Propaganda

After 9/11: The Staggering Economic And Human Cost Of The War On Terror

September 12, 2018 By Benjamin Dangl, Towardfreedom.org Educate! 9/11, Propaganda, Terrorism, US Imperialism

“Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” President George W. Bush announced on September 20th, 2001, following the 9/11 attacks. Bush’s “War on Terror” did not end with Al Qaeda – it has roared on into an endless conflict spanning the globe, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of US taxpayers’ dollars. “Americans should not expect one battle,” Bush continued, “but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.” Days later, the Bush administration launched its air war. By the end of 2001, the US had dropped 17,500 bombs on Afghanistan. The War in Afghanistan is now in its 17th year, making it America’s longest war. The Pentagon reports that the Afghan conflict costs US taxpayers $45 billion per year. The human and economic cost of the post-9/11 US War on Terror has been investigated extensively by the Costs of War Project, based out of the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Censored Documentary Exposes Israel’s Attack On Black Lives Matter

September 10, 2018 By Max Blumenthal, Mintpressnews.com Educate! Black Lives Matter (BLM), Documentary, Israel, Propaganda

When the Movement for Black Lives released a platform in August 2016 that supported the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement and identified Israel as an apartheid state engaged in a project of genocide against Palestinians, the Israeli government snapped into action. Previously unreleased footage from Al Jazeera’s censored investigative documentary, “The Lobby – USA,” shows Israeli diplomats complaining about the Black Lives Matter “problem” and boasting about their cultivation of established black civil rights activists as pro-Israel proxies. The footage also reveals how the Israel lobby orchestrated the sudden cancellation of a Black Lives Matter fundraiser at a New York City nightclub.

Britain Should Be In The Dock Over Skripal Saga, Not Russia

September 10, 2018 Staff, Strategic-culture.org Educate! Propaganda, Russia, United Kingdom (UK)

The latest announcement by British authorities of two named Russian suspects in connection with the alleged poison assassination of a former Russian spy and his daughter is more absurd drama in a long-running tawdry saga. No verifiable evidence is ever presented, just more lurid innuendo and more refusal by the British authorities to abide by any due process and international norms of diplomacy. It is all scurrilous sound and fury aimed at smearing Russia. This week, Britain’s Metropolitan Police released video shots of two alleged Russian men purporting to show them arriving at London’s Gatwick airport on March 2. Other video shots purport to show the same men walking the streets of Salisbury on March 3, the day before former Russian Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were apparently stricken with a powerful nerve agent.

Spike Lee’s Film Makes Cop That Spied On Blacks Into Hero

August 31, 2018 Boots Riley, Blackagendareport.com Educate! Police, Propaganda, Racism, Revisionism

This contains spoilers, so read no further if you don’t want the film spoiled. This is not so much an aesthetic critique of the masterful craftwork of this film as it is a political critique of the content of and timing of the film. I also want to say, as I tweeted last week, that Spike Lee has been a huge influence on me. He’s the reason I went to film school so many years ago. He’s the first person I sent a demo tape of my music to when he had 40 Acres and a Mule Musicworks, and he has inspired me as a cultural critic as well. He never held his tongue about what he thought of Tyler Perry films or any other films that he happened to see and be displeased with. Spike doesn’t hold his tongue. Although I’m gonna lay out my disagreement, I hold him in highest respect as a filmmaker.

Why Won’t The Mainstream Media Tell The Truth About ‘Medicare For All’?

August 20, 2018 Jacob Sugarman, Truthdig.com Educate! Healthcare, Media, Medicare, Propaganda

At the end of a segment posted Friday in conjunction with factcheck.org, CNN’s Jake Tapper issues a playful warning to the country’s politicians: “You’re perfectly entitled to your own opinions,” he quips, “not to your own facts.” It’s a piece of advice the correspondent would be wise to heed himself. As a pair of essays published in Jacobin this week demonstrate, his comprehensive fact-check of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s claims about the cost-efficiency of “Medicare for all” is misleading at best and willfully dishonest at worst. The subject of Tapper’s report is a study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a libertarian think tank underwritten by the Koch brothers. More specifically, he focuses on Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s contention that the study’s findings indicate universal health care would save money over a 10-year period.

‘Too Big To Fail’: Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed A Leak, Not A Hack

August 15, 2018 Patrick Lawrence, Consortiumnews.com Educate! Inter-Imperialist Rivalry, Propaganda, Russia, RussiaGate

A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge. The initial reaction to these revelations—a firestorm of frantic denial—augured ill, and the time since has fulfilled one’s worst expectations. One year later we live within an institutionalized proscription of proven reality. Our discourse consists of a series of fence posts and taboos. By any detached measure, this lands us in deep, serious trouble. The sprawl of what we call “Russia-gate” now brings our republic and its institutions to a moment of great peril—the gravest since the McCarthy years and possibly since the Civil War. No, I do not consider this hyperbole.

Russiagate: Dems Would Rather Get Elected Opposing Russia Than On Popular Progressive Causes

August 2, 2018 Staff, Peoplesvoice.ca Educate! Electoral Politics, Propaganda, RussiaGate

The world is watching the latest political in-fighting in Washington with a mixture of fascination and dread. This is not surprising, since every twist and turn of the melodrama around the current occupant of the White House has implications for other countries. But personalizing politics doesn’t help us understand the huge challenges faced by humanity – the widening gap between billions of impoverished people and a handful of super-billionaires, unending imperialist wars and militarism, the deepening crisis of climate change, the assault by powerful transnational corporations against working class rights, ongoing attempts by bigots and fundamentalists to roll back social and equality gains. These issues emerged long before the 2016 US election, and they will remain after Trump leaves office, whenever that happens.

The Myth That Capitalism Saved The World

August 2, 2018 Umair Haque, Eand.co Educate! Capitalism, Propaganda

Every year of my life so far, it seems, some wise and learned old man publishes a book which recites the same old gruesome and weird myth, almost word for word. It’s like groundhog day, but for…The myth goes like this. Capitalism! Yay! It saved the world! The latest such person is Steven Pinker, and it’s his third? fourth? book proclaiming so. Needless to say, it must be something people feel the need to hear, over and over again,a And so it’s very much a modern myth: a tale we tell, ritually, to comfort ourselves. But from what, exactly? Probably from the sinking feeling, that, right about now, the myth is probably about as true as Snow White being rescued by Prince Charming, which is to say, not very.

When It Comes To War, Words Matter

July 28, 2018 Gayle Morrow, Counterpunch.org Resist! Propaganda, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

Words matter. It’s an important lesson learned by children in the play yard and PR firm executives alike. That is why the recent unheralded word change to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Mission Statement is unsettling,to say the least. In January of this year, the Trump administration disturbingly changed the Department of Defense’s mission from “deter war” to “provide a lethal Joint Force to defend the security of our country and sustain American influence abroad(my italics).” The United States government knows all too well the importance of words. Post-World War II, the cabinet-level “Department of War”was whitewashed and re-named the Department of “Defense.” This retitling from “War” to “Defense” in no way changed the ideology of a department that sports a long history of warmongering, rather than defending a mainland that has not been invaded by “foreign” forces since Pancho Villa in 1910.

A Plea To Progressives: Reject Russia Hysteria And Prioritize Social Justice

July 28, 2018 By Ben Spielberg, 34justice.com Educate! Progressive, Propaganda, RussiaGate

Skepticism of our intelligence agencies’ claims is warranted, as history has shown. From overthrowing the democratically elected Allende government in Chile and lying about it to secretly selling weapons to Iran in the 1980s and lying about it to falsely declaring that Iraq had provided al Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction, the CIA’s history doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their credibility. The FBI similarly helped to lead us into Iraq under false pretenses (see this video from 15 years ago of none other than lead Russia investigator Robert Mueller) and has a long history of targeting anti-war and civil rights activists with dishonest smears. And as exposed by Edward Snowden during the Obama Presidency, the NSA has lied repeatedly to Americans about their warrantless spying programs.

Here’s The Real Reason The US Must Talk To Russia

July 27, 2018 Pepe Escobar, Atimes.com Educate! Media, Propaganda, Russia

Future historians may well identify Russian President Vladimir Putin’s landmark March 1 speech as the ultimate game-changer in the 21st-century New Great Game in Eurasia. The reason is minutely detailed in Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, a new book by Russian military/naval analyst Andrei Martyanov. Martyanov is uniquely equipped for the task. Born in Baku in the early 1960s, he was a naval officer in the USSR era up to 1990. He moved to the US in the mid-1990s and is now a lab director in an aerospace firm. He belongs to an extremely rarified group: top military/naval analysts specializing in US-Russia.

Let’s See Who’s Bluffing In The Criminal Case Against The Russians

July 19, 2018 Scott Ritter, Theamericanconservative.com Educate! Inter-Imperialist Rivalry, Propaganda, RussiaGate

It was a remarkable moment in a remarkable press conference. President Donald Trump had just finished a controversial summit meeting in Helsinki with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and the two were talking to the media. Jeff Mason, a political affairs reporter with Reuters, stood up and asked Putin a question pulled straight out of the day’s headlines: “Will you consider extraditing the 12 Russian officials that were indicted last week by a U.S. grand jury?” The “12 Russian officials” Mason spoke of were military intelligence officers accused of carrying out a series of cyberattacks against various American-based computer networks (including those belonging to the Democratic National Committee), the theft of emails and other data, and the release of a significant portion of this information to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Cynical Helmets

July 11, 2018 Carola Chavez, Resumen-english.org Educate! Colombia, Fake News, Propaganda

The White Helmets have arrived at Cúcuta. They came to save the Venezuelan “refugees” who live there. They arrived with their doctor’s gowns, with their marketing helmets, with Gabi Arellano, with Williams Dávila of the Venezuela National Assembly who work in opposition to the Bolivarian government along with Colombian politicians, with tents to set up their media circus, but something was missing. “The humanitarian medical assistance strategy that the White Helmet develops in Colombia aims to serve 200 patients daily, giving priority to women of childbearing age, pregnant women, infants and children under 17 years of age from Venezuela,” they wrote in their Twitter account. They claimed that they came to attend two hundred desperate Venezuelan patients a day on the border, but on the day of their debut, when all the media were there to sing the chorus at the fake concert...

The Media Needs To Radically Change The Way It Covers ‘Foiled Terror Plots’

July 9, 2018 Adam H. Johnson, Truthdig.com Educate! FBI, Media, Propaganda, Terrorism

This holiday week, we saw yet another high-profile “foiled” terror plot. And once again, when one looks closely at the government’s case, it consists of an FBI ruse, driven largely by the government itself. According to The Washington Post, the suspect, Demetrius Pitts, “indicated to [an] FBI employee he did not want to detonate any bombs himself” and the FBI special agent in charge “conceded it was unclear whether Pitts had the means to carry out an attack by himself.” The FBI even gave Pitts a bus pass and a cellphone so he could “carry out” the entirely theoretical attack on an Independence Day parade in Cleveland. But right on cue, the average American was met with the routine barrage of sexed-up headlines, giving one the distinct impression an organic, al-Qaida-driven plot had been stopped at the eleventh hour.

Why Venezuela Reporting Is So Bad

June 28, 2018 Joe Emersberger, Fair.org Educate! Corporate Media, Propaganda, Venezuela

For almost 20 years, the US government has been trying to overthrow Venezuela’s government, and establishment media outlets (state, corporate and some nonprofit) throughout the Americas and Europe have been bending over backwards to help the US do it. Rare exceptions to this over the last two decades would be found in the state media in some countries that are not hostile to Venezuela, like the ALBA block. Small independent outlets like VenezuelAnalysis.com also offered alternatives. In the US and UK establishment media, you are way more likely to see a defense of Saudi Arabia’s dictatorship than of Venezuela’s democratically elected government.

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