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

On 11/20/17, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>> Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>