocked and awed enough that McCarthy didn't even have to produce his nonexistent list. Times have changed, though, and if you can't come up with at least a million Russian operatives who sneakily forced American voters to pick Trump over Hillary, then your whole hysterical plot is in danger of completely falling apart. From the New York Times:

The company’s  presentation “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions and again begs many more questions than they offered,” Mr. Warner said, adding, “Their response was frankly inadequate on every level.”

Translation: Has Twitter now, or has it ever been, an associate of Vladimir Putin or a member the Russian Federation?

Adam Schiff went on CNN Thursday to vaguely not answer any questions about what actual evidence he might have in his own pocket regarding Twitter malfeasance. He said that his House Intelligence Committee has "only scratched the surface" of the alleged massive meddling by Russia in our democracy. He's only had almost a year to scratch, and congressional fingernails grow more slowly than we might like. And then he was caught flat-footed when, as almost an afterthought, Wolf Blitzer asked him about the Puerto Rico catastrophe. Schiff, looking perplexed, said he "thinks" that Congress might be voting on a long-term relief bill next week... or maybe it's the week after that. He's not sure, because that's not his department. But he certainly seems sure that RussiaGate is far, far more important than thousands or even millions of American citizens sickening and dying right before our eyes on national TV.

From the front-page Times article, which is handily placed above the old news that American citizens are being callously allowed by their own government to sicken and die:

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Republican chairman, would not answer questions about the briefing on Thursday, and his spokeswoman declined to comment. Mr. Warner said that he and Mr. Burr would hold a news conference as soon as next week to update the public on their investigation and try to draw attention to the continuing threat by foreign entities to the American political system.

It will be very hard to draw the attention of Americans who are faced,every single day of their lives, with such mundane threats as climate change catastrophes, lack of jobs and health care, institutionalized racism and police brutality, and rents that are too damned high. The propagandists of the Democratic/Neocon Alliance have taken on the very daunting task of making us believe in magic. Just as Trump is sending in the troops to Puerto Rico to stifle the dissent as they hand out the water bottles, our government is sending in the shock troops, trying to stifle dissent by tacitly accusing more and more people of treason. If you dare to complain about your lot in life, or to call out social and economic injustices, then you are unpatriotic and probably a dupe of the Russians. So it's best for everybody to shut up, and let American leaders get on with their gaslighting.

The modern congressional witch-hunters are very poor propagandists if they think that gullible Americans will be shocked that somebody in Russia spent a paltry $100,000 on some fake ads which proceeded, all by themselves, to magically propel Donald Trump to victory. Since this is chump change compared to the billion dollars that Hillary Clinton raised and spent on her own failed bid, it must mean that a crappy hundred thou has more clout than a billion smackeroos. This is what Mark Warner and Adam Schiff actually expect us, knowledge-impaired dupes that we are, to believe as they strive valiantly to reduce our quivering jelly brains into one great big puddle of fear and docility.

Perhaps they can get a friendly state attorney general to sue Twitter and take this all the way to the Supreme Court. After all, even the tiniest smattering of "possibly foreign" cheap fake ads is a subversive violation of the great Citizens United ruling, which equates money with speech. The very survival of all-American greed and capitalism is at stake.

Power To the McCarthyite People

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

Taking a page from the paranoid Trump playbook, this liberal interventionist of the Obama administration penned a New York Times op-ed calling for the construction of a huge, amazing, beautiful wall like the world has never seen before. This wall would consist of stringent monitoring and censorship of whatever independent thought on the Internet that she and some shadow cohort deem to be "fake news" - a/k/a subversive. Suppression is needed, Power writes, because any and all criticism of the Military-Industrial Complex is obviously coming straight out of Russia. Vladimir Putin is secretly feasting upon what she calls "a ripe subset of the population."

While television remains the main source of news for most Americans, viewers today tend to select a network in line with their political preferences. Even more significantly, The Pew Research Center has found that two-thirds of Americans are getting at least some of their news through social media.

After the election, around 84 percent of Americans polled by Pew described themselves as at least somewhat confident in their ability to discern real news from fake. This confidence may be misplaced. (my bold.)

People not fortunate enough to be a member of Samantha Power's Class of Expert Thinkers are too stupid to distinguish proper, American, market-based neoliberal propaganda from other types of propaganda. Therefore she wants to take us back to a mythical time when all good citizens and true strictly adhered to mainstream media. She wants consumers to settle for whatever political discourse the corporate media chooses to slice, dice, marinate, cook up and boil down in a limited smorgasbord of pre-approved information.

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

Here's the fake, untrue, paranoid and misleading paragraph in her op-ed that really got me chuckling:

During the Cold War, most Americans received their news and information via mediated platforms. Reporters and editors serving in the role of professional gatekeepers had almost full control over what appeared in the media. A foreign adversary seeking to reach American audiences did not have great options for bypassing these umpires, and Russian dezinformatsia rarely penetrated.

As a former "professional gatekeeper" on both newspapers and radio during the waning days of the Cold War and its aftermath, neither my job description nor that of my editors ever involved watching the wires and news releases coming across our desks for evidence of rampant infestations of dezinformatsia. Our main challenge was in mucking out whole boatloads of domestic political manure, which propagated in mountainous piles of real American press releases and flowed in endless streams of homegrown gobbledygook warning real Americans about such dangers as the Black Panthers lurking on every rooftop, and the Commie plot to sneak fluoride into our drinking water supply.

Revisionist History, Henry Kissinger-Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RussiaRussiaRussiaFearFearFearWarWarWarBuyBuyBuyMedicateMedicateMedicate.

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

She despises the lefties, what's left of them, just as much as Joe McCarthy did back in the good old late 40s and early 50s. She wants America to hate again just as eagerly as Donald Trump does. But the special thing that centrist Democrats want us to hate, besides Russia, is a brand-new horrible something called divisiveness:

 In the United States, the vulnerability to foreign influence is exacerbated by divisions within the political establishment. During the Cold War, the larger struggle against communism created a mainstream consensus about what America stood for and against. Today, our society appears to be defined by a particularly vicious form of “partyism” affecting Democrats and Republicans alike. This divisive environment can make the media more susceptible to repeating and amplifying falsehoods.

More nonsense from a self-described historian. All you have to do is watch the Vietnam War documentary currently airing on PBS to remember that Lyndon Johnson demanded that the anti-war raging protests on American streets and on college campuses be exposed as a Kremlin plot. He was very sorry when even J. Edgar Hoover himself couldn't shut down the dissent and come up with evidence of Russian meddling. The war and its critics ended up destroying his presidency.

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

The diversity of these publications is evident at a glance. Yet they only faintly suggest the multitude of cleavages which exist in our society, and along which flow information and opinion carrying authority to the individual groups....

"Life" satirically expresses the idea in the reply which it represents an American as giving to the Britisher who praises this country for having no upper and lower classes or castes:

"Yeah, all we have is the Four Hundred, the White-Collar Men, Bootleggers, Wall Street Barons, Criminals, the D.A.R., the K.K.K., the Colonial Dames, the Masons, Kiwanis and Rotarians, the K. of C., the Elks, the Censors, the Cognoscenti, the Morons, Heroes like Lindy, the W.C.T.U., Politicians, Menckenites, the Booboisie, Immigrants, Broadcasters, and - the Rich and Poor."

So therefore, methinks that Samantha Power doth protest too much.

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

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

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

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


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

MSM Puts the Pedal to the Meddle

*Updated below.

The corporate media is in full Russophobic overdrive again. The over-hyped meetup between Trump and Putin in Hamburg last week spurted more gallons of high octane gas into the tank of official discourse, to wit: the Kremlin Has Meddled, Does Meddle, and Will Meddle in American Democracy Forever and Ever Amen.

Elder CNN Situation Room Stentorian Wolf Blitzer, more breathless than usual on Monday afternoon, announced that Donald Trump Jr.'s gleeful response to an email claiming that Russians had dirt on Hillary is finally - finally! - exactly the proof we need...  of the possibility that the Trumps directly colluded with Putin to cost Clinton the election

This is an apparent upgrade from the improbability that Russia infiltrated the brains of the American electorate through a nefarious campaign of fake news,  making Trump a co-conspirator only by default. If a thing can now be deemed absolutely possible, then we're halfway home to reality itself. 

Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, meanwhile, can see the future despite admitting having no official current access to intelligence. Russia is prepping the 2018 Battlefield with its meddles of mass destruction even as we speak, he told CNN. Not that there is any actual evidence of this meddle-prep, mind you. The only requirement for intelligence is Possibility's close cousin, High Confidence.

The New York Times is creamily spreading, mini-scoop by mini-scoop, a whole series of friendly leaks from anonymous sources within the government, all regarding that "smoking gun" of emails to and from Trump's son.  The big scandal today is that Junior shockingly "loved it" when told that there was dirt on offer from Russia on Hillary Clinton. Plus, (and this engendered yet another news-flash to my inbox) the Times now has a physical copy of the email itself, an upgrade from simply reporting on what was dictated to them from their anonymous sources. Junior then proactively leaked said emails to the media himself, because if there's anything the Trumps hate, it's being scooped by the fake media on stuff that turns out to be totally unfake.

 The implicit message of the JuniorGate subsidiary of the Russophobic franchise is that Junior was unpatriotic and possibly -possibly! - treasonous for even talking to reps of Russian oligarchs, not to mention having the poor taste to gloat over oppo research on Hillary. The Times and other big media outlets neglect to add that these oligarchs have been given absolutely free and legal permission for the past several decades to launder their plundered money in luxury New York City real estate. The Trumps not engaging with rich Russians would therefore make no sense.

Junior's crime, if it is in fact a crime, is that he is stupid, a liar, and failed to disclose to the proper security agencies the meeting with a Russian attorney (who, as it turned out, was mainly a bait-and-switcher with the agenda of overturning Russian sanctions and not, in fact, in possession of any Hillary "dirt").

The inclusion of the eldest Trump son in RussiaGate gives added high entertainment, high-octane value to the Political-Media Complex's heretofore weak orchestrated campaign to weaken, if not get rid of, Trump himself. The very fact that President Trump sat down with Putin at the G-20  had been characterized as near-treasonous. It's as if they met in a back alley or Trump Tower rather than at a highly-publicized conference organized and attended by the global oligarchy.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, notorious for implementing Obama's Terror Tuesday policy of thousands of extrajudicial drone killiings, went on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday to scold Trump for saying it was "an honor" to meet Putin. “An honor to meet the individual who carried out the assault against our election?” Brennan fumed. “To me, it was a dishonorable thing to say.”

This, from the same spook who was caught hacking into Senate computers to spy on elected individuals who were reading a (still-suppressed and redacted) report of CIA torture. This, from the same spook who over a 30-year career was intimately involved in some of the 81 documented "meddlings" and attempted regime changes conducted by the United States, with varying degrees of success.

Here's Brennan's full friendly conversation with the Democratic Party-affiliated Chuck Todd:

If you think you're seeing more than the usual amount of blatant government propaganda couched in some unprecedented sensationalist tabloid language recently, you're not dreaming. Under cover of last Christmas, the outgoing President Obama quietly signed a law making government dissemination of domestic propaganda perfectly legal. Of course, it is cynically written in terms of being "anti-propaganda" in order to fool people into thinking that political campaigns such as RussiaGate are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act" - bipartisanly introduced by Republican Senator Rob Portman - established a Global Information Center within the State Department whose job is to collect and collate foreign attempts to endanger national security by spreading "fake news." The law also directs that money grants be given to "non-governmental agencies" willing to help the government keep track of all those efforts to undermine said national security interests.

Could the mainstream, corporate-funded media be included in the category of a helpful non-government agency?

Given their spreading groupthink willingness to engage in counter-propaganda propaganda to the near-exclusion of actual independent investigatory journalism, I wouldn't be too surprised. As it is, CNN and MSNBC and Fox all employ "former CIA analysts," retired generals, revolving-door political hacks and officials, corporation-funded think tank "scholars," and even cross-over Times and Post reporters, to form panels and disseminate what are increasingly the same talking points, repeated ad infinitum, the better to manufacture the public consent.

Not that propagandist stenography is anything new, of course, but in this digital age, it has the added strength of traveling at the speed of light. Or should I say darkness?

For a primer on how the New York Times, in particular, has historically relied upon red-baiting and Russophobia to help enhance the interests of the ruling class, look no further than this damning piece by Edward S. Herman. The Times started hating on Russia during the 1917 Revolution, and they've never looked back.

Fake news, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And the Times and its media cousins are looking none too gorgeous these days.

*Update 7/12

I wrote this post before the publication of Junior's email chain, which is a pretty chilling encapsulation of the casual corruption of the Trump clan in particular, and the international oligarchy in general. These people have a hands-on, clannish approach to a politics in which, as Trump as gaffed in the past, there is literally no line between the country and his company. They not only think they own the place, they do own the place, and they act with breathtaking impunity. Why not? Despite decades worth of evidence of larceny and fraud, law enforcement has never called them to account. Why should they quit just because Big Daddy is now president of the United States?

They're being called to account now because it is not in the best interests of other segments of the ruling class to be nice to Russia. Trump's interest in making friends with Putin connotes sharing of global looted wealth, especially oil, combined with a lessening of NATO sabre-rattling for fun and defense industry profit.

The mega-dot - more of an exclamation point, really - connecting all the events in question is that Daddy Don apparently knew more about the June 2016 meeting on Hillary dirt than he's let on. Coincident with this meeting was Trump's promise, at a rally, for a major reveal about Clinton corruption in the coming days. That big reveal never materialized, probably because the dirt that the Russians promised on Hillary was never forthcoming. The Trumps have been revealed to be as gullible as they are greedy.

If Trump goes down for this, others should go down too. They probably won't, but at least they might have to squirm for a while before the choking dust from the smoking gun clears, and they (think a minute about President Mike Pence) can urge us all to "look forward, not back."

Meanwhile, Trump is so desperate that he has submitted to a ritual Laying On of Hands. Although no devils were seen fleeing the Oval Office, one evangelical participant was quoted as saying, "I get goosebumps thinking what God is going to do."

It Don't Mean a Thing If You Ain't Got That Good Christian Bling

Today's Corporate News Agenda

His name is Milo Yiannopoulos, and he ran Breitbart News until the other day. Then something outrageous he once said about pedophilia lost him his job, ruined his book deal and rescinded his invitation to the annual CPAC confab. Bill Maher had just had him on his show to display what an open-minded liberal Bill Maher is, and what wusses other liberals are.

Maher is, of course, taking full credit for Milo's stunning downfall.

But following the show, Mr. Maher came under attack for the chummy and conciliatory vibe of his conversation with Mr. Yiannopoulos and for a panel segment, broadcast online, in which his guest made more inflammatory remarks that seemed to go unchallenged.

Speaking on Tuesday night, Mr. Maher, who counts himself as a liberal, did not sound particularly chastened by these assessments. He said he knew his interview with Mr. Yiannopoulos would never be satisfactory to some viewers. “No matter what I did,” he said, “it was never going to be enough for that slice of liberalism that would much rather judge a friend than engage an enemy, because it’s easier.”

 I suspect that Maher would much rather book an inflammatory right-winger than a boring right-winger, because outrage sells. The more that you can profit off divisiveness, the more that you can encourage hatred, the better it is for ratings and audience share and corporate profits. You have to supplement those standard and obligatory Moments of Hate with countering Moments of Outrage and Sanctimony. It's the duopolistic American way. It distracts the audience of consumers who used to be quaintly known as citizens. You are hereby divided between the Deplorables and the Enlightenees.

 I have to admit that I'd never heard of Milo, except for vaguely remembering the name from something I'd skimmed in Salon about some two-bit provocateur getting disinvited from a Berkeley speech and inspiring a small riot. But there is no avoiding him now. Today, he is all the outrageous mainstream rage. He is the distraction du jour.

Just quickly glancing at today's New York Times homepage, I counted four prominent articles (including the one quoting Maher above) about this provocative little creep of a guy. Unlike the Kardashians, though, he is not famous for just being a famous attention addict. He is famous because he is vaguely associated with Donald J. Trump.

And since the Powers That Be desperately want to get rid of Trump by any means possible, they will smear him with all the means at their disposal. If the tape about assaulting women didn't bring him down, then maybe his vague association with a guy who thinks pedophilia is O.K. will at least speed up the process. You see, the Deep State campaign is to gin up the liberal outrage to such a sustained fever pitch that Donald Trump will be history sooner rather than later. And then finally, the world can again be made safe for American hegemony and global capitalism on crack.

"Milo is the Mini-Donald!" dutifully shrills the ever-reliable Frank Bruni:

If you halved Donald Trump’s age, changed his sexual orientation, gave him a British accent and fussed with his hair only a little, you’d end up with a creature much like Milo Yiannopoulos.

He could be Trump’s lost gay child. In fact, Yiannopoulos, 33, has a habit of referring to Trump, 70, as “Daddy.”

Trump the father and Yiannopoulos the son are both provocateurs who realize that in this day and age especially, the currency of celebrity isn’t demeaned by the outrageousness and offensiveness through which a person achieves it.

The currency of celebrity wouldn't be half as valuable without the likes of Frank Bruni to keep it center-stage in his bi-weekly columns, which only pretend to be offended at such titillating outrageousness. (No, I didn't submit a comment to this crap. The liberal choir was dutifully outraged, with one of the most popular and prolific respondents lifting his own outrage directly from the Wikipedia entry on Narcissism.)

Meanwhile, resident Catholic conservative young fogey Ross Douthat not only couldn't help being titillated by the Milo distraction, he dutifully and artificially deepened the shallow discourse by purporting to ponder "The Meaning of Milo."

Douthat's lede is pure offended boilerplate topped off with a generous dollop of his trademark bigotry (not to be confused with the more lowbrow Trumpian xenophobia), describing Milo as

...a gay cross-dressing Catholic part-Jewish Brit who likes to boast about his sexual appetite, favors “ironic” racial and misogynist humor, and not occasionally describes the president of the United States as “Daddy.”

The only reason I still read the New York Times is because it's kind of amusing to see what kind of creative anti-Trump propaganda they'll cook up next. How many anonymous Deep State sources can be crammed into any one story? Which supposedly unrelated stories actually are part of the same predigested narrative?

Last week, for example, Andrew Ross Sorkin had a piece about plutocrat Steve Schwarzman's excessive birthday bash no longer being such a big deal now that we have a wealth of Trumpian excesses to sneer at. And lo and behold, this week the Times is running a special "wealth section" on the plight of the poor billionaires. The gist of these stories is that there really are a lot of virtuous tycoons out there who are not Trumpian grifters, but who "pledge" to give some of their money away to good causes, such as one another's charities. Or at the very least they park it in a tax shelter or hedge fund so that it has the potential to do a little good one of these centuries.

Better to be one of the eight benevolent billionaires now owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the whole global population than to be creeps like Malevolent Milo or Daddy Donald. The Times is only too happy to pick out your enemies for you.

The paper now as much as admits that it has an agenda to maintain the pre-Trump ruling order and to get rid of Trump in the bargain. One blurb on the homepage asks the moneyed class to "support a student subscription and inspire the future generation of readers." Suggested amounts in the click-boxes go up to $1,000, but larger donations are more than welcome.

"Supporting The Times is my way of fighting back against fake news and alternative facts. I wanted to give till it hurt," one alleged benefactor liberally gushed in the promo.

Another front page message which has begun appearing daily blatantly invites anonymous disgruntled anti-Trump whistle-blowers to write in and dish some dirt. Maybe this is where they got that big scoop about Trump hanging around the White House in his old bathrobe and how he can't even find the light switches as he roams the premises in all his demented ignominy.

In order to anonymously tip off the Times, though, you are ironically required to relinquish some of your privacy through the use a Facebook app:

WhatsApp is a free messaging app owned by Facebook that allows full end-to-end encryption for its service. Only the sender and recipient can read messages, photos, videos, voice messages, documents and calls. Though you can limit some account information shared to Facebook, WhatsApp still keeps records of the phone numbers involved in the exchange and the users’ metadata, including timestamps on messages.

 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world's eight top billionaires, is meanwhile doing his own dubious part to combat "Fake News" as his organization stays in the business of scooping up the personal information of all its participants for the sole purpose of marketing and profiting off as many of the world's human beings as is plutocratically possible.

He recently wrote a "manifesto" to his serfs subscribers asking them to ponder how they can support global institutions that he doesn't bother to name, but which, he says, will to serve to "bring humanity together." (If I had to make a wild guess about his meaning, I'd pick the International Monetary Fund, seeing how it brings humanity together by saddling poor countries with such onerous debt that they stay permanently tethered to the Lords of Finance, whether they like it or not.)

  The plutocratic manifesto is a paradoxical feel-good study in innocuousness. It even has echoes of a more polite version of Bill Maher. For example,

Research shows that some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as foreign. A more effective approach is to show a range of perspectives, let people see where their views are on a spectrum and come to a conclusion on what they think is right. Over time, our community will identify which sources provide a complete range of perspectives so that content will naturally surface more.

If it reads like a political campaign document, it's a political campaign document. He's all "for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

And you thought Donald Trump was a scary dude? Mark Zuckerberg doesn't just want to be president, it sounds like he wants to be dictator of the whole world. He wants to Make the Globe Great Again.

Not only must we learn to love Big Brother, we must learn to love the worldwide neoliberalism designed to keep us numb as it extracts our dwindling money and directs the bulk of our wrath toward cartoon villains like Malevolent Milo.