By PAM MARTENS – RUSS MARTENS
ABOVE Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0

Timberg and the Washington Post, which is owned by the billionaire CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, are being stridently called out as McCarthyites for an article published on Thanksgiving Day that cited unnamed “experts” at a shadowy group called PropOrNot to smear 200 alternative media sites as tools of Russia. The blacklist included some of the most informed and courageous voices on the Internet like Naked Capitalism, Truthout, CounterPunch, and Truthdig, where the brilliant Chris Hedges, part of a New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, regularly asks the uncomfortable questions — like this one:

“When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?”

Theories abound as to why Timberg would write such a shoddily sourced article and smear some of the best writing and thinking on the Internet. One line of thought is that corporate media is struggling to survive financially and needs to take out its competition. Others see something far more nefarious. Max Blumenthal sums it up this way at AlterNet:

“Fake news and Russian propaganda have become the great post-election moral panic, a creeping Sharia-style conspiracy theory for shell-shocked liberals. Hoping to punish the dark foreign forces they blame for rigging the election, many of these insiders have latched onto a McCarthyite campaign that calls for government investigations of a wide array of alternative media outlets.”

The Black Agenda Report’s Executive Editor, Glen Ford, builds on Blumenthal’s theory, writing:

“Had Clinton won the election, she would have begun a campaign of repression against the Left along the same national security lines as the Washington Post article, with that paper probably leading the propaganda charge.

“The Obama administration and Post owner Bezos are quite tight, politically. Back in 2013, when Obama was still trying to reach a ‘grand bargain’ with the Republicans in Congress, he proposed lower corporate tax rates as a way to spur economic growth, and showcased the Amazon distribution center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as a model — despite the deplorable working conditions, low pay (less than $12 an hour, to start) and heavy use of part-time and contract workers at the plant. His White House economist, Gene Sperling, told the press, ‘We should be looking for other avenues of progress, other grand bargains that can be for middle class job growth.’ Bezos closed the deal on the Washington Post the same year. His paper is clearly the go-to media for the Democrats’ brand of fascism, which is crazily cloaked as an anti-fascist crusade.”

The Black Agenda Report was also listed on the 200-website blacklist as a tool of Russia.

The Thanksgiving Day article by Timberg currently has 14,800 reader comments, many heaping ridicule on Timberg and the Post. A comment from “dmarney” illustrates the intellectual savvy of the Post’s readership:

dmarney 11/29/2016 6:42 PM EST

“A fake news story about fake news sourced to fake researchers writing in a now-fake news organization that once brought down a sitting US president with investigative journalism back in the day when cynics still ran the place.

“You can’t make this stuff up.”

Another commenter with the name, Room V, writes:

“Now WaPo reduces itself to being merely a McCarthyite rag. The black list produced by the shadowy group Propornot and shamelessly promoted by this former newspaper includes online publications such as truthout, truthdig, and consortiumnews, each of which practices journalism to a degree no longer seen at this location. People should turn their backs on the preachers of the New McCarthyism.”

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]any of the articles trashing Timberg refer to him as a “technology reporter” for the Post because that’s currently the description under his articles. His background is far more complicated. For starters, his agent, Gillian MacKenzie, states on her web site that she “was a five year term member of The Council of Foreign Relations.” The Co-Chair of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) is Robert Rubin, the Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton who played a major role in the deregulation of Wall Street and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which set in motion the historic financial collapse in 2008. CFR’s Corporate Program includes approximately 200 multi-national corporations.

Timberg’s official bio shows that his earlier tenure at the Washington Post included a stint as Bureau Chief in Johannesburg where he covered political crises in Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast and Nigeria. He later became Deputy Editor for National Security and finally moved to his current post as Technology Correspondent. But when we say “technology,” we’re not talking about laptops. In this 2013 C-Span video, Timberg talks about facial recognition technology being used by law enforcement for surveillance. In this 2014 C-Span video, Timberg interviews Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, on the revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance program. The interview is conducted at the right-wing Cato Institute – a nonprofit that was secretly under the partial ownership of the Koch Brothers for decades.

Timberg’s father, the late Robert Timberg, had been a political writer at the Baltimore Sun and author of two books on the Vietnam War. The earlier work, The Nightingale’s Song, traced the lives of five of Timberg’s fellow Naval Academy graduates: Senator John McCain; Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North; Navy Secretary and Senator Jim Webb; and National Security Advisers John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane. (North, Poindexter and McFarlane were central figures in the Iran-Contra scandal.)

We have our own theory about these McCarthyite attacks coming on the heels of the discrediting of the Democratic National Committee as a propaganda outlet for continuity government in Washington and a saboteur of Senator Bernie Sanders’ genuinely populist campaign for President. Many of the web sites that made it onto the blacklist were those that carried in-depth reports on the WikiLeaks’ emails that opened a heretofore closed window on the Wall Street corruption inside the Democratic Party.

When Wall Street On Parade broke the bombshell story from the WikiLeaks emails showing that an executive from the collapsing, corrupt and massively bailed out Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup, was making key hiring decisions for President Obama’s first term, we expected to see the story quickly move to the front page of the Washington Post. Instead, it has yet to see the light of day there. The same is true for the New York Times. Both the Post and Times editorial boards endorsed the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, for President. An article documenting with actual emails how Wall Street continued to control the reins of power in Washington, even during an epic economic crash it had created, was apparently censored by both papers.

WikiLeaks, which made these emails available in the public interest, was included on the 200-website blacklist. The Washington Post and New York Times, which withheld this blockbuster story from their readers in an outrageous form of censorship, did not make the cut as a propaganda tool.

This article originally appeared on Wall Street on Parade.

APPENDIX 1 : Matt Taibbi weighs in
The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting

The capital’s paper of record crashes legacy media on an iceberg

The ‘Washington Post’ ran a piece last week headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” Joe Raedle/Getty

The thrust of Timberg’s astonishingly lazy report is that a Russian intelligence operation of some kind was behind the publication of a “hurricane” of false news reports during the election season, in particular stories harmful to Hillary Clinton. The piece referenced those 200 websites as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.”

The piece relied on what it claimed were “two teams of independent researchers,” but the citing of a report by the longtime anticommunist Foreign Policy Research Institute was really window dressing.

The meat of the story relied on a report by unnamed analysts from a single mysterious “organization” called PropOrNot – we don’t know if it’s one person or, as it claims, over 30 – a “group” that seems to have been in existence for just a few months.

It was PropOrNot’s report that identified what it calls “the list” of 200 offending sites. Outlets as diverse as AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com and the Ron Paul Institute were described as either knowingly directed by Russian intelligence, or “useful idiots” who unwittingly did the bidding of foreign masters.

Forget that the Post offered no information about the “PropOrNot” group beyond that they were “a collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”

Forget also that the group offered zero concrete evidence of coordination with Russian intelligence agencies, even offering this remarkable disclaimer about its analytic methods:

“Please note that our criteria are behavioral. … For purposes of this definition it does not matter … whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point: If they meet these criteria, they are at the very least acting as bona-fide ‘useful idiots’ of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny.”

What this apparently means is that if you published material that meets their definition of being “useful” to the Russian state, you could be put on the “list,” and “warrant further scrutiny.”

Forget even that in its Twitter responses to criticism of its report, PropOrNot sounded not like a group of sophisticated military analysts, but like one teenager:

“Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject – they’re so vewwy angwy!!” it wrote on Saturday.

“Fascists. Straight up muthafuckin’ fascists. That’s what we’re up against,” it wrote last Tuesday, two days before Timberg’s report.

Any halfway decent editor would have been scared to death by any of these factors. Moreover the vast majority of reporters would have needed to see something a lot more concrete than a half-assed theoretical paper from such a dicey source before denouncing 200 news organizations as traitors.

But if that same source also demanded anonymity on the preposterous grounds that it feared being “targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers”? Any sane reporter would have booted them out the door. You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won’t put your name to your claims? Take a hike.

Yet the Post thought otherwise, and its report was uncritically picked up by other outlets like USA Today and the Daily Beast. The “Russians did it” story was greedily devoured by a growing segment of blue-state America that is beginning to fall victim to the same conspiracist tendencies that became epidemic on the political right in the last few years.

The right-wing fascination with conspiracy has culminated in a situation where someone like Alex Jones of Infowars (who believes juice boxes make frogs gay) is considered a news source. Jones is believed even by our new president-elect, who just repeated one of his outrageous reports, to the effect that three million undocumented immigrants voted in the November 8th election.

That Jones report was based on a tweet by someone named Greg Phillips of an organization called VoteStand.

When asked to comment on his methodology, Phillips replied in the first person plural, sounding like a lone spree killer claiming to be a national terror network. “No. We will release it in open form to the American people,” he said. “We won’t allow the media to spin this first. Sorry.”

This was remarkably similar to the response of PropOrNot when asked by The Intercept to comment about its “list” report. The only difference was, Phillips didn’t use emoticons:

“We’re getting a lot of requests for comment and can get back to you today =)” PropOrNot told The Intercept. “We’re over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny anyone’s involvement.”

“They” never called The Intercept back.

Most high school papers wouldn’t touch sources like these. But in November 2016, both the president-elect of the United States and the Washington Post are equally at ease with this sort of sourcing.

Even worse, the Post apparently never contacted any of the outlets on the “list” before they ran their story. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism says she was never contacted. Chris Hedges of Truthdig, who was part of a group that won the Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times once upon a time, said the same. “We were named,” he tells me. “I was not contacted.”

Hedges says the Post piece was an “updated form of Red-Baiting.”

“This attack signals an open war on the independent press,” he says. “Those who do not spew the official line will be increasingly demonized in corporate echo chambers such as the Post or CNN as useful idiots or fifth columnists.”

All of this is an outgrowth of this horrible election season we just lived through.

A lot of reporters over the summer were so scared by the prospect of a Trump presidency that they talked – in some cases publicly – about abandoning traditional ideas about journalistic “distance” from politicians, in favor of open advocacy for the Clinton campaign. “Trump is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism,” is how The Times put it.

These journalists seemed totally indifferent to the Pandora’s box they were opening. They didn’t understand that most politicians have no use for critical media. Many of them don’t see alternative points of view as healthy or even legitimate. If you polled a hundred politicians about the profession, 99 would say that all reporters are obstructionist scum whose removal from the planet would be a boon to society.

The only time politicians like the media is when we’re helping them get elected or push through certain policies, like for instance helping spread dubious stories about Iraq’s WMD capability. Otherwise, they despise us. So news outlets that get into bed with politicians are usually making a devil’s bargain they don’t fully understand.

They may think they’re being patriotic (as many did during the Iraq/WMD episode), but in the end what will happen is that they will adopt the point of view of their political sponsors. They will soon enough denounce other reporters and begin to see themselves as part of the power structure, as opposed to a check on it.

This is the ultimate in stupidity and self-annihilating behavior. The power of the press comes from its independence from politicians. Jump into bed with them and you not only won’t ever be able to get out, but you’ll win nothing but a loss of real influence and the undying loathing of audiences.

Helping Beltway politicos mass-label a huge portion of dissenting media as “useful idiots” for foreign enemies in this sense is an extraordinarily self-destructive act. Maybe the Post doesn’t care and thinks it’s doing the right thing. In that case, at least do the damn work.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda?

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
Please see our red registration box at the bottom of this page

By PAUL STREET

Soft Power, Hard Power

I’ve made the argument myself, with the requisite footnotes to Alex Carey and to Noam Chomsky, who has made it a central part of his intellectual legacy.  I’ve tended to advance the Carey-Chomsky thesis with two key qualifications, however.  The first is an insistence that the vast entertainment component of the mass media – almost completely ignored in Chomsky’s voluminous writings and interviews – is every bit as central, if note more pivotal, to the “manufacturing consent” process as the news and public affairs content Chomsky has always emphasized.

The second is the observation that state violence continues to hold a central place in the enforcement of “homeland” inequality and oppression combined with a nagging suspicion that the soft power functions to soften the population up for hard force when push comes to shove.

Destroying Occupy

Take the dismantlement of Occupy Wall Street in the fall and winter of 2011. We know that the multiple metropolitan repressions and evictions of the Occupy movement across the country were coordinated with assistance and advice from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.  In coordinating this suppression, federal agencies including the U.S. Naval Intelligence Service worked with the Federal Reserve and numerous private banks and businesses including the “corporate security business” to function as what the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund called “a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and corporate America.”

“It has become increasingly clear,” the liberal economist Jeffrey Madrick wrote in the spring of 2013, “that Occupy Wall Street…was undone by a concerted government effort to undo it…the coordinated and disproportionate actions of the NYPD, the FBI, and Homeland Security represent a campaign of suppression without which Occupy might well have evolved into something more formidable, even in the cold of New York City’s winter.”

The state violence was quite pronounced in some cases. In Oakland, California, a chilling police state attack was described by a downtown security guard who witnessed a massive, Nazi-like police rush on 100 or so hundred peaceful Occupiers on October 25^th, 2011:

“It was terrifying to see …. There were helicopters flying about and with high beams on the camps…the beams were moving across every which way…there were young people in these camps and children, infants in a lot of the tents and this was just….they shot…tear gas into the middle of the camp, and at the time…the police…moved in and the first thing they hit was the information tent, and they just started just tearing everything down… this was a military type operation, the way they moved in. It harkened back to old footage I had seen of Nazi Germany where you know you had the Nazis, the SS going in and picking up innocent people. It had that tenor. …the helicopters, and the lights, and the loud speaker, all those were all intended to create panic and terror for the people inside…. They had these vehicles that looked like armored boxes, black…the thing that stays in my mind’s eye is in the middle ground with the lights from the helicopters, the police moving in and just stomping on these tents, and moving in one layer, after another, moving in deeper and deeper.”

LAPD officers hold a skirmish line against members of Occupy Los Angeles, participating along side planned May Day marches in downtown LA. 5/1/2012

Oakland’s exercise in militarized policing (ordered by a “liberal” Democratic mayor) put a U.S. military veteran (Scott Olson) in intensive care with a fractured skull and inflicted numerous other injuries.

Then came the tear-down of the original Occupy Wall Street camp in lower Manhattan’s Zucotti Park. Under the cover of martial law and a media near-blackout, the glorious camp that had attracted national and global attention (I spent hours taking in its remarkable spirit one early October day) was trashed, storm-trooper style.  Activists were tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, baton-whipped, and hauled away.

The repression in New York City continued into the following year, reflecting authorities’ determination that no such populist uprising would raise its head again in the nation’s leading metropolis. The NYPD declared lower Manhattan a “special security zone” to justify driving Occupiers off whenever they tried to establish new protest sites. At one point, then original OWS sparkplug David Graeber and his fellow activists were contained by two large steel cages and watched over by an NYPD SWAT team as they gathered on the marble steps of the Federal Hall, where the Bill of Rights (including the First Amendment guarantee of Free Speech) was signed.

In the fall of 2012, Chris Hedges reported that 25 military veterans were detained at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza in New York City.  “We don’t want to arrest you,” police said to the veterans, “but the Occupy movement messed it up for you because we can’t allow another one.”  There was “a decision by the security and surveillance state,” Hedges told the Real News Network, “to essentially seize all public space, to make any kind of protest within public space impossible.”

“Whatever the internal faults of the Occupy movement,” Hedges noted, “the Occupy movement was destroyed. The state was quite rattled by the Occupy movement and is determined not to allow a movement, a mass movement like that to rise up again.”

Not-So Non-Lethal

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he nation’s ever more militarized police departments are loaded up with an array of so-called “nonlethal crowd-control technologies” designed to abolish the right of public assembly.  The terrible tools include things like the “Long Range Acoustic Device” (LRAD) – a sonic cannon that can cause total hearing loss for protesters who refuse to disperse at authorities’ command. Drones are now routinely deployed against protestors inside the U.S.  (Along with dozens of other opponents of the eco-cidal Dakota Access Pipeline [DAPL] in Iowa, I have now been drone-surveilled at close range).

It is true that protestors are not murdered in U.S streets by government gendarmes. At the same time, the proscriptions against sheer mass and bloody repression here have incentivized American authorities to develop more subtle, technically sophisticated forms of state coercion that prevent or discourage citizens from assembling and protesting .The legal and cultural ban on outwardly murderous rule in the nominally free and democratic U.S. has compelled elites and their servants to develop new, less provocative  ways to “incapacitate” angry and active citizens – more quietly sinister methods of repression that are deadly for democracy:  penned-off “free speech zones” and “frozen zones” (where protestors are denied access to those they seek to influence),  “rubber bullets” that hurt and harm but do not generally kill, “concussion grenades” that disorient and confuse without generally shattering skulls,  tear gas and pepper spray that sends protestors running, Tasers that stun but do not generally kill, sonic canons and other acoustic devices that make your eardrums feel like they are splitting, and perhaps – someday soon to be deployed in freedom’s “homeland” – Raytheon’s perfectly named “Silent Guardian,” which noiselessly seems to cook human skin and eyeballs and has the capacity “to inflict limitless, unbearable pain.” It’s all quite lethal – to democracy and free speech.

LRADS were on quiet display – along with much more chilling to behold – during the mass protests staged against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit that occurred in Chicago in the spring of 2012. From Friday May 18^th through Monday, May 21st, 2012, the downtown and South Loop of Chicago were placed under proto-totalitarian multi-dimensional para-militarized police-state occupation. Heavily armed, high-tech federal, state, county, city and private security forces from across the nation were omnipresent and ubiquitous in the gleaming center of “global Chicago.” At almost every step in and around the city’s downtown and South Loop, I beheld black-clad, baton-wielding and vest-wearing agents of repression, high-speed police vans and cars speeding around corners and occasionally into crowds – an intimidating, vast “security” presence that seemed more than vaguely dystopian. Except for many thousands of militarized police, the Loop was nearly a ghost town by the Friday preceding the main protests. City, federal, state, and media helicopters hovered above the central business, hotel and restaurant district and swept the lakefront, monitoring real and potential protest. Police cars and vans swept around corners with sirens blaring to descend on real or imagined dissenters. Everywhere you looked, it seemed, men in paramilitary black were getting out of shiny white vans and black SUVs.

From Ferguson to Standing Rock

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]lash forward to Ferguson, Missouri just more than two years later, when the police killing of the black teenager Mike Brown sparked mass Black and civil rights protests. In response to legitimate Black anger and protest over yet another fatal shooting of a young black man by a white police officer in the U.S., predominantly white police from Ferguson, other jurisdictions, and (above all) St. Louis County went into paramilitary and anti-insurgent mode – reminding some observers of Israel’s repressive tactics in Gaza and the West Bank. The police donned helmets, shields, flak vests, gas masks, and shields, using armored vehicles as they dispersed crowds with tear gas, rubber bullets, and LRADs. SWAT team members brandished high-powered assault rifles, aiming their deadly military-issue weapons at unarmed fellow civilians. Much the same basic scene – with large-scale deployments of militarized police in response to mass protests following police killings of Black men – has since been re-enacted in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Baton Rouge, and Charlotte.

The current leading hot-spot for militarized police-state repression is southeastern North Dakota, where militarized local, county, and state police and National Guard units have attacked Native American water- and climate-protectors and others resisting the eco-cidal Dakota Access Pipeline. As Sarah Lazare reported on AlterNet last October, “Military-style checkpoints. Low-flying surveillance planes. Invasive strip searches. These are just some of the repression tactics that have targeted the thousands of Indigenous people and supporters who, heeding the call of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, mobilized to North Dakota to stop the…DAPL.” Advanced military technologies have been on display and deployed throughout the ongoing repression: automatic rifles, MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), Humvees, armored police trucks, tear gas, mace, pepper spray, flash-bang (concussion) grenades, smoke grenades, Tasers, bean bag rounds, rubber bullets, and more. The Native American journalist Brenda Norrell and other writers at Censored News have reported that Morton County (North Dakota) police criminally tortured Native American activists, placing hoods over the heads of arrestees, and forcing at least one young woman to remain naked in jail cell for an entire night.

The National Guard and police from multiple jurisdictions in North Dakota and from other states, including Minnesota, were sent in to assist the Morton County Sheriff’s Department in quelling the protests beginning last August. In September, the North Dakota Governor’s Emergency Commission borrowed $6 million from the state-owned Bank of North Dakota to cover the costs of repression, including the compensation of out-of-state gendarmes.

The Standing Rock protests have become something of a regional cop magnet. As David Lindorff recently noted on CounterPunch,  “many of the ‘law enforcement’ thugs attacking the peaceful water protectors are volunteers from neighboring states’ police departments – people anxious for a chance to play ‘cavalry’ in this latest iteration of American’s murderous history of Indian Wars.”

On Wednesday, November 3, 2016, the day the Chicago Cubs finished off the Cleveland Indians – the team with the offensive racist name (on par with “The New Jersey Negroes”) and revolting Red Sambo logo – in the baseball World Series, police dressed like U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan shot, sprayed, and beat real Native Americans fighting to protect safe drinking water, ancestral lands, and livable ecology.  You can see film footage of the assaults here. You behold, in the words of filmmaker Josh Fox, “a line of peaceful water protectors in the water, up to their waists, freezing cold.” Above them stand police in riot gear, equipped with shotguns.  The gendarmes blast the pipeline fighters, journalists, and medics point-blank at close range with streams of mace and pepper spray and rubber bullets. You see a female journalist zapped while she interviews an Indigenous activist. You see a military sniper (certainly with real bullets) perched on a hill above the vicious scene.

The LRAD has been deployed in Standing Rock, compelling savvy water protectors to use military-level earplugs.

The state violence intensified three weeks ago. As Lindorff reported, “National Guard troops and the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, bolstered by volunteers from various other police departments conducted an all-night attack using…flash-bang concussion grenades, rubber bullets, mace, teargas and three water cannons — this at a time the temperature on the prairie had fallen to a low of 22 degrees Fahrenheit…The casualties of this one-sided battle against peaceful protesters on a bridge were enormous, with some 300 of the estimated 400 protesting water protectors, both native people and non-native supporters, injured, 26 of them seriously. There was evidence that police were aiming rubber bullets at protesters’ heads and groins to inflict maximum pain and damage, with eight of the injured hospitalized, including a 13-year-old girl shot in the face, whose eye was reportedly damaged.” Sophia Wolansky, a 21-year-old woman from New York City, had to be evacuated to a Chicago hospital after a sheriff’s deputy hit her directly in the arm with a flash-bang grenade, “blowing away the flesh and muscle and reportedly some of the nerves and bone of [her] elbow joint.”

“This,” Wolansky’s father said, was “the wound of someone who’s a warrior, who was sent to fight in a war,” Wayne said. “It’s not supposed to be a war. She’s peacefully trying to get people to not destroy the water supply. And they’re trying to kill her.” Concussion grenades, Lindorff notes, are not supposed to target human beings.

Is this, to use Lindorff’s phrase “Wounded Knee III in the making?” We may know by December 5^th. That’s the day that Barack Obama’s Army Corp of Engineers (ACE) has given the Standing Rock pipeline-fighters to leave or face final eviction by police-state force.

Obama has refused to use his power to stop the police-state violence.  He told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last fall that “We’re going to let [the Standing Rock situation] play out for several more weeks.”

One day before the deadline, thousands of U.S. military veterans are going to Standing Rock to intercede on behalf of the pipeline fighters and their cause of saving livable ecology.  It will be interesting moment – to say the least – in the history of the American military police state.

The Empire Strikes Home

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]urprised by all this militarized police-state violence in the “homeland” of your beloved “land of liberty”?  We shouldn’t be.  A report issued by the Army War College in late 2008 informed U.S. authorities that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The likely sparks for such civil unrest included another major terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disaster” (emphasis added). Later reports by Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security lectured government officials on their duty to identify and monitor military veterans, leftists, right-wingers, sovereign citizens and to classify them all as dangerous “extremists” and “terrorists.” (See John Whitehead’s excellent recent Counterpunch account and sources here).

Clearly some strategic thinkers in the American “security” state are not content to rely only on Chomskyan-Careyan-Walter Lippmanesque consent-manufacture and/or (Antonio) Gramscian ideological and cultural hegemony to maintain proper control over the populace. Brute force – with its properly lethal/non-lethal updates and permutations – remains very much part of the state-capitalist tool box and not just in the imperial hinterland.

By some reports, the quasi-fascist President Elect Donald Trump is considering imperial General David Patraeus – the former head of U.S Central Command, former commander of U.S. and multinational forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and former CIA Director – to head the Department of Homeland Security.  How perfect a statement would that be?  The Empire strikes back on its own domestic populace.

Bipartisan

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ake no mistake: armed force state repression is alive and well in the United States. The Iron Heel lives, updated and refined for the current age. It did not simply pass into the dustbin of history with the Ludlow Massacre, the Palmer Raids, Kent State, COINTELPRO, the murder of Fred Hampton, or Wounded Knee II. It has hardly been rendered obsolete by the soft power of the mass media and other modes of propaganda and thought and feeling control, including carefully staged quadrennial electoral extravaganzas that tell people that democracy consists of getting to mark a ballot for five minutes or less once every four years and then going home to let rich people run the world (into the ground).  Millions of non-white Americans, it should be noted, confront armed state power not just when and if they protest but on a routine and daily basis in and around the nation’s large number of poor and highly segregated Black and brown ghettoes, barrios, and reservations and in the nation’s vast, globally unmatched number of prisons – very disproportionately inhabited by people of color. It is not uncommon for Black Americans to confront SWAT teams breaking down their doors over relatively minor drug and other crimes. (I expressed shock when a defense attorney recently regaled me with a story about a SWAT raid on a Black woman holding her baby in her arms in her own apartment.  She was wanted for questioning on a traffic offense.  The attorney laughed at my incredulity.  “This is routine now” she said.)

And the repression is richly bipartisan.  It is enforced by government agencies headed by slick, smooth-talking Democrats like Bill Clinton or Barack “Let it Play Out” Obama as well as by gendarmes under the command of more outwardly thuggish Republicans like George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

The Dispensable Silk Glove?

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ree speech and the democratic tradition? How powerful are they really in this era of global corporate media, rampant vote fraud, and corporate political duopoly – in an age of transnational hyper-capitalism where the concentration of national and planetary wealth and power dwarf individual and popular voice on a seemingly dystopian scale? What does free speech really mean in an ever-more union-free nation where one places not only one’s job but also one’s health care and often one’s family’s health care at risk by saying anything deemed controversial by one’s employer – and where we are always just one more major terrorist attack away from draconian restrictions on even minor dissent? Where public opinion is largely irrelevant to not-so “public” policy that continues year after year to follow in accord with the interests of a Deep State financial and corporate oligarchy that gets what it wants over and against majority sentiments regardless of which party holds nominal sway in the surface-play marionette theater of electoral and parliamentary politics? Where surveillance is ubiquitous, historical memory is nil, and a President Elect can talk in at least semi-seriousness about taking away the citizenship of someone who burns a U.S. flag?  Where professors and high school teachers are reasonably frightened to tell elementary truths about class, power, race, and empire, among other topics that must be treaded around carefully if one doesn’t want to be reported to right-wing thought-monitors? At a certain point the potency of our vaunted free-speech and democracy traditions can be knocked down so low that the masters feel gloriously free to dispense with them altogether, tilting the balance from hegemony through consent to hegemony though force.  An at once softened-up and beaten-down populace no longer garners the silk glove around the iron fist.

Trump: Clown Cover?

Donald Trump, scheduled for Inauguration in less than two months, embodies the tension between soft and hard power alluded to at the beginning of this essay.  On one hand, he owes much of the notoriety that allowed him to triumph to his many years as a clownish “reality television” star – the blustering boss of “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.”  He is a product of the mass entertainment media complex.  As was the case with the former grade-B Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan during the late 1960s, the mention of his name as a serious political candidate has long and until quite recently elicited chuckles, eye-rolls, and disdainful amusement in liberal and left circles.

On the other hand, Trump’s campaign persona and policy promises have oozed with racist, white-nationalist, sexist, nativist, and eco-cidal violence. He encouraged the beating of Black protestors at his ugly Make America Great [Hate]Again rallies. His racially toxic neo-Nixonian calls for “law and order,” a “national stop and frisk law” (his draconian response to Black Lives Matter[BLM]), mass deportations, a giant military build-up, and national greatness (lost but restored) carry more than a vague whiff of repressive, Iron Heel fascism. Will the trivial Trump of Celebrity Apprentice and the New York tabloids prove to have provided juvenile cover for the rise of Herr Trump the remorseless crusher of dissent? Will he warm War College and white supremacist hearts and pad Big Carbon pocketbooks by declaring BLM activists, pipeline-fighters, prison-state opponents, serious trade unionists, and immigrant rights activists “terrorists”? We will find out soon enough.

Veterans are Key: Standing Rock Showdown

“Buy a gun,” an Iowa City radical tells me as Herr Trump’s installment looms closer: “we know how this movie turns out.” Well, shoot, there’s nothing wrong with equipping and training oneself reasonably and responsibly for self-defense against right-wing vigilantes these days.  That would seem almost like a necessity now in communities of color. But, of course, we the people are not going to take on the militarized American police state with small arms and have the slightest chance of prevailing. Force matters, of course, but to defeat that police-state we will need – among other things – people inside to defect and turn against it, to stand down, to refuse to target citizens even with so-called non-lethal repression tools and methods.  And that means difficult moral and political work.  Nobody is more equipped to reach out and do that work than the many U.S. military veterans who are now key members of the movements for social justice, peace, equality and sustainability.  And that’s why the coming remarkable gathering and confrontation in Standing Rock in two days – with two thousand veterans going to serve as human shields for the water-protectors while wearing the uniform of the U.S military – is potentially of great historical significance

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda?

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
Please see our red registration box at the bottom of this page

By Patrick J Buchanan / Antiwar.com

Our leader had another terrifying secret document, “made in Germany by Hitler’s government. …

“It is a plan to abolish all existing religions – Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish alike. … In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an international Nazi Church…

“In the place of the Bible, the words of ‘Mein Kampf’ will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols – the swastika and the naked sword. … A god of blood and iron will take the place of the God of love and mercy.”

The source of these astounding secret Nazi plans?

They were forgeries by British agents in New York operating under William Stephenson, Churchill’s “Man Called Intrepid,” whose assignment was to do whatever necessary to bring the U.S. into Britain’s war.

Though still very much a capitalist, FDR had a far more democratic vision for the world than current Western leaders.

FDR began his address by describing two German submarine attacks on U.S. destroyers Greer and Kearny, the later of which had been torpedoed with a loss of 11 American lives.

Said FDR: “We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot.”

The truth: Greer and Kearny had been tracking German subs for British planes dropping depth charges.

It was FDR who desperately wanted war with Germany, while, for all his crimes, Hitler desperately wanted to avoid war with the United States.

Said Cong. Clare Boothe Luce, FDR “lied us into war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it.”

By late 1941, most Americans still wanted to stay out of the war. They believed “lying British propaganda” about Belgian babies being tossed around on German bayonets had sucked us into World War I, from which the British Empire had benefited mightily.

What brings these episodes to mind is the wave of indignation sweeping this capital over “fake news” allegedly created by Vladimir Putin’s old KGB comrades, and regurgitated by U.S. individuals, websites and magazines that are anti-interventionist and anti-war.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman says the “propaganda and disinformation threat” against America is real, and we must “counter and combat it.” Congress is working up a $160 million State Department program.

Now, Americans should be on guard against “fake news” and foreign meddling in U.S. elections.

Yet it is often our own allies, like the Brits, and our own leaders who mislead and lie us into unnecessary wars. And is not meddling in the internal affairs, including the elections, of regimes we do not like, pretty much the job description of the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy?

History suggests it is our own War Party that bears watching.

Consider Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Who misled, deceived, and lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the “fake news” that sucked us into one of our country’s greatest strategic blunders?

Who lied for years about an Iranian nuclear weapons program, which almost dragged us into a war, before all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies debunked that propaganda in 2007 and 2011?

Yet, there are those, here and abroad, who insist that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program. Their goal: war with Iran.

Were we told the whole truth about the August 1964 incident involving North Vietnamese gunboats and U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy, which stampeded Congress into voting a near-unanimous resolution that led us into an eight-year war in Southeast Asia?

One can go back deeper into American history.

Cong. Abe Lincoln disbelieved in President Polk’s claim that the Mexican army had crossed the Rio Grande and “shed American blood upon American soil.” In his “spot” resolution, Lincoln demanded to know the exact spot where the atrocity had occurred that resulted in a U.S. army marching to Mexico City and relieving Mexico of half of her country.

Was Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt telling us the truth when he said of our blasted battleship in Havana harbor, “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards”?

No one ever proved that the Spanish caused the explosion.

Yet America got out of his war what T.R. wanted – Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, an empire of our own.

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

So said Winston Churchill, the grandmaster of fake news.

COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda?

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
Please see our red registration box at the bottom of this page