CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Like every single hotly publicized Russiagate “bombshell” that has broken since this nonsense began, Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian social media trolls was paraded around as proof of something hugely significant (an “act of war” in this case), but on closer examination turns out to be empty. The always excellent Moon of Alabama recently made a solid argument that has also been advanced by Russiagate skeptics like TYT’s Michael Tracey and Max Blumenthal of The Real News, pointing out that there is in fact no evidence that the troll farming operation was an attempt to manipulate the US election, nor indeed that it had any ties to the Russian government at all, nor indeed that it was anything other than a crafty Russian civilian’s money making scheme.
February 19, 2018
-
-
The media and the Mueller indictment: A conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories
11 minutes readPATRICK MARTIN—Given that the US government has just issued a series of strategy documents that, among other conclusions, suggest that a significant cyberattack on the United States could justify retaliation with nuclear weapons, the implications of the argument put forward on the front page of the Times are chilling: What cyberattack could be more significant than an effort to hijack the US presidential election?
-
PAUL STREET—The “liberal” corporate media – itself a key part of the nation’s business and military establishment – has focused especially on the president’s weird behavior and transgressions, and on the oversold and deeply conservative, diversionary, and imperialist Russiagate narrative. Lost in all this are the far more important problems that Hedges mentions: the accelerated plundering and spoliation of the common good, including above all livable ecology, the ramped-up plutocratic ruination of what’s left of democracy and popular sovereignty by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of wealth and money.
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License ALL CAPTIONS…
-
SHELDON RICHMAN—It takes only a few minutes to see that the PTSD is a racket intended (by some of its advocates at least) to gull the unsuspecting populace into supporting whatever the war party and the Pentagon want. It is handy for parrying the antimilitarist’ charge that its espousers are dangerously reckless, if not outright warmongers.
- 1
- 2