CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped. This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if people’s votes are cast without a clear understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world. When their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to the electorate whatsoever.
CAPITALIST SICKNESS
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The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust
23 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Mass media punditry is divided on where to assign the blame for the plummet in public opinion of their work, with some blaming it on Russia and others blaming it on Donald Trump. Others, like a recent Forbes article titled “Restoring Public Trust In Technology And Media Is Infrastructure Investment” blame it on the internet. Still others, like a Washington Post article earlier this month titled “Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values” blame it on the people themselves.
The one thing they all seem to agree on is that it’s definitely not because the billionaire-controlled media are propaganda outlets which manipulate us constantly in conjunction with sociopathic government agencies to protect the oligarchic, imperialist status quo upon which the members of the billionaire class have built their respective kingdoms. It cannot possibly be because people sense that they are being lied to and are fed up with it.
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P. GREANVILLE—While the Covid emergency has detonated a fair number of scatter-brained conspiracies on the [illiterate] left and the right, many highly respectable observers of reality have voiced alarms and objections to the manner in which this global phenomenon has been handled, from its putative origins in China to its manipulation in Europe and the United States, where neoliberalism certainly showed its colors by proving that the capitalist elites are in no way overly concerned about the welfare of the populations under their control.
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GARY OLSON—We know, from Kenneth Flamm’s historical overview, “Creating the Computer,” that computers were born at public initiative and public expense. During the 1950s, the funding came from the taxpayer funded Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. Virtually everything was created at public expense and then gobbled up by enterprising opportunists like Gates. For example, the Pentagon was absolutely fixated on having a communication system that could survive a nuclear attack. The answer? The internet.
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Maupin: Is the empire really opting for peace? What’s behind the Afghanistan withdrawal?
12 minutes readCALEB MAUPIN—Watch this video with Caleb Maupin, arguing that the Biden admin, while seeming to retract US imperialism’s overt military tentacles (i.e., Afghanistan troop withdrawal), and singing tunes of peace and diplomacy with Russia and China while also ratcheting sanctions, may be trying to spark conflagrations by proxy in multiple areas—Ukraine, South China Sea/Taiwan, Syria and Iran, Xinjiang, etc.—so as to inflict both hybrid and kinetic war defeats on Moscow and Beijing. This type of strategic approach was originally recommended by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, both Trilateral Commission advisors to what Caleb (correctly in our view) identifies as the “ultra rich/managerial/long term” wing of the US capitalist system (think big oil, big tech, Rockefeller money, Wall Street, CIA/deep state and Democratic party and legacy media assets), that is the “more effective evil”, more sophisticated wing of global capitalism.