The American Working Class has always been under attack by the Ruling
Class. But in the days since Ronald Reagan, it has become a lopsided
war. And the reason is that the Working Class still trusts their
wealthy bosses far more than is good for them.
Chris Hedges article is a "must read and reread".
Carl Jarvis
On 9/24/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Please do read this piece very carefully. It is relevant to our access to
> the kinds of journalism and opinion pieces that Sylvie used to post and
> that
> I currently post. All of the journalists and thinkers whom I value are
> slowly being silenced. All of what Hedges describes, I've seen reported in
> pieces in other articles, aside from the statistics which show that Google
> and Face Book have made it impossible for people to search for information
> on certain subjects and individuals.
> Miriam
>
> The Silencing Of Dissent
> Fish-Tree-of-Knowledge-17Sep2017-850x765
> By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
> September 19th, 2017
>
> Above Photo: Mr. Fish
>
> The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate
> capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual
> credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to
> their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting,
> censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and
> purveyors of "fake news."
>
> No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas
> that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to
> resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This
> ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who
> attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large
> numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda,
> but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.
>
> The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to
> protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the
> mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the
> population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the
> New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and
> corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party
> leadership, have decided to quash public debate. The tactic they are using
> is as old as the nation-state—smearing critics as traitors who are in the
> service of a hostile foreign power. Tens of thousands of people of
> conscience were blacklisted in this way during the Red Scares of the 1920s
> and 1950s. The current hyperbolic and relentless focus on Russia, embraced
> with gusto by "liberal" media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC,
> has unleashed what some have called a virulent "New McCarthyism."
>
> The corporate elites do not fear Russia. There is no publicly disclosed
> evidence that Russia swung the election to Donald Trump. Nor does Russia
> appear to be intent on a military confrontation with the United States. I
> am
> certain Russia tries to meddle in U.S. affairs to its advantage, as we do
> and did in Russia—including our clandestine bankrolling of Boris Yeltsin,
> whose successful 1996 campaign for re-election as president is estimated to
> have cost up to $2.5 billion, much of that money coming indirectly from the
> American government. In today's media environment Russia is the foil. The
> corporate state is unnerved by the media outlets that give a voice to
> critics of corporate capitalism, the security and surveillance state and
> imperialism, including the network RT America.
>
> My show on RT America, "On Contact," like my columns at Truthdig, amplifies
> the voices of these dissidents—Tariq Ali, Kshama Sawant, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
> Medea Benjamin, Ajamu Baraka, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Margaret Flowers, Rania
> Khalek, Amira Hass, Miko Peled, Abby Martin, Glen Ford, Max Blumenthal, Pam
> Africa, Linh Dinh, Ben Norton, Eugene Puryear, Allan Nairn, Jill Stein,
> Kevin Zeese and others. These dissidents, if we had a functioning public
> broadcasting system or a commercial press free of corporate control, would
> be included in the mainstream discourse. They are not bought and paid for.
> They have integrity, courage and often brilliance. They are honest. For
> these reasons, in the eyes of the corporate state, they are very dangerous.
>
> The first and deadliest salvo in the war on dissent came in 1971 when Lewis
> Powell, a corporate attorney and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote and
> circulated a memo among business leaders called "Attack on American Free
> Enterprise System." It became the blueprint for the corporate coup d'état.
> Corporations, as Powell recommended in the document, poured hundreds of
> millions of dollars into the assault, financing pro-business political
> candidates, mounting campaigns against the liberal wing of the Democratic
> Party and the press and creating institutions such as the Business
> Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato
> Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Federalist Society and
> Accuracy
> in Academia. The memo argued that corporations had to fund sustained
> campaigns to marginalize or silence those who in "the college campus, the
> pulpit, the media, and the intellectual and literary journals" were hostile
> to corporate interests.
>
> Powell attacked Ralph Nader by name. Lobbyists flooded Washington and state
> capitals. Regulatory controls were abolished. Massive tax cuts for
> corporations and the wealthy were implemented, culminating in a de facto
> tax
> boycott. Trade barriers were lifted and the country's manufacturing base
> was
> destroyed. Social programs were slashed and funds for infrastructure, from
> roads and bridges to public libraries and schools, were cut. Protections
> for
> workers were gutted. Wages declined or stagnated. The military budget,
> along
> with the organs of internal security, became ever more bloated. A de facto
> blacklist, especially in universities and the press, was used to discredit
> intellectuals, radicals and activists who decried the idea of the nation
> prostrating itself before the dictates of the marketplace and condemned the
> crimes of imperialism, some of the best known being Howard Zinn, Noam
> Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Ward Churchill, Nader, Angela Davis and Edward
> Said.
> These critics were permitted to exist only on the margins of society, often
> outside of institutions, and many had trouble making a living.
>
> The financial meltdown of 2008 not only devastated the global economy, it
> exposed the lies propagated by those advocating globalization. Among these
> lies: that salaries of workers would rise, democracy would spread across
> the
> globe, the tech industry would replace manufacturing as a source of worker
> income, the middle class would flourish, and global communities would
> prosper. After 2008 it became clear that the "free market" is a scam, a
> zombie ideology by which workers and communities are ravaged by predatory
> capitalists and assets are funneled upward into the hands of the global 1
> percent. The endless wars, fought largely to enrich the arms industry and
> swell the power of the military, are futile and counterproductive to
> national interests. Deindustrialization and austerity programs have
> impoverished the working class and fatally damaged the economy.
>
> The establishment politicians in the two leading parties, each in service
> to
> corporate power and responsible for the assault on civil liberties and
> impoverishment of the country, are no longer able to use identity politics
> and the culture wars to whip up support. This led in the last presidential
> campaign to an insurgency by Bernie Sanders, which the Democratic Party
> crushed, and the election of Donald Trump.
>
> Barack Obama rode a wave of bipartisan resentment into office in 2008, then
> spent eight years betraying the public. Obama's assault on civil liberties,
> including his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, was
> worse than those carried out by George W. Bush. He accelerated the war on
> public education by privatizing schools, expanded the wars in the Middle
> East, including the use of militarized drone attacks, provided little
> meaningful environmental reform, ignored the plight of the working class,
> deported more undocumented people than any other president, imposed a
> corporate-sponsored health care program that was the brainchild of the
> right-wing Heritage Foundation, and prohibited the Justice Department from
> prosecuting the bankers and financial firms that carried out derivatives
> scams and inflated the housing and real estate market, a condition that led
> to the 2008 financial meltdown. He epitomized, like Bill Clinton, the
> bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Clinton, outdoing Obama's later
> actions,
> gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the dismantling of
> the welfare system, the deregulation of the financial services industry and
> the huge expansion of mass incarceration. Clinton also oversaw deregulation
> of the Federal Communications Commission, a change that allowed a handful
> of
> corporations to buy up the airwaves.
>
> The corporate state was in crisis at the end of the Obama presidency. It
> was
> widely hated. It became vulnerable to attacks by the critics it had pushed
> to the fringes. Most vulnerable was the Democratic Party establishment,
> which claims to defend the rights of working men and women and protect
> civil
> liberties. This is why the Democratic Party is so zealous in its efforts to
> discredit its critics as stooges for Moscow and to charge that Russian
> interference caused its election defeat.
>
> In January there was a report on Russia by the Office of the Director of
> National Intelligence. The report devoted seven of its 25 pages to RT
> America and its influence on the presidential election. It claimed "Russian
> media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as
> the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while
> consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton."
> This might seem true if you did not watch my RT broadcasts, which
> relentlessly attacked Trump as well as Clinton, or watch Ed Schultz, who
> now
> has a program on RT after having been the host of an MSNBC commentary
> program. The report also attempted to present RT America as having a vast
> media footprint and influence it does not possess.
>
> "In an effort to highlight the alleged 'lack of democracy' in the United
> States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third party candidate debates
> and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates,"
> the report read, correctly summing up themes on my show. "The RT hosts
> asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at
> least one-third of the population and is a 'sham.' "
>
> It went on:
>
>
> RT's reports often characterize the United States as a 'surveillance state'
> and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality,
> and drone use.
>
> RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency
> policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's
> hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted
> that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial
> collapse.
>
> Is the corporate state so obtuse it thinks the American public has not, on
> its own, reached these conclusions about the condition of the nation? Is
> this what it defines as "fake news"? But most important, isn't this the
> truth that the courtiers in the mainstream press and public broadcasting,
> dependent on their funding from sources such as the Koch brothers, refuse
> to
> present? And isn't it, in the end, the truth that frightens them the most?
> Abby Martin and Ben Norton ripped apart the mendacity of the report and the
> complicity of the corporate media in my "On Contact" show titled "Real
> purpose of intel report on Russian hacking with Abby Martin & Ben Norton."
>
> In November 2016, The Washington Post reported on a blacklist published by
> the shadowy and anonymous site PropOrNot. The blacklist was composed of 199
> sites PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, "reliably echo Russian
> propaganda." More than half of those sites were far-right,
> conspiracy-driven
> ones. But about 20 of the sites were major left-wing outlets including
> AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig,
> Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. The blacklist and
> the spurious accusations that these sites disseminated "fake news" on
> behalf
> of Russia were given prominent play in the Post in a story headlined
> "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during the election,
> experts say." The reporter, Craig Timberg, wrote that the goal of the
> Russian propaganda effort, according to "independent researchers who have
> tracked the operation," was "punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping
> Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy." Last
> December, Truthdig columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote a good piece about
> PropOrNot, which to this day remains essentially a secret organization.
>
> The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, also the founder and CEO of
> Amazon, has a $600 million contract with the CIA. Google, likewise, is
> deeply embedded within the security and surveillance state and aligned with
> the ruling elites. Amazon recently purged over 1,000 negative reviews of
> Hillary Clinton's new book, "What Happened." The effect was that the book's
> Amazon rating jumped from 2 1/2 stars to five stars. Do corporations such
> as
> Google and Amazon carry out such censorship on behalf of the U.S.
> government? Or is this censorship their independent contribution to protect
> the corporate state?
>
> In the name of combating Russia-inspired "fake news," Google, Facebook,
> Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence
> France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by
> "evaluators," that hunt for key words such as "U.S. military," "inequality"
> and "socialism," along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura
> Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google's vice president for search
> engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 "evaluators" to determine
> the "quality" and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on
> Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites
> such
> as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York
> Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this
> censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders
> for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are
> struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an
> economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt.
>
> The World Socialist Web Site reported in July that its aggregate volume, or
> "impressions"—links displayed by Google in response to search requests—fell
> dramatically over a short period after the new algorithms were imposed. It
> also wrote that a number of sites "declared to be 'fake news' by the
> Washington Post's discredited [PropOrNot] blacklist … had their global
> ranking fall. The average decline of the global reach of all of these sites
> is 25 percent. …"
>
> Another article, "Google rigs searches to block access to World Socialist
> Web Site," by the same website that month said:
>
>
> During the month of May, Google searches including the word "war" produced
> 61,795 WSWS impressions. In July, WSWS impressions fell by approximately 90
> percent, to 6,613.
>
> Searches for the term "Korean war" produced 20,392 impressions in May. In
> July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions.
> Searches
> for "North Korea war" produced 4,626 impressions in May. In July, the
> result
> of the same search produced zero WSWS impressions. "India Pakistan war"
> produced 4,394 impressions in May. In July, the result, again, was zero.
> And
> "Nuclear war 2017" produced 2,319 impressions in May, and zero in July.
>
> To cite some other searches: "WikiLeaks," fell from 6,576 impressions to
> zero, "Julian Assange" fell from 3,701 impressions to zero, and "Laura
> Poitras" fell from 4,499 impressions to zero. A search for "Michael
> Hastings"—the reporter who died in 2013 under suspicious
> circumstances—produced 33,464 impressions in May, but only 5,227
> impressions
> in July.
>
> In addition to geopolitics, the WSWS regularly covers a broad range of
> social issues, many of which have seen precipitous drops in search results.
> Searches for "food stamps," "Ford layoffs," "Amazon warehouse," and
> "secretary of education" all went down from more than 5,000 impressions in
> May to zero impressions in July.
>
> The accusation that left-wing sites collude with Russia has made them
> theoretically subject, along with those who write for them, to the
> Espionage
> Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires Americans who
> work on behalf of a foreign party to register as foreign agents.
>
> The latest salvo came last week. It is the most ominous. The Department of
> Justice called on RT America and its "associates"—which may mean people
> like
> me—to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the
> corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents,
> meaning we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the
> intent. The government will not stop with RT. The FBI has been handed the
> authority to determine who is a "legitimate" journalist and who is not. It
> will use this authority to decimate the left.
>
> This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this
> contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale
> surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed
> censorship and, eventually, violence.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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