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by Dean Baker
By “wiser,” the Washington Post (3/19/18) means embracing “trims to entitlements.” And by “trims,” they mean taking trillions of dollars from the elderly.
It’s hard not to have a certain attachment to the Washington Post‘s longstanding crusade against Social Security and Medicare. After all, it has been pushing for cuts to these programs at least since I came to town in 1992. They did in the high-deficit years of the early 1990s, the boom times of the late 1990s, the housing bubble years of the 2000s and through the Great Recession. The Post calling for cuts to these programs is pretty much as predictable as the sun coming up. So this morning’s call for “reform” (3/19/18) is a bit like the morning coffee, although somewhat less pleasant.
At the most basic level, you sort of have to love the Post criticizing politicians for not wanting to go on record for cuts to these programs, even when the editorial writers, who don’t have to run for office, are scared to say what they actually want, and instead use the euphemism “reform” when they mean cuts. But the substance is also a bit hard to take.
Suppose we get to the years when these programs face a shortfall and simply raise taxes enough to meet the tab. Yes, this would mean a hit to workers at the time, and would be unpopular. But since the programs are hugely popular, there quite likely would be public support for higher taxes, precisely because of the demographics described in the Post:
That is, 21 percent of the entire population will be on Medicare, Social Security or, in most cases, both. Just five years thereafter, in 2035, the number of 65-and-overs will surpass the number of Americans under 18 for the first time in the nation’s history.
Would it be a disaster if we had to raise taxes to pay for these programs? Well, we raised taxes by amounts comparable to the projected shortfalls in the decades of the ’60s, the ’70s and the ’80s, so tax increases have precedents.
It’s also important to keep in mind that average wages are projected to be more than 25 percent higher in 2035 than they are today. This means that after-tax wages would be more than 20 percent higher in 2035 even if we raised the payroll tax by 3 percentage points. (I’m not saying this is the best way to close the projected shortfall, just pointing out the arithmetic.)
People can rightly make the objection that most workers have not seen much gain in wages over the last four decades, as most of the benefits from growth have gone to high-end earners like CEOs, Wall Street types and upscale professionals like doctors and lawyers. That’s an important point, but that would suggest we focus on policies to reverse this upward redistribution, which has cost workers hugely more than any remotely plausible increase in the payroll tax. (Yes, this is yet another pitch for my [free] book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.)
If the Post were interested in free trade, we could also do a lot to directly reduce the cost of Medicare and Medicaid by bringing in more foreign doctors and ending patent monopoly financing of prescription drug research. But we know the Post is only interested in cutting the wages and benefits for ordinary workers, not doing anything that would jeopardize the incomes of rich people.
Finally, people should be completely disgusted by hearing for cuts in these programs from a paper whose austerity policies have literally cost the country trillions of dollars in wages over the last decade. Maybe if Post editorialists acknowledged their mistake, their ideas might deserve an audience, but surely not now.
A version of this post appeared on the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s blog Beat the Press (3/19/18).
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter@washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
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Neocon Max Boot now says it’s better for the Syrian people if Assad stays in power. But we still can’t get the American left to come to its senses about Syria.
Louis Proyect says in Counterpunch that the suffering coming out of East Ghouta is “on a massive scale reminiscent of Leningrad in 1941.”
According to Wiki, a million and a half people died during the Leningrad siege. According to the authoritative-sounding Syrian Observatory for Human Rights -- one anti-Assad guy in a Coventry flat, relying mostly on reports from anti-Assad fighters -- 1,000 people have been killed in East Ghouta, horrible to be sure but not Leningrad. In Leningrad, people were reduced to cannibalism. There was cannibalism in Syria in 2013: a commander for the left's beloved Free Syrian Army cut the lungs out of a Syrian Army soldier and ate them on camera. A “moderate” rebel eminently worthy of CIA dollars -- and spicy recipes.
While bringing up Lou-dicrous comparisons to 1941 Leningrad, Proyect fails to mention the US-destroyed Raqqa and Mosul from which dead bodies are still being found and dragged out of the rubble. Rest assured that the Great Satan will not rebuild those cities as Assad is doing with Palmyra and Aleppo. To the colonized mind of the American left, the crimes of America’s enemies are always worse and more worth talking about than the crimes of America itself. US airstrikes were responsible for most of the 40,000 dead civilians in Mosul and over 3,000 in Raqqa.
Continues below editor's note.
The Jackals' Choir: Western "news" networks gang up to sing the same tune, accusing Syria and Russia of crimes against humanity. Hypocrisy has never strutted around so impudently.
2. By ABC News (US)
Published on Feb 23, 2018
Syrian government's offensive has escalated humanitarian crisis, warns U.N. as aid fails to reach people.
3. By Star TV —complete propaganda, using staged material furnished by the notoriously spurious White Helmets organisation. Notice the professional production value, including the Hollywood sound track.
4. By CBS/ Face the Nation
Published on Feb 25, 2018
5. By AlJazeera (owned by the Qatari government, one of the US-affiliated Gulf tyrannies supporting the overthrow of Pres. Assad and Syria's dismemberment.
The Syrian government, backed by its key ally Russia, has been pounding rebel-held areas in Syria. Rescue workers are scrambling to keep up with the onslaught in Idlib and the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta. At least 138 people have been killed in the last 48 hours - activists say most of them are civilians. Al Jazeera's Bernard Smith reports.
6. By Strait Times (Reuters)
7. The Washington Post (WP)
Published on Feb 8, 2018
The WaPo is literally owned by Jeff Bezos, richest man on earth and heavy contractor with the CIA. Guess how impartial this rag is going to be.
Text by Randy Shields resumes here.
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]y the way, two thirds of the casualties in Syria have been Syrian soldiers and anti-government fighters. The anti-Assad left and the mockingbird media would have us believe that all 345,000 Syrian deaths have been civilians who Assad and Putin deliberately, personally and exclusively killed. The presstitutes tell us how unpopular the Alawite Assad is while the entire world sees a Sunni majority army fighting to the death for him and the rest of Syria by killing off Wahhabist Sunni fanatics. Huh? (Syria has never been a “civil war” or a “sectarian conflict” -- it’s been a pre-planned destruction led by the US, piggy-backing on legitimate grievances of the Syrian working class.)
Interestingly, the anti-Syrian-government left never tells us the names of the armed opposition groups that it supports. Why? Is it because they are al-Qaeda offshoots? Is it because they are so tiny and few in number that they are inconsequential and/or the Syrian working class majority don't support them? Is it because they collaborated with the most regressive fundamentalist groups and/or got wiped out by them? The anti-Assad left seems to live in an ivory tower that got destroyed somewhere around 2012 -- they never say what should be done now.
Then [Louis] Proyect makes a false equivalency between Israel bombing Gaza in response to Hamas’ largely ineffectual rockets and the Syrian government bombing terrorists in East Ghouta who have been shelling Damascus for years with howitzers, mortars and GRAD rockets, killing and wounding thousands of civilians. Gazans are occupied and have legitimate rights under international law to resist, including violently.
Proyect quotes Counterpunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair that aerial bombing of cities is a war crime. I couldn’t agree more and I’ll raise you an aerial bombing of jungles also. And I think shooting a barrage of GRAD rockets into downtown Damascus is a war crime too. (What parts of war aren’t a crime?) So, where does that put us? It puts “us” safely and snugly in the belly of the beast. It puts the Syrian working class majority wanting its government to protect them from a minority of al-Qaeda metastases, funded and armed by the most reactionary regimes on earth, trying to win violently what they can’t win intellectually, socially or politically. The left just won’t cut its intellectual (“moderate” rebels) or political (Russia-gate) losses. And isn’t it interesting how so much of what the left does is in harmony with what the Pentagon, the CIA and the empire wants.
And since Proyect brought up Gaza and the Palestinians… It was the Palestinian Liwaa al-Quds force who stormed the al-Shaaher roundabout in Aleppo on September 24, 2016 which liberated the Handaraat Camp which turned around the battle for Aleppo which turned around the fight for Syria which is turning the American empire upside down with indispensable help from Russia and Iran. On that memorable September day eastern Aleppo residents were cheering on Liwwa al-Quds, Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Army as they hunted down and killed the members of the CIA-funded Nour al-Din al-Zenki who beheaded the 12-year-old Palestinian boy on film. The Syrian working class doesn’t actually like the 31 flavors of takfiri terrorists that some western leftists find so sweet.
In fact, during the December 2016 liberation of Aleppo, Syrians who lived for years under the rule of the fanatics were outraged that the Syrian army put the terrorists on buses to Idlib instead of killing them outright. A day later it was discovered that, just before they surrendered, the terrorists had summarily executed over 100 hostages and prisoners in basement prisons, including many Syrian soldiers.
Then Proyect attempts to make a case for the fanatics in East Ghouta by contrasting their poverty-stricken area with wealthier Damascus. A splendid insight. Now, how about you leading the charge of South Central against Beverly Hills? Oh, that’s right -- the impotent defeated American left has been on the run for 40 years and can only mind the business of the Assads, Saddams, Gadaffis and the ayatollahs -- all Israeli enemies and sitting atop large energy resources -- while “our” own government remains the chief engine of destruction in the world. Blessedly, the brown working classes of the world don’t give a flying fuck about what white western leftists think because they know they aren’t going to get any help from us. We’re irrelevant. Ask a Yemeni, ask a Honduran, ask a Congolese.
Christmas and New Years have been celebrated for the last two years in Aleppo and some semblance of normalcy is returning. Right now, in liberated areas of East Ghouta, people are welcoming the return of the Syrian Arab Army and telling the media how they've been used as human shields. In non-liberated areas, civilians are demonstrating against the terrorists and negotiating with them to leave. As with Aleppo in 2016, people in East Ghouta have been telling the SAA the locations of terrorist commanders, ammo dumps, jails and headquarters. Also, as with Aleppo, terrorists are sniping and shelling humanitarian corridors so civilians have difficulty leaving. There are also now civilians rallying in Raqqa for the occupying American monster to GTFO.
The future of the world is being fought for in Syria -- that’s why the propaganda of the mockingbird media has been unrelenting in its lies, hypocrisy, hysteria and demonization for seven years. Tel Aviv and Riyadh are going crazy and they are making sure Mordor-on-the-Potomac goes crazy with them. Putin is killing off America’s regime-changing terrorist mercenary army although, characteristically, he’s been too slow and cautious and Daesh has now set up shop in Afghanistan to harass, delay and destroy China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Assad and Putin are bringing a horrible end to the carnage in Syria as opposed to the Saudi, Israeli and US-preferred endless horror.
One last thing. People have not been paying proper attention to the written transcript of several lines toward the end of Putin’s March 1st address to the Russian Federal Assembly: “I should note that our military doctrine says Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons solely in response to a nuclear attack, or an attack with other weapons of mass destruction against the country or its allies, or an act of aggression against us with the use of conventional weapons that threaten the very existence of the state. This all is very clear and specific. As such, I see it is my duty to announce the following. Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, weapons of short, medium or any range at all, will be considered as a nuclear attack on this country. Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences.” (My emphasis.)
An attack with other weapons of mass destruction against Russia or its “allies.” Who does Russia consider allies? China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela? Turkey? The Donbass? Did Putin just tell the criminal neocon filth who rule America to never attack Iran and North Korea -- or ever attack the Syrian government again? No sane person in the world should test that out. Perhaps the previously mentioned neocon Max Boot is one of the first to “listen.”
The last time no one paid careful attention to Putin was his September 28, 2015 address to the United Nations where he condemned the US use of terrorists to further its regime change operations throughout the world, saying “We can no longer tolerate the current state of affairs in the world.” Two days later Russia began bombing hundreds of ISIS oil tankers in Syria that US satellite surveillance had been contentedly watching grow for years. Wake up, Americans. “Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences.” The three horses' asses of the apocalypse -- Trump, Satanyahoo and Saudi Clown Prince Mohammad bin Salman -- are leading the world to disaster.
Randy Shields, is a Marxist, vegan, writer and artist who believes that individuals should never stop challenging themselves to lead more compassionate and sustainable lives while working collectively to make those changes easier, faster and more widespread.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Things to ponder
While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union
By Mario Sousa
From Hitler to Hearst, from Conquest to Solzhenitsyn
Soviet battery at work in the Crimea. Their precision and obstinacy gained them German respect.
The history of the millions of people who were allegedly incarcerated and died in the labour camps of the Soviet Union and as a result of starvation during Stalin’s time.
INTRODUCTION
Stalin was the West's bete noire for generations: he was a firm believer in communism, unbribable and impossible to intimidate. He was at the USSR's helm during some of the toughest years of the young state, including the Nazi onslaught. He provided the capitalists with a perfect propaganda platform onto which they could and did pile up all manner of lies to scare people about communism and the Soviet Union.
In this world we live in, who can avoid hearing the terrible stories of suspected death and murders in the gulag labour camps of the Soviet Union? Who can avoid the stories of the millions who starved to death and the millions of oppositionists executed in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time? In the capitalist world these stories are repeated over and over again in books, newspapers, on the radio and television, and in films, and the mythical numbers of millions of victims of socialism have increased by leaps and bounds in the last 50 years.
But where in fact do these stories, and these figures, come from? Who is behind all this?
And another question: what truth is there in these stories? And what information is lying in the archives of the Soviet Union, formerly secret but opened up to historical research by Gorbachev in 1989? The authors of the myths always said that all their tales of millions having died in Stalin’s Soviet Union would be confirmed the day the archives were opened up. Is that what happened? Were they confirmed in fact?
The following article shows us where these stories of millions of deaths through hunger and in labour camps in Stalin’s Soviet Union originated and who is behind them.
The present author, after studying the reports of the research which has been done in the archives of the Soviet Union, is able to provide information in the form of concrete data about the real number of prisoners, the years they spent in prison and the real number of those who died and of those who were condemned to death in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The truth is quite different from the myth.
The present author, Mario Sousa is a member of the Communist Party in Sweden, KPML(r). The article was published in the Communist Party’s newspaper Proletären in April 1998.
There is a direct historical link running from: Hitler to Hearst, to Conquest, to Solzhenitsyn. In 1933 political change took place in Germany that were to leave their mark on world history for decades to come. On 30 January Hitler became prime minister and a new form of government, involving violence and disregard of the law, began to take shape. In order to consolidate their grip on power the Nazis called fresh elections for the 5th of March, using all propaganda means within their grasp to secure victory. A week before the elections, on 27 February, the Nazis set fire to parliament and accused the communists of being responsible. In the elections that followed, the Nazis secured 17.3 million votes and 288 deputies, about 48% of the electorate (in November they had secured 11.7 million votes and 196 deputies). Once the Communist Party was banned, the Nazis began to persecute the Social Democrats and the trade-union movement, and the first concentration camps began to fill up with all those left-wing men and women. In the meantime, Hitler’s power in parliament continued to grow, with the help of the right wing. On 24 March, Hitler caused a law to be passed by parliament which conferred on him absolute power to rule the country for 4 years without consulting parliament. From then on began the open persecution of the Jews, the first of whom began to enter the concentration camps where communists and left social-democrats were already being held. Hitler pressed ahead with his bid for absolute power, renouncing the 1918 international accords that had imposed restrictions on the arming and militarisation of Germany. Germany’s re-armament took place at great speed. This was the situation in the international political arena when the myths concerning those dying in the Soviet Union began to be put together.
The Ukraine as a German territory
At Hitler’s side in the German leadership was Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, the man in charge of inculcating the Nazi dream into the German people. This was a dream of a racially pure people living in a Greater Germany, a country with broad lebensraum, a wide space in which to live. One part of this lebensraum, an area to the east of Germany which was, indeed, far larger than Germany itself, had yet to be conquered and incorporated into the German nation. In 1925, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had already pointed to the Ukraine as an essential part of this German living space. The Ukraine and other regions of Eastern Europe needed to belong to the German nation so that they could be utilised in a ‘proper’ manner. According to Nazi propaganda, the Nazi sword would liberate this territory in order to make space for the German race. With German technology and German enterprise, the Ukraine would be transformed into an area producing cereals for Germany. But first the Germans had to liberate the Ukraine of its population of ‘inferior beings’ who, according to Nazi propaganda, would be put to work as a slave labour force in German homes, factories and fields - anywhere they were needed by the German economy.
The conquest of the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union would necessitate war against the Soviet Union, and this war had to be prepared well in advance. To this end the Nazi propaganda ministry, headed by Goebbels, began a campaign around a supposed genocide committed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, a dreadful period of catastrophic famine deliberately provoked by Stalin in order to force the peasantry to accept socialist policy. The purpose of the Nazi campaign was to prepare world public opinion for the ‘liberation’ of the Ukraine by German troops. Despite huge efforts and in spite of the fact that some of the German propaganda texts were published in the English press, the Nazi campaign around the supposed ‘genocide’ in the Ukraine was not very successful at the world level. It was clear that Hitler and Goebbels needed help in spreading their libelous rumours about the Soviet Union. That help they found in the USA.
William Hearst – Friend of Hitler
Son of a mining prospector turned newspaper tycoon, the towering Scot-Irish William Hearst (1.91 m) was one of the great anti-communist and raw imperialist scourges of the 20th century. His overt Nazi sympathies were logical.
William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the ‘father’ of the so-called ‘yellow press’, i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.
This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to ‘arrange’ matters. It is this which in fact characterises the ‘yellow press’: lies and ‘arranged’ atrocities served up as truth.
These lies of Hearst’s made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US’s first TV stations, BWAL – TV in Baltimore. Hearst’s newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years – on r issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler’s righthand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.
After his visit to Hitler, Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with ‘revelations’ about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union – murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!
The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine
The "discovery" of articulate and famous dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a boon for American anti-Soviet propaganda. Quirky and complex, Solzhenitsyn was an old-fashioned White Russian nationalist who eventually proved difficult to manage by the west, although his anti-Sovietism never waned.
One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine. This campaign began on 18 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American ‘6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union’. Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathiser, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine. The truth of the matter was altogether different. In fact what took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a major class struggle in which poor landless peasants had risen up against the rich landowners, the kulaks, and had begun a struggle for collectivisation, a struggle to form kolkhozes.a bit
This great class struggle, involving directly or indirectly some 120 million peasants, certainly gave rise to instability in agricultural production and food shortages in some regions. Lack of food did weaken people, which in turn led to an increase in the number falling victim to epidemic diseases. These diseases were at that time regrettably common throughout the world. Between 1918 and 1920 an epidemic of Spanish flu caused the death of 20 million people in the US and Europe, but nobody accused the governments of these countries of killing their own citizens. The fact is that there was nothing these government could do in the face of epidemics of this kind. It was only with the development of penicillin during the second world war, that it became possible for such epidemics to be effectively contained. This did not become generally available until towards the end of the 1940s.
The Hearst press articles asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine – a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists – went into graphic and lurid detail. The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union. This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union. In the wave of protests against the supposedly communist-provoked famine which the Western press unleashed, nobody was interested in listening to the Soviet Union’s denials and complete exposure of the Hearst press lies, a situation which prevailed from 1934 until 1987! For more than 50 years several generations of people the world over were brought up on a diet of these slanders to harbour a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union.
KEEP READING—
please download the complete article in PDF by clicking here.
BONUS VIDEO MATERIALS
The author offers a lecture on the same topic: CIA asset Robert Conquest's lies about socialism and USSR.
AND, WHAT IS A COMMUNIST? Communist have been slandered for over 100 years, with the bourgeois press and politicians attributing all manner of sinister and sordid motivations to their activism, including the absurd notion they want to acquire power, as if power for power's sake, or to line their pockets, was all that communists were after. In this video, Michael Parent puts such stupid and insidious notions to rest.
The present author, Mario Sousa is a member of the Communist Party in Sweden, KPML(r). The article was published in the Communist Party’s newspaper Proletären in April 1998.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Things to ponder
While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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In order to be a staff journalist, one must adhere to the propaganda-aims of the individual(s) (the employer) who control(s) the given ‘news’ medium. No newsmedia-owner hires ‘reporters’ or editors who report (or allow to be published) facts which contradict that owner’s (or controller’s — because this applies to ‘non-profits’ as well) central viewpoint. The employees are purely megaphones for their boss’s views. That’s what they were hired to be, and that’s what they are if they succeed in their profession and rise up the career-ladder in it. Anything that a staff journalist writes (or allows to be published, if that person is an editor) contradicting the owner’s views, counts against that employee, and increases his/her likelihood of being eliminated, or at least of being denied a deserved promotion (because not doing the person’s job for the employer). To be a staff ‘journalist’ is to be a ‘reporter’ for hire, who is willing to exclude reporting whatever facts the owner wants his/her audience not to know (which can be some very important things, such as that the President is clearly lying to say that solid evidence exists that “Saddam’s WMD” still exist). Unfortunately, almost all media-owners have an agenda that overrides truth — they don’t obtain the huge funding that’s necessary to build audience-share if they aren’t backed by big money (billionaire investors, and mega-corporate advertisers) to begin with. Opposing the big money is a sure pathway to obscurity in the field of ‘journalism’; and ‘journalism’ prizes (especially on international-news or other major stories) are pig’s lipstick, far more than indications of journalistic competence. The best journalists, and news-sites, are low-budget, basically volunteer operations (such as you now are reading, and wikileaks). The big corporations don’t own them, and don’t advertise in them — and so, don’t control them. A good example of this is the virtually uniform failure of the U.S.’news’ media (including all the Pulitzer people) to have reported the undeniable and simple — and supremely important — fact that U.S. President George W. Bush was lying to assert that he possessed solid evidence that ‘Saddam’s WMD’ still existed, and solid evidence that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his WMD stockpiles — and for him to have asserted, for example, that “a report came out of the Atomic – the IAEA that they [Iraq] were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need” to invade Iraq without allowing international weapons-inspectors to complete any new investigation into the matter. But that ‘IAEA’ ‘report’ was actually fictitious — it didn’t even exist. KEY: WaPo: Washington Post • NYT: New York Times • LAT: Los Angeles Times • ME= Middle East [dropcap]T[/dropcap]hat 7 September 2002 lie by Bush was stenographically reported to the (unfortunately) trusting public, by the many propaganda-organizations (called ‘news’media) — none of which (except the small Washington Times) reported its blatant falsehood — none of them published to readers that, as the IAEA asserted, “There’s never been a report like that [which Bush alleged] issued from this agency.” That ‘IAEA report’ Bush referenced, had simply been cooked-up by George W. Bush and endorsed by Tony Blair. Like one great journalist bannered, “Everyone Knew that Iraq Didn’t Have WMDs”. Among those “Everyone” was Tony Blair himself, but his participation in Bush’s hoax would already have been obvious by no later than 7 September 2002, when Prime Minister Blair was accompanying U.S. President Bush as Bush was fabricating on-the-spot that lie, and when Blair failed to ‘correct’ what the U.S. President had just asserted. Instead, Blair reaffirmed it. They were two gangsters (just ask the Iraqis whether they were gangsters): Bush, and Bush’s lapdog Blair, destroyed Iraq. They are war-criminals, though unprosecuted (because the U.S. aristocracy and the ones that subordinate themselves to it, prohibit any of themselves or their agents from being prosecuted). As Craig Murray blogged in Britain, the UK’s aristocracy joined America’s aristocracy in deep-sixing the truth on this crucial matter; and, furthermore, Barack Obama continued the rabid lying for war, after George W. Bush had finished being America’s Liar-in-Chief. Obama was merely a more-articulate and cunning version of Bush, in blackface (which won him almost solid support from Blacks, and from ‘liberals’). So, Obama gave us Libya instead of Iraq; and Syria instead of Afghanistan; and Yemen as the Sauds’ playground for their American-made weapons and supported by their U.S. trainers — and also civil war and ethnic cleansing in Ukraine instead of peace with Russia (whose longest European border is the one it shares with Ukraine). And, instead of an economic crash, Obama gave us (besides his pretty rhetoric of ‘concern’ about the elite’s injustices that his actual actions did nothing to punish) increased economic inequality, flatlined wages, and soaring poverty with lots of new burger-flipping jobs. How much are such realities being reported (except by Bernie Sanders, whom the Clinton-Obama Democratic Party cheated out of the nomination, by manipulating the primaries and relying — and feeding — upon Democratic suckers, on Election Day)? Lies are not permitted to be called ‘lies’, unless they are made by the ‘enemy’ (such as Putin), even if the ‘enemy’ isn’t really the one who is lying. For example, did the ‘news’ media report that what overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President in February 2014 was no such thing as “democracy demonstrations” which had begun spontaneously in Ukraine after President Yanukovych on 20 November 2013 rejected the EU’s trade offer (which offer would actually have cost Ukraine $160 billion — a cost that was never reported in the U.S. press), but was instead a bloody barbaric coup which Obama’s team had started planning way back in 2011? Did America’s (and ’The West’s’) ’news’ media report this U.S. coup in Ukraine — or even that it WAS a “coup” (or even that it had been one) and that it was (as the head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor called it when speaking only to a non-U.S. audience) “the most blatant coup in history”? None of them reported any of that. But now the hostilities against Russia — including the sanctions, and the NATO buildup — are based upon those lies, those potentially WW-III-generating libels, against Russia. Did they report that the economic sanctions and NATO buildup against Russia that the Obama regime ‘justified’ by ‘Putin’s conquest’ of Crimea was actually forced upon Russia, because it’s next door to Ukraine — forced by Obama’s land-grab of Ukraine via a U.S.-imposed coup in Ukraine (as a hoped-for U.S. missile-base against Russia, a mere five minutes missile-flight to Moscow)? And did they report that this aggressive coup overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President, whom 75% of Crimeans had voted for? And did they report that Crimea had been a state in Russia until 1954 when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine? Obama insisted that Nikita Khrushchev’s imposed transfer of Crimea to Ukraine remain permanently — that Crimea remain as a state in Ukraine, no matter what the Crimean people wanted. What would your own local state do if the federal government were taken over by a bloody coup from an enemy power, and threw out the President whom 75% of the people in your state had voted? Obama was opposed to the right of self-determination of peoples when it referred to Crimeans, but not when it referred to the Scotch, or to the Catalans. And he also opposed democracy in Syria. Was any of that reported in the U.S. ’news’ media? Or will Americans first learn about it in the history books — if even then? Did the ‘news’ media report that the Obama-gang’s entire case against Russia is based upon lies (even if some of the things that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has said have also been lies)? Did they report that Obama’s charges that Russia is the world’s #1 ‘aggressor’-nation are rabid lies from the world’s actual #1-aggressor-nation? Volunteer journalists (such as “bloggers”) can report these things; well-paid ‘journalists’ cannot and do not. In true George Orwell 1984 fashion, reporting these things is called ‘fake news’, by the actual fake-news masters — and unfortunately suckers believe them. Even on serious domestic-policy news, the prestigious ‘news’ media pump the aristocracy’s lies, and inculcate the desired (by the super-wealthy) misconceptions. Thus, the question for many young reporters nowadays is: “Will I be bad enough to keep a good job, or maybe even atrocious enough to advance in it?” As for the consumers of journalism, there is no substitute for a reader’s demanding that every news-report include mentioning each of its sources, and that those sources are 100% reliable ones on the matter alleged, and that the report link directly to the root-source and not to any mere paraphrase of what it allegedly says. In a democracy, the public don’t trust the mere allegations from ‘authority’. Because, to trust ‘authority’ (note: this refers to fake authorities, not to methodologically careful scientific research) is to invite fascist rule, aggressive wars, and mass-exploitation. (Only a few investigative journalists with a long record of proven-accuracy, such as Seymour Hersh, are exceptions, whom a reader can reasonablyaccept upon the basis of unnamed, private, sources. Such veteran, proven, journalists are rare.) Getting to the truth, and staying with it, requires constant vigilance and a constantly open mind to the possibility that there are falsehoods in one’s own beliefs. If a person isn’t skeptical of his own beliefs, then he becomes a waste-dump of falsehoods, instead of an accumulator of truths — a truly (i.e., truthfully) educated person. Even today, Republicans approve of George W. Bush, and Democrats approve of Barack Obama. Democracy is thus virtually impossible in America, because both sides are polluted by the same aristocracy. The aristocracy controls both Parties. And the government. And the press. And that’s the problem. Nobody has figured out a solution for it. And America’s press won’t allow even its existence to be published. So, the public cannot understand why they cannot understand. What can be done to solve this problem that the press hide from the public? Might there be a way for some members of the press to become part of the solution, and no longer part of the problem? Would that even be possible? If not, then how can the public ever come to understand what the problem is?BE SURE TO PASS OUR ARTICLES ON TO KIN, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES
This essay should be required reading by all Americans, and especially by the young aspiring to become "journalists." We doubt it will be read, discussed or even seen in the nation's "J schools", where the aim, as those of a vocational school rather than truly higher education, is to prepare personnel to staff the corporate media machinery as it currently exists, and acceptance and promotion of the careerist goals of most students is left uncriticized.This essay was first published on Jan 19, 2017. It is republished here due to its urgent relevance to current events.
Below, a sampling of well known men and women who, posing as "journalists", have served their masters' interests well. (We also include a few of the "invisible" owners, since they bear primary responsibility for the malefactions of their hirelings.) The rule, as Eric Zuesse so accurately (and scathingly) notes, is to carry out and implement the ideological goals of the media owner(s) for whom they work, but such views are also invariably congruent with and embedded in the broader systemic goal of upholding the legitimacy of the capitalist status quo and its international aims (imperialism). In that sense all these people, conceits aside, look upon journalism as simply a competitive career platform for personal advancement. This is just a very small sample in a very crowded but richly rewarding field, as the constellation of disinformers also includes large numbers of personnel from think tanks, academia, politicians, the military, intelligence agencies, corporations, churches, and the world of entertainment. All certifiable "establishmentarians."—PG
David Ignatius, WaPo Senior Columnist
Dean Baquet, NYT Editor
Brian Williams, NBC Media critter, onetime Network Anchor
Marty Baron, WaPo Editor in Chief
Jeff Bezos, WaPo owner, also of Amazon, and close CIA collaborator. Richest man in the world ($100 bn+)
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., current NYT publisher.
Wolf Blitzer, CNN, Network Anchor
Scott Pelley, CBS, Network Anchor
Leslie Stahl, CBS 60 Minutes
Norah O'Donnell, CBS This Morning
Dan Rather & Steve Kroft, associated with CBS 60 Minutes
Leslie Moonves, Chairman of the Board, President & CEO of CBS. ($300 MM)
Bill O'Reilly, Fox, Resident provocateur
Bob Schieffer, CBS
Charlie Rose, CBS/PBS,
in limbo due to #metoo allegations
Chuck Todd, NBC, Host, Meet the Press
Clarissa Ward, CBS, foreign correspondent
David Muir, ABC Network Anchor
David Gregory, NBC
Elizabeth Palmer, CBS, foreign correspondent (ME)
Jeff Fager, CBS 60 Minustes, Producer
Major Garrett, CBS White House correspondent
Holly Williams, CBS Correspondent (ME)
Diane Sawyer, ABC
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.About the author
What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?
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