BBC Demonstrates How To Make Palestinians The Bad Guys

The BBC reported today that two Jewish colonialist conquerors were killed in the West Bank by a Palestinian "gunman." (Not an armed Palestinian patriot fighter, say.) But they cleverly left something out.

A few hours before that, Israeli Jewish troops conducted more of their ceaseless terror raids into the West Bank, murdering another three Palestinians on top of the tens of thousands they've murdered since 1948.

The picture looks a lot different when you include that fact. But the BBC is not in the business of providing objective news. It is in the business of political propaganda in the guise of news.

Political mythology claims the West Bank is under the control of collaborationist Palestinians called the "Palestinian Authority," headed by a corrupt leech named Mahmoud Abbas. He and his accomplices aided and abetted the murder of Yasir Arafat, by obstructing as long as possible the exhumation of Arafat's corpse to confirm the presence of radioactive polonium which the Israelis slipped into his food. Since then they've been as quiet as possible about the murder.

The PA's "security forces" are CIA-trained, which tells us all we need to know about the nature of those secret police thugs. Their job, like all CIA-trained "security forces" and "intelligence services" is the repression of the people they are assigned to contain.

Another way the BBC- and U.S. media too of course- cover up the fanaticism and imperialism of Israel is by never mentioning what the Israelis calls the West Bank- "Judea and Samaria." These fanatics are literally recreating something that existed over 2,000 years ago, combining ancient violent tribal supremacist ideology straight from the Old Testament with contemporary repressive military and police state technology.

Israel is indeed "part of the West" in the true sense of what that means- it is a nation of "white" imperialists conquering those designated as dark-skilled and subjugating them by force and violence and "settling" their lands, which hiding behind a facade of "democratic values."

[Thanks to Democracynow.org for reporting the facts the "venerable" BBC omitted from its version of reality.]

The REAL Reason the White House Media Propagandists' Association Is Breaking With Its Own Tradition and Not Inviting a Comedian to Perform At Its Annual Celebration of Itself

It has been announced that a self-important propagandist group, the "White House Correspondents' Association," whose membership are the propagandists assigned by corporate propaganda outfits to "cover" the White House (i.e. the U.S. presidency), will not be inviting a comedian to entertain them in their tuxedos at their upcoming annual dinner, as they have done in past years. This is being blamed on the performance of comedienne Michelle Wolf at the last shindig of this group on April 28, 2018.

"The" media has taken this occasion to smear Wolf anew. They claim the "Association's" decision was because Wolf was "harsh," and that she made fun of Trump's White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders' appearance. Which she did NOT. In a 19 minute set, less than a minute and a half were about Sanders, and maybe two jokes referenced her appearance in some way, and they were MILD jokes. You can watch that segment on my youtube channel. [1] 

Wolf mocks Sanders' constant lying, and her vile politics. Apparently that is retrospectively unacceptable. Because when you watch the entire 19 minute performance, the audience laughs a lot, and heartily applauds at the ends. So Wolf actually went over well. 

But afterwards, there was a propaganda campaign attacking Wolf's set. Because she ended with a scathing critique of "the" media's symbiotic relationship with the horrid Donald Trump, landing square on the nose. She nails it. And then with a final throwaway line reminds everyone of the unwelcome fact that the people of Flint, Michigan were poisoned with lead in their water and that the situation there had still not been remedied. [2]

Too much truth for the behind-the-scenes bosses- the bastards.

1] See "All of Michelle Wolf's jokes about Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner." 

2] See "Michelle Wolf sticks it to the media for enabling Trump at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner."

Wolf's entire set is posted by C-Span on youtube.com: "Michelle Wolf COMPLETE REMARKS at 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner."

How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultrareactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights

It's long past time to call out the Democratic Party of the U.S. on one of its major con games. The one in which they claim to be the sole bulwark protecting America from a right-wing "takeover" of the Supreme Court. The one in which they claim that they are the guardians of abortion rights, rights in permanent peril from unnamed right wingers.

Before I continue, I want to bullet-point the critical facts you need to take away with you:

• Extreme reactionary Antonin Scalia was elevated to the Supreme Court by a Senate vote of 98-0. Those weren't 98 Republicans. Scalia was later one of five GOP apparatchiks on the high court who stole the 2000 presidential election for George Bush (Bush the Younger). [1]

• Democratic Senator Joe Biden (later  vice president in the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama) functioning as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was instrumental in putting known sex offender Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Thomas, like Scalia, voted to steal the 2000 presidential election for the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). [2]

• EVERY reactionary elevated to the top court, with its immense power, has gotten there with the support of Democratic Party senators. Even the ones who vote against confirming them soft-pedal how awful and evil the nominees are.

• In the last year of the presidency of Hit Man Obama, a vacancy opened up on the Supereme Court. In an unprecedented power grab, the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell (a venal coal industry stooge from Kentucky) announced that Obama would not be allowed to fill that vacancy. And Democratic response was- some grumbling under their breath and acceptance. Obama himself didn't give any evidence of even caring! (Yet there are still morons who think he is a "progressive" who was somehow thwarted by forces beyond his control. Now imagine if the situation was reversed, and a Democratic-controlled Senate denied a GOP president the right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy! There would be DAILY howls of outrage, even calls for a military coup "to restore the Constitutional order." That's because the Republicans are like rabid wolverines and are serious about power. That's how, with a minority of the populace behind them, they have taken over the presidency, the Congress, the Judiciary, and two-thirds of the state legislatures and governorships. (They have long dominated and controlled the military and secret police apparatus.) They have used their control of state legislatures to draw districts that allow them to elect the majority of Representatives to the national House of Representatives with a minority of overall voters. The Democrats are mainly a party of grifters, unserious about power, just looking for profitable sinecures for themselves.

Okay, that last bulletpoint was a long one, but essential. Now on to the body of the essay, which will illustrate the utter cynicism of the Democrats in manipulating people who are duped into relying on them to protect the few hard-won rights we have.

Every election "cycle," which is to say, every two years [3], Democratic political hacks running for office send out tons of political junk mail to citizens, hoping to woo their votes. One of the perennial themes of this propaganda bombardment is how the Supreme Court hangs in the balance, and the need to protect the right to abortion, which was only granted to women by a divided Supreme Court in the Roe vs. Wade decision. That decision was made under pressure from the women's movement, and only granted a limited right, in the first trimester of pregnancy, after which the government was deemed to have an "interest" in interfering in personal and medical decisions and exerting control over people's bodies.

In the years since, the organized reactionaries of the U.S., including the Republican Party (GOP), rightwing religious zealots, the Catholic Church bosses, and assorted rightwing media and political cadres, have relentlessly attacked abortion. The terrorist arm of this novement has assassinated doctors and clinic workers with bombs and guns, committed thousands of arson and other attacks on abortion clinics, blockaded clinics and much else. The legal offensive has been even more devastating, with states controlled by the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) virtually eliminating abortion clinics by various legislative encumbrances that in effect persecute the clinics. Some states have functionally outlawed abortion drugs, which in early pregnancy are the cheapest and easiest way to terminate a pregnancy. (By the way, these same creeps who care so much about "unborn children" are the same ones who deport children fleeing gang and state violence south of the U.S. border back to their deaths, who destroy water containers left in the desert for them, who rip children and infants away from their refugee parents and separate them by thousands of miles. They have historically supported the murder of children by fascist death squads in the U.S. empire, and bombing cities and villages in Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere that kill large numbers of children, babies, and mothers. So I have a sneaking suspicion that reverence for the sanctity of life isn't their actual motive.)
There IS no abortion provider in almost every town in the U.S. Over 90% of U.S. counties have no abortion facility. Abortion has been stigmatized and isolated, banished from the body of the medical profession. The cowardly medical schools don't even teach their students how to perform abortions,

And what has the Democratic Party been doing all the while the assault on abortion rights has continued unabated for 44 years?

Every election they yell at their voters that the right to abortion is under assault and therefore you must vote for them. And that's pretty much it.

And they ensure that the Supreme Court has a hard rightwing majority, They do this to have a scare tactic to run in elections on, and they do this because they too are fundamentally reactionaries. They serve the corporate oligarchy, which of course wants a reactionary judiciary. They believe in state power over citizens- as the repressive legislation pushed into law by their presidents Truman, Clinton, and Obama proves. Obama gave the government the power to indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens in military gulags without charges or legal representation, by government fiat. The government need only label the victims "terrorists." That is now law because of Obama.

Let's dispose of another myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."

1]  In a bit of ironically poetic justice, the Democratic candidate who along with his party let the GOP steal the 2000 election, Albert Gore, was one of the Senators who voted to put Scalia on the Supreme Court.

2]  Biden made sure Thomas, an arch-reactionary black man who is an enemy of African-Americans in many ways, including his attacks on affirmative action, made it through the confirmation process by stifling witnesses who would have buttressed Anita Hill's testimony about Thomas' vulgar sexual harassment of his underlings, and more critically Biden privately assured his Democratic Senate colleagues not to believe Hill. The story of  Biden's treachery is told in the book "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. The authors were reporters at the Wall Street Journal at the time the book was written. Mayer went on to be a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where she is today. Abramson became the very first female to ascend to the top editor post at the oh-so-august New York Times.

Abramson's tenure as top editor was short. She accidentally discovered that the publisher and chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose family has long owned the paper and its other properties and who inherited his job from his Daddy, was chiseling her on her pay, paying her less than her male predecessors. Sulzberger was miffed when Abramson confronted him about this, proceeded to fire her, and then engaged in a campaign of character assassination against her.

So "liberal" of him!

This sexist asshole also hired the scandalous former BBC boss Mark Thompson. After notorious pedophile and BBC star Jimmy Savile died, the BBC had an expose ready to air. That was killed, and in its place a tribute to Savile was aired. Thompson claimed to know nothing about any of this, despite being in charge. Sulzberger thinks this guy is worth paying millions for.
The result so far has been a discrimination suit against Thompson for the toxic environment he's helped create (or perpetuate) at the NY Times. Two black female employees allege in their lawsuit that Thompson introduced an "environment rife with discrimination based on age, race and gender." It further links his behavior to similar actions by him during his BBC tenure. ["New York Times chief executive accused of discrimination," BBC News, 29 April, 2016.]


3]  In the U.S., one chamber of the national legislature, the "House of Representatives" of the U.S. Congress, stands for election every two years. There are 435 Congressional districts, thus 435 representatives covering all the 50 states. Congressional districts are proportioned roughly by population.

The other chamber of Congress, the U.S. Senate, has 100 Senators, two Senator for each state. This gives grossly disproportional weight and power to sparsely populated states hard rightwing states, and greatly weakens the political weight of populous states. So California has two Senators, and the 20 least populous states, whose total population equals that of California, have 40 Senators. So arch-reactionary states like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the two Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, and so on, are a powerful structural and institutional factor in making the U.S. a rightwing nation, even though only a minority of the population is rightwing in this putative "democracy."

Senators are elected for six year terms. Every two years, one third of the Senate stands for reelection.
U.S. presidents serve 4 year terms. The years that aren't presidential election years are called "off-year elections."

The terms of Congresspeople and presidents is set out in the Constitution. The Republicans passed a Constitutional amendment in the 1950's limiting the president to two elected terms. This was done in reaction to the fact that the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president four times in a row starting in 1932. Ironically, Republican Dwight David Eisenhower, elected in 1952 and 1956, may well have won a third term if not for this amendment.

The Sham "Suspense" Over Trump's Second Supreme Court Nominee

U.S. corporate propaganda systems (aka "the media," as if it's the one and only media) and politicians are pretending there is something to wonder about which awful, fanatically reactionary ideologue in a judicial robe president Trump will nominate to replace the "swing vote" Justice Anthony Kennedy who announced his retirement from the high court. But it doesn't matter, since Trump long ago announced that ALL his Supreme Court picks will come from a list of career reactionaries approved  by a cabal of conspirators called "The Federalist Society." They are all the same!

Trump has repeatedly announced that when he packs the high court with reactionaries, Roe vs. Wade, the 1974 Supreme Court decision that decreed that women had a limited right to abort pregnancies, would be "automatically" overturned.

What the U.S. corporate media REFUSES to report is the ultra-reactionary nature of the so-called "Federalist Society." As always with reactionary organizations, "the" media disguises their actual political nature and presents them as legitimate and respectable. ("The" media does the same with criminal state arms like the CIA, FBI, NSA, U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the murderous Immigration and Customs Enforcement, et al.)

Meanwhile, politicians, mainly Democrats, but also one or two "moderate" Republican Senators claim they're going to "protect" Roe v. Wade by... oh, I don't know, it's so vague what they say. They'll urge Trump to appoint someone who won't overturn it. (That's a joke. They're pretending to be divorced from reality when they say that.) Or they'll closely question the nominee about it. (All nominees these days refuse to answer such questions during their confirmation hearings. And the Senators know it.)

The phoniness of these political hacks is unbearable.

Here's Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, speaking July 1st on the NBC Sunday morning political propaganda show "Meet The Press:"

"Well, we, well I would love President Trump to pick somebody in the mainstream of American views who are going to hold up years, and years and years of precedent. The one great thing about our nation is an independent judiciary. In times of intense political debate, the fact that we have that independent judiciary that will uphold the law is key to what is so great about our country. We're a 51/49 Senate. And if he wants to throw an extreme conservative who basically says, "I'm not going to follow precedent -- "

What mealy-mouthed gibberish.

While we're demystifying ruling class rubbish, let's dispose of a myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."

Israel Eradicates Another Arab Village- U.S. Media Aids and Abets the Crime By Blacking it Out

And not just U.S. media either.

Continuing a tradition dating back to 1948, the self-proclaimed "Jewish homeland" has violently depopulated and bulldozed yet another Arab village, Khan al-Ahmar. The Bedouin villagers had the misfortune to be living in a "strategic location." That is, it was situated until today between two Jewish-only "settlements" (colonies) in the West Bank (which is called "Judea and Samaria," by Jewish imperialist zealots, using the language of religious fanatic cism) and was thus in the way of the ongoing Israeli project of colonization of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, a project begun in 1948 and pursued relentlessly ever since. [1] Israeli soldiers assaulted the residents for refusing to leave, injuring 35, four of whom were hospitalized.

Israel's judiciary has ruled the existence of the village "illegal." (Under Israeli law, Arabs functionally have no rights, and in fact are unlawful squatters in "the land of the Jews.") As in every repressive state, including the U.S., Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many others, much repression in Israel is carried out under color of law. Thus Arabs are never permitted to build houses. So their "illegal" homes are routinely bulldozed.  In 2003 American humanitarian activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by the Israelis while protesting a home demolition, assassinated by a bulldozer river who undoubtedly was acting on instructions. Other foreign activists and Palestinians protesting home demolitions have been maimed and killed over the years.

Israeli general Moshe Dayan once boasted of how 450 Arab villages were wiped off the map during and after the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. We can take him as an authoritative source on that, as he was part of it.

At the same time that "law" is used as an instrument of repression, as in the case of depopulating "the land of Israel" of non-Jews, the laws of the repressive state are themselves transgressed with impunity by the government to carry out yet more repression. Only the oppressed and the average citizen is bound by law, not those in power, who use law as a weapon. [This is true all over the world. See for example the Trump-Sessions regime's current war on refugees fleeing violent U.S.-created Central American hellholes, a violation of refugee law, or U.S. government policies of torture and assassinations.]

The U.S. government has invariably backed Israel's crimes, with very few exceptions. The U.S. media has been a reliable arm of Israeli propaganda efforts over the years,

If you call this obviously racist state, which separates groups by law, and which wipes out Arab villages to make way for Jewish only towns, an apartheid state, which it is, Israel's propaganda chorus in "the West" smears you as "anti-Semitic." In the U.S., virtually the entire establishment media is part of this chorus. U.S. politicians and government officials sycophantically bray the Israeli propaganda line of the day. We just saw that again after Israeli snipers spent two months murdering and maiming thousands of protesters along their fortified border with Gaza, the world's largest prison camp, holding almost two million souls, half of them under the age of 18. Medics, journalists,
children, even a disabled man in a wheelchair (crippled as a result of earlier Israeli violence) were all shot dead by Israeli snipers "in self-defense," according to Israeli propaganda, propaganda amplified by U.S. media, politicians, and government. Hamas was officially blamed for Israel's massacre, by Trump regime apparatchiks like his hand-picked UN ambassador, the horrid GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) career politicial Nikki Haley, who has distinguished herself in that post by her hate-filled demagoguery aimed at Palestinians and at the UN and its various bodies. Not to be outdone in slavish devotion to Israel's "defense," leading Democratic Party politicians like U.S. Senator Charles "Wall Street's Valet" Schumer denounced Hamas and exonerated Israel for its mayhem.

The two political parties that form a cartel an monopolize political power in the U.S. try to outdo each other in hysterical fealty to Israel and endorsement of its every crime. We see that each time Israel launches one of its periodic wars on Gaza, which it calls "mowing the lawn," destroying the laboriously-created infrastructure of Gaza- the power plant, the waterworks, greenhouses, shops, factories, hospitals, apartment buildings. Now there is no potable water in Gaza, literally. This concentration camp for almost two million people will soon be the site of pandemics and mass die-offs. That seems to be Israel's mass murderous plan for the Palestinians, which will get the usual full-throated approval from U.S. politicians and a complicity U.S. media.


1]  Or we could date the project of colonization to the birth of the Zionist movement itself around the beginning of the 20th century. 1948 is the year the UN, dominated by the U.S. and with Soviet concurrence, decided to give most of the land of Palestine to the minority Jewish population. The Jewish "settlers" then waged a terror campaign against defenseless Palestinian inhabitants, driving out hundreds of thousands illegally, and illegally barring their return as required under international law. The Palestinians' insistence on their right of return is painted as an unreasonable demand, when it is in fact their due under international law. At the same time, Israel, its Western backers, and the propagandists pretend that they are the lawful ones, and the Palestinians nothing but international terrorists.

Then Israeli propagandists invented a story as to why hundreds of thousands of Palestinians all up and fled their homes simultaneously. The legend they invented was that a Muslim Imam broadcast an order to the Palestinians to leave, to make way for invading Arab armies. The Palestinians, being obedient sheep, all heeded this fictive radio message. Western media stooges of Israel dutifully repeated this mythological tale for years. Years later, researchers examined recordings of radio broadcasts from that time and found that no such broadcast existed. Of course, Western media has never retracted the disinformation they repeated for years, issued no corrections to "the record." That is typical Western media behavior. [In what seems odd for privately owned, allegedly independent media. Western media often functions just like state-controlled media in places like China and Russia. Witness the frenetic war propaganda in "the" media leading up to the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. There were even purges of media personalities who didn't jump on the pro-war bandwagon, such as of Phil Donahue and others at MSNBC.]

The Holocaust is frequently invoked as justification for the dispossession, immiseration of, and violence against Palestinians. But the Germans are the culprits in the Holocaust. So if justice demanded a homeland for Jews- Jews unsatisfied with their current homelands all over the world, that is- then the State of Israel should have been carved out of Bavaria, heartland of the Nazi movement.

As for the rationalization that Jews- and here we must pause to note the ironic fact that both Zionists and Nazis agree that all Jews belong to a single entity, "the Jewish people," and their bonds to and loyalty to this group supersedes any and all other ties, a super-conspiratorial idea that is clearly false, and indeed, while there are Jews of numerous stripes, including atheists, "the Jewish people" as an entity is as fictive as "the white race," for example. Both things, and other such "races" and "peoples" exist only as delusions in the minds of various chauvinists- but as for the rationalization that "Jews," ALL Jews, need a "homeland" to which to retreat at some future moment of peril when no other place on earth is safe for Jews, this is such an absurdity that it cannot bear the most cursory analysis- which is why the propagandists who promulgate it make sure that such cursory analysis never occurs. Because how could Israel survive if the entire world wanted to kill Jews? Israel is powerful because of Western and ESPECIALLY U.S. backing! If the U.S. wasn't a safe haven for Jews- and today Jews are prominent, powerful, and rich far beyond their numbers in the U.S.- Israel would not be a refuge but a concentration camp for Jews.

But propaganda is successful because the propagandists can monopolize the media systems that target the populations they wish to indoctrinate and brainwash. That is certainly the case in the U.S., where the establishment media is almost uniformly, and relentlessly, Zionist.

U.S. Media Propagandists Rush to Take Advantage of Murder of 5 Newspaper Staffers in Annapolis, MD

In a naked pitch for public sympathy, major "news" media all over the U.S. have made the murder of five employees at an obscure local newspaper the top national story of the day for several days running.

A vicious jackass, angry over accurate reporting of his conviction for stalking a women, attacked the offices of the Capital Gazette paper in Annapolis, Maryland, and shot to death five workers and wounded six others.

U.S. establishment media of all stripes immediately went into "national grief" mode.

Let's put this in perspective.

Every day, people are murdered in the U.S. Thousands are murdered every year.

They are auto mechanics, secretaries, cashiers, air conditioner repairmen, trash collectors, accountants, construction workers, computer technicians, taxi drivers, dietitians, librarians, cooks, bank tellers... do you see where I'm going with this?

What's so special about the particular occupation, "newspaper employee"?

The establishment media feels itself under heavy assault in the Age of Trump, and feels the need to generate public sympathy for itself. Hence the saturation coverage.

The two New York City tabloid rags made it their front page story- as if it had happened in their offices.

The government-established radio propaganda network NPR (National Public Radio) waxed hysterical, with this verbiage: "the deadly shooting an attack on free speech," and it's "courageous" of the reporters at the Capital Gazette to cover the story of their colleagues deaths.

Huh? Why wouldn't they cover it? And given that the killer was immediately arrested at the scene, and denied bail, what's so damn "courageous" about reporting it? Weird assertion.

Meanwhile, the U.S. media barely makes a peep about the ongoing slaughter of journalists in Mexico, for example. Or the persecution of journalists in Turkey, who are regularly jailed on bogus "terrorism" and "coup conspiracy" charges by the autocrat who rules there, Erdogan. There are innumerable other examples of U.S. "journalists" indifference to the murder and oppression of journalists.

How about all the times the U.S. bombed the offices of Al-Jazeera? Nary a word in U.S. establishment media.

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are demonized by U.S. media and subjected to a relentless campaign by the U.S. government aimed at their destruction. WikiLeaks makes information available to the public. That is journalism!

Hey, here's another one. The U.S. government murdered U.S. journalist Michael Hastings. The attitude of the U.S. media towards that one was "good riddance."

So I find this cynical opportunism by U.S. establishment propagandists to generate sympathy for themselves disgusting. They spent 365 days cheerleading for corporate oligarchic capitalism and aiding and abetting the crimes of the U.S. state, domestic and foreign, with their lies and coverups.

They are accomplices to the murders of millions of people killed as a result of U.S. aggression and U.S. coups that install and support fascist death squad regimes. They want me to feel sorry for them because five people employed by some newspaper no one outside of Annapolis has ever heard of got killed?

Please.

Mistress of Torture Scales Summit Of CIA, An Event That Will Go Down In The Annals Of Feminism

At least, that's what the CIA propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by various media organs and stooges, would have us believe.

It's not every day that a CIA torturer is hailed as a feminist Icon.

Mistress of Torture Gina Haspel, Feminist Flag-Bearer? Really?

I don't think so. But that's one line of propaganda that was used to promote her as CIA Director to replace Michael "Death to Edward Snowden!" Pompeo, and is being echoed still after her successful promotion.

Oh, the quibbling and denials that would be hurled in reaction to "CIA torturer," if there was an actual political opposition in this country that was allowed to be heard in "official" forums, and in the "official" media. First of all, they refuse to call it torture. They prefer the Gestapo terminology, "enhanced interrogation techniques." Literally, that is the English translation from the Gestapo torture manual, and the CIA didn't just borrow the euphemism, they borrowed some of the "techniques" too. Sometimes "reporters" and "commentators" use the phrase "brutal interrogation techniques," I guess to show how daring and independent they are. Occasionally one is so bold as to say "torture," then quickly retreat back into the euphemisms.

When they stop using the euphemisms "law enforcement" and "intelligence agencies" for secret police, and "defense" for aggression, then I'll sit up and take notice.

The CIA quibblers and their enablers and protectors  would also seize on the technicality that the aforementioned CIA secret police officer, Gina Haspel, was merely in charge of a "black site" in Thailand, that is, a CIA torture center. She didn't do the dirty work with her own hands. For some reason, the CIA was squeamish about torturing people inside the U.S. Maybe they didn't want to rely solely on the permission slip written for them by Bush regime apparatchik John Yoo, a type of lawyer reminiscent of Third Reich lawyers who wrote the various genocidal Nazi laws and the legal "philosophy" that put an intellectual patina on Nazi ideology. Yoo has been rewarded for his Service To The Nation with a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School, an alleged bastion of liberalism. And by the way, "the" media has whitewashed most of the torture used. It was a lot more than waterboarding, as they are now presenting it, and the other "techniques" which they have tossed down the memory hole have been well documented.

Saying Haspel didn't torture anyone is like saying Adolf Hitler didn't kill any Jews. He didn't, actually. Not by his own hand, that we know of. Heinrich Himmler never tortured anyone either. In fact, the one time he ever witnessed people being executed, he vomited. Such a delicate soul.
The point is, it's completely disingenuous and dishonest for the CIA to deny Haspel's command responsibility for torture.

But no matter. As I expected, the U.S. Senate confirmed Haspel as the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, chief of the CIA global Gestapo.

So the "glass ceiling" of secret police chief has finally yielded to a female. What a glad day.
Like the day a "black" man was elected president. You remember him. The guy who protected torturers, and imprisoned the only CIA officer who publicly denounced torture, John Kiriakou. The president who perfected the secret police total  surveillance state that the Bush regime began under the name "total information awareness." (A form of total population control.)

The "black" president who took Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act and ran with it, going after all manner of whistleblowers and journalists. Oh, what a "historic" presidency that was! A real advance for "black people." (That's why blacks stopped being imprisoned in vastly disproportionate numbers, and police stopped murdering blacks. Oops, those things didn't happen. But blacks got richer under Obama. Oh wait, they got poorer. A LOT poorer, especially since his banker buddies scammed so many of them out of their homes with mortgage chicanery. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...)

Before the whole sorry saga of the campaign to elevate Mistress of Torture Haspel is permanently consigned to the memory hole by the power establishment, let's take a stroll down memory lane and review some of the criminal media complicity with the CIA and its Torture Mistress. Come with me now back to the day Trump announced the nomination of Haspel to replace the loathsome billionaire Koch brothers toady Pompeo, who was picked to replace Rex Tillerson, unceremoniously bumped from his seat as Secretary of State by Trump, who announced his firing on Twitter without telling Tillerson, in order to publicly humiliate him.

 It was March 13, 2018.  At 8 am East Coast time, the alternative program Democracy Now!, a self-styled "progressive" show, came on the air and announced Trump's choice as new CIA director, and that she ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand where kidnapped prisoners were tortured and interrogated in secret.

Democracy Now! may have been aghast, but the reaction of the establishment media was celebratory. And they were apparently briefed in advance by the CIA on what line to push, unless they all just coincidentally think exactly alike.

For example, one of the main local New York City "news" radio stations, WCBS, a cog in the CBS/Viacom media empire, at 8:59 am hailed as historic the first woman to head the CIA. No mention of that key part of her resume, overseeing a secret torture prison and ordering the destruction of videotapes of the interrogations, evidence of her crimes.

Later that day, the U.S. government-created national radio "public" propaganda network, NPR, on their  4 PM "news" show, the propaganda reader Laksmi Singh falsely asserted that Haspel will likely face "tough questioning" over black sites at confirmation. Which was obvious bullshit, as turned out to be the case.

The British government's propaganda arm, the BBC, predictably made itself a handmaiden to the CIA propaganda campaign. The BBC "News"Hour show, that afternoon, promoted the "advance for women" line. As they so often do, they hauled on a U.S. imperialist apparatchik to spew propaganda without being challenged. This creep, a former chair of the House "intelligence" committee, a Congressional body under the control of the secret police, pushed the CIA line, asserting that Haspel "broke the glass ceiling."  He insisted that "no law was broken" by kidnapping, torture, and murder of prisoners. The mealy-mouthed Gestapo cheerleader gushed, "Not a blemish on her record to any degree...Trust me on this," she'll be great, he insisted.

In the ensuing months, establishment propaganda coverage continued to push the CIA's ersatz "feminism" line, minimized the torture (reducing it to just waterboarding) while usually substituting the aforementioned euphemisms for "torture," rarely mentioning the destruction of evidence (and never the deaths of prisoners in CIA captivity), and mostly focusing on wondering whether Haspel would be confirmed, making a drama out of what was really a foregone conclusion given the reactionary, imperialist majority in the Senate, all the while pretending that the Senate "confirmation process" isn't just a show, or that there was any doubt about her confirmation. There was a small moment of semi-drama when the dying Senator John McCain (he has an incurable brain cancer) urged his colleagues to reject Haspel. McCain was shot down while bombing northern Vietnam and tortured in captivity, which taught him that torture was evil. Unfortunately that's the only lesson he learned, as he is going to his death still a fanatical believer in U.S. imperialism, aggression, militarism, and war against small and weak targets. A Trump aide counseled that McCain could be ignored since he would be "dead soon." This comment was duly leaked and then ginned up into a political soap opera pseudo-scandal for days on end by the establishment media and Democratic Party hacks, who demanded an apology or even firing of the offender.

But I actually don't think Haspel is any more egregious as a CIA head than predecessors like Pompeo, or Hayden, or Panetta, or Tenet (who delivered "faulty," i.e. mendacious, "intelligence" to prompt the invasion of Iraq in 2003), or Colby (who before he was DCI headed the Phoenix torture and mass murder program in Vietnam, which created over 50,000 corpses), or Helms, responsible for the CIA coup in Chile in 1973, or the fascist Allen Dulles, who organized the assassination of president Kennedy in 1963 (after he was out of office, but not out of power) and innumerable other crimes.

The CIA is responsible for millions of deaths, most of which they instigated by getting fascist militaries and secret police agencies to kill people whose names were mostly supplied BY the CIA. In Indonesia in 1965 they instigated the murder of a million "communists" by the military, and greased the skids for the awful dictator Suharto to take power as a U.S. client.(The horrible propagandist Fareed Zakaria, is to this day pushing the CIA disinformation story that what happened in Indonesia was an attempted "Communist coup" that was thwarted by the Indonesian military, an absurd story on its face given the million unarmed civilians who were murdered.) Under Allen Dulles, there were the fascist coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) which destroyed democracies in those nations and ultimately resulted in a quarter million state murders in each of those countries. These "operations" were done on the orders of president Eisenhower, who most of the American left only remembers fondly for a couple of throwaway sentences in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, where he says "we must guard against the undue influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military industrial complex." The complex that HE did so much to build up! And MOST of the speech was devoted to defending that complex, and denouncing the Communist Menace. He also uttered the standard guff about the U.S.' "peaceful" intentions and methods! But apparently leftists so crave "respectability" that they'll seize on an establishment icon, even the man who ordered the two most notorious coups in CIA and U.S. history, to "legitimize" their criticisms of an evil, anti-human power structure they think can be talked into reforming itself! Good luck with that! (Most leftists are fatally compromised by their compromises with the system and collaboration with it. Oh, and there's money too, if you trim your political sails.)

And speaking of torture, the CIA has been torturing people since its inception, and training fascists around the world in torture. One of the reasons the CIA scientist Frank Olson was murdered by the CIA was his disillusionment with the agency after he discovered it ran a torture/murder center in West Germany, with "ex"-Nazis, to interrogate defectors from the Soviet bloc who were suspected of being enemy agents. [1] JFK created the so-called "Alliance of Progress," to counter the revolutionary influence of Fidel Castro and Cuba in Latin America. One of its branches was the diabolically misnamed "Office of Public Safety," which sent CIA torture tutors to train fascist secret policemen and military interrogators. One of these monsters was a guy named Dan Mitrione, sent down to Uruguay to do his evil work. According to former CIA officer John Stockwell, Mitrione would have a homeless person kidnapped to demonstrate torture techniques on for his "students," after which the victim would be murdered. Human life to these monsters has no more value than an insect's. But on the all too rare occasions when one of them gets what's coming to them, oh the HOWLS of outrage, and the bathetic beating of breasts in melodramatic media-ready grief! Mitrione was captured and ultimately put to death by the Tupumaro guerrilla group, a rare instance of justice in the U.S. empire. Mitrione is regarded as a heroic martyr by the CIA. (Reminds me of how the Nazis took the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the number two man in the S.S., a much more important cog in a machinery of evil than Mitrione was.)

So Gina Haspel will have to commit some much more major crimes to really make her bones. Torturing a few Muslim "terrorists" is small change in the annals of CIA crimes against humanity.

Does Secret Police Chief + Vagina = Feminism?

1]  There are a number of documentaries about the Frank Olson case. See for example "CIA Documentary - Biological Weapons & Experimentation on Humans (Frank Olson)."

Democratic Party Descends Deeper Into Political Dementia, Sues WikiLeaks, Russian Government Officials, and Trump Campaign For "Conspiracy To Attack U.S. Election"

U.S. elites love deriding exposes of their state crimes as "conspiracy theories," and painting the exponents of such factually substantiated crimes as paranoid, delusional crackpots.

But that doesn't stop them from pushing ludicrous conspiracy theories of their own invention.

For example, historically, social unrest in the U.S. has been attributed to a nefarious, hidden "communist conspiracy," including the movement of African-Americans to be free of racial oppression. The establishment media, politicians, and secret police agencies (first and foremost the FBI and CIA) have all relied on this propaganda trope- and seem to believe it themselves in many cases.

President Lyndon Johnson was convinced that the millions of people who marched against his war on Vietnam were zombie puppets controlled by the Kremlin, and he ordered the CIA to find the "links" between Moscow and the anti-war movement. (That movement, by the way, consisted of numerous organizations with wildly varying political orientations, and millions of people of all ages, classes, personalities, etc. So Lyndon Johnson's conspiracy theory, that his multifarious opposition to his vicious, criminal, murderous attack on Vietnam was all a creation of the Soviet Union, was truly demented,)

Since the election of Trump as president over a year ago, the main U.S. secret police agencies (FBI, CIA, and to a lesser extent NSA), the Democratic Party, and most of the U.S. elite media (and much second and third tier media) has, day in and day out, assiduously peddled a conspiracy theory, that Donald Trump is a Manchurian Candidate elected and controlled by Vladimir Putin, the autocrat of Russia. Even elements of the allegedly alternative media, which is supposed to be in opposition to the establishment power structure and act as a corrective to the propaganda of the ruling structure, has drunk deeply of this hallucinogenic-spiked Kool-Aid.

And now, the Democratic National Committee has dived off the deep end into the pool of delusion.

Refusing to call for reform of the Electoral College, which prevented the person with the most votes, their party's candidate and Queen Bee Hillary Clinton from winning, instead the Democratic National Committee, headed by a horrible hack named Tom Perez, is once again acting in moral and political cowardice, absurdly scapegoating Russia for revealing the party's dirty conniving, WikiLeaks for providing a public service (information), and the winning Trump campaign. Perez and the DNC has filed a lawsuit in a U.S. Federal court in Manhattan alleging a conspiracy by Russian government officials, the Trump presidential campaign, and WikiLeaks to sabotage the Democrats' electoral prospects and elect Trump. [1]

Which is utterly ridiculous.

The DNC's frivolous lawsuit names as defendants Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (he apparently hasn't suffered enough at U.S. hands yet), and the Russian Federation. The suit hysterically alleges "previously unimaginable treachery." The DNC chairman, the noxious creep and cynical political hack Tom Perez, beat his little breast with this pronouncement:

"We're seeking justice and we're seeking deterrence."

Revealing the emails that uncovered the DNC's treachery in the primaries to ensure the defeat of Senator Bernie Sanders and the victory of Queen Hillary, and the secret speech she made to an audience of high financiers in which she explained what she really stood for, and don't pay attention to all that guff she feeds the public, is hardly "previously unimaginable treachery."

Here's real treachery from past U.S. elections.

Nixon 1968. Conspired with the generals ruling "South" Vietnam to sabotage the Paris Peace talks being conducted by the Johnson regime, to help Nixon get elected president. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek was used as a go-between. Johnson knew what was happening from telephone taps.

Reagan 1980. A deal was cut with Iran to not release the American imperialist hostages being held in the U.S. embassy/spy nest in Tehran in order to ensure Carter's defeat. Later U.S. arms were surreptitiously shipped to Iran, a country then publicly reviled by the U.S. government and media.

But I digress.

Since the proximate causes of Clinton's defeat was the archaic Electoral College, and then-FBI director James Comey's reigniting of the scandal of Clinton hiding her emails as Secretary of State on a private server, which he did only 10 days before the November 7 election, causing Clinton's advantage in the polls to plunge precipitously from a lead of 14% to just 3.5% (within the margin of error) or even in some polls, it is perverse for the Democratic Party to pick the scapegoats they have chosen.

Given that this is the second election in two decades in which their candidate got more votes and "lost" because of the Electoral College (Al Gore and the party allowed the GOP to steal the 2000 Election in Florida, engineered by Florida Governor Jeb Bush, brother of "winner" George Bush), you'd think the Democrats would notice a problem with the fairness of the system. Instead we are subjected to propaganda screeching that "Russia is trying to undermine confidence in our elections!" and "Russia is attacking Our Democracy!" ("Our Democracy" is code for Our System of Rule, the corporate oligarchy, the bourgeois class dictatorship, the power establishment that cannot be voted away.)

But the Democrats don't want to challenge the Electoral College. They also don't want to make a PEEP about the Republicans' success in disenfranchising traditional Democratic voters. They refused to challenge the stolen elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of which Trump "won" by small margins thanks to voting machine chicanery engineered by Republican officials in control of the voting process.

See "With Trump’s Margins of Victory Shrinking, Lawsuits Filed to Block Recount in Two States," The Real News Network, December 2, 2016. All the details of the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) election thefts in those three states are explained.


1] Actually there are even more defendants in the 66-page complaint - Roger Stone, former campaign worker George Papadopoulos, former campaign associate Rick Gates, "John Does 1-10," and more are named as part of what was apparently a vast conspiracy against the poor innocent Democrats.

The suit claims the defendants are guilty of violating numerous laws- everything from conspiracy to violations of federal copyright laws and the Trade Secrets Act. And of COURSE the Democrats are suing for millions of dollars in "damages." Hey, it wouldn't be the Democratic Party if they weren't angling for money!

Tom Perez, Obama-Clinton Puppet & Stooge, Tool of Corporate Rule

Apotheosization of Barbara Bush, Grande Dame of Ruling Class Crime Clan, In Full Swing

We're being told by the U.S. corporate propaganda system that we all loved Barbara Bush, who was some sort of kind-hearted yet iron-willed lady who loved children. It's garbage, of course. She was partners with a major criminal of the 20th century, her husband, George Herbert Walker Bush.

Just turning on the radio, I was subjected to career propagandist Susan Page pushing the mythology that Bush was "America's Grandmother" who "loved children." Those are two of the ubiquitous propaganda lines the huge U.S. corporate propaganda system is assiduously shoveling down our throats. (Apparently Queen Mother Bush didn't care for Guatemalan, Salvadorean, Honduran, Panamanian, or Palestinian children, among others.) She's getting the full media sendoff, as the U.S. corporate propaganda system once again acts EXACTLY like state media.

Naturally, the BBC, always reliably sycophantic to U.S. imperialism, is parroting the U.S. propaganda lines about the U.S.' Queen Mother. (Who knew this was really an aristocracy?)

Marx thought that the bourgeoisie had overthrown the aristocracy. If they did, it was only to become a new aristocracy.








Google, partner in mass surveillance with the NSA, does its bit
 to make us bow our heads in memory of the old battle-axe.

Queen Mother Barbara Bush Dies- "Free" Press Acts Just Like State Media

She was 92, with an iron will, and up to her eyeballs in Bush clan criminality. Her husband is a known sex offender who gropes women. But that's the least of his crimes.

The Bushes are part of the contemporary U.S. aristocracy, permanent fixtures of a ruling political elite. This is treated as a natural state of affairs in a nation whose propagandists and politicians can't stop for one second yammering about "Our Democracy," as if such a thing exists. It exists if you apply an Orwellian definition to "democracy," meaning oligarchy.

U.S. and even foreign media is acting as if a Queen has died. They are trying to create the impression that she was a popular figure. I rather doubt most Americans ever gave much thought to Barbara Bush. She operated behind the scenes.

Here's some sample rhetoric from the CBS propaganda network:  She was "as real as it gets," she was "compassionate," and charitable, she cared about "literacy."  No wonder that, according to CBS, "tributes are pouring in" for Mamma Bear Bush. (Actually her kind are dedicated to political and historical illiteracy for the people.)

I didn't see her alleged "compassion" on display when her husband was slaughtering 4,000 poor Panamanians. Or when her son caused the deaths of a million Iraqis. Or when her husband, as Reagan's vice-president, had blood up to his elbows helping to surreptitiously fund the terrorists commiting atrocities in Nicaragua from their CIA bases in Honduras and Costa Rica, or supporting the fascist death squad regime of El Salvador. Numerous other examples could be cited.

The Bush clan supported the Third Reich financially. That's some history that the U.S. establishment has consigned to oblivion. (This is copiously documented in books and videos.)

And then there is the 9/11 conspiracy which the Bush crime family and their Saudi friends wrapped around the Al-Qaeda conspiracy, to allow planes to be flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, a cover for the demolition of those towers, along with a third building, 7 World Trade Center (another real world event consigned to the bourgeoisie's memory hole) by nanothermite explosives, also proven beyond doubt by physical evidence. (Just go to youtube.com and search "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth" and educate yourself. Or go to their website, https://www.ae911truth.org/)



Would the U.S. media be any more uniform if it was all government controlled? It couldn't be more unanimous in its fawning eulogizing for the nasty Bush matriarch.  Put another way, at such times, which come all too often, there is no functional difference between the corporate media and the state media of North Korea, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia. (The beating of the war drums to agitate the populace to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the war on Vietnam in 1964 with the fictitious attack on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, or the war drive in 1917, are particularly pernicious examples of this phenomenon of the privately-owned media acting exactly like government organs.)

Also, in their typical slavish fashion, those reliable sycophants to U.S. imperialism at the BBC also gushed a bunch of guff about the American Queen Mother. Imperialist shills at the BBC intoned: "We'll remember Barbara Bush, wife and mother to two U.S. presidents," "who won the hearts of Americans with her self-deprecating wit, determination, and" blah blah blah.  Self-deprecating wit? Won the hearts of Americans? What bosh, as they'd say in Britain, if they were honest.

Favorite Targets the BBC Loves To Bash (Under the Cover of "Journalism")

After several years of monitoring the British government's global propaganda arm, the BBC (British Broadcasting Government), what leaps out at me are the following objects of hate at the BBC:

-The Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolas Maduro

-The Colombian rebel movement FARC

-The defunct secret police agency the STASI of the defunct nation East Germany (they just bashed this one again September 14)

-The defunct Soviet Union

-Russia

-Vladimir Putin

Now by "bashing" I mean gratuitous stories that are slanted and grossly unbalanced.

For example, in attacking the Venezuelan govenment, they never give the government's viewpoint, nor that of the millions of Venezuelans who support it. You ONLY hear those Venezuelans attacking the regime, and the foreign governments trying to overthrow it (namely the U.S.). Even worse, while constantly portraying the Maduro government as violently repressive, they have completely hidden the facts that the so-called "protesters" are in fact violent thugs who set fires, attack motor vehicles, burn cliinics, murder policemen, and have burned alive dark-skinned poor people who the "protesters" presume are Chavistas, based on their pigmentation and economic class. But that's not bad enough for the smarmy and dishonest propagandists at the BBC. They cynically add in the people, including police, murdered by the thugs the BBC portrays as brave oppressed people fighting for democracy, with the street goons who get themselves killed while committing felonies in the streets, in one total, which they mislead listeners and viewers into believing are all victims of government violence.  They talk about "protesters," then give a number of people killed to date, sneakily aggregating deaths on both sides without telling you.

NPR, a U.S.-government domestic propaganda network, is the same as the BBC in regards to how it "covers" Venezuela.

You don't have to be a supporter of the Maduro regime- I'm not- to see that this vulgar propaganda is merely a political operation to prepare public opinion in the U.S., UK, and wherever in the world people are stuck relying on the BBC for their "news," for the overthrow of the "evil" and "repressive" Venezuelan government, in the name of "restoring democracy."

Yeah, the U.S. and UK are so in love with democracy that both are shoveling armaments in the Saudi Arabian regime''s hungry maw as fast as they can. Saudi Arabia, one of the two most repressive countries on earth (North Korea is the other) is using those weapons to destroy Yemen. They are butchering its people, starving them with a naval blockade, and causing an uncontrolled cholera epidemic which has sickened over 600,000 Yemenis and killed several thousand already. All to try to put in power a so-called "president" who has so little indigenous support that like the South Vietnamese generals who ruled that ersatz country, are totally reliant on foreign military power to try and subjugate the populace. (One group, the Houthis, were able to put the fake Yemeni government to flight in Saudi Arabia.)

Western guff about "human rights" and "democracy," SOO cynically dishonest, has done much to discredit those essential concepts. Just as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and going down the scale of degeneration, the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia (or "Kampuchia" as it was styled when his psychopaths, the Khmer Rouge, ruled it) and Robert Mugabe in Ziimbabwe and others, have discredited and destroyed the very words "communism" and "socialism" with their cynical misappropriation of those terms for their own base power manias, so are human rights and democracy being delegitimized by the scumbag imperialists of "the West."

The BBC (and the entirety of Western power-establishment media) has been so grossly twisted on the question of Ukraine, and Crimea, that it merits a separate essay. Just coincidentally, an example of deranged BBC distortion of reality occurs as I write this. According to the BBC, Russia is now holding military exercises "close to NATO's frontier." In other phrasing, they "report" breathlessly "Russian military operations near NATO's border- is it cause for alarm." That is to say, inside Russia on Russia's own border. It just so happens that NATO has pushed itself RIGHT UP TO THE RUSSIAN BORDER. So now if Russia stations its OWN MILITARY INSIDE ITS OWN BORDERS, that is deemed to be a "Threat" to NATO! Amazing.

I don't like Russia, and Putin is a sinister autocrat. But I don't throw objectivity and reason out the window because of it.

But then, I'm not a propagandist.

In Surprise Upset, Egyptian Military Dictator Wins 97% of "Vote" In "Presidential Election"

Barely a peep out of U.S. establishment media about it. Which provides a stark and very politically revealing contrast with how they went on and on about the "so-called election" of Putin, just concluded. Putin ran against 7 opponents, and received 76% of the vote.  Sisi imprisoned and intimidated all of his opponents, and ran against a ringer who said he was supporting Sisi!

It's true that there were reports of ballot box stuffing in Russia. And the West's choice for Russian president, Viktor Navalny, was barred from voting. However there is no reason to doubt that Putin would have won in a fair election against Navalny, if by a less impressive margin.

Western media gave Putin another demerit for the "low" turnout of 64% in Russia. (It was only 40% in Egypt- of course that was lightly skated over.) I suppose the media hacks forgot that turnout in U.S. presidential elections is only 54-55%!

The elephant in the room here is how U.S. media barely mentioned the Egyptian pseudo-election, and the ongoing, horrible repression in Egypt. It is another example of the blatant, hypocritical, double standards Western media apply. The lack of objectivity is what distinguishes journalism from propaganda.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Dishonored on 50th Anniversary of His Murder

It shows contempt for King that his murderers are being protected, 50 years after they assassinated him. They are being protected by everyone who refuses to name them!

That, unfortunately and shamefully, includes allegedly "alternative," "progressive" media such as Mother Jones, Democracy Now!, and others. (The Nation, another CIA accomplice, doesn't fall into that category as it is Establishment media, the leftward-most edge of the U.S. propaganda system which has always conformed to official lies about U.S. assassinations.)

The murderers are well known, and ample evidence established their guilt long ago.

They are the CIA, the Memphis Police, and the FBI, whose main role, as in all major U.S. domestic political assassinations, was to do a sham "investigation" framing up the designated fall guy, who is always the same guy, the Lone Assassin.
  
The U.S.-government radio propaganda network, NPR (National Public Radio), asserted once again on its "news" show this morning that King was assassinated by James Earl Ray, the designated fall guy. This is easily disproved. Not just by the fact that Ray was no marksman, but by such facts that the CIA procured false identity papers for Ray in the names of four Canadian men who physically resembled him. The CIA's resident agent in Canada admitted after his retirement that he had obtained these documents prior to the assassination on orders from his superiors. (As I recall, this was reported in Rolling Stone magazine. Down the memory hole now!)

Amy Goodman, the head of the Democracy Now! TV/radio program, speaks in incomplete sentences every time she mentions King's murder. She repeatedly mentions he was assassinated, but never says "by the CIA." She doesn't say who murdered him. She is being coy. She doesn't intone the Official Lie that James Earl Ray, the designated fall guy, did it. That would indicate she knows that isn't true. But she just leaves a blank. History is not blank here!

Of course, the corporate media is even worse. Goodman and others at least perform the service of retelling King's opposition to the Vietnam War (which arguably is what got him killed) and his solidarity with oppressed workers, specifically the striking, horribly abused black sanitation workers of Memphis, Tennessee, where the hit was performed.

How about respecting King enough to stop protecting his murderers? And drop the phony cant about "honoring" him!


See also “'Remembering' Martin Luther King, Jr., While Forgetting Who Murdered Him," January 19th, 2015.