BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS

CHRIS KANTHAN—Since 2007, U.S. corporations have spent trillions of dollars on stock buybacks. In 2018 alone, they will spend $800 billion on this financial engineering tool (which has also led to a massive stock market bubble). They won’t use the billions to hire Americans, boost wages or innovate new products. Instead, the CEOs will buy yachts and tell you that Chinese or Mexicans stole your jobs.

Do the low-wage employees of Disneyland get any shares or stock options? A silly question, indeed.

Thus we have a situation where American employers ruthlessly exploit American workers. This isn’t a good model for a country. China and Mexico don’t make us poor. Corporate greed does.

AARON MATE—Although the identity Bellingcat-HuffPost UK’s dodgy source is unknown, the participation of a third outlet in this story – the UK state broadcaster BBC — offers a strong candidate.

Just weeks after Bellingcat’s debunked story appeared, the BBC released a podcast that attempted to advance the same bogus line. “Mayday” host Chloe Hadjimatheou repeated the Bellingcat letter’s falsehoods about the wood samples and the secret Syria-Russian acceptance of the OPCW’s final report. In yet another uncanny crossover, Hadjimatheou also falsely suggested that one of the OPCW whistleblowers received a payment from Wikileaks. In emails to Wikileaks and Whelan one month before Mayday was aired, Bellingcat’s Nick Waters made the same insinuation.

While her uncritical promotion of the Bellingcat-HuffPost UK letter’s debunked assertions was nothing new, Hadjimatheou did offer one significant contribution. To make her case against the whistleblowers, Hadjimatheou interviewed someone whom she claimed was an anonymous OPCW official operating behind the pseudonym, “Leon.” Hadjimatheou did not specify what role, if any, Leon played in the Douma investigation. The anonymous official also offered nothing of substance beyond what was already claimed in the bogus OPCW letter released by Bellingcat.

Editor’s Note: Russell Bentley, American expat and volunteer antifascist soldier in the struggle of Eastern Ukraine’s young republics of Donetsk and Lugansk against Kiev’s Nazi-infested, NATO-supported regime, has produced a moving video showing the people of Donetsk commemorating Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War. Simple and eloquent, the images say it all. I believe that decent people everywhere who understand these things, what WW2 meant to so many in terms of losses, pain and sacrifice,  will have a tough time holding back the tears. Paul Robeson’s singing is a most felicitous addition.—PG. 

When you consider Obama’s record after four years in office–a multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, the continuing “war on terror,” more civil liberties shredded, the Employee Free Choice Act abandoned, deportations on the rise, a deepening assault on public schools–the answer has to be no. The list of broken promises and betrayed hopes goes on and on, outweighing anything that could be described as progress.

CHRIS HEDGES INTERVIEW—This is a rather extraordinary interview for a variety of reasons. For one, Hedges is given space to say what he likes about the topics he is most interested in, chiefly the implosion and extreme toxicity of late-stage capitalism. Apparently, VICE News, which since this interview has become an almost complete propaganda tool for the Deep State, one designed to lure younger viewers wary of the mainstream engines of disinformation (CBS, CNN, NYTimes, Fox, etc.), felt they could not totally control Hedges, and they were right.