The Insider Threat of Media Stenography

Well, at least CNN president Jeff Zucker is being honest when he whines that "we are not investigators. We are journalists."

He was responding to criticism that his network and other corporate media outlets had gotten the #Russiagate coverage totally wrong.

Back in the olden days, there was such a thing as shoe leather reporting, when news professionals would literally pound the pavement in search of the truth. Today it's rare for a reporter to ever tear him or herself away from the computer screen long enough to venture out of doors to talk to actual people on the street and where they live, or to comb through boxes of forgotten dusty files in courthouse basements and to treat with healthy suspicion the pronouncements and press releases of the wealthy and powerful.

Zucker and other media moguls complain that their news personalities are unfairly expected to be prosecutors with subpoena power, that they are ridiculously supposed to actually come up with their own hard evidence, otherwise known as documents and history and personal interviews with myriad people. It is not the job of journalists, in other words, to do something so extreme as to independently verify what they are told by powerful people.

To be fair, though, such investigative journalism has become much harder in recent years, particularly when the Obama administration began cracking down on government whistleblowers with such executive orders as the Insider Threat directive, issued in 2011, requiring workers to spy on one another to ascertain whether their colleagues are talking to reporters. As McClatchey News reported in 2013:

The program could make it easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public, while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations of loyal Americans, according to these current and former officials and experts. Some non-intelligence agencies already are urging employees to watch their co-workers for “indicators” that include stress, divorce and financial problems.
“It was just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, ‘Hey, let’s get people to snitch on their friends.’ The only thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. “I’m waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50 reward.”

If it isn't digitalized or predigested, and if it doesn't come from a think tank or a political party or an approved government spokesperson, it simply doesn't exist to a whole generation of cowed stenographers toiling away in their increasingly repressive and consolidated corporate media hives. The exceptions are natural disasters like hurricanes, or unnatural disasters like the latest school shooting. Only then can they escape into the physical world to get some fresh air and maybe even gain some fresh insight from people who normally wouldn't be given a platform.

On the rare occasions that reporters do venture forth to take the pulse of the nation, they proudly pat themselves on the back for performing a bold feat of "parachute" journalism to prove that they care, they really care, what people in the Heartland are actually doing or thinking. They make sure everybody knows that they're not the elitists whom people, a/k/a the Deplorables, so often accuse them of being.

Zucker admits that his brand of journalism doesn't dig for the facts independently, but relies upon the "facts" that the media are given by their public relations and marketing colleagues in the government, electoral politics and private industry. His brand of journalism is often restricted to presenting  two differing - but not too differing - viewpoints on a given manufactured issue and then sitting passively back as the various factions duke it out on air.

Jeff Zucker is still completely in denial, proclaiming to the New York Times that he is "entirely comfortable" with having spread disinformation for the past two-plus years. It's not the media's fault that Mueller absolved Trump of "collusion", because it is not the media's job to debunk what the ruling class and their sponsors in the oil, weapons and pharmaceutical industries want them to sell to the public. 

And the most valuable product that they want to sell to the public is fear, to deflect attention from the "enemy within" to some amorphous "enemy without." One handy way that the media have accomplished this feat is to constantly lambaste Trump for his anti-Muslim, anti-Latino xenophobia and to replace it with their own anti-Russian xenophobia.

The various news organizations are still wallowing in the grief-stages of denial, depression, and bargaining, with just a hint of anger that they themselves have become the targets of criticism which does not come solely from Donald Trump. The president's own vengeful crowing is such overkill, in fact, that they shouldn't really worry about the continuing hatred from him and his base.

The only thing that they really have to fear is a sudden drop in their ratings and ad revenue now that #Russiagate is dead. Even MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, whose Russophobic fear-mongering over the last two years topped everybody else's, has seen her ratings plunge since the synopsis of the Mueller report was released. She has even been demoted in some media accounts from hard-hitting crusading reporter to "cable TV personality."

While they're rushing to conduct some fake soul-searching, the media-political complex is no doubt plotting the next meta-narrative. Trump, as ever, reliably contributes to the lucrative franchise by playing the Bad Cop, railing against the media as he obligingly performs his various Outrages Du Jour to suck up all the undivided passive attention. 

This week, it was killing Obamacare, yanking funding from the Special Olympics, and caging migrants underneath a Texas overpass. Trump acts, and the media reacts. The virtue-signaling soars to fever pitch. And the money flows in torrents of outrage into the usual select pockets.

The New York Times, for one, has reported record profits during the Russiagate panic, with executive editor Dean Baquet going full Edith Piaf: "We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality."

Sing it, Dean!

Meanwhile, Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, under secret US indictment for his investigative journalism, is still a virtual prisoner in the Equador embassy. And whistleblower Chelsea Manning is still locked up in solitary confinement.

And despite his avowed disdain for Barack Obama and rhetoric about invaders from the Global South, Donald Trump has not only retained Obama's Insider Threat division for the suppression of truth, he has expanded it.

Last November, the Trump administration released a 19-step "maturity framework" directive for the detection of insider threats. The press release strives to mitigate the fascistically authoritarian nature of the  program by repurposing the entire federal work force as the "Insider Threat Community."

Details and required course material for government employees, devised by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials, are readily available online. For example, one section advises employees how to detect mental illness in their co-workers and how to report suspected sufferers to supervisors. Workers must simultaneously be "sensitive" to the stigma associated with mental disorders and still be cognizant that mentally ill people might pose a grave internal national security threat. 

Since Donald Trump does not have a supervisor other than a complicit Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, guidelines regarding his alleged psychological issues do not apply and do not exist.

Still, somebody over at the Insider Threat School does seem to be trying to send a message. This chart, posted on the online course on mental illness, illustrates warning signs that government workers should be on the alert for and report to supervisors (click to enlarge):

Who, if anybody, is going to report this brilliantly subversive artist?

The Stages of #Russiagate Grief

I wish I could say that the long-awaited Meh Report, in which Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy and no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, spells the beginning of the end of the corporate Neocon wing of the Democratic Party and all its associates in the zombie establishment media.

 But I'd be fooling myself. Elite failures rarely go away. They simply fail upward. At the very worst, they temporarily disappear or go into propaganda rehab until such time that the public has moved on to the next new narrative or scandal. The more blatant cases will simply double down on their delusions for the foreseeable future.

Since Donald Trump is nothing if not a gleeful scandal of his own making, he will very likely make it ridiculously easy for the liberal failure class not only to survive, but thrive. He will scream "total exoneration!" and "witch hunt!" so many times that his words will lose their impact.

 Meanwhile, the primary media stakeholders of the #Russiagate franchise - MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post - are all churning violently in their various Five Stages of Grief whirlpools. As students of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross should know, the duration and the order of these stages are not set in psychological stone. They vary from person to person. They often overlap each other. And oftentimes, just when sufferers think they're finally cured, they revert back to the earlier stages.

This whole "closure" thing is a lot of malarkey.  

Therefore, just because Robert Mueller has gone from revered Father of Our Country to Deadbeat Dad who couldn't or wouldn't bring home the Siberian bacon doesn't mean that "the Russians" aren't still out to get us. After all, we have thus far only seen a synopsis of the report written by Trump-friendly Attorney General William Barr. There could be enough hidden nuanced nuggets lurking in the actual report to at least partially satisfy hungry true believers.

As the editorial board of the Times, wallowing in its own initial denial phase of #Russiagate grief, plaintively insisted:

We know that the Russian government interfered repeatedly in the 2016 presidential election, by hacking into computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. We know that it did this with the goals of dividing Americans and helping Donald Trump win the presidency. We know that when top members of the Trump campaign learned about this interference, they didn’t just fail to report it to the F.B.I. They welcomed it. They encouraged it. They made jokes about it. On the same day that Mr. Trump publicly urged the Russians to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails, they began to do just that. And we know that when questioned by federal authorities, many of Mr. Trump’s top associates lied, sometimes repeatedly, about their communications with Russians. None of this is in dispute.

The Times continues to parrot the conventional wisdom that it was "the Russians" who hacked the Clinton emails, even though the Democratic Party relied on its own investigators to reach this conclusion and refused FBI access to its computer servers to prove the Russian connection one way or another. The newspaper still refuses to believe that there was no collusion, even though Trump was more of a passive partner than they originally claimed. He may have been the bottom half of the missionary position, but he still had relations with those Russians. At the very least, he lusts after Putin in his heart, and therefore he is still guilty as sin.

The second traditional stage of grief - Anger - is not yet the overwhelming symptom evident in the Media-Political Complex. #Russiagate grievers were still too shell-shocked on the morning after Mueller's death-knell to get overtly mad at him personally. Mueller has been too elevated to mythological, godlike status for too long for people to immediately turn against him. On the contrary, many are making excuses for him. As valiantly as he strove to cure the Trump cancer, the disease was too far advanced for even a prosecutorial Marcus Welby to tackle. This is especially true given that the body politic under attack by the Trump malignancy was in such horrible shape to begin with.

Former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer pleads that Mueller couldn't indict Trump on obstruction of justice for the simple fact that the president has been acting out in full public view. The tumor was just too large and too slippery to excise:

This was apparently a significant consideration in the decision by Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosenstein not to prosecute (along with the determination that there was no underlying “collusion” legal offense). Here, once again, the president who is a demagogue — who is fully prepared to flout well-established, vitally important expectations about how American presidents faithfully execute the laws — can safely bring self-interested, self-protective pressure on the Department of Justice and undermine its public standing and authority.

In other words, Trump wasn't sneaky and occult enough. This is like claiming that it's easier to catch an embezzler than it is to nab an armed robber bumbling with guns a-blazing in broad daylight. Bauer's op-ed represents the overlapping stages of denial and bargaining, as he suggests that if only we had a stronger penal code, Trump might yet go to jail. All we need is the right legal miracle drug to catch this guy, juxtaposed with major changes in our legalized lifestyle regimens. It's the normalized shameless corruption, stupid!

Democratic politicians are similarly in bargaining mode. If only they can subpoena more miracle documents, then maybe, just maybe, the lucrative #Russiagate enterprise can remain on life support. If only they can raise enough money through a barrage of email appeals demanding that Barr "release the report now!," maybe the outcome will be different.

There's also a fair bit of pragmatic acceptance going on along with the understandable depression. Some pundits know when they're beat and already are urging the country to get over itself and move on.

And some Democratic leaders, like New York's Hakeem Jeffries, seem downright relieved that they finally have permission to collude with Trump, while they simultaneously investigate him, now that their manufactured Russia scare has largely outlived its political and monetary usefulness to them. The Mueller report has served the desired purpose of tamping down all that pesky impeachment talk and vindicating Speaker Nancy Pelosi's reluctance to go that route.

I hate to sound heartless here, but it's not as though the Russophobes weren't warned that their disease was terminal. As long ago as last October, legal experts were trying to impart the bad news in the gentlest possible terms. As Politico reported, 

The public, they say, shouldn't expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump -- not to mention an explanation of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller sleuths. Perhaps most unsatisfying: Mueller's findings may never even see the light of day.

And as recently as a month ago, Senate investigators themselves were trying to hammer home the sad fact that as hard as they'd tried, they too had found no evidence of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. All eyes then turned to Doc Mueller as the last best hope to come up with some factual crimes to fit their beloved conspiracy theories.

It must indeed be a buzzkill, after having spent more than two years of your life steadfastly performing conspiracy nursing duty, to suddenly discover that your seemingly viable patient has suddenly upped and died on you.  The demise of #Russiagate, to its devotees, must feel like losing a beloved family pet. To the most extreme among them, it might even feel like losing a child. 

So while I am not going to gleefully stomp all over irresponsible propagandists and #Russiagate birthers like Paul "beware the Siberian Candidate!" Krugman and Rachel "the Russians will freeze us to death!" Maddow, I do sincerely hope that they and their ilk will at least just quietly fade away for a week or a month and do their grieving and their bargaining and their teeth-gnashing in a dark closed room somewhere. Because thanks to them and hundreds of other handsomely paid corporate group-thinkers like them, this country has entered into another Cold War, complete with a renewed nuclear arms race.

Trump may have dodged an existential bullet. But the country and the world have not.

Breaking Up With #Russiagate Is Hard To Do

Caught up in a thorny Russophobic propaganda trap of their own making, Democratic presidential contenders are feebly trying extricate themselves from it without getting too badly scratched in the process.

Ignoring, if not outright disowning, designated national hero heartthrob Robert Mueller is especially hard to do, given that most of the corporate news "resistance" to Trump in the last two years has revolved around Trump's alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin and the largely ineffectual meddling by a handful of Russian trolls in the 2016 election. One "blockbuster" scoop after another has fallen apart, with the latest one - that Special Counsel Mueller has documents proving that Trump ordered his former fixer to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate scheme -- having been directly debunked by Mueller himself.

The #Russiagate propaganda crusade, you might remember, picked up steam in the days immediately following Hillary Clinton's embarrassing loss to Donald Trump. Her operatives had to come up with another scapegoat, besides the FBI, to divert attention from their own terrible campaign skills and lack of a coherent message. This emergency planning and plotting and placement of the propaganda by the Clintonites is well-documented in the book Shattered.

But with public polling revealing that the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling and collusion is way down on the list of the electorate's concerns, Democratic Party consultants are suddenly warning candidates away from using #Russiagate as a campaign issue.

Forget about an increasingly unhinged Rachel Maddow warning her MSNBC fans that we're all going to freeze to death in the Polar Vortex if "the Russians," and maybe even China, take it into their heads to mess with the US power grid. (see hilarious Jimmy Dore video below) 

 After two years of relentlessly propagating their dangerous and nonstop McCarthyite hysteria, it now appears that Mueller has been a lousy boyfriend, if not a stalker, all along. "2020 Dems See Danger In the Mueller Probe," according to a Politico piece published today.

Although skillfully flirting with the manufactured "seething outrage" of the politicized Russiagate franchise might help propel one lucky candidate to the Democratic nomination altar, the contenders must be very careful to not be seen as "politicizing" it, or enjoying it too lustfully.

Instead, using one of the favorite neoliberal buzzwords that justifies everything from austerity for the poor to endless wars of aggression, they have to be "smart" about it:

"Smart campaigns will war game this very quietly," said Ben LaBolt, a former spokesman from the Obama White House and 2012 reelection campaign. "They'll have smart plans on the shelf. But it's not something they'll talk about. It's not something that they'll broadcast."

Translation: campaigns will have to carefully and anonymously leak Russiagate propaganda dirt-slime to churnalists like Maddow without the risk of getting personally scratched in the process. Because that would really smart.

Not only would it hurt, but the cure for Trumpism actually turns out to be even worse than the disease:

Democrats working for 2020 candidates describe Mueller's work as something akin to a virus that will keep forcing their campaigns to take precautions.

I wonder if they'll come up with a vaccine in time to avoid getting infected by their own dirt-slime. I wonder how Mueller will react to being called a virus by the same fan club that's had such a huge crush on him for more than two years now. Maybe the Democratic operatives can invent a special condom to protect themselves from a Mueller STD or an unplanned Mueller pregnancy. Or, as one contender, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota bluntly puts it, they may even have to divorce themselves entirely from Mueller's probe.

It's the elephant in the room," said the party strategist working with a White House hopeful, fretting about the uncertainties tied to Mueller, from the rumors about possible new indictments to the advice from inside their own campaigns to just stay quiet about the topic.

What the anonymous strategists don't say and what the Politico article doesn't reveal is that #Russiagate might as well be called #Nothinggate. 

The so-called epidemic of "fake news" on social media which magically propelled Donald Trump to victory is itself fake news, according to Brendan Nyhan, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. A study conducted by his team of researchers reveals that blaming fake news for Trump's win has provided nothing more than a "psychological refuge" for the millions of Clinton voters disappointed with the outcome.

Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election.
The fake news panic echoes fears that prior forms of communication would brainwash the public. Just as exaggerated accounts of hysteria over Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast took advantage of doubts about radio, claims about the reach and influence of fake news express people’s broader concerns about social media and the internet.

His research, which relied upon the voluntary cooperation of people who allowed their Internet search histories to be examined,  reveals that only 27 percent of Americans visited a fake news site in the final weeks before the 2016 election. These sites were designated "fake" because they made wild and misleading claims about either Trump or Clinton. The vast majority of people who visited these sites did so because they already had opinions which gelled with those espoused by the sites. Even then, Nyhan writes, these fake sites only made up eight percent of the subjects' total news diet.

And despite all the hysteria to the contrary, Nyhan and his team found that visits to fake news outlets declined dramatically in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.

The alleged scourge of fake news is merely the excuse being used by the public-private surveillance state to censor independent journalism and to suppress independent thought. It's easier for the Powers That Be and their postmodern McCarthyite media hacks to blame an outside bogeyman like Russia for "sowing dissent" among the increasingly precarious masses of people than it is for them to admit that their own wrongdoing is causing America to collapse. Their fear-mongering helps them avoid supporting policies like universal health care and a living wage or guaranteed income for every citizen.

Nyhan concludes:

 Finally, there remains no evidence that fake news changed the result of the 2016 election. Any such claim must take into account not just the reach of fake news but also the proportion of those exposed to it whose behavior could be changed. As noted above, approximately six in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10 percent of Americans with the most conservative news diets — a group that was already especially likely to vote and to support Donald Trump. Accordingly, my colleagues and I find no association between pro-Trump fake news exposure and differential shifts in candidate support or voter turnout.

But as Rachel Maddow might say, "what if" Nyhan and his team are really Russian stooges?

I have a feeling that despite the squeamish Democratic candidates' avowed trial separation from the Mueller probe, #Russiagate will die over her dead body, her top ratings, and her $7 million annual salary. She'll war-game it to death, if the ongoing climate catastrophe doesn't do the trick first.  

"If True..."

*Updated below.

It's another bombshell to end all bombshells: two of those anonymous FBI sources told the sometimes-reliable BuzzFeed News that Donald Trump had personally instructed his convicted former fixer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the failed bribery attempt to build another Trump Tower in Moscow. This is despite the fact the president has readily admitted this attempt happened while he was actively running for the presidency and well-positioned to win the nomination if not the actual election.

Like any savvy businessman, Trump had to keep all his options open. It's the all-American way.

The reason that this is such a bombshell, according to BuzzFeed, is that for the very first time, Trump didn't bother to use a variant of wink-and-nod Mafia code to protect himself, via the plausible deniability route, but specifically instructed his minion to lie, lie and lie again, both vocally and in writing.  

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
But Cohen's testimony marks a significant new frontier: It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.

And here Trump was, openly colluding with the Pentagon just the other day on a new multi-billion dollar "Star Wars" initiative. Little did he know that BuzzFeed would try to ruin the latest diversionary tactic by cadging the marketing slogan of the cheaper Star Trek franchise. Forget about space being the final frontier. Cohen's utterly reliable testimony is now the official newest frontier of the bombshell to end all bombshells Russiagate franchise.

Just when you thought the crater couldn't get any deeper, it gets deeper. It's the crater that will change everything.  

Still, absent the concurrent leakage of any actual alleged "cache of documents," members of the seamlessly joined political-media complex are also keeping their own options open, salivating over and promoting the story while being very careful to preface their glee with the standard avalanche of "if this is true" caveats.

"If this is true," discreetly said former Attorney General Eric Holder, "then Congress must start impeachment proceedings." Because not only will Trump have obstructed justice, he will have suborned perjury. Cohen is expected to testify to Congress on Feb. 7th about what he claims he knew and when he claims he knew it. House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, meanwhile, vows he will do everything possible to find out if the BuzzFeed story is true. Good luck suborning the First Amendment to demand from the reporters the identities of their two anonymous FBI agents.

As a sidelight, Trump's nominee for attorney general, William Barr, told congressional inquisitors this week that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's own report on Russiagate may never even be made public. This suppression would presumably be done to protect other innocent guilty parties in Trumpworld and beyond.

It will also conveniently tie Congress's hands regarding an impeachment and trial. The "resistance fighters" of the opposition party have already stated that they are loath to do anything that might ham-handedly interfere with Mueller's ever-so-delicate and selective surgical probings into whether Trump's long history of sleaze actually translates into his being a treasonous witting or unwitting Putin puppet.

The same Democrats who have been relentlessly promoting the Russiagate propaganda -  our democracy is under attack by the Kremlin! - for the past two years are now professing to be alarmed that Trump wants to start a new Cold War with the Kremlin via his space weapons missile "defense" gambit. It seems like only yesterday they were professing themselves alarmed that Trump was being too chummy with Putin. Actually, they are still professing themselves to be alarmed over two mutually contradictory things. Maybe nobody will even notice, especially the talking heads of the corporate cable TV propaganda mills.

Sure sounds like collusion to me. But it's probably neither completely witting nor completely unwitting. If true, it's more like half-witting.  

*Update, 1/19. If what Mueller's office says is true, then the BuzzFeed bombshell is a complete dud. This, according to the Russiagate franchise, is mighty confusing, because the special counsel spokesman didn't specify exactly what isn't true. Is it a lie that Trump ordered Cohen to lie, or did the secret FBI sources lie to BuzzFeed, and furthermore, Mueller should just go ahead and release the cache of documents BuzzFeed breathlessly reported on without seeing them or otherwise verifying their alleged existence.

As the HuffPo is reporting, this is all too confusing. It has morphed from the bombshell to end all bombshells into a frantic roller coaster ride with a three-way fight in mid-air among BuzzFeed, Trump and Mueller.

So far, as far as I know, nobody in the Russiagate franchise has yet accused Mueller of being a Putin puppet, a closet Trumpie, or an unwitting Russian stooge.

Ru$$ophobia Must Never Die

The New York Times and Washington Post and other corporate media outlets are all pushing new documents today pushing the same old Russiagate propaganda.

The reports, contracted by the "bipartisan" Senate Intelligence Committee, seem designed to both shame "Russian-targeted" Black voters who failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton and thus unwittingly gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump, and to gaslight supporters of Bernie Sanders, who remains the most popular politician in America and who threatens Joe Biden and others of the neoliberal persuasion as they vie for the next Democratic presidential nomination.

The Times piece, written by Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel, uncritically highlights the findings of an Austin, TX-based "brand defense" start-up called New Knowledge. This organization says it discovered that the indicted Russian troll farm, Internet Research Agency, which meddled in our free and fair elections process, was even more evil than they first told us to believe. They produced a lot more cheesy ads on a lot more social media platforms than were immediately apparent when Russiagate first became a "thing" more than a year ago. The ads were just discovered to have been specifically aimed at Black voters and at Bernie supporters. Although there is no proof that the ads actually swung the election to Trump, that possibility exists, says the Times. They will never know. And neither will you.

Sow the doubt, and sow it good and hard. Because doubt and confusion are prerequisites of fear. And fear is essential to compliance.

Meanwhile, a quick visit to the New Knowledge website tells you what the Times doesn't bother disclosing:  it was founded and is run by former (and who knows, maybe even current) employees of, and advisers to, the US military, the NSA and the State Department.

My published comment on the "blockbuster" story:

This article doesn't inform readers that the co-founder and chief operating officer of New Knowledge, contracted to write the report on Russian influence, spent 15 years at the NSA working on SIGINT and has also served in US Army's Joint Special Ops.

 https://www.newknowledge.com/our-company

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-sigint-seniors/

 It's always a good idea to investigate the sources of one's information, both in cheesy, amateurish Facebook and Instagram ads, and in highly respected mainstream media outlets.

This article also serves the subtle purpose of denigrating the popular Bernie Sanders, at whose supporters the ads were directed. If you didn't vote for Hillary, if you voted for Jill Stein, and if you simply voted for nobody at all, and if you are still a Bernie fan, it is possible (but of course not provable as the article hastens to add) that the Russians infiltrated your brain. And the Russian trolls are even snidely joking about it in their subsequent ads!

Solutions? Quit Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and agitate for more public education funding, specifically teaching kids basic civics and critical thinking to help them identify propaganda, whatever the source. And pay teachers a living wage so that more people will enter this important and undervalued profession.

And reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, which mandated broadcasting in the public interest. Here's looking at the biggest disinformation troll of all: Fox News.

 The Times article also doesn't disclose that the author of the New Knowledge report, Renee DiResta, is a venture capitalist and derivatives trader in a parallel professional life. This presumably gives her the expertise to declare that while "very real racial tensions and feelings of alienation have existed in the United States for decades," the Russians make them worse by exploiting them. After all, she sunk some her own money into the New Knowledge startup.

New Knowledge actually gets its funding from several venture capital firms, including GGV Capital, Moonshot Capital, Haystack Ventures, Geekdom Fund, Capital Factory and Spitfire Ventures. 

Nowhere in the New York Times piece is the question asked why Ryan Fox, the NSA veteran and special ops spook running New Knowledge, didn't come up with the goods on Russian meddling a long time ago, when he was developing all that advanced global eavesdropping technology and defending our precious national security interests. Maybe, and quite probably, he did. And he and the other spy state operatives dismissed it out of hand as being too trivial and commonplace to even worry about.

Then Hillary lost, and her campaign operatives needed to come up with a big excuse in a big hurry. Enter the good folks in the public-private Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex and some old intel gathering dust in the cyberfiles of the NSA and its various partners.

And so it's time once again to cast doubt in the minds of people who still support Bernie Sanders or who otherwise champion progressive and socialist ideas. The Times article does it, none too subtly, with this paragraph:

Of 81 Facebook pages created by the Internet Research Agency in the Senate’s data, 30 targeted African-American audiences, amassing 1.2 million followers, the report finds. By comparison, 25 pages targeted the political right and drew 1.4 million followers. Just seven pages focused on the political left, drawing 689,045 followers.
While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home.
Whether such efforts had a significant effect is difficult to judge. Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.

The spooks and private equity capitalists at New Knowledge, meanwhile, want you to discard your previous knowledge, and just trust the predatory lords of capitalism to divide the good discourse from the bad. Without a hint of irony, given the security state's current vendetta against truth-revealing whistleblowers like Ed Snowden and Julian Assange, its mission statement asserts:  

 We are living in a crisis of trust - and societies in which citizens can’t trust their information sources are vulnerable to collapse. It’s no secret that in today’s information-rich society, the lines between fact and fiction have blurred. 
New Knowledge is on a mission to make it easier to monitor and defend against damaging social media security risks and disinformation so the truth will prevail in our public discourse.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Meanwhile, try very hard to censor your own independent thoughts, while they go about monitoring your online activities and censoring any information that might hurt their profits and damage their waning credibility.

The World Series of American Endtimes

It's hard to decide what to blog about on any given day or even at any given hour. Trump's mushroom appendage? Brett Kavanaugh's drunken high school hi-jinks (ultra-right code word for sex crimes)? The midterm elections? The crumbling #RussiaGate franchise?

There's certainly a glut of simultaneously detailed and fuzzy Kavanaugh drama all over the nooze without my adding to it here. But to summarize - so far, his predatory escapades have taken us only up to his freshman year at Yale. So the next installment, if there is one, will probably progress to law school. What I'm really hoping for is his ignominious withdrawal from Supreme Court consideration before this Thursday's grilling of his chief accuser, in which Republicans plan to live up to their bullying reputation, and Democrats plan to live up to their grandstanding reputation. Two presidential contenders - Cory Booker and Kamala Harris - are on the inquisition squad, so look for lots of maudlin speechifying and little substantive information-gathering. Will the cam pan to Kam more than the story becoming all about Cory? Stay tuned, or not.

And then there's what increasingly looks like the latest chess move by the Democratic-Neocon-CIA coalition. They appear desperate to checkmate Trump once and for all: the "leakage" to the New York Times of Deputy Atty. Gen. and RussiaGate overseer Rod Rosenstein's suggestion, flippant or serious, that he wear a wire to catch Trump saying something 25th Amendment-worthy.

Here's my speculation: Robert Mueller has zero evidence of TrumPutin collusion, and any criminal evidence he does have on Trump would likely implicate other Ruling Class Racketeers who are too valuable to be sacrificed. Therefore, let's forget about the chess gambit. Maybe Rosenstein is the  designated pinch hitter to win the Series for the D team by a sacrifice high fly right into extreme centrist field. If the Dems can just get Trump to fire him and shut down the Mueller investigation in the process, the Mueller team will save face, and Trump can be declared guilty in the court of liberal public opinion. The RussiaGate plot will live on in American mythology as it becomes the campaign issue to end all other campaign issues. Couple it with the drip-drip-drip of the Kavanaugh allegations, and the donor dollars for #Resistance Dems will come flooding in.
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All this annoyingly progressive talk of Medicare for All, and debt-free college, and all this unwanted attention on the class war and record wealth inequality, and people realizing that this country is now ruled by an oligarchy, is just so damned divisive. If the Dems can only goad Trump into firing Rosenstein, Mueller, and Jeff Sessions, it will be a perfect trifecta, a manufactured victory to get the whole country united under one big mouldering gilded tent! (There I go again, mixing my sports metaphors.)

As of this writing, though, Trump has refused to play ball. Rosenstein was reported to be on his way to the White House for hours on end this morning, either to be fired or to resign. Word had it that his resignation, if any, was yet to be accepted. The high sacrifice fly has turned out to be nothing but a series of failed bunts.

So far.

But wait, there's an update! Rosenstein and Trump are now scheduled to meet Thursday to "discuss his future in the Justice Department." The timing is a pure coincidence and absolutely made for split-screen images of reporters staked out on the White House lawn to see whether Rosenstein sacrifices or Trump beans him with a wild pitch, juxtaposed with the Supreme Court/horserace spectacle over in the Senate.

The long series of propaganda distractions, produced by both right wings of the Uniparty, is designed to keep the public's eye off the real ball: that democracy is a sham, and so are the midterm elections, despite Michelle Obama's get-out-the-vote guilt-tripping tour, a sort of free admission pre-game teaser for her paid book tour, which gets underway only once we have freely cast our votes in dwindling hopes of finally settling the score.

Having Your #Russiagate and Eating It Too

New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel certainly feels the precarity and angst of the average working gal. It's getting to be a real juggle of a struggle in the neoliberal jungle, people!

  Last week she had to juggle rewriting and padding the "blockbuster" Microsoft press release about more Russian hacking, with caring for her infant daughter, with tweeting up a storm on behalf of the corporate security state, with booking TV appearances to plug the Microsoft story in the interest of the corporate sponsors. She arrived at one early morning gig at MSNBC (formerly Microsoft-NBC) after breaking numerous traffic laws, only to find out they didn't have the right makeup on hand. So it was a battle against both time and finding the requisite under-eye fatigue concealer.

  Just reading her "Times Insider" story about how hectic life can be for a dedicated yet frenzied #Russiagate journalist left me feeling exhausted. Her juggling routine left me juggling only two reactionary balls in my own head, compared to her hundred: whether to write her a note and advise her to prioritize her rat-race priorities for the sake of her mental and physical health, or to just ignore her. Tweeting her is not an option, since I have always had a deliberately moribund account.

  So pragmatic juggler that I am, I just decided to split the difference, drop the balls, and let off some steam on a blog she doesn't read. Who has time? Certainly not Sheera Frenkel, already so busy it's a wonder she still has time to breathe.

Her description of a #Russiagate-intensive day in the life of a Times working mom-reporter:

I’ve learned a lot about “the juggle” in the year since my daughter was born. I joined The Times as a cybersecurity correspondent last year when I was eight months pregnant, fully aware I was taking a high-pressure job just as everything in my life was about to change. But I have a supportive husband, family and friends. My editors and colleagues are understanding, and my husband and I were lucky enough to be able to afford a nanny. I looked around and saw so many moms doing it under circumstances so much tougher than the ones I was facing.

Her story itself is a juggling act within a juggling act. How does a working mom Times reporter accomplish kvetch-bragging about her privileged struggle without sounding so privileged and whiney about it? By juxtaposing her struggles with those of "ordinary" working moms who are not quite so well-paid, well-supported, well-understood, married, nannied, credentialed and befriended, of course!

There is a reason parents describe it as a juggle. Even with all the help, there is constantly a ball in the air you are in danger of dropping. Most days, the only way to get through is to remove one of those balls. Stories need to be written, baby needs to get bathed; we can go one more day without filling the car up with gas, buying groceries, doing laundry. The first thing to go is always the personal errands we used to prioritize: dinner with friends, a visit to the gym or a haircut. Those are now icing on the cake, if and when we get to them.

 And what about all those extras, those little things we all do to advance our careers that fall outside of the 9-to-5 requirements laid out in our job descriptions? There are the after-work drinks, the last-minute dinners with a visiting boss. The out-of-town conferences and meetings that aren’t mandatory, technically.

 Oh, and those annoying appearances on MSNBC and CNN, which are practically mandatory in Consolidated Corporate Media World. Tellingly, Sheera Frenkel does not write about how "supportive" her employer is in providing any kind of onsite nursery care, or subsidized long-term maternity leave. It's a competitive, dog-eat-dog out there, and "just saying no" to overwork, no matter how well-compensated, seems never to occur to her. She couldn't even say no when her bosses asked her write a sidebar story about juggling and tweeting for the weekend edition. They want you to know that there are dedicated professionals behind the #Russiagate propaganda, and that they are human beings just like you and me.

The subtext of her piece is that there's always some other talented journalist out there, waiting in the wings, salivating to steal your job right out from under you. So she and others in the professional "knowledge class" are resigned to the fact that they are essentially on call to their corporate propaganda masters 24 hours a day and seven days a week. She writes unquestioningly:

 In journalism, which is never a 9-to-5 job, it’s even harder. News breaks at all hours of the day, and any phone call might be an important source with blockbuster news. Journalists are increasingly pushed to have a presence on social media. They are called to speak on television news shows to promote their stories. To be the face behind the byline means being in a studio early in the morning or late in the evening — exactly the hours of the day most parents carve out to be with their kids.

Sheera Frenkel sounds like most professional people, a "willing slave of capital." She doesn't need her "caring" editors to order her to work like a slave. She has totally internalized the ethos, her only solution being how to creatively carve out some spare time for the baby.

As cultural critic Franco Berardi tells it in "Futurability," we are now in an era where

 The power of knowledge has been uncoupled from social welfare.We have entered an age of techno-barbarianism: innovation has provoked precarity, richness has created mass misery, solidarity has become competition, the connected brain has uncoupled from the social. 

The conjunction among bodies has become fragile, while the connection among disembodied brains has grown permanent, all-encompassing, and obsessional, to the point of replacing life with the spectral projection of life on the ubiquitous screen.

  So after her harried onscreen MSNBC appearance to plug the latest New York Times hysteria, all she could do to express her frustration was to take to the ubiquitous Twitter screen and vent into the void. And lo and behold, other working parents came out of the cyber-depths to vent right back. For one bright shining moment, Sheera Frenkel was no longer alone, no longer just a cog in the capitalist machine, no longer an ant in the mindless ant farm, no longer an atomized dehumanized automaton. The cyber-security expert was herself fleetingly cyber-secure.

Of course, those are not her words, but mine. Here are her words:

Lots of moms, and some dads, wrote me to say that they could relate to the impossibility of trying to give your all both at work and at home. Some people wrote to tell me that I was a terrible mother, and that I should have stayed home with my child. Others wrote to tell me I was a terrible journalist, skirting my responsibility to inform the public in order to be with my child.

That's another thing. Besides print reporters plugging #Russiagate to TV reporters, and print reporters then plugging and quoting TV reporters in the newspaper in order to cement the "narrative," it is also the duty of journalists working the #Russiagate franchise to tweet incessantly and thereby portray themselves as central actors - sympathetic, put-upon victims of both the reading public and Trump - in whatever story they are writing. It does not occur to them to quit Twitter, let alone their jobs, or after-hours drinks and TV appearances. At most, as the uber-productive Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently did, they will "pull back" from social media until such time as they can recover from the 24/7 chore of feeding the trolls and then having to write more Times articles about the chore of feeding the trolls and pulling back from Twitter.

But to hear Sheera Frenkel cheerfully tell it, it's all been worth it. Or so she says. To admit otherwise might put a damper on her career. 

That's sad. Back when I was a working-mom journalist, my most memorably frantic career moment came when I had to abandon an article and leave work early when the school nurse called me to pick up my daughter, on whose head lice had been discovered. I drove the 20 miles to pick her up, envisioning juggling my nitpicking editor with the physical picking of nits. Luckily, the "lice" turned out to be just remnants of shampoo, which as a juggling working mom I had failed to completely rinse out the previous night. The school nurse's name was, aptly enough, Mrs. Dudman. I doubt that she reads this blog or even tweets, let alone breathes. She'd be at least 97.


 Back then, (in the temporarily booming deregulated Clintonoid 90s) I was even allowed to work from home on days that my kids were sick. This being before the Internet, the paper would actually send a courier over to pick up my copy.

Reporters covering local news aren't the only ones out of a job these days. What's a courier, anyway?

Foreign democracy-meddler Rupert Murdoch eventually bought the local paper, which was drastically downsized and assimilated into the consolidated corporate media borg. I didn't even have the outlet of Twitter to unleash my angst and my wrath. I think that was probably a blessing and still is, because unleashing your angst on Twitter and expecting to hold on to your brilliant career when, ten years from now your angst is deemed un-PC, is not conducive to a continued brilliant career in any field.

I wouldn't trade places with Sheera Frenkel for a million bucks or a thousand cable TV spots.

New Litmus Test For Patriotism: Loyalty To the Police State

Treason is in the air. If you hate everything that Trump stands for, but still agree with him that #Russiagate is a fraud*, then it naturally follows that you are just as much a traitor as he allegedly is. 

Hysteria is in the air. Trump betrayed the United States by meeting with Vladimir Putin, who did attack us, is attacking us, and will continue to attack us. If you don't believe it, then you weren't paying attention when actor, Hillary Clinton supporter and #MeToo critic Morgan Freeman made the big announcement last year. He informed the nation that we are at war with Russia, and he urged Congress and the Intelligence agencies to act. And they listened. Because Morgan Freeman is so much better at playing President than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is such a lousy actor, in fact, that he  committed the cardinal sin of presidents. He actually criticized what is hideously euphemized by its media enablers as the Intelligence Community. He has made this critique before, of course,  mainly on Twitter, but on Monday he did it with Vlad the Impaler standing right there at his side. 

Elite heads proceeded to explode.

 James Clapper, the former NSA chief who lied to Congress about spying on everybody, and John Brennan, the former CIA chief who couldn't even get confirmed in Obama's first term because he helped implement Bush's torture program, are under attack by the Treasonous Traitorous Trump (see the New York Times's Charles Blow, who got the whole treasonous media ball rolling with his pre-TrumPutin Summit column.)

Since the punishment in the United State for high treason is death, look for the next phase in the media hysteria to be a debate over how to execute Donald Trump. The more passionate pundits will probably opt for bringing back the electric chair, while the liberal humanitarian interventionists will suggest nitrogen gas.

Of course I'm kidding. They don't really want to put Trump on trial for high treason. They don't want to gift him with such a ratings bonanza, especially since his martyrdom would include a stirring speech with the theme "I regret that I only have one life to give for My Company."

 They just want to weaken him a bit while spreading their scare stories and raising donor money for the mid-terms. They'd prefer he lose a second term to a centrist Democrat, aka moderate Republican, who will be loyal to the unaccountable rogue police state and spy agencies whose own main function is enabling corporate global plunder and protecting the oligarchs against the restive global rabble. The elite media-political complex wants somebody who will stay mum on all the meddling in foreign elections which the United States has done, is doing, and will continue to do until the American Empire collapses under the weight of its own hubris and greed.

Trump is acting too much like an outside critic of Empire and not enough like its discreet marketer. His idea of the presidency is being the star of his own reality show. To impress one another and portray themselves as righteous to the rest of the world, therefore, our elite Thought Leaders must pretend to despise him, despite the mammoth tax cuts he recently gifted to the wealthiest among them. They want the rest of the world to forget the record hundreds of billions of dollars they just gifted right back to Trump's own war machine by a very compliant and corrupt Congress.

This recent Russophobic hysteria is very much an internal war between the two political right wing factions of the ruling class: the Dollarcrats and the Reprivatans. Since the latter abhor regular people by rewarding the private interests of capital at every opportunity, they should just remove the "public" part of their moniker and exhibit a little honesty for a change.  Ditto for the Dems. The people, or Demos, have become too utterly subservient to the big money gilding the Big Tent into a virtual gated community to have their name co-opted any longer.

Totalitarianism is alive and well in the Land of the Free. The FBI and the CIA and the NSA have usurped what used to be the purview of the independent press and have become an all-powerful and highly weaponized fourth branch of government. 

Why else would a Congress pretending to despise Trump just confirm a known torturer, "Bloody Gina" Haspel, to head the CIA at Donald Trump's own specific and very personal behest? They love Trump, but they just can't admit it in public.

* Update. Never mind. Trump has officially caved. He is not willing to die, not even for his brand, his dynasty, or his company:

=======================================

I can barely stand any more to look at the propaganda tool of the "Deep State" which the New York Times has unabashedly (rather than heretofore stealthily) become - but I have nonetheless submitted a few more comments in recent days. Readers who express even the slightest skepticism in the comment threads about the inherent goodness and honesty of the Police/Surveillance State are becoming fewer and farther between. Propaganda absolutely does work, even upon the minds of otherwise very intelligent people.

Maureen Dowd, who used to write such fun and shallow pieces on Trump's antics, is now deadly serious about the Great Orange Evil and his puppet master Vlad. Ever the name-dropper, she shares that she and some other celebrity pundits once had dinner with Putin at the 21 Club and were so put off by his icy cold stare and his sanguine attitude toward a Russian submarine disaster that they lost their appetite for all that fine service and overpriced food. 

  So not to be outdone by the hysteria and overwrought angst of her corporate media cohort, Dowd has finally seen the careerist light. She bloviates:

Trump hugging Putin even as Putin stabs at our democracy is an incomprehensible mystery.

Flummoxed and craven Republicans scramble to go along with a president who has turned the traditional heroes and villains of the G.O.P. topsy-turvy, berating our European allies, NATO, the N.F.L., the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and canoodling with the mendacious and scheming Russians.

On the eve of the Helsinki summit, which Trump has arranged as a very intime pas de deux, it is still befuddling and alarming to watch him kowtow to Putin.

When you are as disloyal to football as you are to the police state and the permanent war machine, any lingering doubts about your patriotism will get flushed right down the toilet. 

So how shocking that we all woke up on this Summit morning-after, still breathing and the sun still shining, and Amazon Prime still delivering. The nuclear war that the Neocons and the Liberal Interventionists are hankering for will have to wait for another time, especially since the one lone anti-nuke protester at the Summit was summarily ejected from the room by our very honorable patriots, aka police state strongmen.

My (not highly recommended) published response to Dowd:

Trump is a master of spectacle. Since the show's the thing, he doesn't care as long as he's still #1 at the box office and on Twitter. Pathological lying? Meh. As long as he gets the wall-to-wall coverage from our pathologically consolidated media, he's a winner in his own stunted little mind.

A gaslighter for the ages, he saturates the news cycle till it's as flat and stale as yesterday's pancake. Still, the manic over-coverage of the TrumPutin Apocalypse does serve to distract our attention from our own day-to-day problems, such as lack of a living wage, lack of savings, unaffordable rents, unaffordable health care, and so much student debt that people are actually dying before they're able to pay it all back.

So while we blame Russia for hacking our "democracy," the culprits much closer to home can remain free, screwing the body politic with the immunity and impunity to which they've become accustomed.

 Trump is the symptom, not the core problem. The scary thing is that unless our politics is replaced by some actual representative democracy, our future presidents will not only be like Trump, they'll be smarter than Trump.

Meanwhile, the Blimp above Parliament is sadly something we're not allowed to see above US seats of power, given that the moneyed interests running this show have barricaded themselves below their no-fly zones and behind their armed luxury fortresses.

So down with the Ugly, and up with the beauty of social democracy. Oh, and happy Bastille Day!

Now on to Paul Krugman, who thankfully didn't go full Russophobe himself because he already had a column in the can about the nasty Republicans - and again, it's only the nasty Republicans - waging a war on poor people. The newest gimmick in this endless war is declaring that since the war on poverty was such a success, who needs anti-poverty programs any more anyway?  Certainly not the rich. 

Sadly though, neither poor people nor Krugman's own narrow views on poverty are trending topics  on the Times today, thanks to the Bromance Armageddon Hysteria completely hogging the front page. So, fewer readers than normal weighed in with comments on something so mundane as massive record poverty in the richest country on earth. Outrage can only go so far on any given day and on any given topic, after all. 

Anyway, here's my own published submission: 

The "official" way the US defines poverty paints a falsely rosy picture. According to current standards, only individuals earning less than about $11,000 are deemed poor, while a household of four must fall below $24,000 to qualify for the honor. Thus, "only" about 12% of the US population are that badly off.

A more accurate metric is the Supplementary Poverty Measure, which takes into account the rising costs of rent, food, clothing and utilities. In actuality, at least a third of the population, or 110 million people, can be considered poor or nearly poor. They are:

51.9 percent of children under the age of 18
40.7 percent of adults between the ages of 18-64
42.5 percent of elderly
45 percent of women and girls
33.9 percent of Whites.
60.3 percent of Blacks.
65.1 percent of Latinos.
41.1 percent of Asians. 

 This year also marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's Poor People's March on Washington, which he didn't live to lead. But now we have the Poor People's Campaign, which has been staging protests (with many arrests) all over the country as well as a major rally in D.C. a few weeks ago. There has been little to no corporate media coverage of this movement of. by and for the poor.

If you're wondering why that is, the operative word is "corporate."

Trump isn't the only corrupt entity looking a humanitarian crisis in the face and callously pretending it doesn't exist.

https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/demands/