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Propaganda

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

August 2, 2018 Staff, Peoplesvoice.ca , ,
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 ,
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 , ,
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 , ,
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 , ,
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 , ,
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 , ,
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 , , ,
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 , ,
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.

Western Media Whitewash Yemen Genocide

June 21, 2018 Finian Cunningham, Strategic-culture.org , , ,
With the United Nations warning that millions of civilians could die from violence or starvation from the ongoing military siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, there is no other way to describe what is happening except as “genocide”. The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes. But the latest offensive on the Red Sea city of Hodeida threatens to turn the world’s already worst humanitarian disaster into a mass extermination. Hodeida is the entry point for 90 per cent of all food and medical aid into Yemen. If the city’s port stops functioning from the military offensive – as UN aid agencies are warning – then an entire country population of more than 20 million will, as a result, be on the brink of death.

The NED’s Useful Idiots

June 20, 2018 By Joyce Nelson, Counterpunch.org , ,
On Friday, June 8, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow augmented her nightly Russiagate fetish by extolling the merits of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), telling her huge audience that the NED, created in the 1980s by the Ronald Reagan administration, still does the “non-partisan hard work around the world, of promoting small D democracy and promoting the institutions of civil society that any culture needs in order to have a functioning democracy.” By Wednesday, June 13, at least one progressive writer, Bill Berkowitz, had challenged Maddow’s viewpoint on NED as “naive”. He wrote: “Whatever else can be said about the NED and its affiliated organizations, it is hard to back up Maddow’s naive claim about its work re ‘promoting small D democracy.’

Does The Burns/Novick Vietnam Documentary Deserve An Emmy?

June 18, 2018 By Doug Rawlings, Commondreams.org , , ,
By the time I reached Episode Four in this ten-episode film, I concluded it should not be touted as an Emmy Award-winning documentary. In my eyes, documentation is rooted in facts and, if at all possible, immutable truths. ...We are watching instead a series of anecdotes, each one imbued with the earnestness of the teller. Episode Four, “Resolve,” is the story of 1966, a year that the producers of this film have designated as the time when doubt began to worm its way into American troops. This doubt sows the breeding ground for what we now call “moral injury.” The American soldier in Vietnam begins to realize that his job of killing others, or supporting those who are carrying out the killing, is not divinely ordained. He is not in a just war. In fact, he is being used by others who have much more pedestrian motives—rank, saving face, gaining political favor, selling weapons.

Are You Brainwashed?

June 17, 2018 Uri Avnery, MWC News ,
Does it take a dictatorial regime—Nazi or Communist—to turn the media into a brainwashing machine? Common sense says that this is impossible in a democracy. Common sense is wrong. How is this done? It’s quite simple, really: one has to suppress all other voices. One has to make sure that the citizen hears only one voice. One that repeats a few messages over and over, endlessly. This way the lie becomes truth. In such a situation, the ordinary citizen becomes convinced that the official line is really their own personal opinion. This is an unconscious process. When one tells a citizen that they are brainwashed, they are deeply insulted.

How The Corporate Media Enslave Us To A World Of Illusions

June 16, 2018 By Jonathan Cook, Jonathan-cook.net ,
For several years now, I have been writing regular posts on my blog with one end in mind: to help open a door for readers and encourage them to step through. I select issues, usually those that dominate western media coverage and represent a consensus that we might term the Great Western Narrative, and try to show how this narrative has been constructed not to inform and enlighten but to conceal and deceive. It is not that I and the many other bloggers doing this are cleverer than everyone else. We have simply had a chance – an earlier one – to step through that door ourselves, because of a jarring life experience that the Great Western Narrative could not explain, or because someone held the door open for us, or more usually because of a combination of the two.

Open Letter to Amnesty International by a Former Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience

June 14, 2018 By Camilo E. Mejia, Latin America in Movement , ,
Nicaragua’s close ties with Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and especially China, with whom the country signed a contract to build a canal, the other main reason the United States is after the Sandinistas, is Nicaragua’s highly successful economic model, which represents an existential threat to the neoliberal economic order imposed by the U.S. and its allies. Despite always being among the poorest nations in the American continent and the world, Nicaragua has managed, since Ortega returned to power in 2007, to cut poverty by three quarters. Prior to the protests in April, the country’s economy sustained a steady annual economic growth of about 5% for several years, and the country had the third fastest-growing economy in Latin America, and was one of the safest nations in the region. The government’s infrastructural upgrades have facilitated trade among Nicaragua’s poorest citizens; they have created universal access to education: primary, secondary, and university; there are programs on land, housing, nutrition, and more; the healthcare system, while modest, is not only excellent but accessible to everyone.
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