Dispatches from
STEPHEN LENDMAN
with blitz commentary by Patrice Greanville
John McCain disgraces the office he holds. He’s part of Washington’s lunatic fringe. He’s not one of Capitol Hill’s brightest, graduating near dead last in his 1958 Naval Academy class (894th out of 899 midshipmen). His public disservice shows it, hawkishly favoring wars of aggression against nonexistent enemies, denigrating Russia irresponsibly, perhaps pushing for direct confrontation – madness if it ever happens.

ADDENDUM
The Insidiousness of the Establishment Media
Blitz commentary by Patrice Greanville

The conformist, status-quo supporting pack mentality of the US media is historically well documented. The US public have long confronted a huge irony in the way they acquire their “news” about the world.  Simply stated, they are media rich but information poor, in fact deprived.  On any given day, the US media offer a much narrower spectrum of news and opinion about current events than Chile or Bolivia, let alone larger nations with a still truly diverse press, such as Italy, Spain, Britain and even Russia. This shameful lack of diversity is not just the result of the inexorable dynamics of monopoly under capitalism, but also a class question. The capitalist class—now a puny minority amounting to perhaps 0.00002% of the population, the “billionaires”—literally owns the media (“public” too, as the infiltration of PBS by corporate money has shown repeatedly), and naturally uses it to promote and defend its interests. Thus, despite their enormous numbers, the American media appear tediously uniform in topicality and viewpoint. Under such conditions, the people often confuse “numerosity” with “diversity”.

This feature is common and well illustrated below by CBS, for example, whose behaviour toward the “Russian [nonexistent] hack” is practically identical to the posture exhibited by its sister broadcast networks, cable news channels, and leading print media, all aligned with and taking their cues from the reigning political establishment (in this case Obama and the Democrats).  In all such instances where this story is “reported” the mode of expression is affirmative and conclusive from the headline on, “the Russians did it”, and the same accusation is voiced by myriad, supposedly different independent sources, thereby contributing to the idea that what is in effect a huge lie is actually irrefutable fact.

The “pack” phenomenon has been studied by radical social scientists and (in their more honorable days) decried by left liberals, like Mother Jones’ Adam Hochschild. Such observers have accurately pointed out the anti-democratic effect of such practice, inevitable under conditions of capitalist ownership of public media. In his pathbreaking essay The Packaged Consciousness, an essay that absolutely every American should read, Herbert Schiller (also an early colleague and supporter in my own media struggles and contributor to Cyrano’s Journal), a man widely regarded by his peers as one of the leading political analysts of mass communications in the 20th century (Vide The Mind Managers), denounced the myth of media diversity as an important and inherently devious prop for meaningless elections:

Though it cannot be verified, the odds are that the illusion of informational choice is more pervasive in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The illusion is sustained by a willingness, deliberately maintained by information controllers, to mistake abundance of media for diversity of content. It is easy to believe that a nation that has more than 6.700 commercial radio stations [1975], in excess of 700 commercial TV stations, 1,500 daily newspapers, hundreds of periodicals, a film industry that produces a couple of hundred new features a year, and a billion-dollar private book-publishing industry provides a rich variety of information and entertainment to its people.

The fact of the matter is that, except for a rather small and highly selective segment of the population who know what they are looking for and can therefore take advantage of the massive communications flow, most Americans are basically, though unconsciously, trapped in what amounts to a no-choice informational bind. True variety of opinion, as opposed to superficial differences, on foreign and domestic news or, for that matter, local community business, hardly exists in the media. This results essentially from the inherent identity of interests, material and, ideological, of property-holders (in this case, the private owners of the communications media), and from the monopolistic character of the communications industry in general. (H. Schiller, The Packaged Consciousness)

We should keep in mind that Schiller wrote the above long before the nation and the world had entered the current explosion of media and the proliferation of various platforms for “news channeling” and social commentary, chiefly due to the Internet revolution and the multiplication of multimodal information platforms, from iPhones to iPads, portable laptops and other devices.

PRESENTED AS FACT: “CIA: Russia tried to help Trump win election with hackings”

 PRESENTED AS FACT: Schumer, McCain call for probe of Russian influence (the “influence” is taken as already established.)

Published on Jan 5, 2017

http://democracynow.org – We are joined by Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. His latest article is headlined “WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived.” In it, he writes, “Any story that bolsters the prevailing D.C. orthodoxy on the Russia Threat, no matter how dubious, is spread far and wide. And then, as has happened so often, when the story turns out to be false or misleading, little or nothing is done to correct the deceitful effects.”

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: http://democracynow.org

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ABOVE IMAGE: EDITOR MARTIN BARON AND HIS NEWSROOM ACCOMPLICES AT THE WAPO. CREATING LIES AND DISTORTIONS TO FACILITATE UNENDING WARS AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE GLOBAL PLUTOCRACY. IRREFUTABLE.

Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

(updated below)

THE WASHINGTON POST on Friday reported a genuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. power system through an electrical grid in Vermont. The Post headline conveyed the seriousness of the threat:

The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyberattack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta — what is now routinely referred to as “Russian hacking of our election” — by referencing the code name revealed on Wednesday by the Obama administration when it announced sanctions on Russian officials: “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials.”

The Post article contained grave statements from Vermont officials of the type politicians love to issue after a terrorist attack to show they are tough and in control. The state’s Democratic governor, Peter Shumlin, said:

Vermonters and all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged that one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid, which we rely upon to support our quality of life, economy, health, and safety. This episode should highlight the urgent need for our federal government to vigorously pursue and put an end to this sort of Russian meddling.

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy [a typical liberal, and reputed “progressive”] issued a statement warning: “This is beyond hackers having electronic joy rides — this is now about trying to access utilities to potentially manipulate the grid and shut it down in the middle of winter. That is a direct threat to Vermont and we do not take it lightly.”

The article went on and on in that vein, with all the standard tactics used by the U.S. media for such stories: quoting anonymous national security officials, reviewing past acts of Russian treachery, and drawing the scariest possible conclusions (“‘The question remains: Are they in other systems and what was the intent?’ a U.S. official said”). 

The media reactions, as Alex Pfeiffer documents, were exactly what one would expect: hysterical, alarmist proclamations of Putin’s menacing evil:

Our Russian “friend” Putin attacked the U.S. power grid. https://t.co/iAneRgbuhF

— Brent Staples (@BrentNYT) December 31, 2016

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The Post’s story also predictably and very rapidly infected other large media outlets. Reuters thus told its readers around the world: “A malware code associated with Russian hackers has reportedly been detected within the system of a Vermont electric utility.”

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM here? It did not happen.

There was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid.” The truth was undramatic and banal. Burlington Electric, after receiving a Homeland Security notice sent to all U.S. utility companies about the malware code found in the DNC system, searched all its computers and found the code in a single laptop that was not connected to the electric grid. 

U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT) a “solid liberal” from a “solid progressive state” (Vermont), is clearly quite capable and eager to join the lynching mob when it comes to irresponsible warmongering. What are these guys good for? We’ll bet there will be no retraction or at best a piddling walkback from this guy, if any at all. Trust the liberals at your own peril.

Apparently, the Post did not even bother to contact the company before running its wildly sensationalistic claims, so Burlington Electric had to issue its own statement to the Burlington Free Press, which debunked the Post’s central claim (emphasis in original): “We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop NOT connected to our organization’s grid systems.”

So the key scary claim of the Post story — that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid — was false. All the alarmist tough-guy statements issued by political officials who believed the Post’s claim were based on fiction.

Even worse, there is zero evidence that Russian hackers were even responsible for the implanting of this malware on this single laptop. The fact that malware is “Russian-made” does not mean that only Russians can use it; indeed, like a lot of malware, it can be purchased (as Jeffrey Carr has pointed out in the DNC hacking context, assuming that Russian-made malware must have been used by Russians is as irrational as finding a Russian-made Kalishnikov AKM rifle at a crime scene and assuming the killer must be Russian).

As the actual truth emerged once the utility company issued its statement, the Post rushed to fix its embarrassment, beginning by dramatically changing its headline:

The headline is still absurd: They have no idea that this malware was placed by a “Russian operation” (though they would likely justify that by pointing out that they are just stenographically passing along what “officials say”). Moreover, nobody knows when this malware was put on this laptop, how, or by whom. But whatever else is true, the key claim — “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid” — has now been replaced by the claim that this all shows “risk to U.S. electrical grid.”

As journalists realized what did — and did not — actually happen here, the reaction was swift:

 

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THIS MATTERS NOT ONLY because one of the nation’s major newspapers once again published a wildly misleading, fearmongering story about Russia. It matters even more because it reflects the deeply irrational and ever-spiraling fever that is being cultivated in U.S. political discourse and culture about the threat posed by Moscow.

The Post has many excellent reporters and smart editors. They have produced many great stories this year. But this kind of blatantly irresponsible and sensationalist tabloid behavior — which tracks what they did when promoting that grotesque PropOrNot blacklist of U.S. news outlets accused of being Kremlin tools — is a byproduct of the Anything Goes mentality that now shapes mainstream discussion of Russia, Putin, and the Grave Threat to All Things Decent in America that they pose.

The level of groupthink, fearmongering, coercive peer pressure, and über-nationalism has not been seen since the halcyon days of 2002 and 2003. Indeed, the very same people who back then smeared anyone questioning official claims as Saddam sympathizers or stooges and left-wing un-American loons are back for their sequel, accusing anyone who expresses any skepticism toward claims about Russia of being Putin sympathizers and Kremlin operatives and stooges.

But it’s all severely exacerbated by social media in ways that we don’t yet fully understand. A large percentage of journalists sit on Twitter all day. It’s their primary window into the world. Because of how intense and raw the emotions still are from Trump’s defeat of Clinton, the social media benefits from tweeting and publishing unhinged claims about Trump and Putin are immense and immediate: thousands upon thousands of re-tweets, a rapidly building follower count, and huge amounts of traffic.

Indeed, the more unhinged it is, the greater the benefits are (see some of the most extreme examples here). That’s how otherwise rational people keep getting tricked into posting and re-tweeting and sharing extremely dubious stories that turn out to be false.

And that’s to say nothing of the non-utilitarian social pressures. It’s not news that coastal elites — particularly media and political figures — were and are virtually unified in their unbridled contempt for Trump. And we have seen over and over that any time there is a new Prime Foreign Villain consecrated — now Putin — U.S. media figures lead the campaign. As a result, any denunciation or accusation toward Trump or Russia, no matter how divorced from reason or devoid of facts, generates instant praise, while any questioning of it prompts instant peer-group denunciation, or worse.

Few things are more dangerous to the journalistic function than groupthink, and few instruments have been invented that foster and reinforce groupthink like social media, particularly Twitter, the platform most used by journalists. That’s a phenomenon that merits far more study, but examples like this one highlight the dynamic.

In this case, the effect is a constant ratcheting up of tensions between two nuclear-armed powers whose nuclear systems are still on hair-trigger alert and capable of catastrophic responses based on misunderstanding and misperception. Democrats and their media allies are rightly alarmed about the potential dangers of Trump’s bellicose posture toward China, but remarkably and recklessly indifferent to the dangers of what they themselves are doing here.

* * * * *

Those interested in a sober and rational discussion of the Russia hacking issue should read the following:

(1) Three posts by cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr: first, on the difficulty of proving attribution for any hacks; second, on the irrational claims on which the “Russia hacked the DNC” case is predicated; and third, on the woefully inadequate, evidence-free report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and FBI this week to justify sanctions against Russia.

(2) Yesterday’s Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi, who lived and worked for more than a decade in Russia, titled: “Something About This Russia Story Stinks.”

(3) An Atlantic article by David A. Graham on the politics and strategies of the sanctions imposed this week on Russia by Obama; I disagree with several of his claims, but the article is a rarity: a calm, sober, rational assessment of this debate.

Since it is so often distorted, permit me once again to underscore my own view on the broader Russia issue: Of course it is possible that Russia is responsible for these hacks, as this is perfectly consistent with (and far more mild than) what both Russia and the U.S. have done repeatedly for decades.

But given the stakes involved, along with the incentives for error and/or deceit, no rational person should be willing to embrace these accusations as Truth unless and until convincing evidence has been publicly presented for review, which most certainly has not yet happened. As the above articles demonstrate, this week’s proffered “evidence” — the U.S. government’s evidence-free report — should raise rather than dilute suspicions. It’s hard to understand how this desire for convincing evidence before acceptance of official claims could even be controversial, particularly among journalists.

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UPDATE: Just as The Guardian had to do just two days ago regarding its claim about WikiLeaks and Putin, the Washington Post has now added an editor’s note to its story acknowledging that its key claim was false:

Is it not very clear that journalistic standards are being casually dispensed with when the subject is Russia?

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

Glenn Greenwald✉glenn.greenwald@​theintercept.comt@ggreenwald

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OPEDS |  DEENA STRYKER

As usual, the media takes on the new American president one bite at a time, without seeing the big picture. Oh my, he appointed all those generals! Gee whiz, he put all those millionaires in charge of the departments!  My God, his kids are sitting in on high-level meetings! No, wait, his kids are organizing donations to ‘charities’ in return for access, just like the Clintons!

Actually, these events spell continuity: the people will be fed, while the elite runs the world, with no pretense of ‘democracy’.  Trump believes businessmen and women can run the world better than politicians with degrees in law and government.  More worryingly, he also supports white nationalism, as seen by his nomination of Steve Bannon as Chief White House Strategist, among others.

The reason for this goes beyond a universal desire to live among one’s own kind: at 16% of the world’s population, Caucasians are an ever-diminishing minority. At the same time, the modernity that white people created has left most of the world’s other peoples without work. On the very day that the perpetrator of a truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin was killed, RT aired a documentary centered on the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid where in 2010, a street vendor set himself on fire because the police were harassing him, igniting the Arab Spring. Since then, rather than idling away their lives, many young people have undertaken the perilous journey to Europe, seen as an El Dorado. Once there, however, they discover that they are not welcome, and that its attractions are beyond their reach. The twenty-four year-old Berlin terrorist had been one of those.

Neither the US Alt right nor Europe’s New Right have shown how eliminating multiculturalism (the attempt by white nations to integrate refugees from non-white nations) will solve the problem of their global minority status. Their capitalist culture does not include the preference for peace over war that is a fundamental (true) socialist meme. Very differently, the Russian President’s plan, reflecting the socialist tradition he grew up in, is for each nation be alone in its home, while entertaining peaceful, cooperative relations with all others.

Donald Trump believes that good relations with Russia are a better way to secure access to its mineral wealth than war, as shown in the appointment for Secretary of State Exxon Mobil’s CEO, who has pioneered that access. However, he does not yet realize that Vladimir Putin’s plan to protect Caucasians includes building long term relationships with the other major world races, starting with China. Trump is ready to take on the Middle Kingdom (as well as Iran, based on race and religion rather than on the nuclear deal) as if their ties to Russia were irrelevant.

Vladimir Putin will invite him to accept a multi-polar world in which American hegemony is replaced by regional power centers currently defined around the left-leaning but still quite precarious BRICS: Russia, China, India, South Africa and Brazil, and a Muslim nation, probably left-leaning Iran—in objective terms—rather than ultraright-leaning, utterly corrupt Saudi Arabia, because the former wants to resolve the Sunni-Shia divide while the latter exacerbates it.

In the lead-up to the inauguration, Donald Trump is not the only one who has a lot to learn about the world: most Americans voters do too, starting with the real nature of the Sunni-Shia divide, to be spelled out in another article.

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Kuntzman—who last gained slight internet fame after he insisted that firing off a few rounds from an AR-15 gave him “a temporary form of PTSD”—appears to be enjoying his 15 minutes. “Apologize, Russia?” Kuntzman mugged. “Only if you go first and apologize for Putin’s thuggery.” Such bravery. Or at least we could pretend it was, if he didn’t go on immediately afterwards to backpedal:  

Make no mistake: I condemn violence in all forms. My article only sought to explain the assassination and put it in the current context.

But wait—aside from support for the assassin being the logical implication of comparing Putin to Hitler and the Russian bombing campaign to the Holocaust, he expressly defended the killing on Twitter. On Monday, he tweeted out his initial hot take with the words, “Wherein I make a case for political assassinations … when the victim works for Putin or Hitler, that is.” The case for political assassinations: Kuntzman is unequivocally arguing in favor of what the assassin did.

In defending himself on social media, Kuntzman time and again shows he’s far more concerned with grandstanding than engaging, even clumsily referring to the gunman as Syrian (he is, of course, Turkish) in one of his responses.

The reality is, Kuntzman has a superficial understanding of the conflict in Syria, has a separate bone to pick with Russia, and cheaply used the former to demagogue the latter. In scores of pieces written over his four years at the Daily News, Kuntzman has, until Monday, never once written about the Syrian conflict. (The one mention of the word “Syria” in his writings came when he quoted his Trump-supporting father blaming Democrats for “allowing the Russians into Syria”—8/2/16.)

Kuntzman: a sleazy hatchet man for the empire, and shockingly ignorant about the whole incident, erroneously calling the murderer “a Syrian”.

That’s correct—what he now insists is a genocide unfolding before our eyes, so morally urgent it justifies gunning down diplomats, isn’t something he once felt the need to highlight to his paper’s hundreds of thousands of readers. Like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who spent weeks advocating the bombing of Libya in 2011 only to never write about Libya again, Kuntzman’s bleeding heart stops and starts at the whims of the US national security state.

This speaks to what I sometimes refer to as “The North Korea Law of Journalism,” which states that editorial standards are inversely proportional to a country’s standing with the US State Department. Because relations with Russia are so frayed right now, US journalists and pundits can basically report or say anything they want. Despite the abhorrent human rights records of US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia—to say nothing of the United States itself—one would never read a columnist advocating the murder of their diplomats in the pages of a major American paper.

Kuntzman, without ever explaining himself, goes full Godwin, asserting Putin as the moral equivalent of Hitler without ever laying out how this moral calculus was arrived at. After equating Karlov’s Turkish killer with Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish student who assassinated Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath in France in 1938, Kuntzman insisted Russia’s undefined Nazi status made all Russia public servants fair game:

Karlov’s job in Turkey was to ease tensions over Russia’s atrocities in Syria and its incursions inside Turkey itself — meaning his job was to enable and normalize Vladimir Putin. Given that role, he wasn’t a diplomat, but a soldier, and his death is the same whether it came on a battlefield outside Aleppo or in an art gallery in Ankara.

The logical follow up to this is: Does this apply to all countries who commit war crimes? To US diplomats? If so, doesn’t it also render virtually all modern diplomacy impossible? Such glaring holes in his argument are never addressed.

They’re not addressed because, like many Western pundits, he is not serious about having a discussion on Syria—or how to mitigate its horrors—he’s only interested it in using it as a proxy for other geopolitical grievances. He has never written about it before Monday, and will likely never write about after this spat is over. Syria, and its countless victims, are simply a moral bludgeon to be wielded when scoring points against US enemies and, as with others before, he will likely drop the subject once these aims are achieved.

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EDITOR’S NOTE:
Mortimer Zuckerman: The elitist tycoon that enables Kuntzmann and his disgusting posturing.

Mort  Zuckerman has the smarts and elite credentials (as evidenced by his Harvard pedigree, etc.), but lacks the elementary morality to do something decent in this world with all that accumulated power, like opposing barbaric wars instead of fostering them. 

Mortimer Benjamin “Mort” Zuckerman (born June 4, 1937)^[2] is a Canadian-born American media proprietor, magazine editor, and investor. He is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO of Boston Properties, one of the largest real estate investment trustsin the United States. Zuckerman is also the owner and publisher of the New York Daily News and of U.S. News & World Report, where he serves as editor-in-chief. He formerly owned The Atlantic and Fast Company. His personal net worth is estimated at $2.7 billion.^[3]

Zuckerman was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the son of Esther and Abraham Zuckerman, who owned a tobacco and candy store.^[4][5] His family was Jewish, and his grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi.^[6] Zuckerman entered McGill University at the age of 16.^[7]He graduated from McGill with a BA in 1957 and a BCL in 1961, although he never took the bar exam.^[8] That same year, Zuckerman entered the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an MBA degree with a distinction of honor. In 1962, he received an LLM degree from Harvard Law School. After graduating, Zuckerman remained at Harvard Business School as an associate professor for nine years. He also taught at Yale University. Zuckerman spent seven years at the real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, where he rose to the position of senior vice president and chief financial officer.^[9]
(Wikipedia)

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