Exposing ‘Democracy NOW!’ as democracy never: deceit to hide dictatorship by the billionaires

Along with the ideologically center and right-wing ‘news’-media that everyone knows are fronting for billionaires to deceive Americans to tolerate America’s lousy Government, dozens of ‘alt-news’ media that likewise receive crucial funding from billionaires, fool leftist and libertarian populists into thinking that this is a two-party democracy instead of two sides (the liberal and conservative sides) of a one-party, actually right-wing — the billionaires’ — fascist dictatorship. 

Here, for example, is the way that “Democracy NOW!” covered America’s coup that in February 2014 grabbed, for the purposes of America’s billionaires, the country, Ukraine, which has the nearest border (only 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying distance) away from The Kremlin. Thus, Ukraine is craved by U.S.-and-allied billionaires because it’s the country that’s the best situated for an ultimately planned blitz nuclear decapitation of Russia’s central command — checkmate against Russia:

https://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/3/who_is_provoking_the_unrest_in

Who Is Provoking the Unrest in Ukraine? A Debate on Role of Russia, United States in Regional Crisis

Democracy Now!
MARCH 03, 2014

Russia is vowing to keep its troops in the Ukrainian region of Crimea in what has become Moscow’s biggest confrontation with the West since the Cold War. Ukraine’s new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, said Russian President Vladimir Putin had effectively declared war on his country. Concern is growing that more of eastern Ukraine could soon fall to the Russians. Earlier today, Russian troops seized a Ukraine coast guard base in the Crimean city of Balaklava. On Sunday, the new head of Ukraine’s navy defected to Russia. To talk more about the crisis in Ukraine, we speak to Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder. His latest article for The New York Review of Books is "Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda." We also speak to retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern. He focused on Russian foreign policy for the first decade of his 27-year career with the agency. He recently wrote an article titled "Ukraine: One 'Regime Change' Too Many?” …

Snyder comes forth there with one lie after another, while McGovern fails to call any of it a lie, and only argues that Russia’s position is more reasonable than America’s is. So, the really core issues (pertaining to Ukraine’s having the nearest border to The Kremlin) are hidden from the public, instead of exposed to the public. The most core issue of all, in this matter, is whether what had happened to Ukraine in February 2014 was a democratic revolution as Yale’s Timothy Snyder maintains, or instead was a U.S. coup that installed an American rabid anti-Russian dictatorship taking over the country on behalf of the U.S. Government that McGovern fails even to assert to have been the case — though it was the actual situation there. At no point in the 6,400-word “Democracy NOW!” discussion does ANYONE even once use the word “coup” — much less “an American coup” — which it definitely WAS. (See, for example, its smoking gun, which had been uploaded to the Web on 4 February 2014 and PROVED that it had been a U.S. coup.) Much less, why that coup was perpetrated. This is merely distractionary ‘leftist’ ‘news’-reporting.

For a deeper historical background on this hoax — a hoax that fools the U.S.-and-allied political left — I recommend two great articles of investigative journalism which target this matter:

One is a phenomenally outstanding article by Steve Weissman, on 25 March 2014, “Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev”, which went deeper into the hoax that Yale’s Timothy Snyder perpetrates, but Weissman ignored McGovern’s soft-ball response to it there. No historical account of the present situation in Ukraine is honest that fails to use the concept “coup” in it, and to document that the ‘democratic revolution’ at the Maidan Square in Kiev was neither democratic nor a revolution but clearly instead another U.S. Government coup d’etat. The fact that the word “coup” didn’t appear even once in that 6,400-word “Democracy NOW!” show transcript displays that operation’s fraudulence. Though Weissman was, unfortunately, letting that program off the hook and — to that extent — was suckered by liberal or Democratic Party billionaires’ propaganda, his article has much else in it that merits close reading and clicking on its highly informative links, such as some of the pay-offs from George Soros, and from Netherland’s Government, as well as from the U.S. State Department and other U.S. Government agencies and fronts, which financed that coup.

Perhaps even more important is the extraordinarily fine article by the great chronicler of the corruption that stands behind U.S. ‘left’-wing ’news’-media: Bob Feldman, his 8 February 2018 “In The Pay of Foundations: How U.S. power elite foundations fund a ‘parallel left’ media network--Part 1”, reveals (among other things) that:

during the last 25 years, some U.S. “parallel left” journalists and “parallel left” alternative media organizations have been funding their news operations by accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in “charitable grants” from the tax-exempt foundations of the same U.S. power elite whose undemocratic abuses of power, crimes and immoral policies they claim to be — unlike the corporate-sponsored mainstream media — exposing and holding accountable in their “independent journalism” work and reporting. Take, for example, the foundation-sponsored Democracy Now! Productions radio-tv show which is broadcast on over 1,440  radio and television stations daily around the globe, according to the Democracy Now! Productions website.

 In the early 1950s — when the CIA was using the Ford Foundation to help fund a non-communist "parallel left" as a liberal Establishment alternative to an independent, anti-Establishment revolutionary left--the Pacifica Foundation was given a $150,000 [equivalent to over $1.4 million in 2018] grant in 1951 by the Ford Foundation's Fund for Education, whose “first chief was Alexander Fraser, the president of the Shell Oil Company,” according to James Ledbetter's Made Possible By book.

Besides subsidizing the Pacifica Foundation in the early 1950s, the Ford Foundation also spent a lot of money subsidizing many other noncommercial radio or television stations in the United States. According to Ledbetter's Made Possible By, between 1951 and 1976, the Ford Foundation "spent nearly $300 million on noncommercial radio and television."

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pacifica relied primarily on listener-sponsor contributions to fund the operations of its radio stations. And in the early 1970s, Pacifica also began to accept funds from the U.S. Establishment's government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB], according to Rogue State author William Blum — who worked as a KPFA staffperson in the early 1970s. By the early 1990s, according to the January/February issue of Extra! magazine, Pacifica was accepting nearly $1 million [equivalent to over $1.6 million in 2018 dollars] in "Community Service Grant" program money annually from the CPB to finance about 17 percent of "listener-sponsored" radio stations network's annual operating budget. 

In the early 1990s, some Pacifica administrators also then decided to again seek grants from the Ford Foundation and other U.S. power elite and liberal establishment foundations. As former Pacifica Development Director Dick Bunce wrote in the appendix to the "A Strategy for National Programming" document which was prepared for the Pacifica National Board in September 1992, entitled "Appendix Foundation Grantseeking National Programming Assumptions for Foundation Fundraising":

“The national foundation grantseeking arena has changed enough in recent years to make activity in this arena potentially worthwhile--for organizations prepared to be players and partners in the same field as NPR…Foundation fundraising at this level has extraordinary payoffs... It also requires `venture capital visits' to the foundations to open doors and conversations that lead to partnerships.

“In initiating three top-level contacts in April, May and June, and attempting to capitalize on the opportunities apparent to us, we have already been stretched beyond our capacity to really interface effectively with these funders...

“Short-Run Strategies for Developing a Foundation Grantseeking Program

“Seek Development Committee leadership in planning for Foundation grantseeking.

“Pursue 3 `anchor' grants to acquire funding beginning in FY'93 from the Big 3 foundations we've already begun to work with.

“Long-Range Strategies for Developing a Foundation Grantseeking Program

“Initiate an informal `feasibility inquiry' of foundation support for Pacifica's objectives by requesting visits with the dozen top prospects to shape proposals and establish relationships...

“Foundation Grants Summary: Late this spring we began our first efforts in national foundation grantseeking on behalf of national programming. We have a good chance of securing six figure grants in the coming fiscal year from any or all of the 3 foundations we're working with…, The second tier of foundation prospects is more challenging, and will require increased staff resources, a modest feasibility inquiry and active planning with the Board Development Committee.”

By 1995, billionaire speculator George Soros' Open Society Institute foundation had given the Pacifica Foundation’s KPFA radio station in Berkeley, California a $40,000 [equivalent to over $64,000 in 2018] grant. And in 1996, the Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation gave Pacifica a $25,000 [equivalent to over $40,000 in 2018] grant to launch a daily radio news show, Democracy Now!, hosted and produced by long-time WBAI Evening News producer Amy Goodman, that was initially broadcast from Pacifica’s New York City area WBAI radio station in Manhattan on February 19, 1996.

Sitting on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (whose assets had increased to $3.3 billion by 2017) in 1996, when it provided Democracy Now! with its initial foundation funding, were U.S. power elite-connected Establishment folks like then-Chevron board member and future Bush II administration National Security Advisor and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the managing editor of the Time Warner mainstream media conglomerate’s Time magazine, Henry Muller, and the multi-millionaire wife of then-U.S. Senator and future 2004 Democratic presidential candidate and Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry, Teresa Heinz.

And in 2017, the Carnegie Corporation of New York board of trustees included former New Jersey Governor and 9/11 Commission Report Chair Thomas Kean, former New York Times Company CEO and president Janet Robinson, PBS NewsHour Co-Anchor/Managing Editor and Duke Endowment Chairperson Judy Woodruff and the former Commander of U.S. Central Command [CENTCOM) from 2013 to 2016, (Ret.) General Lloyd Austin III, who “was responsible for military strategy and joint operations throughout the Middle East and Central and South Asia” during the Obama administration, according to the Carnegie Corporation website. The same website also noted that Carnegie Corporation of New York trustee Austin helped “to spearhead the 2003 invasion of Iraq as the assistant division commander for the 3rd Infantry Division” and in 2008 “returned to Iraq as the commanding general of the Multi-National Corps-Iraq during the period when the surge forces were drawing down under Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

To this, I might add that Matt Taibbi, another successful ‘alt-news’ leftist, wrote in Rolling Stone, on 13 October 2016, about Amy Goodman and her “Democracy NOW!” show, by saying that “she’s as close to the ideal of what it means to be a journalist as one can get in this business” and, that, despite all the barriers which conservatives present against honest journalism, “Amy Goodman found another way. She insisted on her complete independence throughout her entire career.”

About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.