MEDIA SCUM

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It isn’t true that if you allow authority to come after dissident journalists they’ll necessarily end up coming after you. That’s only true if you intend at some point to publish something that those in power don’t want you to publish. If you’ve closed the door to the possibility of your ever doing that, then you know that there is no risk to you, so there’s no need to defend dissident journalists when their reporting sees them targeted for legal persecution by the powerful.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Sometimes all I can do is stare in awe at the power and efficiency of the imperial propaganda machine. When I first started this gig in 2016 Assange had way more support, from Berners, Greens, Trumpers, all across the spectrum. Now a large amount of that support has been eroded. For Trumpers Assange is being extradited for his own good to bring down the Deep State. For liberals he’s a Russian asset. For leftists he’s a rapist and fascist enabler. There’s a narrative for everyone, no matter where you are on the political spectrum. It’s really impressive.

RICK JOHNSON—The whole impeachment affair is a brazen sequel to the Russia Hoax involving many of the same key players. Susan Rice, John Brennan, Adam Schiff. Designed to target, destroy, and in this case, fabricate grounds for the impeachment of the President. The playbook is the same as the Mueller Inquisition and the Russia Hoax, the same as the Kavanaugh smear campaign. With the same co-conspirators of the left-wing mainstream media. Not only carrying water for the coup plotters but being actual participants in the scheme. Paid mouthpieces for the Deep State.

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

ED CURTIN—The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a “deep state” that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcom X, MLK, RK, among others) and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in democracy intent on doing the right thing.