CITIZENS COUNTER-PROPAGANDA

MAS—During the entire day of November 11, the coup plotters put the lives of our leaders Evo and Álvaro at serious risk, first with public threats from police to proceed with operations to stop them and then with the closure of our air space, through administrative obstacles of the Bolivian Air Force, preventing the entry of the Mexican airplane that came to pick them up.

The Bolivian people are living terrible moments, with policemen and motorcyclists creating panic in the streets and with the military high command deciding to attack the people in the name of pacification, even preventing personalities, church and politicians from finding constitutional and democratic solutions to the crisis we are facing.

YASHA LEVINE—This week, the FBI unveiled charges against two former Twitter employees — one of whom is a Saudi citizen — accusing them of spying for Saudi Arabia. According to the feds, the two of them were being run by another Saudi national on behalf of Crown “Bone Saw” Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Reading the complaint, these “spies” come off as very inept. They did everything out in the open, had their activity logged, and even got caught by Twitter management.

PAUL STREET—Still, since the Yellow Jackets have risen up against capitalism in a popular and anti-capitalist movement., arch-capitalist FOX wasn’t eager to pay all that much more attention to the street-fighting men and women of France than did the Obama-Macronists at CNN and MSDNC. There’s a very simple reason I had to turn to the Internet to get any decent coverage and commentary on the yellow vests. The problems that have pushed ordinary French people into the streets and to support those ready to destroy bourgeois property are widely present – more present, in fact – in the United States.  The U.S. is more plagued than any other rich Western nation by the savage inequality (of both condition and opportunity), plutocracy, corruption, insecurity/precarity, and debasing soullessness of contemporary eco-cidal capitalism – and of a constitutional political set-up that is badly out of step with the needs of its embattled working-class majority. 

STRATEGIC CULTURE—More generally, the event has afforded US media the opportunity to proclaim the virtue of American military power in apparently bringing a notorious renegade “to justice”. The timing could not be more important. The nearly eight-year war in Syria has exposed the criminality of Washington and its NATO partners for fueling carnage. By contrast, the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies have been vindicated in their long-held claims that a criminal US-backed aggression using terrorist proxies has been thwarted.

MoA—The New York Times is now running a virtual public relations campiagn for the Deep State: “President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.”