Due to its long track record of disinformation, the US government has no right to tell the American people what the truth is, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has stated.
During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Paul grilled Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas over the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ his agency is setting up to help social media platforms filter out ‘fake news.’
“Here’s the problem: we can’t even agree what disinformation is,” the Republican Senator pointed out. “You can’t even agree if it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier.”
He was referring to the controversial and largely dismissed report that relied on info from anonymous sources to allege collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Moscow ahead of the 2016 presidential election in the US.
“If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation, so that you can police it on social media?” Paul wondered.
“Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US government!” he insisted.
In order to back his claim, the Senator mentioned several examples of false information being deliberately spread by Washington over the past decades.
Among them were the so-called Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the US government had been misinforming the public about the scale of its military operations during the Vietnam War. The documents were officially declassified in 2011, but the media had been reporting on them since 1971.
Paul also mentioned “George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction,” referring to American claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime had been in possession of WMD, claims that were used by the US to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but were never confirmed by findings on the grounds.
His other example was the Iran–Contra affair, which saw top US officials secretly organizing the sale of weapons to Iran in violation of an arms embargo between 1981 and 1986 in order to obtain money to fund the Contras insurgent group in Nicaragua.
“I mean, think over all the debates and disputes we’ve had over the last 50 years in our country. We work them out by debating them. We don’t work them out by the government being the arbiter,” the Senator said.
“I want you to have nothing to do with speech… You think the American people are so stupid they need you to tell them what the truth is?” Paul added.
The creation of the Disinformation Governance Board was announced in late April. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the new body would help counter disinformation, which is being spread by “foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,” and by human traffickers operating on the US-Mexico border, among others.
The DHS gave assurances that it won’t be targeting US citizens. But critics were quick to nickname the board ‘The Ministry of Truth,’ after a fictional organization from George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel ‘1984’.
US intelligence officials have leaked information about the Ukraine conflict that wasn’t “rock solid” and outright made up some claims, all to win an “info war” against the Kremlin, according to an NBC News report on Wednesday. The officials admitted to, and boasted about, releasing this misinformation.
When the American media cited US “intelligence” to warn that Russia was preparing to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, and when President Joe Biden repeated these warnings, they were participating in a disinformation campaign, the NBC report reveals.
According to the intelligence officials who came up with the warning, the intention was to discourage Russia from actually using these weapons, even though they themselves rated the intelligence used “low confidence.”
NBC quotes the officials involved in releasing such “low confidence” intelligence, who described their mission to misinform as part of an effort to “undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world.”
Some releases were accurate. For instance, the Biden administration insisted for weeks that Russian President Vladimir Putin intended to launch an assault on Ukraine.
More were fabricated: A report that Putin was “being misled by his own advisers,” as NBC put it, was made up. So was an assertion by US officials that Putin had turned to China for military aid. Despite being fabricated, the latter was released to discourage China from actually doing what the officials said it was doing – sending arms to Russia, they said.
One European official cited by NBC said that the report was “a public game to prevent any military support from China.”
“There’s no way you can prove or disprove that stuff,” a retired intelligence operative told NBC regarding the claims that Putin was being misled by his own team.
Prior to the outbreak of war, US media warned for weeks that Russia was laying the groundwork to attack Russian-speakers in the Donbass region and blame the attack on Ukrainian nationalists, thus generating a pretext for war.
These reportscited Pentagon and State Department officials and unnamed “intelligence sources,” none of whom provided evidence to back up their claims. When pressed, State Department spokesman Ned Price said that those who doubted the claims were finding “solace in the information the Russians are putting out.” Now the NBC story reveals that the assertion was indeed cooked up by US spies.
“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence,” one US official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of [the Russians], Putin specifically before they do something.”
While the officials cited in the report admitted to at the very least exaggerating their claims, another unnamed US official quickly responded to the network, insisting that the National Security Council and “intelligence community” made sure to “validate the quality” of everything they released to the public.
One of the authors of the NBC story is Ken Dilanian, a national security reporter shown in 2014 to have had a “collaborative”relationship with the CIA. He was disavowed by his then-employer, the Los Angeles Times, as the result.
Fact-checking is one part of the campaign to control what you see online, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains how virtually everything you see and hear online has been co-opted, or taken over to serve a greater agenda
Instead of real journalists and reporters, the media is infiltrated with propagandists who dictate what’s “fake news” and what’s not
The public is being manipulated to want their information censored by third-party “fact”-checkers, which were introduced as a tool to confuse and control the public further
“Conspiracy theory”, “debunked”, “quackery” and “antivaccine” are examples of terms that are being used as propaganda tools; if you hear them, it should make you dig deeper for the truth
Those who rely solely on the internet for their information are at serious risk of being controlled; you can fight back by doing your own research, trusting your cognitive dissonance and using your common sense
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Prior to 2015 or 2016, you could still read what you wanted online without much interference. This has since changed, as propagandists have infiltrated the media and, along with other major players, like Big Tech and government, set out to control information. Fact-checking — a once-obscure term that’s since gone mainstream — is one part of the campaign to control what you see online, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality — but it’s all a ruse.
Speaking with Jan Jekielek, The Epoch Times senior editor and host of the show “American Thought Leaders,” investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains how virtually everything you see and hear online has been co-opted, or taken over to serve a greater agenda:1
“One has to understand that nearly every mode of information has been co-opted, if it can be co-opted by some group. Fact checks are no different either, they’ve been coopted in many instances or created for the purpose of distributing narratives and propaganda.
And your common sense is accurate when it tells you that the way they chose this fact check and how they decided to word it so they could say this thing is not true when at its heart it really is true, but the message they’re trying to send is that you shouldn’t believe it, your common sense is right.
That’s been created as part of a propaganda effort by somebody, somewhere, as part of a narrative to distribute to the public so virtually every piece of information that can be co-opted has been.”
The Information Landscape Is Being Controlled
Attkisson calls out several common online sources that are heavily manipulated — Wikipedia, Snopes and most “fact” checkers to name a few, along with HealthFeedback.org, which is a fake science group used by Facebook and other Big Tech companies to debunk science that is actually true.
Fact-checkers are often referred to as scientists, but this, too, is “part of a very well-funded, well-organized landscape that dictates and slants the information they want us to have.” While there have always been efforts to shape the information being given out by the media, it used to be that news reporters would push back against organizations to ensure the public had the other side of the story.
Beginning in the early 2000s, Attkisson noted a shift from efforts to simply shape information to those that attempt to keep certain information from being reported at all. This was particularly true among the pharmaceutical companies she was covering at that time. Attkisson described “efforts by these large global PR firms that have been hired by the pharmaceutical industry, by government partners that work with the pharmaceutical industry, to keep the story from being reported at all.”2
Now, suppressing and censoring information that those in charge don’t want to be heard is really common. Attkisson believes the practice really took off in 2015 to 2016, “with Donald Trump proving to be a unique danger perceived by both Democrats and Republicans, and by that I mean by the interests that support and pay for them to be in office and make certain decisions.”3
With a wild card in office, a campaign was organized that exploited a media that was already conflicted and less apt to report what was actually going on. “This all dovetailed together to create this crazy information landscape we have today,” she said. Instead of journalists seeking to uncover the truth, we have “writers seeking to spread whatever establishment scientists or politicians want them to say, uncritically and at the expense, oftentimes, of accuracy.”
Now, instead of real journalists and reporters, the media is infiltrated with propagandists who dictate what’s “fake news” and what’s not. Many believe that fake news is a product of Trump, but Big Tech was brought into the campaign early on. A lobby campaign by behind-the-scenes propagandists met with Facebook and said you’ve got to start censoring and “fact” checking information, Attkisson said.
The term “fake news” was popularized after Trump was elected, but it actually got its start before that — it was an invention of political activist website First Draft News, which is partially funded by Google.4
Inviting Propagandists Into the Newsroom
We’re in the midst of an information war where it’s difficult to tell truth from fiction or lies. Journalists are no longer the watchdogs; instead, they take information from obviously conflicted sources and then try to convince the public to believe that particular viewpoint. Other information that’s in conflict is censored or “debunked.”
It’s an unusual time in history where efforts are even underway to manipulate the public to want their information censored and appreciate third-party “fact”-checkers, which were introduced as a tool to confuse and manipulate the public further.5
Yet, when you only hear one side of the story, and you can’t access other information to the contrary, it’s nearly impossible to uncover the truth — and that’s precisely the point. Is this all just a matter of reporters not knowing how to think critically and ask the right questions, or believing that they’re doing the right thing?
Attkisson states that it goes much deeper. A lot of propagandists have become part of the media, and while there used to be a firewall between reporters and the people they reported on, “that’s long gone.” She says:6
“We’ve not just invited them to influence what we report, but we’ve hired them, not just as pundits and analysts but they are reporters. They are editorial presences within our newsrooms. Now we are one and the same.
It’s hard to say that there’s a distinctive difference in many instances between the people trying to get out a message and the messengers in the media who should be doing a more independent job of reporting accurately.”
The COVID Misinformation Campaign
In early 2020, as the pandemic first started brewing, Attkisson talked to everyone she could, including scientists with the government and outside the government. “Pretty quickly, I could see that certain things that were being said publicly were bearing out as not true, and certain things that other scientists were telling me privately rang true, and in hindsight have actually been proven to be true.”7
Early on, quite a few scientists she talked to were questioning the advice being given by government scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and lead spokesperson for the president’s COVID response. She asked them if they should say something and speak out about their concerns, but they all came back with the same response:8
“They said they dared not speak out for fear of being controversialized and for fear of being called coronavirus deniers, because that phrase was starting to be used in the media. And secondly, they feared contradicting Dr. Fauci, who they said had been kind of lionized or canonized in the press for reasons that they couldn’t understand, because they really didn’t think that his guidance that he was giving publicly was the right guidance.”
Certainly, those scientists’ opinions deserved to be heard, but the fear of speaking out silenced them. They feared losing their grants, as most grants for research are funded by the government. If the government doesn’t like what you say or do, you can get fired or never get a grant again, ending your career and threatening your very livelihood.
“That started to strike me as, this is a really dangerous environment, when esteemed scientists who have valuable information and opinions are afraid to give them, and instead we’re hearing a party line that many of them disagree with but won’t say so,” Attkisson said.9
She mentioned the controversial U.S. government funding of gain-of-function research in China, and the notion that SARS-CoV-2 could have come from a Chinese laboratory — both were glaring issues that no one would talk about.
“These are the kinds of things early on that were sort of a red flag to me that says somebody’s trying to shape the information,” she continued. “They’re using reporters to do it. Public health figures are involved in some instances and that makes me want to know what’s really behind it.”10
‘Conspiracy Theory’ Was Devised by the CIA
The term “conspiracy theory” is now used to dismiss narratives that go against the grain. According to Attkisson, this is intentional, as the term itself was devised by the CIA as a response to theories about the assassination of JFK.
“It was shown in documents that there was a suggestion that agents go out and talk to reporters about these things as conspiracy theories — and again, common sense should tell you, as it does me, I’m married to a former law enforcement official who has said to me many times, you know the conspiracy theory phrase in its use doesn’t make sense. Nearly everything is a conspiracy.”11
Anything that involves two or more people is technically a conspiracy, but now when people hear the term, they’re conditioned to think it’s false. “That’s designed to pluck this little part of your brain that says, ‘well that thing’s not true.’” When Attkisson hears the term, however, she thinks that information may well be true. “If somebody’s trying to debunk it, it usually means a powerful interest is behind it and it makes me want to go search for more information on that thing.”
The term “conspiracy theory” has lost meaning now because it’s used so much. “Debunked”, “quackery” and “antivaccine” are all terms that are similarly being used as propaganda tools. “There’s a whole cast of propaganda phrases that I’ve outlined that are cues. When you hear them, they should make you think, ‘I need to find out more about it,’” Attkisson says.
Fact Checkers Pounce on Accurate BMJ Investigation
In another example of the lengths that fact-checkers will go to discredit a story — even if it’s true — take an article published in the BMJ, titled, “COVID-19: Researchers blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial.”12 Written by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, it details a series of problems with laboratory management and quality control checks by Pfizer subcontractor Ventavia Research Group, which was testing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
According to a regional director formerly employed by Ventavia, she witnessed falsified data, unblinded patients, inadequately trained vaccinators and lack of proper follow-up on adverse events that were reported. After notifying Ventavia about her concerns, repeatedly, she made a complaint to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — and was fired the same day.13
Soon after Thacker’s investigative piece was published in BMJ, it was “fact checked” by a group called Lead Stories, which referred to the investigation as a “hoax alert” in the related URL. Along with “correcting” statements that Thacker did not make, Lead Stories disparaged the investigation for “missing context,” but as investigative reporter Matt Taibbi explained, “‘Missing context’ has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient.”14
Lead Stories took further issue with the BMJ investigation because it was shared by people such as Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy, who themselves have been targeted by fake fact checkers. Taibbi added:15
“The real issue with Thacker’s piece is that it went viral and was retweeted by the wrong people. As Lead Stories noted with marked disapproval, some of those sharers included the likes of Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy. To them, this clearly showed that the article was bad somehow, but the problem was, there was nothing to say the story was untrue.”
Thacker also called the “fact check” against his BMJ investigation “insane,” telling Taibbi:16
“Here’s what they do. They’re not fact checking facts. What they’re doing is checking narratives. They can’t say that your facts are wrong, so it’s like, ‘Aha, there’s no context.’ Or, ‘It’s misleading.’ But that’s not a fact check. You just don’t like the story.”
Reality Is Being Altered in Real Time
As it stands, information is being changed in real time to meet the common agenda. This includes definitions in dictionaries and on official government websites. Examples of definitions that have been changed recently include those for pandemic, herd immunity, vaccines and anti-vaxxer. Attkisson reiterates:17
“Virtually every form of information and sourcing that can be co-opted has been. That includes the dictionary definitions; that includes everything because these are important ways to influence thought. Language is very powerful. People don’t want to be affiliated with certain names and labels.
It reminds me of ‘1984,’ the George Orwell story about the futuristic society, under which history was being rewritten in real time to jive with the version that the government wanted or the party wanted it to be. Definitions now are being rewritten and changed in real time to fit with the vision that the establishment wants people to think.”
For now, you can still use the Internet Archive, commonly known as Archive.org and IA, as a historical archive. In addition to digitally hosting more than 1.4 million books and other documents, Archive.org acts as a historical vault for the Internet, preserving cached versions of websites that are no longer accessible to the public.18
Archive.org’s Wayback machine preserves digital information that has been removed or deleted, whether intentionally or for other reasons, but it, too, could one day disappear. Attkisson says:19
“It’s been a fascinating way to prove the effort to change our perception of how things are and the reality and what we thought we remembered from the other day, because all we really have now is the electronic record, by and large, and if that can be manipulated, there could be a time when — if they get rid of the Wayback machine, for example — that we can’t ever prove that anything was any different.”
Attkisson is maintaining a running list of things the media or public policy got wrong during the pandemic, which can still be verified using the Wayback machine, but which were not acknowledged for being wrong or corrected by the press. They include:20
You Can Be Controlled if You Live Inside the Box
Attkisson references a whole generation of people who live inside the box, meaning the internet. Those who rely solely on the internet for their information are at serious risk of being controlled. She explains:22
“They didn’t know a time when information was to be gathered elsewhere by looking around and seeing what you hear, and seeing what you saw, and talking to people around you and looking at books and research and so on.
And the people that want to control the information understand that if they can only control really a few basic sources — we’re talking about Google, Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia — they’ve got a lock on information, because we’ve all been funneled to those few sources, and that’s been the goal.
So if you think of it that way, there’s a whole lot of people that get pretty much everything they know through the internet. And the goal of the people trying to make the narrative is to make people live online and to think that’s reality.”
The danger of this is that the internet paints a picture that’s different from reality. You may read something that doesn’t sound quite right, or that you don’t agree with, but the internet makes you feel like you’re in the minority — even if you’re really not.
“Understand that you may actually be in the majority,” Attkisson says, “… but the goal of what they do online is to make you think you’re an outlier when you’re not, to make you afraid to talk about your viewpoint or what you think, because you may actually be the majority opinion but they want to control that and make you think you’re the one who’s crazy.” The solution? Live outside the box:23
“You can be made to believe that — if you live in the box. So, I’m constantly telling people live outside the box. Yes, you can get information there and do what you do online, but certainly trust your cognitive dissonance, talk to the people around you. If you travel, talk to the people in the places you go. You’ll get a whole different picture, as I do, of what’s really happening out here than if you look online.”
The Truth Finds a Way To Be Told
While there are powerful forces at play to control information, all is not lost. Attkisson is aware of three entities that are actively working on a solution, which include:
Investors who want to invest in independent news organizations
Technical people trying to invent platforms that can’t be controlled and deplatformed by Big Tech
Journalists who want to work or contribute to these efforts
Outlets like Substack newsletters and the video platforms Rumble, Bitchute and Odysee, which don’t censor videos for ideological reasons, are actively getting around the censorship of Big Tech, and Attkisson believes that these efforts will accelerate in the next couple of years.
Further, she says, “The propagandists may have overplayed their hand by being so heavy-handed and obvious about the control of information and the censorship. It’s no longer deniable. Even people who want their information curated, they can’t always be happy with the notion that they’re not going to be able to get the full story, or that they’re only getting one side of something.”24
Ultimately, she adds, “I think the truth finds a way to be told … it may take some time and there may be a lot of people that don’t want the truth out, but we inherently as humans seek it.”25 On a personal level, you can go a long way toward finding the truth by following your own common sense and reason, and Attkisson agrees.
“I always say, do your own research, make up your own mind, think for yourself. Trust your cognitive dissonance, use your common sense. You’re going to be right more often than you think, but open up your mind, read a lot, think a lot and don’t buy into the prevailing narrative at face value.”26
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Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue.
“…the evidence is glaring that the US has just moved blatantly to destroy the democratic process in Bolivia, to terrorize a nation and blackmail its president to resign. Yet Western media dutifully turn off that narrative to keep chasing their fantasies about Russia. Another illustration of why corporate Western media are more accurately defined as propaganda channels, not news outlets.”
Only days before Evo Morales stepped down as Bolivia’s president audio tapes were published implicating opposition politicians, the US embassy and American senators in a coup plot.
Among those US senators mentioned in the leaked tapes by the Bolivian politicians seeking Morales’ ouster were Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, according to a report by Telesur.
It is believed that the US embassy in La Paz helped coordinate a deliberate campaign of street violence and media disinformation in order to destabilize the Andean country and force Morales to quit.
The whole scenario fits Washington’s standard-operating procedure for instigating coups or regime change against governments it disapproves of. Bolivia’s socialist president Evo Morales was in Washington’s cross-hairs for toppling.
What has happened in Bolivia is similar to the US-backed violent protests which earlier this year rocked the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Fortunately for Maduro, the Venezuelan military has remained loyal to the constitution and was not turned by Washington’s pressure.
Unfortunately for Morales, however, sufficient pressure was exerted on the Bolivian military and police. When those institutions called for Morales to step down on Sunday, he did so in order to spare his nation from further deadly conflict. “The coup mongers are destroying the rule of law,” said Morales, who was re-elected for a fourth term on October 20.
Several countries have denounced what they see as a coup against the democratically elected leader. Russia, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina have all condemned the subversion of Bolivia’s constitution.
When Morales won the election last month, the Organisation of American States (OAS) alleged “manipulation” of the voting system. Such claims by the OAS were predictable because it has long served as a pro-Washington agency which is vehemently opposed to left-wing governments in Latin America. Critics call it a relic of the Cold War.
The organization has spearheaded international criticism of the Venezuelan government and served to whip up public disturbances earlier this year in that country which challenged the elected president, Nicolas Maduro. The orchestrated coup in Venezuela has since subsided over recent months.
Washington supplies the OAS with 60 per cent of its financial budget. It is, therefore, a tool for promoting US geopolitical interests across Latin America, as amply noted by the Grayzone.
It’s meddling in Bolivia seems to have succeeded, unlike its failed attempts in Venezuela.
The allegations of voting fraud in Bolivia gave immediate fuel for street protests by rightwing groups loyal to opposition politicians. Those opposition factions are linked to the past oligarchic regimes which ran Bolivia before Morales came to power in 2006. Morales was the first indigenous president in a country which has traditionally been dominated by a ruling class associated with Spanish colonialists. His policies gained much international praise for lifting millions of Bolivians out of poverty, especially the indigenous people who had historically been marginalized by the ruling elite.
For the past three weeks, since the election result designated Morales as the clear winner, Bolivia has been convulsed by extreme violence. Protesters attacked members of Morales’ party, burning homes and offices and intimidating journalists from broadcasting the scenes of anarchy on the streets. It is reported that one of Morales’ family relatives was kidnapped at the weekend.
Given the reign of terror threatening to destroy the country, the president was compelled to relinquish power at the weekend.
The implication of US senators colluding with Bolivia’s rightwing opposition to create a climate of hate and fear is straight out of the same playbook for subversion that Washington has used most recently in Venezuela and in dozens of other countries around the world. The coup d’état that occurred in Ukraine in February 2014 leading to a takeover by neo-Nazi parties is just one other example.
The irony is that Washington and its European partners are consumed with accusations made against Russia for allegedly interfering in their political systems. US and European media relentlessly claim with scant evidence that Moscow is running “influence campaigns” to distort elections.
Just this week the New York Times has published yet another report in a recent series of reports alleging that Russia is cranking up interference and meddling in African states.
Meanwhile, the evidence is glaring that the US has just moved blatantly to destroy the democratic process in Bolivia, to terrorize a nation and blackmail its president to resign. Yet Western media dutifully turn off that narrative to keep chasing their fantasies about Russia. Another illustration of why corporate Western media are more accurately defined as propaganda channels, not news outlets.
The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
“When you tune into that idiot box just remember that you are viewing a club of super rich people. It does not matter if it is news, politics, sports or any type of entertainment… these folks do NOT have a clue as to what you and your family and friends are up against each and every day. They all are NOT representative of anything worth appreciating.”
For decades many critics of broadcast television labeled it ‘The idiot box’. As Ed Norton said in a Honeymooners episode “Maybe the phrase fits.’” Well, today, perhaps more than ever before, we all must be idiots to continue viewing it.
Let’s first examine the news and news talk shows that seem to almost go 24/7 along with their cousin, the sports and sports talk shows. You stroll down the dial and you get mostly millionaire and wannabe millionaire pundits labeled as journalists, political analysts,Democratic or Republican strategists (how I just love that term), or contributors to their channel of servitude – usually CNN, Fox or MSNBC.
Amazing how every single one of these people gladly and regularly serve the Military Industrial Empire! The only delineating factor is if they are with the Republicans or Democrats… period! What in God’s name could any of these wealthy people understand how we working stiffs, or worse than that, unemployed or homeless Amerikans are going through? Really! They sit there and pontificate on the subject of a Medicare for All ideal, always finding some fault in it, whether they be from either of the two corrupt and hypocritical parties. If anyone reading this is a millionaire, or goodness, a mega millionaire, paying out $ 15- $ 20k a year for what they call a Cadillac Health Plan would be a drop in the bucket (of course we taxpayers subsidize the plan our elected officials get gratis). So, how can they ever comprehend the stress that NOT having such a plan means? Ditto for paying rent to an Absentee Landlord when that figure eats up too large a portion of one’s wages. Need I go down the list of the costs of raising a child or children on the wages most of us have to survive on? The faces we see on that idiot box do not, in most cases, have even a clue!
You turn on the sports talk shows, as I used to do too much of the time, and the dribble that comes out of the mouths of those sports journalistsis overwhelming! This economic system is so skewed that any working stiff should now realize the futility of it all. All of these sports talk shows readily accept the fact that the pro sports like football, basketball and baseball pay these players mega millions of dollars. Imagine the debates that these sports talk shills have on about some above average player demanding a salary of $ 300 million dollars over 10 years. They don’t argue that the whole enchilada is ridiculous, when guys are earning that much to throw or catch a ball or make a basket while we suckers pay through the nose to watch.
No, to these whores of the sports media the more these guys get paid, the more they can get paid as water carriers. Of course, to them and to the players this all is fine and dandy, because the owners of both the teams and the media channels are raking in billions! Going to a game in person, with a couple of kids, will cost, just for middle of the road seats, at least hundreds of dollars! For one game! As a baby boomer, I can recall taking my two sons to a Met game in the 1970s and paying out maybe $ 75 for everything: parking , tickets, food and drinks and programs.
How about the people you vote to represent we working stiffs? This is from the 2018 Roll Call listing:
In 2018, to rank among the top 50 wealthiest members of Congress required a net worth of at least $7.5 million.
When you tune into that idiot box just remember that you are viewing a club of super rich people. It does not matter if it is news, politics, sports or any type of entertainment… these folks do NOT have a clue as to what you and your family and friends are up against each and every day. They all are NOT representative of anything worth appreciating. So, who are the real idiots here?
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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net.
Featured image is from Newsbud
The original source of this article is Global Research
Assistant Professor of Communications (Social Media) & Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, Syracuse University
Facebook’s News Feed algorithm determines what users see on its platform – from funny memes to comments from friends. The company regularlyupdates this algorithm, which can dramatically change what information people consume.
As the 2020 election approaches, there is much public concern that what was dubbed “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election could happen again. But what’s not getting enough attention is the role Facebook’s algorithm changes play, intentionally or not, in that kind of meddling.
Political operatives know Facebook serves as a gatekeeper of the information diets of more than 200 million Americans and 2 billion users worldwide. Actions and abuse by others on the platforms have generated much concern and public discussion, including about how much disinformation and propaganda Americans saw before the election. What has not been talked about enough is the effect that Facebook’s algorithmic shifts have had on access to news and democracy.
Changing the system
In mid-2015, Facebook introduced a major algorithm change that pivoted readers away from journalism and news, to deliver more updates from their friends and family. The change was couched in friendly language suggesting Facebook was trying to make sure users didn’t miss stories from friends. But social media data shows that one effect of the change was to reduce the number of interactions Facebook users had with credible journalism outlets.
Data from CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring company, shows that Facebook traffic dropped noticeably at CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, The New York Times and The Washington Post after the company updated its algorithms to favor friends and family in June 2016.
That proves the algorithm worked the way it was designed to work, but I am concerned that major U.S. publishers were suppressed in this way. Voter interest in the presidential election was higher in 2016 than in the previous two decades, and misinformation was rampant. Facebook’s changes meant that key news organizations across the political spectrum had a harder time getting the word out about credible election news and reporting.
Just after the election, reporter Craig Silverman’s research at BuzzFeed showed that fake election news had outperformed “real news.” In late 2018, Facebook’s own company statement revealed issues with how its algorithm rewarded “borderline content” that was sensational and provocative, like much of the hyperpartisan news that trended in advance of the election.
Prof. Grygiel calls for algorithmic transparency on MSNBC.
Algorithmic transparency
To date, research on how Facebook’s algorithm works has been limited by the lack of access to its proprietary inner workings. It’s not enough to investigate the effects of the changes in Facebook’s News Feed. I believe it’s important to understand why they happened, too, and consider Facebook’s business decisions more directly and how they affect democracy.
Recent insight into the company’s internal processes suggest that Facebook is beginning to understand its power. In July 2019, Bloomberg News revealed that the company had deployed software on its own platform to look out for posts that portrayed Facebook itself in potentially misleading ways, reducing their visibility to safeguard the company’s reputation.
Some international legal scholars have begun to call for laws to protect democracies against the possibility that algorithmic manipulation could deliver electoral gain. There’s no proof that Facebook’s changes had political intentions, but it’s not hard to imagine that the company could tweak its algorithms in the future, if it wanted to.
To guard against that potential, new laws could bar changes to the algorithm in the run-up periods before elections. In the financial industry, for instance, “quiet periods” in advance of major corporate announcements seek to prevent marketing and public-relations efforts from artificially influencing stock prices.
Similar protections for algorithms against corporate manipulation could help ensure that politically active, power-seeking Facebook executives – or any other company with significant control over users’ access to information – can’t use their systems to shape public opinion or voting behavior.
When will American politicians ever speak the truth instead of muddling it with their own petty agenda? The reason why many of us go to RT and Sputnik is because they have better journalism. Period. Most American mainstream media is merely a feeble regurgitation of what the White House says. That’s not journalism buddy. And the lies keep on coming.
The CEO of the American agency that governs international broadcasting has made a powerful, if blatantly false, sales pitch for his fight against ‘Russian disinformation’… right after saying “any lie will do” for the Kremlin.
What is happening to Venezuela is a coup d’état and it has nothing to do with democracy, human rights, free and fair elections or international law. The US and Canada represent the antithesis of those values; defying the United Nations Charter and international law by interfering in the internal affairs of Venezuela. Their hands are not clean, and their motives are not pure, because their foreign policy objectives everywhere are to promote the interests of their domestic corporations, oligarchs and war profiteers.
In 2017 the US and Canada formed a posse of vigilantes that they named the Lima Group. The members of the Lima Group are Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Saint Lucia. Mexico’s newly elected liberal government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has withdrawn from the Lima Group, saying that Mexico follows the principles of sovereignty, non-intervention, and self-determination in foreign policy. Viva AMLO! The Lima Group makes a mockery out of the United Nations and international law.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Idriss Jazairy specifically condemned the US and Canada for imposing economic sanctions on Venezuela. Jazairy stressed that the economic sanctions are immoral on humanitarian grounds, and they are an illegal attempt to overthrow the internationally recognized sovereign government of Venezuela. On January 31, 2019 the UN released a report that quoted him as saying:
“I am especially concerned to hear reports that these sanctions are aimed at changing the government of Venezuela… Coercion, whether military or economic, must never be used to seek a change in government in a sovereign state. The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law…. Economic sanctions are effectively compounding the grave crisis affecting the Venezuelan economy, adding to the damage caused by hyperinflation and the fall in oil prices.”
Former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas, who is also an international expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, said on his website on February 7th the following about the current situation in Venezuela:
“Members of the United Nations are bound by the Charter, articles one and two of which affirm the right of all peoples to determine themselves, the sovereign equality of states, the prohibition of the use of force and of economic or political interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states…… the enormous suffering inflicted on the Venezuelan people by the United States is nothing less than appalling. The economic war against Venezuela, carried out not only by the United States, but also by the Grupo de Lima in clear violation of Chapter 4, Article 19 of the OAS Charter, the financial blockade and the sanctions have demonstrably caused hundreds of deaths directly related to the scarcity of food and medicines resulting from the blockade.”
Zayas also said that what the US, Canada and the mainstream media are doing to Venezuela reminds him of the deliberate disinformation campaign that led to the US, and the “coalitions of the willing” that included Canada anonymously, illegally invading Iraq in 2003, and their destruction of Libya in 2011.
In the case of Libya in 2011, the so-called “no-fly zone” authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 was for the intended purpose of bringing about a ceasefire. It specifically forbade any “boots on the ground”, which the US is known to have violated.
The US, Canada and other NATO forces illegally exceeded their UN mandate, and used it as a cover to completely destroy Libya and regime change. It later was learned that the supposed Gaddafi genocide, which the no-fly zone was intended to stop was a hoax. The point is that the US and its junior partners can never be trusted to tell the truth when a lie serves their purposes much better.
Whenever the US and its junior imperial partners resort to pleas of democracy and human rights, an ulterior motive should be assumed. For instance, the little the US and Canada care about democracy, human rights and free elections is shown by their long history of supporting non-democratic governments.
Canada has supported every US regime change project, and the overthrow of democratic governments, which did not conform to their mutual foreign policy objectives. Both countries’ foreign policies prefer corrupt business-centric rightwing repressive governments. Democracy and human rights conflict with the interests and profits of their exploitative and extractive corporations.
Both the US and Canada supported the apartheid government of South Africa right up until the very end; they support the apartheid government of Israel, which is the number one violator of human rights in the world; and they both sell arms and support the most repressive government in the world, Saudi Arabia. Human rights have not been an issue.
The US overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende of Chile, with Canada’s support. Both countries supported the junta regime of Augusto Pinochet, whom was later arrested for crimes against humanity. Both the US and Canada supported the illegitimate coup governments of Haiti in 2004, and in Honduras in 2009. By some estimates, the US (and Canada) support 73% of the dictators in the world. Human rights have not been an issue.
The US and Canada have been trying to overthrow the democratically elected reformist government of Venezuela, known as the Bolivarian Revolution, since 1999. Hugo Chavez’s elections were all certified by the Carter Foundation, the OAS and other legitimate observers. Chavez was elected in free, fair and democratic elections, but that did not matter to the US and Canada. They wanted to overthrow him anyway. Human rights were not an issue.
Democracy, human rights, the right-to-protect, humanitarian interventions and all the other righteous soundbites are just talking points for the US and Canada. They are only used against governments that get in their way, and never used against corrupt business-friendly governments, no matter how oppressive. Paul Jay, a Canadian, who is the editor-in-chief of The Real News Network says that he personally became aware in 2005 of Canada’s involvement in the conspiracy of regime change in Venezuela:
The hypocrisy of US concerns over human rights is on full display in a leaked US State Department memo from Brian Hook to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The memo is titled “Balancing Interests and Values”. The memo does not mince words about human rights concerns being only a tactic to use against adversaries:
“America’s allies should be supported rather than badgered…. allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries…. We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them…. pressing those regimes [adversaries] on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”
Hook continues his memo by giving Tillerson a history lesson on the art of US hypocrisy from 1940 to 2017.
In other words, rightwing dictators, military juntas, ethnic cleansing, fraudulent elections, human rights violations, political prisoners, torture and murder should be treated differently, and better, with compliant allies. Even when adversaries are democratically elected, they should be roasted in order to “extract costs”, according to Hook…. but not because the US cares about people.
There is no serious doubt about the legitimacy of the more than a dozen elections in Venezuela between 1998 to 2013. That did not prevent the US and Canada from “extracting costs”, and trying to overthrow Hugo Chavez anyway. Given the examples of the US and Canada overthrowing the democratically elected governments in Chile, Haiti and Honduras, the objections to Maduro are unbelievable.
In the past few years, there have been a half-dozen certified democratic elections in Venezuela. The real motives for opposing Maduro must be something else. It is obvious what that something else is. The real motives behind the US and Canada are Venezuela’s massive wealth in oil, gas, and other natural resources, such as gold, copper and coltan.
There are also tremendous profits to be had by bringing Venezuela into the Washington Consensus. US and Canadian banks profit from IMF and World Bank loans. The corrupt politicians and oligarchs steal the loans, and then it is the poor that have to repay them, through higher prices for life’s necessities, reduced wages and government-imposed austerity. The privatization of state-owned enterprises at corrupt fire-sale prices enrich oligarchs and corporations tremendously.
The Washington Consensus also forces unequal trade agreements and currency devaluation on poor countries. The resulting lower prices are used to extract natural resources, monocrops and sweatshop produced products for export. Small farmers are driven off the land because they cannot compete with dumped US and Canadian tax-payer highly-subsidized agricultural products, such as corn and wheat. Those that suffer are the local farmers, the poor, landless and indigenous people, who go from subsistence, to poverty, to wage slavery.
The chaotic political situation in Venezuela has been purposely made worse by the US and Canada. Since Venezuela is “cursed” with natural resources, especially oil, its economy has historically gone from boom to bust depending on international oil prices.
It was low oil prices, endemic poverty, gross inequality, and neoliberal economic policies that favored the rich in the 1990’s, which swept Chavez into power in the 1998 election. A majority of the Venezuelan people elected Hugo Chavez and his “Bolivarian Revolution” of rewriting the constitution, increasing participatory democracy, frequent elections, and implementing social programs for the poor. The Carter Center (as well as the OAS)certified the election, and praised Venezuela’s modern voting systems as one of the best in the world:
“Venezuelans voted peacefully, but definitively for change. With more than 96 percent voting for the two candidates who promised to overhaul the system, Venezuelans carried out a peaceful revolution through the ballot box”, said Jimmy Carter’s Foundation upon Chavez’s victory.
The US opposed Chavez regardless of fair and democratic elections. A surprisingly honest 2005 article in the Professional Journal of the US Army explained why the US opposed Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution for economic and geopolitical reasons:
“Since he was elected president in 1998, Chávez has transformed Venezuelan Government and society in what he has termed a Bolivarian revolution. Based on Chávez’s interpretation of the thinking of Venezuelan founding fathers Simón Bolívar and Simón Rodríguez, this revolution brings together a set of ideas that justifies a populist and sometimes authoritarian approach to government, the integration of the military into domestic politics, and a focus on using the state’s resources to serve the poor—the president’s main constituency.”
“Although the Bolivarian revolution is mostly oriented toward domestic politics, it also has an important foreign policy component. Bolivarian foreign policy seeks to defend the revolution in Venezuela; promote a sovereign, autonomous leadership role for Venezuela in Latin America; oppose globalization and neoliberal economic policies; and work toward the emergence of a multipolar world in which U.S. hegemony is checked. The revolution also opposes the war in Iraq and is skeptical of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). The United States has worked fruitfully in the past with Venezuela when the country pursued an independent foreign policy, but the last three policies run directly contrary to U.S. foreign policy preferences and inevitably have generated friction between the two countries.” [Emphasis added.] [See Appendix]
Whether it is Chavez or Maduro, the US, Canada and the oligarchs in Venezuela have been trying to kill the Bolivarian Revolution from when it was an infant in the cradle.
The opposition with the support of imperialists have been trying to get rid of the Bolivarian Revolution with every means imaginable. They have tried a US supported military coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002. It failed. They tried strikes by the management of the Venezuelan oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela. It failed. They tried a recall election in 2004. It failed. Obama tried economic sanctions in 2015. It failed. The US and Canada tried an economic blockade in 2017. It has failed, as of this article. They tried to assassinate Maduro with a drone. It failed.
In 2018 the opposition boycotted the election. Maduro won by a landslide. He had invited the United Nations to be election observers, but the opposition kept the UN away. Other international observers certified the election. Now the opposition complains about the integrity of the election observers. The opposition is making a circus out of elections. The objections by the oligarchs, the US and Canada that the 2018 elections in Venezuela where fraudulent is itself a fraud. Their objectives are to knowingly “extract costs” that Venezuela can ill afford.
The US chose Canada to be the mouthpiece for the Lima Group, but the coup is being directed by imperial powers in Washington. Canadian politeness is not working, and its imperialism is out of the closet where it has been hiding. As Canadian historian Yves Engler puts it, the US carries the big stick in Latin America, and Canada comes along afterwards with the billy club. Engler is referring to Canadian peacekeeping missions, which he exposes as actually policing and counter insurgency missions. Yves Engler has written dozens of books and articles on Canadian imperialism.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be fooling some of the people, some of the time. But he is now under attack at home for corruption. His accusers say that he has obstructed justice in the world-wide corruption scandal involving the powerful international Canadian conglomerate SNC-Lavalin. SNC-Lavalin is a mining, energy and engineering company that is typical of the corrupt face of Canadian imperialism.
Trudeau’s conspiracy with Trump to overthrow the internationally recognized government of Venezuela has unmasked Canada as a second-rate imperial power. Upon closer look, Canada has been protecting its oil and mining companies that have been raping Latin American countries, destroying their environment and poisoning their people for decades. Canadian imperialism has to obey its “deep state” too, as Canadian journalist Bruce Livesey puts it:
“Those who believe the oil industry has become a deep state point to how the political elites, whether Liberal, Conservative or NDP — from Justin Trudeau to Stephen Harper to Rachel Notley — go to bat for the industry….”.
Mining companies as well as oil and gas are a big part of Canada’s “deep state”. They control approximately 50 to 70% of the mines in Latin America, and they are not held accountable in Canadian courts for their destruction to the environment and harm to human beings in foreign countries. They dispossess the indigenous people and poor of their land. They hire goons to threaten, attack and murder those that try to form labor unions, or demonstrate about land confiscation and human rights abuses. Honduras is just one example of what happens when a democratically elected leader is overthrow by a US and Canadian-backed coup; Canadian mining companies move in. It is all exposed in the book “Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras”, by Tyler Shipley.
All extractive industries wound the planet. That happens with relatively more impunity abroad, but capitalism inflicts severe harm at home, too. [Canadian Mining Companies in Latin America. Photo Council on Hemispheric Affairs.]
Dispossessing native people of their land and natural resources comes natural to Canada. After all, like the US it was a settler colonial outpost for the British Empire. Both the US and Canada committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of their mutual Indigenous People. They were even allies and coordinated the genocide. According to historian Andrew Graybill:
“….the NorthWest Mounted Police were created and the Texas Rangers renewed and reorganized in the early 1870s specifically to address the pressing ‘native question’ confronting Texas and western Canada, among the few places where bison still roamed after 1870….. both Austin and Ottawa called on their rural police to manage indigenous populations facing societal collapse….by controlling or denying the Natives access to the bison.”
In other words, both the US and Canada collaborated in killing the buffalo to extinction. It was the coup de grâce for the starving “native question”. [This reminds us that the “settler” capitalist states have been morally despicable practically from inception, all propaganda to the contrary.—Ed ]
Mining is one of Canada’s biggest and most powerful and politically influential industries. Canada has approximately 60% of all mining companies in the world. Canadian companies such as Ascendant Copper, Barrick Gold, Kinder Morgan, and TriMetals Mining have operations in Canada, Latin America and elsewhere. They are continuing the ethnic cleansing of the “native question” in Latin America, and at home. (See map and statistics of Canadian Mining in Latin America.)
Canadian mining and natural resource companies are heavy handed when it comes to First Nations at home. TransCanada Corporation recently was in the news because of its pipeline route, which they are trying to put through First Nation’s land in the Wet’suwet’en territory, in northern British Columbia. On a court order, a militarized unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police broke up a road blockade, which the tribal leaders had put up to keep the pipeline company out of their nation. The Mounties whom lacked jurisdiction arrested 14 tribal leaders on their sovereign land.
During the reign of the British Empire, Canada helped the British put down slave rebellions in the Caribbean. Canada was involved in the slave trade, and slavery was legal in Canada until 1834. The products of slavery, such as cotton and sugar were used for trade and to industrialize Canada. When the British conquered New France, the 1760 declaration of surrender signed in Montreal specifically said:
“The Negroes and panis [aborigines] of both sexes shall remain, in their quality of slaves, in the possession of the French and Canadians to whom they belong; they shall be at liberty to keep them in their service in the colony, or to sell them; and they may also continue to bring them up in the Roman Religion.”
In the 19th century Canadian banking and insurance companies, along with those of the British, monopolized finance in British controlled parts of Latin America. Canada is still financially powerful in the English-speaking Caribbean. For example, the Bank of Nova Scotia, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and the Royal Bank of Canada, as well as Sun Life Financial are dominate in the Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Turks and Caicos, and Trinidad. After the decline of the British Empire, Canada assumed its natural role as a second-rate imperial power and junior partner for US imperialism.
In the Lima Group, Canada is the US’s junior partner. The US has the leading role from behind the curtain. To prove it, right on cue at the January 4th meeting of the Lima Group, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pulled the curtain back in a video presentation to the group. Pompeo showed the members who they would have to answer to if they did not vote according to Washington’s wishes. The Lima group obeyed, and voted to politically isolate and economically blockade Venezuela, contrary to international law. Leaving nothing to chance, Pompeo again addressed the group from behind the video curtain at their February 4th meeting in Ottawa.
As Christopher Black wrote in New Eastern Outlook:
“The United States is the principal actor in all this but it has beside it among other flunkey nations, perhaps the worst of them all, Canada, which has been an enthusiastic partner in crime of the United States since the end of the Second World War. We cannot forget its role in the aggression against North Korea, the Soviet Union, China, its secret role in the American aggression against Vietnam, against Iraq, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Haiti, Iran, and the past several years Venezuela.”
Black left out many other imperial crimes of the partners in Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Somalia, Sudan, the Congo, Palestine, Libya, Yemen, etc. The US and Canada are “always there for each other” and stand “shoulder to shoulder” in war and imperialism, in Justin Trudeau’s own words. Even against Cuba!
The current Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland recently referred to Venezuela as being in “Canada’s backyard”. As the SNC-Lavalin case illustrates, the Canadian “backyard” of imperialism also extends to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and former Soviet Union republics, such as Ukraine.
This is not the 19th century. Central America, South America and the Caribbean Islands are not anybody’s back yard. It is insulting, degrading and shows a colonial mentality for the US and Canada to even think about having a backyard.
*
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David William Pear is a columnist writing on U.S. foreign policy, economic and political issues, human rights and social issues. David is a Senior Contributing Editor of The Greanville Post (TGP) and a prior Senior Editor for OpEdNews (OEN). David has been writing for The Real News Network (TRNN) and other publications for over 10 years. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete (Florida) for Peace, CodePink, and the Palestinian-led non-violent organization International Solidarity Movement.
Featured image: A Hands Off Venezuela protest in London on January 28, 2018. (Socialist Appeal/Flickr).
The original source of this article is Global Research
As we enter 2019, one thing above all others is clear, the mechanisms of human engagement, education, media and information, even what passes for human contact through social media and email, is all subjected to “algorithms,” whatever those are. It was Snowden that brought it to our attention…
As we enter 2019, one thing above all others is clear, the mechanisms of human engagement, education, media and information, even what passes for human contact through social media and email, is all subjected to “algorithms,” whatever those are.
It was Snowden that brought it to our attention, from the Guardian back in 2014:
“Increasingly, we are watched not by people but by algorithms. Amazon and Netflix track the books we buy and the movies we stream, and suggest other books and movies based on our habits. Google and Facebook watch what we do and what we say, and show us advertisements based on our behavior. Google even modifies our web search results based on our previous behavior. Smartphone navigation apps watch us as we drive, and update suggested route information based on traffic congestion. And the National Security Agency, of course, monitors our phone calls, emails and locations, then uses that information to try to identify terrorists.”
Documents provided by Edward Snowden and revealed by the Guardian today show that the UK spy agency GHCQ, with help from the NSA, has been collecting millions of webcam images from innocent Yahoo users. And that speaks to a key distinction in the age of algorithmic surveillance: is it really okay for a computer to monitor you online, and for that data collection and analysis only to count as a potential privacy invasion when a person sees it? I say it’s not, and the latest Snowden leaks only make more clear how important this distinction is.”
When we look back on 2014 from where we are today, Edward Snowden’s warnings of an Orwellian nightmare seem innocent. Maybe it was Donald Trump that opened our eyes, if so, whatever contribution history attributes to him, he might well want to hang his hat on this one.
The fake science of intruding into lives in order to recognize and control “influencers” began in the private sector and was “tuned up” for political races, crime and terrorism prevention and more.
By “more,” we mean “dumbing down” the “masses,” as they are called, presenting reality as a consumer product, custom engineered to be believable, to create drama or fear, to raise concerns of imaginary threats, to distract, and, above all, to control.
Social scientists have postulated that humans can actually be programmed to respond to the most basic stimuli, touch, hearing, taste, based on “fake” information, that the human mind can be fooled into filtering out such basic sensory responses as smell.
The basic synaptic connections that tie sensory input to ideas or concepts, let’s look at one glaring example. Try to say the word “Palestinian” without following it with “terrorist.”
Then again, let’s go back one more step and define the difference between an “armed militant” and a “freedom fighter.” Nothing here is new, the rules were laid out a century ago.
Einstein predicted this in his “Autobiographical notes” on epistemology. It was some 50 years ago when Dr. John Ward of Michigan State University pounded this into my head in his Philosophy of Science lectures. “The relationship between sense experiences and concepts is entirely intuitive as are the relationships between all concepts. You see what you see, not because of what you see but because of what you think.”
It was quite one thing when such pursuits were endeavors of science and philosophy at our great universities, but it became something quite different when Wilson Bryan Key, back in 1973, wrote the seminal work, Subliminal Seduction, demonstrating how altered images could reach into the most basic primitive drives, the “reptile brain,” as it were, driving an unknowing viewer to alter both perceptions and reasoning, even toward lowering human survivability.
Key’s imagery, taken from popular magazines, strange figures of death’s heads or nude women, airbrushed into ice cubes, were an opening salvo. If thanatotic drive could sell liquor or cigarettes, how easy might it be to sell a war?
No more films like Sergeant York or Red Dawn needed, or perhaps only as a “supporting actor,” pounding the nail in just a bit more.
Twenty years prior to the publication of Key’s work, the US government began a project known as MK Ultra. Though it officially ended in 1973 after 20 years of poorly documented “research” into every form of psychological manipulation, in truth, MK Ultra and other programs as well, simply “went dark.”
The reason, of course, we are traveling his historical path today is that those programs, after not 50 but 65 years of still classified efforts, after billions of dollars in black funding, programs with no oversite, programs carried out on unsuspecting citizens, sometimes entire cities, sometimes on unwilling victims in “black sites,” are the precursors to the world of Google and Facebook today.
Looking at 2018, there were some obvious “projects,” the White Helmet staged fake gas attacks for sure. This involved Facebook posts, fake videos, but the key is that they were channeled directly to the President of the United States who had been programmed to ignore credible intelligence sources. Thus, Trump ordered an attack on Syria entirely based on a Facebook post.
But there are millions of Facebook posts every day. Why did he get this one? Who put it in front of him? Is Trump surrounded by handlers, traitors?
You see, it is one thing when something is put on the internet, the equivalent of leaving a post-it note in a public restroom on the “wrong side of town.” It is quite something else when the message, a parentless bastard of disinformation, is given to a man who has, according to sources within the White House, openly advocated use of tactical nuclear weapons against Syrian people in retribution for wildly fabricated accusations.
Consider the implications, even if someone, perhaps General Mattis, had taken the nuclear option off the table. Simply put, it lowers the standards of the United States exercising war powers in attacking a sovereign nation to an anonymous social media post.
Again, we ask, it is one thing posting something malicious and dangerous and quite something else when a national leader with access to nuclear weapons is programmed to seek out and act upon same.
Then again, were any other president to order a missile strike based on, well, based on nothing whatsoever, not even a decent lie, one might expect negative repercussions.
Let’s take a second to juxtapose. If a fake public narrative exists, and it is reasonable to postulate that “the public,” such as it is, is more than aware that a “real world” exists in which what is generally known and accepted as true is, in fact, utterly false.
In fact, some of the most popular television series of the past decades have exposed the flummery of generally accepted history. Shows like The Secret History of World War II and many if not endless others, feed a hungry public a continual diet of debunked reality.
What we are left with is this, an ongoing process, a spiral as it were, around and down, around and down, ever faster, ever more hopeless, intrusion into lives, into thoughts, planted feelings, manipulated responses, altered perceptions, until nothing can be trusted, especially not ourselves.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
I believe that the older generation the article speaks about knows about fake news, but have decided to use that information as an ideological weapon to propagate their agenda.
“It’s “important to be clear about how rare this behavior is on social platforms,” researchers say.”
Most social media users still know bullshit when they see it, a new study suggests. In a study of social media behavior during the 2016 election, more than 90 percent of their sample “shared no stories from fake news domains,” a trio of researchers reports in Science Advances.
The study has been getting a good deal of media attention, mainly for the parts that confirm people’s biases. “Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains,” states the study abstract. And “on average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.”
The conservative bit comes with a caveat: In 2016, fake news domains “were largely pro-Trump in orientation.” So it’s not necessarily that conservatives are more susceptible than moderates or liberals to propaganda; it could just be that there was more propaganda aimed at them.
The research team—Andrew Guess of Princeton, Jonathan Nagler of New York University, and Joshua Tucker of New York University—considered the possibility that older people were more likely to be Trump fans. But they found “the age effect remains statistically significant when controlling for ideology and other demographic attributes.” Older liberals shared a lot of fake news too.
A common denominator in many visits to hoax articles was scrolling through Facebook. That network appears “to be much more common than other platforms before visits to fake news articles,” the study found.
Most consumers are unaware off the mainstream media’s dirty little secret. Think tanks are increasingly taking advantage of tight news budgets to influence the press agenda in favour of their sponsors.
Most consumers are unaware off the mainstream media’s dirty little secret. Think tanks are increasingly taking advantage of tight news budgets to influence the press agenda in favour of their sponsors.
Decades ago, these outfits generally operated as policy advisories. Although, some were comfortably enumerated ‘retirement homes’ for distinguished public servants or intellectuals. However, in modern times, they have become indistinguishable from lobbying firms. With the budgets to match.
On the Russia (and broader Eastern European) beat, think tank influence is becoming increasingly dangerous and malign. And it’s leading to a crisis in journalistic standards which nobody wants to acknowledge.
Two cases this week highlight the malaise.
Right now, Hungary and Ukraine are embroiled in a standoff regarding the rights of ethnic Hungarians in the latter country. The disagreement is entirely local, with roots in the 20th century carving-up of Budapest’s territory after it found itself on the losing side in both World Wars. As a result, lands were dispersed into other nations – former Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.
There are tensions, to varying degrees, between Hungary and pretty much all the successor states housing its lost diaspora. Especially since nationalist Viktor Orban started handing out passports to compatriots stranded on foreign soil.
Until recently, most of the focus was on disagreements with Slovakia, but now attention has switched to Ukraine.
Let’s be clear. This is a mess of Kiev’s making. In a bid to appease “patriotic” fundamentalists, it began moves towards restrictive language laws, which has especially alienated the small band of Hungarian speakers on its western frontier.
Predictably, Budapest rushed in to defend its “people,” and now we have a nasty little imbroglio with headbangers on both sides entrenched.
One thing it’s not about is Russia. But Western media, egged on by think tank “experts,” keeps banging this drum. And here is a case in point this week.
The Los Angeles Times sent a correspondent to Uzhgorod, a Ukrainian border city. And rather than merely report from the ground, the writer spends a huge amount of the article referring to Russia and intimating that Orban is operating in lock-step with Moscow. Which is laughable to anybody who understands the Hungarian PM’s political methods. And which reeks of disinformation.
And who is used to “back up” these assertions? Only one Peter Kreko, “director of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest think tank,” who is concerned Orban’s moves “help Russia hamper Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration.”
Now, isn’t that a weird sort of thing for a Hungarian analyst to be worrying about? Well, it wouldn’t be if the LA Times were transparent and disclosed Kreko’s funding. You see, here’s who bankrolls the “Political Capital Institute, a Budapest think tank.”
Institute of Modern Russia (plaything of disgraced former 90’s oligarch and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky)
National Endowment For Democracy (a US neoconservative outlet dedicated to “regime change” and promoting a pro-US outlook in Eastern Europe, whose chair has dubbed Ukraine “the big prize”)
Open Society (George Soros, who needs no introduction)
And here are some of the “most important international and domestic professional partners” of the Political Capital Institute:
Atlantic Council (NATO’s propaganda wing)
European Values (a Soros-funded Prague lobby group which smeared hundreds of European public figures as “useful idiots” for appearing on RT. Including Jeremy Corbyn and Stephen Fry).
German Marshall Fund of the United States (proprietors of the infamous ‘Hamilton 68’ dashboard)
Thus, the agendas at play are pretty clear here. Yet, the LA Times keeps its readers ignorant of Kreko’s paymasters. Which is especially interesting when you see RT, almost always, referred to as “the Kremlin-funded Russia Today,” or some version thereof, when described in Western media. And this is fine, because it’s true, but when the same rules don’t apply across the board, the bias is obvious.
The second case comes courtesy of “the Rupert Murdoch controlled Times of London” (see what I did there?) This week, it alleged around 75,000 Russians in London alone are Kremlin informants. All based on an “investigation” by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a neoconservative pressure group which seems to have successfully mounted a reverse takeover of the once venerable paper. With its leader writer, for instance, being a founding signatory of the concern.
Anyway, HJS, apparently based on a mere 16 interviews, with unnamed sources, concluded that “between a quarter and a half of Russian expats were, or have been informants.” And the Times splashed it.
However, it “clarified,” with comment from an anonymous “dissident,” how, in reality, “it was about half.” So, only the 32,500 odd ‘agents’ in London then. Which, if true, would means the walls of the Russian Embassy would have to be made from elastic to house the amount of handlers required to keep tabs on their information sources.
Look, it’s hardly a secret that standards at the Times are low. After all, the main foreign affairs columnist, Edward Lucas, is literally funded by US weapons manufacturers.
No, this is not a joke. Lucas is employed as a lobbyist at CEPA, a Washington and Warsaw-based outfit, which promotes the arms manufacturer’s agenda in Central and Eastern Europe. Namely, the likes of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, FireEye, and Bell Helicopters.
Of course, The Times doesn’t make this conflict of interests clear to its readers. Another example of how the ‘think tank’ tail is wagging the mainstream media dog these days.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
(CD Op-ed) — Over 7 months have passed since WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was deprived of his ability to communicate with the outside world in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was granted asylum with the risk of extradition to the US, relating to his organization’s publications. Recently, after UN Special Rapporteurs for Freedom of Expression and Refugees visited the country, it appeared that Ecuador would finally end this isolation of its refugee and own citizen, which Human Rights Watch general counsel described as being similar to solitary confinement.
Yet, injustice on Assange continues. President Lenin Moreno who was said to partially restore Assange’s communication, now with a special protocol, imposes prison-like surveillance and restriction on his free speech. Under the new rules, Assange is banned from expressing opinions that are considered political or could interfere with Ecuador’s relationship with other nations. Journalists, lawyers and anyone else who seek to visit Assange are required to disclose their private details including email accounts and links to their social media, which then will be shared with UK authorities.
On Monday, a judge in Ecuador ruled against the suit filed by WikiLeaks lawyer, the former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon who argued that this Ecuadorian government’s inhumane treatment of Assange violates his basic human rights. This came while there is an increasing pressure from the US on Ecuador to evict Assange. Joining the aggression of the Trump administration, members of the US Congress urge the Ecuadorian President to persecute Assange, calling him a ‘dangerous criminal’ and a ‘threat to global security’.
Assange has become a high profile Western dissident. He has been arbitrarily detained for 6 years without charge, deprived of fresh air, sunshine and an access to a proper medical care. What made him be considered dangerous by the most powerful government in the world? WikiLeaks has published material that exposed the crimes and corruptions of governments and institutions. Their disclosure of secret documents challenged those in power. But this is not the only reason that made him become an enemy of the state. He has been silenced and attacked because of a particular voice he carries that is critical for a future of our civilization.
Ghandian Struggle for the Oppressed
Assange, an Australian born computer programmer and journalist, together with a small group of dedicated people, launched a media outlet that radically altered the face of modern journalism. He is not just an excellent journalist or an editor in chief of a publisher that performs its job better than other media organizations. Over the years, through his work with WikiLeaks, Assange has become a champion of the oppressed, regarded as a hero around the world, especially by those who live under authoritarian and oppressive regimes, where human right abuses are rampant.
At its inception, WikiLeaks was conceived with aspiration of human civilization to better itself, which was manifested in common people’s desire for liberation. In his Oslo speech in 2010, where he spoke in front of an audience who was just about to witness a huge tide shift in the media landscape, Assange articulated the organization’s vision and its goal of achieving justice. He made it clear that the aim of WikiLeaks is to create intellectual records of how civilization actually works in practice, and by using that knowledge to stop abuse before it happens.
As the whistleblowing site has blazed into a mainstream spotlight with a series of sensational publications, Assange never wavered in his commitment to justice and ordinary people’s struggle for freedom. Until before he was cut offline, from a tiny room in the embassy, he spoke in defense of Catalans’ non-violent resistance against Spanish Central government’s abuse of their democratic rights. He called their peaceful self-determination in the face of police brutality “the most disciplined Gandhian project since Gandhi” and said that “its results will spread everywhere.”
In a sense, WikiLeaks has become a modern embodiment of the Gandhian project. Almost a century ago, Mohandas Gandhi, a spiritual and political leader led India’s independence from Britain. For Gandhi’s time, it was the colonial rule of the British Empire that his people fought against. Now, this old empire’s ambition for domination is carried on by American hegemony. It is this unaccounted Western power that WikiLeaks came to confront through a trove of original source documents with a pristine record of accuracy.
Cryptography as a Weapon for Non-Violent Resistance
So, how does WikiLeaks make itself become a modern day Gandhian project? Gandhi put the principle of non-violence at a center of his efforts. He wanted to end wars and state abuse of power, not by the methods of oppressors, perpetuating further violence, but with different means. For this, he employed a non-violent civil disobedience as a way for people to engage in the peaceful resistance against injustice.
Now, in this digital age, WikiLeaks revived this Gandhian tradition of peaceful resistance online at a global scale. Assange saw potential in cryptography to offer a way for common people to non-violently resist the domination of powerful states. He once articulated the potent revolutionary force inherent in cryptography:
“Cryptography can protect not just the civil liberties and rights of individuals, but the sovereignty and independence of whole countries, solidarity between groups with common cause, and the project of global emancipation. It can be used to fight not just the tyranny of the state over the individual but the tyranny of the empire over smaller states.”
Specifically, with creative application of cryptography, Assange enabled a free speech right in a form that is resilient to government censorship and restriction. In the colonization of the past, the empire’s aggression was naked, where people who were oppressed by colonial masters were able to see their savagery and brutality. Now, the beast inside civilization hides its claws behind a façade of democracy and conspires to bring humanity down in secret.
Permissionless free speech that has been distributed across the Internet offered ordinary people a non-violent democratic weapon to combat against the patronage network that tries to control people through deception and secrecy. An invention of an online anonymous secure drop box made it possible for people anywhere in the world, regardless of their jurisdiction, to expose governments’ wrongdoing and corruption of institutions, without fear of political retaliation. They then could stop violence and mitigate the harm inflicted by those in power.
Pursuit of Truth Through Scientific Journalism
Gandhi has shown the world the effectiveness of his non-violence in opposing oppression. He characterized the revolutionary force inherent in his peaceful method with the term “satyagraha (from the Sanskrit for ‘truth-force’)” (as cited in Dear, 2002, p. 19). He noted satyagraha means “resisting untruth by truthful means” (p. 22) as well as “‘steadfast, nonviolent direct action for truth’ and ‘nonviolent civil disobedience’” (p. 83).
With the creation of WikiLeaks, Assange made an investigative journalism into a platform for pursuit of truth. He firmly believed that for justice to prevail, people ought to have an accurate knowledge about how the world works. He once noted, “If we are to produce a civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based upon the truth.”
In his engagement of people in this search for truth, Assange recognized how the media has become not a purveyor of truth, but of lies, actively promoting and defending the force that violates and destroys truth. Speaking in defense of the disclosure of classified US military documents on the Iraq War, Assange pointed out how “most wars that are started by democracies involve lying,” and noted how “the start of the Iraq war involved very serious lies that were repeated and amplified by some parts of the press.”
WikiLeaks, with its method of transparency steadily upheld a doctrine of satyagraha. Through scientific journalism, Assange found a way to resist governments’ perversion of truth by truthful means. Full archives of the original source material countered media propaganda that works to distort truth through censorship, omission and manipulation of information.
Sword of Love
Gandhi reminded how “realizing Truth ‘means realizing that all human beings are one” (as cited in Dear, 2002, p. 84). For him, justice meant to restore this truth. Calling a person who is dedicated to truth a satyagrahi (p. 89), Gandhi noted how “the sword of the satyagrahi is love and the unshakable firmness that comes from it” (p. 93). For his fight for justice, Gandhi voluntarily submitted himself to suffering, being imprisoned and in the end was assassinated.
This Gandhi’s fierce commitment to truth ignited the minds and hearts of revolutionaries, inspiring movements for civil rights around the world. Political leader Nelson Mandela took up a sword of satyagrahi to bring unity between blacks and whites in South Africa. By uncovering the truth of human rights violations that had occurred during apartheid, he facilitated the country to attain restorative justice. The leader of the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his stride toward freedom for African Americans, surrendered himself to the ethics of love to combat racist laws. Just like Gandhi who was willing to suffer for his cause, both out of their own volition chose to engage in speech and an action that would bring consequence. Mandela was being put on a US terrorist watch list and served 27 years in prison. Dr. King was put into jail and shot dead.
Similarly, WikiLeaks derives its courage from ordinary people around the world who are willing to take great risk on behalf of truth. What drives WikiLeaks scientific journalism is inspiration of its sources—their love for humanity, manifested in their concern for their fellow men and women that transcend nationality, color of skin and language. On April 5, 2010, with the publication of the collateral murder video, the sword of satyagrahi once again struck a chord on the Internet. The conscience of whistleblower Chelsea Manning cut through deception, shedding light on human affairs that were kept in the dark.
In uncensored images of modern war that depicted a US Army helicopter gunship killing innocent civilians in New Baghdad, American people were able to see the real face of those who are made into enemies, being kept on the other side of the barrel of the gun held in their name. Manning’s compassionate account of this forbidden landscape, seen from a perspective of not either American or Iraqis, but from a view of humanity opened up a vantage point of equality, where we were able to recognize our shared humanity and truly witness atrocities and violation of human rights committed by the powerful. For this courageous act to restore truth, she was condemned, being tortured and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Give Peace a Chance
With the work of WikiLeaks, Assange took up a Gandhian tradition of peaceful resistance, instigating a worldwide non-violent movement on the Internet. Through publishing full archives, the organization made it possible for ordinary people to directly connect with the source of legitimacy and begin a quest for truth that has so long been obstructed by the media that functions as a gatekeeper of power.
WikiLeaks opened a path of redemption for our civilization. By enabling free speech rights, this Gandhian investigative journalism restored the laws of peace, helping people reconnect with the true impulse behind enlightenment ideas. The idea of free speech brought a departure from the old rule of the jungle and its logic of might and conquest. It made it possible for humanity to learn to solve problems through dialogue and diplomacy rather than violence.
As released documents began illuminating the way of peace, a shadow of a colonial past grows to resist this new light emanating from the conscience of ordinary people. In 2012, a small country of South America showed enormous courage to stand up to protect the journalist who was seeking refuge from Western governments’ persecution. Now, the US with the UK and Spain rekindles old colonialism, bullying this sovereign nation of Ecuador to go outside both international and Ecuador’s own constitutional law to act subservient to its power.
Recently, Ecuador indicated that it would no longer intervene in diplomatic talks with Britain on behalf of Assange. As the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa has spoken, there is a grave concern that his successor will hand over Assange to the British authorities. The UK government, by ignoring the UN ruling that indicated Assange’s situation at the embassy as arbitrary detention, refuses to give assurance that they will not extradite him to the US.
Assange is a revolutionary of our times. He sacrificed his liberty in order to give civilization a chance. He now has become a world-renowned political prisoner. Just as his forerunners who fought for emancipation were attacked by the empire states, he has been subjected to a political persecution at a scale that has never been seen before. In a tiny room of an embassy under heightened security, he now quietly suffers in solitude, fighting against character assassination that is now slowly turning into a real murder.
When the justice system is controlled in the hands of oppressors, justice of this founder of the publisher of last resort relies on the court of public opinion. As Julian Assange’s plight for freedom intensifies, we can remain silent, allowing tragedy brought upon all those legendary peacemakers to repeat itself. Or, we can act with moral courage to end oppression and change the course of history. Will humanity find strength to claim its own dignity to open democracy? Or, will crudeness and barbarianism take over, bringing a society into despotism? Future of civilization rests on each individual’s ability to seek in love to unite with those who struggle for the rights of ordinary people. Now it is up to us to carry out this great work of justice and realize the truth of liberty and equality for all people.
In all the mounting media coverage of problems with the Internet, such as invasion of privacy, vulnerability to hacking, political manipulation, and user addiction, there is one constant: online advertising. Online advertising is the lifeblood of Google, Facebook, and many other Internet enterprises that profit by providing personal data to various vendors. Moreover, the move of tens of billions of dollars from conventional print and broadcast media continues, with devastating impacts, especially on print newspapers and magazines.
But does online advertising work for consumers? The Internet was once considered a less commercial medium. But today consumers are inundated with targeted ads, reviews, comments, friends’ reactions, and other digital data. Unfortunately for advertisers, consumers are not intentionally clicking on online ads in big numbers.
Google’s search ads tackle people when they search for a product or service. A controlled study by eBay research labs in 2014 concluded that Google was greatly exaggerating the effectiveness of such ads—at least those bought by eBay. eBay’s researchers concluded that “More frequent users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by ads account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative.” This is the “I-was-gonna-buy-it-anyway problem,” says an article in the Atlantic.
The Atlantic notes:
“Whether all advertising—online and off—is losing its persuasive punch…Think about how much you can learn about products today before seeing an ad. Comments, user reviews, friends’ opinions, price-comparison tools…they’re much more powerful than advertising because we consider them information rather than marketing. The difference is enormous: We seek information, so we’re more likely to trust it; marketing seeks us, so we’re more likely to distrust it.”
Some companies like Coca-Cola have cooled on using online advertising. But advertising revenues keep growing for Google, Facebook, and the other giants of the Internet. These companies are racing to innovate, connecting ads to more tailored audiences, which tantalize and keeps hope springing eternal for the advertisers. The Internet ad sellers also provide detailed data to advertise themselves to the advertisers staying one step ahead of growing skepticism. This is especially a problem when there is inadequate government regulation of deceptive advertising. It is the Wild West! Online advertising revenues are the Achilles’ heel of these big Internet companies. Any decline will deflate them immensely; more than public and Congressional criticism of their intrusiveness, their massive allowed fakeries, their broken promises to reform, and their openings to unsavory political and commercial users. If they lose advertising revenue, a major revenue bubble will burst and there goes their business model, along with their funding for ventures from video hosting to global mapping.
After reviewing the many major negatives attributed to the Internet, the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo writes, “So who is the central villain in this story, the driving force behind much of the chaos and disrepute online?… It’s the advertising business, stupid.” He adds, perhaps optimistically, “If you want to fix much of what ails the internet right now, the ad business would be the perfect perp to handcuff and restrain.”
Randall Rothenberg, who heads a trade association of companies in the digital ad business, urges advertisers “to take civic responsibility for our effect on the world.” Then he shows his frustration by saying that, “Technology has largely been outpacing the ability of individual companies to understand what is actually going on.” All of this even before artificial intelligence (AI) takes root. Meanwhile, Facebook, Google, and Twitter keep announcing new tools to make their ads “safe and civil” (Facebook), open and protective of privacy. At the same time matters keep getting worse for consumers. The backers and abusers keep getting more skilled too (see Youtube Kids ).
In a recent report titled “Digital Deceit,” authors Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott wrote:
“The Central problem of disinformation corrupting American political culture is not Russian spies or a particular media platform. The central problem is that the entire industry is built to leverage sophisticated technology to aggregate user attention and sell advertising.”
If so, why isn’t more public attention being paid to this root cause? Not by the mass media which is obviously too compromised by the Congress, by academia, or by more of US before “We the People” become the conditioned responders that Ivan Pavlov warned about so many years ago.
Deep K. Datta-Ray says democracy’s reliance on people’s ability to be rational [which should be based on access to reliable, not manipulated information] is its fatal weakness. While malfeasance in politics, poverty and inequalities hold back progress in India, China is charging ahead in delivering economic growth, and freedom for its people.
India’s PM Narendra Modi at the podium, addressing a rally.
Disinformation scarred campaigning in elections in the Indian state of Karnataka, culminated in an illegitimate minority government. Its downfall by covert surveillance, money politics and an opportunistic alliance of sworn enemies is no consolation.
Such odious tactics are democracy’s leitmotif globally, as Brexit and Donald Trump’s election demonstrate. In combination, they suggest that democracy is not fit for purpose, especially in developing nations, particularly since there is a clear alternative: China’s political system.
Irredeemably flawed at inception, democracy’s most debilitating characteristic is its reliance on – often illiterate – people to analyse events. This has been proved repeatedly, by electorates worldwide. India’s Narendra Modi stormed to victory in 2014 on the people’s disgust with several scams, but investigations now reveal that there were none! Disinformation continues to be harnessed, with people’s inability to reason through the morass of media reports.
Nearly 90 per cent of India’s population voted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power regionally because they accepted its outlandish claims. Modi, for instance, asserts ancient Indians invented genetic surgery and that climate change is just people feeling colder.
Democracy’s dependence on the democratic principle to animate institutions fatally undermines it because, paradoxically, democracy is eroded by the very politics it countenances. The politicisation of India’s provincial judiciary has now reached the apex court. The Supreme Court is embroiled in an ugly imbroglio to impeach the chief justice. The opposition brought the motion, alleging politically motivated assigning of cases to judges.
Meanwhile, everyone knows justice hinges on wealth and power. Its operation was highlighted, again, by a politician’s son – no less – getting away with murder in February 2006.
Democracy is also unworthy because it is delusive. Claiming to engender equality, democracy actually succeeds by enhancing inequality. Overshadowing highly incendiary rhetoric against minorities is the rise in attacks by the Hindu majority.
Legislative inequality is also distressing. Minorities are disproportionately under-represented in Parliament, by design. In 2014, of the BJP’s 482 candidates, just seven were Muslim. None won. Muslims are roughly 4 per cent of Parliament, but 14 per cent of the population.
The story is replicated in the provincial parliaments. There, as of January, only four of the 1,418 members are Muslim. That the number of minorities exceeded 300 as recently as November 2014 reiterates that the BJP’s democratic success is contingent on eliminating minorities from having any, let alone an equal, political voice.
Ultimately, however, a political system is by definition too grandiose to be judged technically. What matters is its moral accountability, and democracy’s bankruptcy is laid bare when the metric is the only one that matters: delivering freedom.
All Indian parties sing from the same democratic hymn sheet. Yet Indians continue to be subjugated, both absolutely and relative to other developing nations, by poverty. This is often blamed on the handicap of massive colonial exploitation, which developed Europe at India’s expense. But this blame culture divests leaders of any responsibility for having failed to free people, and even permits the erosion of what little freedom they enjoy. What democracy offers then is a powerful elite empowering itself by demonising the enemy without, and by exacerbating inequality within.
Nor are the devastating effects of democracy limited to democratic states, for they wage war. India has been involved in continuous border wars since independence, at a minimum, with Pakistan. Meanwhile, China has fought less in the past 40 years than the UK, France and the US did in one weekend of bombing Syria. The West calls the Tiananmen Square incident a “massacre”, but it is insignificant compared to the deaths meted out by the democratic West’s militaries.
A pacific China is possible because its political system is moral in a manner impossible for democracies. China is moral for delivering freedom, more equitably and efficiently than, at the very least, India. Until the 1950s, India’s gross domestic product per capita was higher than China’s. In 1978, China’s was US$13 more than India’s.
That China’s political system achieved this is all the more remarkable because those decades saw the tumult of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but no economic reform. The superiority of China’s political system is confirmed by the freedoms citizens – and beneficiaries of Chinese investment globally – now enjoy thanks to stupendous growth, distributed equitably, over the past 30 years. As the World Inequality Report notes, Chinese inequality is “moderate” because Beijing invests in everyone but Indian inequality is “extreme” because investments are made by them for themselves.
(Be sure to click on the arrows on the top right of the diagram below to see more panels.]
In short, China’s political system, without deluding its people or resorting to international violence, ensures the elite deliver freedoms to the people in a manner unimaginable in India or other democracies. Representative is the freedom to travel and think. In 2017, just 16,000 Indians, versus 88,000 Chinese, were allowed to study in the UK.
Their predecessors imported democracy to Asia, but it is now time for Indians to reassess their inheritance and for the Chinese to disseminate the truth about democracy vis-à-vis Beijing’s system.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Why democracy is no longer fit for purpose in India.
PRIDE IN THEIR NATION AND MORALE REMAIN HIGH IN CHINA Chinese dressed in replica red army uniforms take pictures at a base relief showing former Chinese Communist leaders Mao Zedong and Zhu De at a historic site of the Long March in the mountains outside Jinggangshan, Jiangxi province, on September 14.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deep K. Datta-Ray is the author of The Making of Indian Diplomacy
We can no longer trust data and conclusions being published as impartial by institutions that were once trustworthy.
When someone says they “know” what’s happening on the ground in Syria, how can we assess the validity of their claim to knowledge, i.e. their claim to “know” “facts” or (gasp) “truth”?
When someone says they “know” the U.S. economy is growing and unemployment is at record lows, what is the basis of their claim to knowledge?
Before you tell me what you “know,” tell me your sources. We all know how this works nowadays: the sources are rigged or gamed to support the pre-selected narrative.
In “fake news,” the sources are designed to appear legitimate via official-sounding institutional titles for the source organizations and human “experts” / researchers, and the data that’s presented to support the “fake news” is also designed to be indistinguishable from legitimate data.
The cursory consumer of such content will be inclined to grant the institution, source and data as equal in legitimacy to other accepted sources. For example, if we read that the United Nations Labor Information Council has collected data showing the U.S. unemployment rate is actually 7.2% rather than the official 3.9%, the invocation of the UN and the precision of the data point suggests a legitimate source and data base.
But it’s “fake news;” there is no United Nations Labor Information Council (at least not to my knowledge).
Official sources have learned that the most effective way to propagate the sanctioned narratives is to rig or game the data and/or its interpretation. Thus the bailouts of the U.S. “too big to fail” financial institutions in 2008-09 were purposefully obscured; it took independent researchers to assemble all the bailout guarantees and publish the staggering total of over $16 trillion.
Official data is massaged to promote the official narrative. This is well-known to anyone who digs into the actual mechanics of the adjustments made to the raw data. For example, to mask real-world inflation, big-ticket expenses such as healthcare are minimized as a percentage of the basket of expenses being measured, and hedonic adjustments reduce the sticker price we actually pay.
The unemployment rate of 3.9% is based on excluding 95 million working-age residents from the labor pool. Many of these people are indeed unavailable for work, but millions have been categorized as “discouraged” and thus are not counted as being in the work force.
In other words, the process of rigging and gaming “facts” to support a pre-determined narrative is identical for both “fake news” and “official news.” When researchers compared electricity consumption in China with the official growth rate, a vast discrepancy appeared: electrical consumption, a reliable indicator of economic activity, lagged the official growth rate.
The official response was to stop reporting electrical consumption data or rig the numbers to match the official narrative.
Now that the loss of trust in official reporting of data is widespread (due to the obviousness of the rigging / gaming / manipulation), the institutions tasked with generating belief in the sanctioned narratives are accusing anyone questioning the officially sanctioned data or narratives of issuing “fake news.”
The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife: as institutions gin up ever more dubious “evidence” that all is well with the status quo, the line between “official news” and “fake news” has effectively dissolved.
We are now being bombarded with engineered data from supposedly legitimate sources that’s explicitly designed to support insider rackets or profiteering cartel. A prime example is medical/pharmaceutical research data, which is increasingly funded by self-serving corporations or institutions with the explicit goal of finding (or rigging) evidence supporting some claim of efficacy that is highly profitable to the owners of the medication/genetic material.
In other words, we can no longer trust data and conclusions being published as impartial by institutions that were once trustworthy as these institutions become politicized or funded by corporations whose sole goal is to maximize profits by any means available.
Much of this legerdemain is statistical and therefore difficult for laypersons to analyze or assess. Despite the educational industry’s focus on STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, math), relatively few citizens seem equipped to read the results of a pharmaceutical Stage III trial (human subject trials for the efficacy and risks of a new medication/treatment) or scientific paper that supports some overarching policy or a “headline number” such as GDP or unemployment.
A skeptical reader naturally looks for weaknesses such as small sample size, wide margins of error, various assumptions made when eliminating data samples, and so on.
The general lack of interest and/or ability to make even a rudimentary critical assessment of the officially sanctioned evidence and narratives plays right into the hands of those engineering the evidence.
But the Internet is messing everything up by providing a universal forum for skeptics to publish critical assessments of officially sanctioned evidence. The spectrum of critics is wide, ranging from those promoting improbable theories backed by little substantiated evidence to those who have conducted rigorous critiques that interested parties can critique.
Such a forum requires a skeptical populace with critical-thinking skills and the willingness to ask cui bono–to whose benefit? As institutions are politicized and dissenters are marginalized and profit-maximizing organizations fund their own self-serving research, it falls to the citizenry to sort the wheat from the politicized. self-serving chaff.
The term ‘media bias’ does not do justice to the western corporate media’s relationship with Israel and Palestine. The relationship is, indeed, far more profound than mere partiality. It is not ignorance, either. It is a calculated and long-term campaign, aimed at guarding Israel and demonizing Palestinians.
The current disgraceful coverage of Gaza’s popular protests indicates that the media’s position aims at suppressing the truth on Palestine, at any cost and by any means.
Political symbiosis, cultural affinity, Hollywood, the outreaching influence of pro-Israel and Zionist groups within the political and media circles, are some of the explanations many of us have offered as to why Israel is often viewed with sympathetic eyes and Palestinians and Arabs condemned.
But such explanations should hardly suffice. Nowadays, there are numerous media outlets that are trying to offset some of the imbalance, many of them emanating from the Middle East, but also other parts of the world. Palestinian and Arab journalists, intellectuals and cultural representatives are more present on a global stage than ever before and are more than capable of facing off, if not defeating, the pro-Israeli media discourse.
However, they are largely invisible to western media; it is the Israeli spokesperson who continues to occupy the center stage, speaking, shouting, theorizing and demonizing as he pleases.
It is, then, not a matter of media ignorance, but policy.
Even before March 30, when scores of Palestinians in Gaza were killed and thousands wounded, the US and British media, for example, should have, at least, questioned why hundreds of Israeli snipers and army tanks were ordered to deploy at the Gaza border to face-off Palestinian protesters.
Instead, they referred to ‘clashes’ between Gaza youth and the snipers, as if they are equal forces in an equivalent battle.
Western media is not blind. If ordinary people are increasingly able to see the truth regarding the situation in Palestine, experienced western journalists cannot possibly be blind to the truth. They know, but they choose to remain silent.
The maxim that official Israeli propaganda or ‘hasbara’ is too savvy no longer suffices. In fact, it is hardly true.
Where is the ingenuity in the way the Israeli army explained the killing of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza?
“Yesterday we saw 30,000 people,” the Israeli army tweeted on March 31. “We arrived prepared and with precise reinforcements. Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.”
If that is not bad enough, Israel’s ultra-nationalist Minister of Defense, Avigdor Lieberman, followed that self-indictment by declaring there are “no innocent people in Gaza”; thus, legitimizing the targeting of any Gazan within the besieged Strip.
Unfair media coverage is not fueled by the simplistic notion of ‘clever Israel, imprudent Arabs’. Western media is actively involved in shielding Israel and enhancing its diminishing brand, while painstakingly demolishing the image of Israel’s enemies.
Take for example, Israel’s unfounded propaganda that Yasser Murtaja, the Gaza journalist who was killed in cold blood by an Israeli sniper while covering the Great March of Return protests at the Gaza border, was a member of Hamas.
First, ‘unnamed officials’ in Israel claimed that Yasser is ‘a member of the Hamas security apparatus.’ Then, Lieberman offered more (fabricated) details that Yasser was on Hamas’ payroll since 2011 and ‘held a rank similar to a captain.’ Many journalists took these statements and ran with them, constantly associating any news coverage of Yasser’s death with Hamas.
It turned out that, according to the US State Department, Yasser’s start-up media company in Gaza had actually received a small grant from USAID, which subjected Yasser’s company to a rigorous vetting process.
More still, a report by the International Federation of Journalist claimed that Yasser was actually detained and beaten by the Gaza police in 2015, and that Israel’s Defense Minister is engineering a cover-up.
Judging by this, Israel’s media apparatus is as erratic and self-defeating as North Korea; but this is hardly the image conveyed by western media, because it insists on placing Israel on a moral pedestal while misrepresenting Palestinians, regardless of the circumstances.
But there is more to western media’s approach to Palestine and Israel than shielding and elevating Israel, while demonizing Palestinians. Oftentimes, the media works to distract from the issues altogether, as is the case in Britain today, where Israel’s image is rapidly deteriorating.
To disrupt the conversation on Palestine, the Israeli Occupation and the British government’s unconditional support of Israel, British mainstream media has turned the heat on Jeremy Corbyn, the popular leader of the Labor Party.
Accusations of anti-Semitism has dogged the party since Corbyn’s election in 2015. Yet, Corbyn is not racist; on the contrary, he has stood against racism, for the working class and other disadvantaged groups. His strong pro-Palestine stance, in particular, is threatening to compel a paradigm shift on Palestine and Israel within the revived and energized Labor Party.
Sadly, Corbyn’s counter strategy is almost entirely absent. Instead of issuing a statement condemning all forms of racism and moving on to deal with the urgent issues at hand, including that of Palestine, he allows his detractors to determine the nature of the discussion, if not the whole discourse. He is now trapped in a perpetual conversation, while the Labor Party is regularly purging its own members for alleged anti-Semitism.
Considering that Israel and its allies in the media, and elsewhere, conflate between criticism of Israel and its Zionist ideology, on the one hand, and that of Jews and Judaism on the other, Corbyn cannot win this battle.
Nor are Israel’s friends keen on winning, either. They merely want to prolong a futile debate so that British society remains embroiled in distractions and spares Israel any accountability for its action.
If British media was, indeed, keen on calling out racism and isolating racists, why then is there little discussion on Israel’s racist policies targeting Palestinians?
Media spin will continue to provide Israel with the needed margins to carry out its violent policies against the Palestinian people, with no moral accountability. It will remain loyal to Israel, creating a buffer between the truth and its audiences.
It is incumbent on us to expose this sinister relationship and hold mainstream media to account for covering up Israel’s crimes, as well as Israel for committing these crimes in the first place.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London). His website is: ramzybaroud.net
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 