New York Times stokes anti-Russia campaign to promote Facebook, Twitter censorship

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By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org
Dateline: 12 September 2017

he New York Times has mounted a concerted campaign promoting a crackdown on political expression on social media on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of Russian government interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

In conjunction with a public statement by Facebook last Wednesday on political advertising allegedly originating in Russia, the Times published a sensationalist “investigative” report titled “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” an op-ed piece indicting Facebook for failing to exercise greater censorship of political content and an editorial Saturday touching on the same themes.

Facebook briefed members of both the Senate and House intelligence committees on its findings on September 6. It said it found $50,000 in spending on 2,200 “potentially politically related” ads “that might have originated in Russia” over a two-year period beginning in June 2015. It added that this included Facebook accounts and pages “with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort,” including “accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian.”

The vast majority of the ads, Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos added, “didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate,” but rather appeared to focus on amplifying “divisive social and political messages.”

The testimony was seized upon by Democratic politicians attempting to promote the theme of Russia meddling in the US elections in support of Trump. Representative Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the highly ambiguous Facebook findings “deeply disturbing and yet fully consistent with the unclassified assessment of the intelligence committee.”

The Times “investigation” was as weak in its substantiation of a Russian government operation to influence the 2016 presidential election as the Facebook report, but far more inflammatory.

It described an “unprecedented foreign intervention in American democracy” and a “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.”

It repeated the unproven allegations that Russia was responsible for the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails exposing the party leadership’s attempts to sabotage the presidential campaign of self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, while accusing Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik of having “battered” Hillary Clinton with a “fire hose of stories, true, false and in between.”

The story focuses, however, on the alleged Russian use of Facebook and Twitter, darkly accusing the two companies of failing to prevent themselves from “being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.”

The “evidence” uncovered by the Times consisted of linking “suspect” Facebook accounts, since taken down by the company, that posted material linking to a website, DCLeaks.com, that published hacked emails from billionaire financier and Democratic Party donor George Soros, a former NATO commander, and Democratic as well as Republican functionaries. With no substantiation, the newspaper claims that “United States intelligence concluded” that the site was a creation of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.

The article also accuses Russia of exploiting Twitter, using “hundreds of accounts” for “posting anti-Clinton messages and promoting leaked material.”

It further charges that the alleged Russian campaign employed “automated Twitter bots, which send out tweets according to built-in instruction.”

According to Twitter’s own estimate, there are some 48 million such bots on Twitter, and they accounted for fully 19 percent of all election-related tweets during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Times report acknowledges that it investigated Twitter accounts identified as “Kremlin trolls” to discover that there were real people behind them with no ties to the Russian government. It quoted one of them, Marilyn Justice, 66, from Nova Scotia, who told the newspaper she believed that “Hillary’s a warmonger” and that she was hostile to the anti-Russian bias in the Western media. Another so-called “troll” turned out to be a web producer in Zurich, who expressed sharp disagreement with Western narratives on the Ukraine and Syria.

The existence of such views, the Times concluded was “a victory for Russia’s information war—that admirers of the Kremlin spread what American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.”

The Times followed up its “investigation” with an op-ed piece accusing Facebook of having “contributed to, and profited from, the erosion of democratic norms in the United States” by having allowed the posting of “anti-Hillary ads precisely aimed at Facebook users whose demographic profiles implied a vulnerability to political propaganda.”

It went on to comment: “Unfortunately, the range of potential responses to this problem is limited. The First Amendment grants broad protections to publishers like Facebook.”

The Times editorial published Saturday questions whether “any federal agency is focused on” the alleged “problems” uncovered in the newspaper’s report: “foreign intervention through social media to feed partisan anger and suspicion in a polarized nation.”

There is a farcical element to the Times exposé. The idea that the spending of $50,000, vaguely linked to Russia, on Facebook ads over a two-year period undermined US elections in which total spending is estimated at roughly $7 billion is ludicrous.

Whatever actions may have been taken by the government of Vladimir Putin to promote the international interests of Russia’s ruling oligarchy, Moscow’s alleged Internet activities pale in comparison to the unrelenting campaigns mounted by US government agencies, from the CIA to the Pentagon and the National Endowment for Democracy, to rig foreign elections, engineer regime change operations and militarily destroy entire countries. As the former US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland proudly acknowledged, Washington sunk some $5 billion into promoting pro-Western regime change in Ukraine.

Even more preposterous is the attempt to attribute the sharp social tensions and intense political antagonisms that are ripping apart the seams of American society to Russian propaganda. Both are the product of the crisis of American capitalism, characterized above all by the uninterrupted growth of social inequality.

There is, however, a sinister and deadly serious content to the campaign by the Times editorial board, which functions as a reliable conduit for CIA propaganda. It has joined its long-running campaign around allegations of Russian interference in the US election with the demand for a crackdown on political expression on social media.

The two are inextricably linked. Underlying the Times campaign around Moscow’s supposed assault on the “integrity of American democracy” lies the political agenda of powerful factions within the US ruling establishment, which are demanding the continuation and intensification of the drive toward regime change in, and military confrontation with, Russia.

The preparations for war abroad are inevitably accompanied by the growth of censorship and political repression at home. The Times ’ criticisms of Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding, these corporations, along with Google, are collaborating closely with the US government and its intelligence agencies in the attempt to suppress freedom of speech and thought and censor anti-capitalist and anti-war reporting and opinion.

Under the phony banner of combating “fake news,” Google announced a change in its search algorithms last April that was clearly directed at slashing the readership of anti-war and left-wing websites, with the World Socialist Web Site being hit the hardest, losing more than two-thirds of its traffic from Google search results.

Facebook has followed suit, rolling out a similar announcement in June that it was updating its own News Feed algorithm aimed at “deprioritizing” posts viewed as “problematic” promoting “low quality content” “sensationalism” and “misinformation.”

The attempts by these multi-billion-dollar corporations to arrogate to the themselves the power of gatekeepers of the Internet, censoring content that conflicts with the interests of the American ruling oligarchy and its military-intelligence apparatus has aroused broad popular hostility. The WSWS has spearheaded the opposition to these attacks, with 3,500 people from more than 80 different countries signing it petition demanding that Google cease its censorship of the Internet.

About the Author

Bill Van Auken is a senior editorialist and geopolitical analyst with wsws.org, a socialist publication.

BILL VAN AUKEN The testimony was seized upon by Democratic politicians attempting to promote the theme of Russia meddling in the US elections in support of Trump. Representative Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the highly ambiguous Facebook findings “deeply disturbing and yet fully consistent with the unclassified assessment of the intelligence committee.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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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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There Is No Valid Counterpart to Right-Wing Violence (OpEd)

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Sonali Kolhatkar, Truthdig

Fifty years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in a speech he gave at Riverside Church in New York that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” is “my own government.” Under the leadership of Donald Trump, that statement is perhaps truer today than ever before. The president has signaled time and again that he accepts the use of violence as a tool on the individual, departmental, state and international levels. Worse, media outlets and politicians, including some liberal ones, are helping to distort the narrative regarding which side of the political spectrum actively promotes violence.

The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and other mainstream media outlets homed in on some videotaped instances of black-clad antifa (anti-fascist) protesters beating and chasing off right-wing activists in Berkeley, Calif., last weekend. Trump retweeted the words of notorious right-winger Dinesh D’Souza, who lauded that specific piece in the Post because, D’Souza said, it “admits the truth about where the violence is coming from.” And then, as if to ensure she would not be left out of the chorus of denunciations of anti-fascists, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi jumped on the bandwagon, proclaiming that the “violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.”

But Shane Bauer, the reporter who videotaped and witnessed the incidents in Berkeley, wrote in Mother Jones that media outlets took his video out of context and that the reporter who wrote the Washington Post story was not even present in Berkeley that day. Indeed, many confrontations between anti-fascist activists and the white supremacists ended without violence, but most media outlets reduced the counterprotest coverage to the rare instances of “antifa” activists baring their teeth, ignoring the broader context of the event—including actual instances of fascist protesters pepper-spraying crowds of people.

There was nowhere near the same level of reporting and denunciations of violence from politicians when right-wing extremists invaded Berkeley earlier this year. While the Los Angeles Times did report on the clashes in April, it did not attribute violence directly to the fascists, choosing to dub the entire rally “violent” rather than singling out one side or another. The report also attempted to equate left- and right-wing violence, even though it was the right-wingers that went on the offensive.

The Washington Post also published a piece in April about how a white supremacist was caught punching a woman in the face at the earlier Berkeley rally. But the paper decided to give the man in question the benefit of the doubt by headlining the article, “A white supremacist is accused of punching a protester.” However, when anti-fascists were seen as the perpetrators, the paper decided against nuance in its headline and became a propaganda tool in the hands of D’Souza and Trump.

Editor's Note: The issue of violence in tumultuous times is always a contentious one, with liberals usually favoring an absolutistic ban on any "violence" on the left, as if the left was looking for ways to pick a fight with the establishment and its goon allies, so we do not claim to have the answers to that, except that self defence is both individually and politically legitimate in the presence of imminent threats to life and property. This piece by Sonali tries to lay down a clearer perspective, and we appreciate her effort, although at times both her tone and witnesses are too much of a liberaloid muzak to our ears, like quoting the despicable Joshua Holland as a man with some moral capital to pass judgment on these issues. We live in troubled and confused times. Hope this article helps, however limitedly. Read with caution. Let us just remember here that it is always the right that—through its endless abuses, injustices, stubborn ignorance, brutality, and hypocrisy— creates the left.—PG

The debate over who is really violent ought not to be a debate at all. Trump, the GOP and the American right promote and glorify violence and weapons to such an extreme degree that there ought to be no question. But in this age of Orwellian “fake news,” it bears reiterating who is truly guilty of violence.

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly celebrated violent behavior, even offering to pay the legal fees of those who beat up protesters at his rallies. He has continued this behavior as president, most prominently when he reposted a video on Twitter showing him beating up on a wrestler who had CNN’s logo superimposed over his face. And, of course, his initial silence over the fascist brutality in Charlottesville, followed by multiple attempts to downplay the white supremacy on display or equate it with the behavior of the counterprotests, spoke volumes.

It was the president’s fans and allies who viciously beat Deandre Harris and killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. A post-election spike in hate crimesagainst Muslims was attributed to Trump supporters. And now one of the president’s prominent boosters, televangelist Jim Bakker, has gone on recordsaying there will be a “civil war” if Trump is impeached. Given how many firearms members of the far right have stockpiled, there is every reason to believe him. As Joshua Holland pointed out in The Nation, “[T]he overwhelming majority of serious political violence—not counting vandalism or punches thrown at protests, but violence with lethal intent—has come from the fringes of the right.”

All told, there are very few degrees of separation between the ideology of violent hate groups and current and former members of Trump’s Cabinet. As documented by John Nichols, Stephen Miller, Kris Kobach—and to an extent, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, who are no longer formally associated with the president but who will likely continue to operate from the outside to bolster his power—all advocate white supremacist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant views.

In addition to these obvious sources of violence on the right are those we tend to take for granted, such as how the right actively promotes state violence against communities of color. Trump came into the presidency embracing law enforcement, essentially claiming the pro-police mantra of “Blue Lives Matter,” when he eulogized slain officers earlier this year, declaring that “[e]very drop of blood spilled from our heroes in blue is a wound inflicted upon the whole country”—while making no mention of the many African-Americans and others who have been killed by police. That proof of how much more he values the police over ordinary Americans has been highlighted by his Justice Department’s moves to pull back investigations of police departments that were under federal consent decrees to fix racial biases in policing, as well as by Trump’s order this week to resume gifting police with surplus military equipment and weapons. Essentially Trump and his supporters want police to have a free hand to brutalize and kill, and they are arming them to the teeth to do it.

The president and his Republican and extremist right-wing supporters have engaged in violent rhetoric and actions aimed at undocumented immigrants to a degree we have not seen in a long time in America. Trump’s Homeland Security Department has overseen a whopping 40 percent jump in arrests of undocumented immigrants this year compared to last year, making it clear there is no distinction anymore between violent felons and ordinary hard-working immigrants who may have strong family ties to the U.S. He appears to be inching toward dismantling DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which would leave hundreds of thousands of young immigrants raised in the U.S. vulnerable to the cruelty of the immigration enforcement apparatus. Trump relishes the violence of the arrests, raids, detentions, swift deportations and wrenching apart of families, offering it up as red meat for his anti-immigrant supporters.

Trump has expanded his penchant for violence to the international realm, promising an open-ended war in Afghanistan. Refusing to specify how many more troops would be sent there or what conditions would have to be met in order to declare the war over, Trump has essentially turned over the war plan to the Pentagon, and already we are witnessing the results: At least 11 civilians were killed by U.S. air strikes in southeastern Afghanistan this week. Trump has also sent U.S. military advisers and launched lethal air strikes on Somalia, and of course he has continued the wars in Iraq and Syria, supported Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, given a green light to the Israeli government to continue oppressing Palestinians and engaged in a dangerous war of words with North Korea. U.S. military violence, which is usually promoted by leaders of both major parties, has now been ratcheted up significantly by Trump.

And then we have the violence of climate change unfolding before our eyes this week with the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey in Texas. Global warming deniers have taken over our federal government, unshackling fossil fuel companies from the meager restrictions they faced under the previous administration. Trump is essentially enabling future deadly hurricanes and other forms of violent, extreme weather that climate change is bringing. He has been dismantling government programs like the flood risk management standard and wants to defund disaster preparedness agencies while handing over power to oil and gas interests through direct appointments to his Cabinet, such as naming Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO, as his secretary of state. While Trump does not bear sole responsibility for the violence of climate change, as president he is doing everything he can to ensure that climate change accelerates—to the detriment of us all. And his supporters and party are cheering him along the way.

It is a shame that these assaults on the public need to be spelled out, given the evidence all around us. True, the right does not have a monopoly on violence, but it engages in violent rhetoric, embraces violent policies and commits violent actions to such a great extent that there is no comparison to how the rest of us, including those on the left, behave, speak and act. There is no equivalence between right-wing and left-wing violence. There is only a perception of equivalence that many on the right (and sadly, some on the liberal left) seem intent on advancing.

About the Author

Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV).

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Comparing ‘coups’: Macron’s is one, Maduro’s is not

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Of course, the biggest coup of them all is the American Deep State (now available for the first time ever!) against Trump.

After that the biggest coup was the one against Mohamed Morsi, because Egypt is more than double the size of Ukraine. Seems like Morsi’s problem was that his “Islamist coup” was approved by referendum and thus not a coup at all. What Erdogan learned from Egypt was that he had to go big with autocracy when it was his turn to make a coup. I mean, only after there was a failed coup against him….

Ruthless exploitation of the poor is not enough for the ruling classes: contempt and a sense of inherent superiority is also a prime ingredient in their self-complacent makeup. (Still: Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Luis Buñuel, Dir.)

Coups seem like a dime a dozen these days! There’s hasn’t been one in Iran and there isn’t going to be one (just sayin’), but what appears to be rarer are states of emergency.

For the West, all coups are obviously not created equal, and neither are states of emergency. Just take a look at Amnesty International – the West’s sainted NGO nonpareil. This is from their 2017 guidebook on human rights:

Amnesty begins their section on France: "In response to several violent attacks, the state of emergency was extended 4 times...."

Amnesty begins their section on Venezuela: "The government declared a state of emergency which was renewed 4 times."

The problem, subtle though it may seem, is that the sweet, glorified secretaries who compiled this – with their oh-so-pure hearts, and their faces pretty enough to be considered out of your league, you bozo – decided that France merits context, but not Venezuela.

Furthermore, it implies that terrorism – the West’s bête noire, or more honestly, their raison d'être – is a sufficient justification for extending a state of emergency four times, but Venezuela’s situation is insufficient.

For romantic France the NGO do-gooders will rationalize away without concern for the calendar, even though the crisis in Venezuela drastically affects everyone, is not 99.9% paranoid nightmares, and even though the Venezuelan government is actually trying to grant more democratic power to the average person instead of decreasing their power.

Macron’s state of emergency hides a very real coup

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday, the French Parliament began debating the series of decrees new President Emmanuel Macron and his government intends to make the law (mainly to enforce another rollback to the labor code); parliamentarians can only vote “yes” or “no”, and therefore…Macron has usurped their power to actually be a part of writing the laws.

To put it another way: Macron the monarch decides the labor code for us serfs. This is a coup of the executive branch against the legislative branch.

It is unacceptable, it is what Nicolas Maduro’s government is being vilified for in the West, and yet Macron is not being denounced in sufficient numbers in the West; contrarily, it is being rationalized and encouraged in a much, much larger proportion.

French law, because Macron’s powers are technically found in the constitution (like Maduro’s), says this is not a coup. However, France’s constitution sucks, to put it crudely, and that is why their #4 presidential candidate this year got 20% of the vote – his main plan was to create a 6^th Republic.

You can go on and on all you want trying to explain how the letter of the law is somehow the same as the spirit of the law, but when politicians take advantage of the inherent weaknesses of the society they are elected to defend and support, that is betrayal. Macron’s power grab shows the absolute failure of France's "modern" democracy, which is why so many want a new, more democratic 6^th Republic.

Creating a more democratic constitution is what Maduro is guilty of trying to do, but we can’t move on to that yet because this is not even media-darling Macron’s only coup!

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]acron just extended the state of the emergency for a 6^th time, and it will be the last. The appalling reason it will be the last is that a leaked bill shows that Macron intends to make all of the special police powers of the state of emergency common police practice – “warrantless ______ if national security is invoked” (fill in the blank).

The Venezuelan protests, chiefly organized by the local burgos supported by many in the middle classes and even clueless workers, along with the nonstop economic sabotage and disruptions, are straight from the CIA's destabilization book. It's been tried in many countries, and the overthrow of Pres. Salvador Allende in Chile, in 1973, remains one of the most eloquent examples. The opposition media, overwhelmingly in the hands of the upper class, also plays a significant role in stirring up anti-government sentiment.

This is the 2^nd part of Macron’s coup: You cannot make the Interior Minister – the nation’s “top cop” or “top prosecutor” – into the “top judge” as well! The conflict of interest is obvious, and that’s why even the pro-imperialist autocrat General De Gaulle didn’t set up the 5^th Republic that way – he couldn’t get away with it.

If Maduro tried to neuter BOTH branches in the way Macron is…no one can believe that the West would not be up in arms, with armies, paid mercenaries and cute NGO secretaries at the ready.

The Amnestys of the West will make tiny squeaks about Macron’s double coup, and then safely vent their little-girl PC indignation on big, bad, unromantic socialist darkies like Venezuela (no assembly-line love for them!).

This is the true context which I am unfortunately not permitted to add to Amnesty’s 2017 human rights guidebook: “The West (the US-led “5 Eye Nations”, the EU and many of their allies) is repeatedly using terrorism to promote right-wing measures economically, politically and culturally which dramatically reduce a range of human rights it has taken their people decades to win.”

What Maduro is proposing is nothing even similar to what Macron has done: Maduro’s attempted coup is against the rich. And for that I should be damned for even proposing to give it context….

Usurping a constitution - good. Rewriting a constitution - bad.

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]aduro’s call to rewrite the constitution with a Constituent Assembly in August – how is that inherently illegal or terrible? Changes are what happen in life as well as politics – the only questions are the moral basis and moral outcome of those changes. The Venezuelan government is going to hold a referendum on the draft constitution, of course, so it may be democratically rejected - what on earth is the problem?

Fundamentally, the problem is that there can be no discussion of socialism, period, in the West. That is a Western cultural issue.

The political issue is: It is “anti-democratic” in that it grants more power to the People by reducing the power of the Rich Individual. This is also anathema in the Western view of democracy.

The proposed changes will learn from Cuba, where 50% of parliament comes not from election but from grassroots/communal organizations.

This is a far, far cry from the much-ballyhooed “civil society” which makes up half of Macron’s new Parliamentary majority – they are nothing but CEOs, bosses and lobbyists.

Macron’s PMs are tied to the elite and not to the grassroots anything, except for the fine fescue yards of their second homes in southern France. They are all for keeping those service jobs to keep that fescue green, of course, but heaven forbid those workers get a decent wage and try to move up the ladder – think of the difficulties the rich have in finding good servants, after all!

Maduro’s “sectorial” representation scheme is criticized as being a form of “indirect representation,” even by the right-wing Chavistas (alleged Chavistas, I would say). The most unamusing irony of this is that voting for parliament members is…indirect representation as well.

However, Latin American Socialism rejects this form of representative democracy as being insufficiently democratic for the reasons which are so clear in France today (betrayal of the Socialist Party on austerity, betrayal of Macron’s party to defend the historical powers of the legislative branch, etc.).

The West hates this idea of Venezuela’s, because they are not for direct representation – they are for the rule of the 99% by the 1%, as we all know.

The key, as usual with Maduro and his comrades, is two sides of this precious coin: A pillar of their method of governance is to make sure they operate on firm legal principles, but…they are an oil-rich, formerly colonized, emboldened leftist society which is the target of foreign nations that will work 100% illegally to ruin them.

Maduro and the ‘gradual revolution’ of the Bolivarian Movement

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]an a revolution be “gradualist”? Venezuela is perhaps the best example of this question today.

Maduro campaigning. Chavez screen in back serves as tacit endorsement.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is why Maduro deserves enormous credit: he is obviously relying on the peoples' support for the moral/political tenets of Chavismo because, amid major economic and political disruption, he is willing to move legally and methodically.

Maduro believes, rightly or wrongly amid $50/barrel oil, that Cuba has become so successful, normal and inevitable that the people will support following their model.

However, does Maduro realize that the West will employ the same warfare against him as they did and are still doing to Cuba? I’m sure he does, and that’s why he’s moving – not a revolutionary pace, but he’s moving, and the Constitutional Assembly begins on July 30.

The idea that Venezuela is “in no condition” to hold a constitutional referendum right now is pure nonsense. Westerners can’t have it both ways: that establishment made barely a squeak about the legality of Mali’s election in 2013, even though they were in the midst of a civil war and hundreds of thousands of voters were displaced. Why? Because new president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta is a neo-colonial puppet of France, of course. Maduro, thankfully for the Venezuelan people, is no Western puppet.

Any true leftist hopes that the food shortages and inflation problems result only in targeted anger against the rich bourgeoisie, and in this case that is represented by the current National Assembly.

Let’s remember: Macron’s majority in the National Assembly will vote to grant Macron the power to rule by decree - they are willingly sidelining themselves! They are willingly sidelining the highest organ of representation granted to the collective/communal will in France: the voting district of a parliamentarian.

Obviously, on a theoretical level, Venezuela’s Western-influenced National Assembly can be expected to be no different from France’s National Assembly: it inherently prioritizes the influence of the individual (politician) over the group (grassroots organizations, unions, collectives, etc.).

Because the Venezuelan opposition is so clearly pro-Western and so supported by the West, we must always remember that the West's vision of revolution and governance is totally bourgeois; even when they win, it is to go backwards to protect the 1%.

Any popular revolution must occur solely from within: 1917 Russia had no foreign help, 1979 Iran had no foreign help, etc., - they succeeded because they were supported by the only group that matters: the citizens. Yet the opposition to the Maduro government is clearly in cahoots with innumerable foreign leaders and organizations.

Finally, and to repeat: Maduro’s proposed changes can only be approved in a referendum. Therefore, the real attempted coup here is Venezuela’s legislative branch against the executive branch, a reversal of Macron’s coup (one of his two coups).

However, others say the rich bourgeoisie in Venezuela is not the parliamentarians, lobbyists and their funders, but the boliburguesía: the top state officials/military class of Chavismo.

Even if the boliburguesía is a problem, it is not Venezuela’s most reactionary problem

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o be fair, all Socialist revolutions must guard against creating a rich bureaucratic class. It seems highly likely that the young in Venezuela look at the older (and thus inevitably more empowered) class, combines that with the current shortages and inflation, and thinks – “I can sure do better than this!”

That reaction is quite logical, and this situation represents an opportunity, a danger and a reality to be accommodated.

Mao was right in insisting on a cultural revolution to keep the masses on the socialist track and avoiding bureaucratism. The concept of the "permanent revolution" —maliciously translated as "permanent turmoil"—by his class enemies and even some misguided revolutionists, is a vital idea to keep the revolution in the workers hands. Mao knew that winning the insurrection phase is just one stage of making revolution. Building socialism entails its own tough struggles.

Mao was well aware of this, and he led the extremely, extremely, extremely misunderstood Cultural Revolution, which saw a leader at the height of his power willingly refuse even more power and instead devolve it to the young in order to keep the Revolutionary ideals fresh. Thus you had students taking revenge on power-drunk teachers, etc…. (And let’s note that Chinese support for socialism remains unflagging today.)

The “Gradual Revolution” makes one wonder if Venezuela can accommodate this reality? We can term this “the youth question”, which should stand right alongside other key socialist questions like “the nationalism question”. In the capitalist West, the solution to the “youth question” is: yoke them to as much debt as possible (university, housing), promote a culture which foments greed, envy, individualism and materialism, and make them permanent serfs who foolishly believe today is the day they will join the 1%.

The USSR could not answer either the youth question or the rich bureaucratic class question, and their boliburguesía created a black market capitalist Second Economy which, unleashed by Gorbachev, devoured one of the world’s enlightened, intelligent, inspirational societies.

However, what is critical to theoretically understand is that the boliburguesía cannot be the main problem in Venezuela because the original bourgeoisie was never truly deposed: It has always been the “Bolivarian Movement”, after all – Venezuela never truly had a popular revolution, like Iran or the USSR, which swept them out.

There is no doubt that some members of Venezuela’s National Assembly and their supporters are obviously cahooting with foreign powers and rich foreign capitalists; but the allegedly corrupt members of the boliburguesía have the very significant advantage of being, at least, not foreigners: Without sovereignty, there is no nation, only corporation - that is capitalism.

Nobody has said Maduro – for a host of reasons – has led the most effective government the world has ever seen, but he has indeed played by the rules. Playing by Western, bourgeois rules requires a lot of faith in the people so, again, one should salute Maduro and his government.

But I would remind Maduro: Morsi’s constitution was passed in a referendum, yet look where he and Egyptian democracy currently are….

Whose state of emergency is more brutal: France’s or Venezuela’s?

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]uch a question is probably what Syrian government soldiers think of when they need something easygoing and peaceful to relax their mind after a hard day of defending….

Yes, more have died in Venezuela protesting than in France. However, the conversation cannot stop here, or else it is incomplete and thus misleading.

Macron—photogenic, young, a perfect corporatist product for the media to sell the masses.

Of the 90 or so deaths so far, Venezuelan security forces are implicated in only around 20, full stop. The pro-Chavismo labor leaders, student leaders, security forces and protesters who have died at the hands of the opposition clearly must equal or even outweigh the crimes of the government.

This is critical, yet the West clearly asserts that only Chavismo is violent and that the opposition are all angels. That does not add up, and thus is morally reprehensible and intellectually unsatisfying.

And, over 20 members of Venezuela’s security forces have been arrested for actions taken against protesters. In France only 1 protester has been recently killed, and that cop was just exonerated (they always are over here – this protester was even White, but still…).

But the arrest numbers are nearly identical: In Venezuela it stands at 3,132, and in France it was at least 2,000 during last year’s protests.

Let me guess: You’re going to say that I’m comparing apples and bowling balls; or that I’m just looking at quantity (statistics) and not quality (necessary context to properly understand statistics).

I agree – the situation in Venezuela is far, far more intense on every side: opposition, government, citizen, foreign involvement, etc.

But I make the comparison not to whitewash the mistakes of the Venezuelan government, but to illuminate the disproportionate response of the French regime.

Demonstrations against the government. Man in red shirt, pretending to be a "chavista" is actually a provocateur wielding a gun.

Amnesty – a day late and a dollar short, as usual when it comes to Western crimes - reported last month that of the 155 demonstrations banned by ex-president Francois Hollande, 90% were associated with last year’s labor code protest (how many more were strangled in the cradle from fear?). At least 650 pro-democracy activists were placed under house arrest. Of course, terrorism-rationalizing Amnesty did not include the 4,000+ terror-related house raids and house arrests…because they are 99% against Muslims.

Here is the “unaskable question” in the West: How is any of that justified in order to gut a labor code in order to “restore economic growth”?!

That is the crux of the biscuit. The Venezuelan government appears far more justified in a state of emergency, of any level of intensity, because they have been nearly besieged by protesters whose leaders have literally supported armed coups in the recent past! [And continue to receive covert aid from the US.]

But brutality, we must concede, is not only about blood on the streets. Tens of thousands of people were killed by the Shah during the course of the Iranian Revolution, but I’ve never heard anybody mention that in English. (Of course, like Venezuela, Iran never merits context either….)

The "news" can never be understood without furnishing its proper context. Yet this is the specialty of "professional" Western journalism, especially in the US.

It is simply unmodern to pretend to not know about psychological warfare, as well as the brutal, dehumanizing and long-term effects it can have on a population.

Creating a legal police state dictatorship (the official term for France’s current state), gutting the labor code repeatedly, bailing out bankers and selling off France to the highest bidder – all of this is psychologically brutalizing to the French people.

Why? Because it reduces their security for work, lodging, education, health and all these things which humans need to live; these are things which human beings need to avoid thinking they live in a horrendous, animalistic scramble for resources.

Therefore, what else can you say but that people in France are being forced to live in a psychological brutal state of mind?

Venezuelans are facing psychological brutality because there are shortages of food and goods. This problem is not only not being alleviated by foreigners but is being exacerbated. So, their government’s installation of a police state appears more reasonable. But France’s installation of a police state, and the plan to make it permanent…?

Apples and bowling balls: not in terms of government responses, but in causes. And yet there is a very, very, very different treatment from the Western-dominated establishment.

Maduro’s faith in his people appears as boundless as Macron’s faith in himself

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he most appalling thing is that France is so much richer than Venezuela: It is shameful for a rich country to have so many advantages and yet perform so less ethically and capably. Then, on top of it all, to claim moral superiority (and even be widely believed, because they are richer in media power as well).

Pres. Maduro with supporters.

BELOW: Pictures of organized disturbances. The idea is to make "normal life" and governance impossible.

And this is why we all hate Western rich people - they have no sense of responsibility, nor even of unity, in the individualistic West.

Venezuela’s National Assembly is an outdated outgrowth of the aristocratic sense of superiority, but in 2017 such aristocrats are simply rabidly competitive, Machiavellian, self-serving and narcissistic. All of these attributes have been fairly levelled against Macron, who has the gall to openly say that he aspires to a "Jupiterian presidency". This appallingly godlike goal for himself should be enough for immediate recall in a true democracy….

You cannot say that “all politicians are the same” - Maduro has flaws, but does he openly aspire to rule in a godlike fashion? No, he is aspiring to get a better democratic model approved democratically.

Chavismo is showing tremendous faith by going so slowly, by following the constitution, by freeing “political prisoners” who led and promoted foreign-backed coups, etc.

However, taking a larger historical view for ourselves, we understand clearly that the Bolivarian Movement is not a revolution because they are following Cuba. Cuba was the revolution. The process in Venezuela is, therefore, simply the part of a historical trend.

(Similarly, I have speculated that Syria could be a part of a historical trend sparked by the Iranian Revolution.)

In truth, only the opposition in Venezuela is trying to make a revolution of the existing order. It should not be supported.

The Bolivarian Movement may not be a revolution, but that certainly does not mean it isn’t progress. And that doesn’t mean that foreign and reactionary forces won’t fight against it.

Maduro keeps playing by the rules in order to give more power to the disempowered individual; Macron takes advantage of the rules in order to grab more power for himself at the expense of the People.

“Coup” or not - therein lies a world of difference.

About the author

RAMIN MAZAHERI, Senior Correspondent & Contributing Editor, Dispatch from Paris | Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television.

This is What Plutocracy Looks Like

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by ROB URIE
CROSSPOST WITH COUNTERPUNCH.ORG

In significant ways popular condemnation of Donald Trump and the corporate titans and billionaires he brought with him to ‘public’ office is cluttered beyond what makes analytical sense. Mr. Trump is the quintessential plutocrat— a self-interested man of inherited means and limited life experience who stumbled upward through political economy engineered to benefit his class. It is this very public nature of his ‘success’ that attaches class culpability to his actions.

If the problem is plutocracy, this is the one that must be addressed. Otherwise, who are these wise and caring plutocrats who are preferred to Mr. Trump? When Hillary Clinton was giving speeches to Wall Street ($21 million in speaking fees in two years), was she speaking to the intelligent, competent and socially ‘woke’ plutocrats who will someday soon save the environment and end U.S. militarism? When Barack Obama was bailing out Wall Street, was he bailing out the good and just plutocrats who really care about the rest of us?

Graph: The economic circumstances of people who have to work— middle-aged breadwinners, has been declining since the onset of the neo-capitalist coup in the mid-1970s. The Clinton ‘boom’ was weak relative to earlier history and the (George W.) Bush and (Barack) Obama booms (a/k/a economic calamities) were weaker still. Bi-partisan political actions have supported the ‘right’ of capitalists to crush labor and that is what they have done. How surprising then are the consequences? Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The conceptual challenge of the moment is reconciling the form and function of late-capitalist political economy with its product(s). Even if Mr. Trump were a ‘rogue’ plutocrat, he brought enough of his class-mates into his administration to provide ballast to the ‘ship of state’ were they collectively interested in doing so. The most public political tension now playing out is between those who prefer the veil of ‘system’ against the venal vulgarity of that system’s product now visible for all to see. What Mr. Trump’s political opponents appear to be demanding is a better veil.

The howls of outrage coming from displaced Democrats would be hilarious if they weren’t so pathetic. Quickly, who wrote Barack Obama’s ‘signature’ legislation, the ACA (Affordable Care Act)? A health insurance industry lobbyist named Liz Fowler wrote it. Who are the intended beneficiaries from the ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provisions of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) ‘free’ trade agreement that Mr. Obama so vigorously supported? Wall Street, hedge funds and multi-national corporations at the expense of national, state and local governments and their citizens.

Furthermore, some fair measure of what is so vile about Donald Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants is that the American government, at the behest of the plutocrats who control it, created serial refugee crises through economic policies and military adventurism. Barack Obama was the ‘deporter in chief’ of economic refugees from Mexico displaced by Bill Clinton’s passage of NAFTA. Mr. Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, supported a right-wing coup in Honduras and then argued that the orphaned child-refugees fleeing the resulting violence should be forcibly returned there.

The charge here isn’t that ‘both parties do it,’ but rather that they— Democrats and Republicans, are partners on the side of reigning plutocrats in a class war against a broadly-defined global working class. Democrats have spent decades cynically overwriting / overriding demands for meaningful employment, food, health care and pension security with identity politics that reduce to the right of people who can afford rights to receive them. Another name for this is class warfare.

Graph: relative labor force participation by race is a function of institutional racism and economic cycles, not a ‘will to work.’ From slavery to convict leasing and Jim Crow, American Blacks have been systematically separated from the product of their labor. White privilege promotes the illusion of absolute working class division where degrees of exploitation define factual outcomes. Graph is: [(white labor force participation – black labor force participation) / white labor force participation]. The division is to (mathematically) normalize the difference to account for economic cycles. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

To state what was occasionally obvious to earlier generations, the way to support civil ‘rights’ is through inclusive political economy. (Martin Luther King was murdered about the time he started arguing this point). The political problem with Donald Trump isn’t that he’s a boorish bigot. It’s that he has the social power to force his boorish bigotry on the rest of us— power that he inherited as part of his (socially given) ‘fortune.’ And the power to refuse boorish bigots comes from employment, housing, health care and pension security that is independent of the good graces of boorish bigots. Another term for this power is economic democracy.

Here Democrats have long partnered with Republicans to do their masters’ bidding. The imperialist roots of capitalism are found in the neo-colonialist mantra that economic insecurity motivates labor to work harder and demand less in return. From the end of WWII through the early 1970s regularly recurring recessions engineered by the Federal Reserve kept labor scrambling. From the 1970s forward ‘offshoring’ and institutional racism (reserve army of the unemployed) have served this purpose.

It is hardly accidental that the more successful proponents of the ‘free trade’ agreements that have facilitated offshoring have been liberal Democrats. In pushing policies to benefit connected capitalists the language of the Left — against welfare dependence (jobs, not welfare) and economic nativism, were used by cynical liberals to recover pre-New Deal capitalism with entirely predictable consequences. Economic mobility has declined in precise proportion to the concentration of wealth as plutocrats have used their newfound political power to close off economic competition.

In more locally visceral terms, it was only a few short years ago that Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, worried about ‘moral hazard’ when it was proposed that ill-sold home mortgages be forgiven while he shoveled untold billions in public funds to connected bankers and their families and friends. The language used was similar but the facts weren’t— the bankers and their families and friends got the money while those with ill-sold mortgages didn’t.

Hillary Clinton’s much decried declaration against ‘deplorables’ was telling in that it conflated the dim social-pornographic sentiments of the marginally connected and partially and wholly dispossessed with the dismal factual outcomes her major campaign contributors bring into being on a daily basis. Institutional racism (graph above) has waxed and waned with economic ‘cycles’ and not with the moral sentiments of bourgeois hate-mongers and the righteously pissed dispossessed.

To take one dimension of the Democrats’ cynical bullshit at face value: who is to be held to account for institutional racism— the type we can collectively do something about, and who is going to do the accounting? Well, let’s see— Democrats have held (national) power about as often as Republicans over the last half-century and the answer so far is no one and nobody. Any look at initial economic distribution finds the ‘heavy hand’ of government handing out corporate welfare to people and organizations who have the capacity to end institutional racism in labor markets if they were made to— the levers to force the issue exist. But they haven’t been used.

More to the point, when Democrats actually held power (1) the Clintons slashed social spending, demonized immigrants and Black children, militarized the police, built out mass incarceration, pushed racist drug laws and demonized the poor while (2) Barack Obama gave voice to economic austerity while bailing out Wall Street, had a lobbyist for the health insurance industry redesign the health care payments system; ended due process to murder citizens without evidence at will and pushed the power of corporate lawyers to override civil legislation through so-called ‘free’ trade agreements.

This is what plutocracy looks like. In this regard, Donald Trump is archetypal, quintessential. Resisting Mr. Trump while supporting the political economy that gives him social power is paradoxical, and as such, doomed. Bernie Sanders sold his soul to the Democrat party decades ago. If the national Democrats had two functioning brain cells they would support Mr. Sanders up to his election as president and then undermine him to ‘prove’ that socialism doesn’t work. Proof that they don’t have two functioning brain cells is that they didn’t do this in 2016.

About the Author

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

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Stephen Colbert mocks Oliver Stone for interviewing Vladimir Putin (Video)

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

ALEX CHRISTOFOROU | THE DURAN

Stephen Colbert disrespects Oliver Stone and Vladimir Putin, for ratings and liberal left approval.

Stephen Colbert went from hosting a US late night TV show with ratings in the tank, to becoming the top rated late show TV host thanks to President Donald Trump.

Colbert has assumed the lead role as number one Trump hater and the radical liberal left loves it.

Colbert also has a history of being a rabid Russia hater, often proudly promoting his racist rants against Russian people and Russian culture…and the moronic liberal left loves it.

It comes as no surprise that Colbert, and people stupid enough to attend his show, booed and mocked Oliver Stone for his latest documentary, “The Putin Interviews.” [Which is a "must watch" for independent minded people.]

About the Author

Alex Christoforou

Writer and director for The Duran - Living the dream in Moscow.
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Stephen Colbert scores cheap points by snidely dismissing Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews., while his audience cheers.

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