Re: [blind-democracy] US gov’t orders Russia Today to file as ‘foreign agent’

On 11/20/17, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
> The claims by the American Empire and its Lackeys drive me crazy.
> Talk about pointing the finger and claiming that others are guilty of
> the same journalistic corruption being conducted by the Empire's Media
> is a prime example of the failure of American journalists to expose
> our own twisted Media's reporting.
> I suspect that most Americans will not miss RT TV when it is finally
> driven off the airwaves. Our Free Nation only allows news networks
> that Love America.
> It is becoming more difficult to gain a national platform for the
> Loyal Opposition.
> To paraphrase that old tune, "Bye bye Miss American Pie. Turned on my
> TV and watched our Freedom Die".
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
> On 11/19/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
>> http://themilitant.com/2017/8144/814455.html
>> The Militant (logo)
>>
>> Vol. 81/No. 44 November 27, 2017
>>
>>
>> US gov't orders Russia Today to file as 'foreign agent'
>>
>>
>> BY SETH GALINSKY
>> In an attack on freedom of the press and workers rights, the Department
>> of Justice ordered Russia Today to register as an agent of a foreign
>> power by Nov. 13. The Russian state-owned media company has operated in
>> the U.S. since 2005.
>> Faced with the possibility of up to five years in jail, a fine of
>> $10,000 and confiscation of the news channel's assets, "we are forced to
>> choose registration," said RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan.
>>
>> Under the 1938 Foreign Agent Registration Act, RT will have to post a
>> disclaimer on its material and periodically turn over to the government
>> its financial records and to disclose the names of all its employees.
>>
>> The Brookings Institution, a supposedly nonpartisan "think tank," backed
>> the thought-control move. "RT is not a 'news service' in any meaningful
>> sense of the term," it wrote. "RT has no regard whatsoever for basic
>> journalistic values like objectivity or the pursuit of truth."
>>
>> But if disregard for pursuit of truth were the criteria for tossing
>> aside the constitutional rights to freedom of the press, what bourgeois
>> news media in the U.S. would still be in business?
>>
>> The Foreign Agent Registration law was passed on the eve of the second
>> imperialist world war, along with the Smith Act and other anti-labor,
>> anti-political-rights laws, adopted by the propertied rulers as they
>> prepared to attack the unions and groups like the Socialist Workers
>> Party as an integral part of their war efforts.
>>
>> Starting in 1940, the FBI began investigating members of the SWP under
>> the Foreign Agent law, but never used it to concoct charges. Instead 18
>> members of the party and leaders of the Teamsters union were convicted
>> and jailed on frame-up charges of "conspiracy to overthrow the
>> government" for their activities leading the union in Minnesota and
>> advocating a revolutionary perspective for workers to fight to take
>> political power.
>>
>> The rulers continued to use the Alien Registration Acts, including
>> against the Communist Party, the growing movement against Jim Crow
>> segregation and against supporters of the Cuban Revolution. In 1951
>> well-known Black historian W.E.B. DuBois was charged but acquitted on
>> charges of failing to register as a foreign agent. He was accused
>> because of his collaboration with the pro-Moscow Communist Party.
>>
>> Cuban revolutionary Arnaldo Barrón, a founding member in New York of the
>> July 26 Movement, was indicted and convicted in 1958 on charges of
>> acting "as an agent of Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement of Cuba
>> without having filed the registration statement required." The law is
>> written to allow accusations of acting as an "agent" to be based on ties
>> to any person or group based outside the United States, not just foreign
>> governments.
>>
>> And failure to register as an "agent" of revolutionary Cuba was among
>> the trumped-up charges Washington filed against Cuban revolutionaries
>> known as the Cuban Five, along with false accusations of "conspiracy to
>> commit espionage." The Five served between 13 and 16 years in U.S.
>> jails, for defending Cuba from violent attacks by Florida-based
>> counterrevolutionary organizations.
>>
>> The Militant has no brief for the political line of RT or Vladimir
>> Putin's rule in Moscow. But we join wholeheartedly in protesting the use
>> of this witch hunt law against them and the precedent Washington hopes
>> to set to use against the working class and revolutionary parties as the
>> class struggle heats up in years to come.
>>
>>
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