Court Jester Jon Stewart Ends 16 Years of Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Jon Stewart's stepping down from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" is being marked as a notable media event by U.S. media. GOP politicians have pissed on his backside on his way out. (It's far from the first time they've lobbed shells on Stewart. Contrary to the mythology Republicans push, Stewart is not a one-sided pro-Democrat partisan. He has skewered Democratic politicians and Obama regime bureaucrats and government organizations under Obama plenty of times. [1])

What Stewart did was akin to the role of court jesters in medieval courts. Truths that no one dare speak on penalty of losing their heads could be referenced "in jest" by the court jester. This provided both an outlet for expression and a check on the ruler getting too out of touch with reality.

In America, reactionary claptrap and demented assertions of absurd non-"facts" is treated as perfectly reasonable and respectable. This causes people who are even semi-rational to feel like they are losing their minds. Stewart's show provided a needed mental salve for such people to hang on to their sanity. It validated what is in fact obvious but that "society" in general denied, namely that much of political discourse, ideology, and action in the U.S. is irrational, noxious, and deranged.

I say it was shooting fish in a barrel because the absurdities Stewart sent up were very obvious. Yet since they are treated as "respectable" by the propaganda system, there was nowhere else in mass establishment media people could turn to except a comedy show.

And as in medieval courts, using humor as cover allows the jester to get away with speaking taboo thoughts.

Stewart though is no radical. Rather, he is a classic American liberal, a person who has no gripe with the system fundamentally, but is too pragmatic and rational to swallow some of the very glaring irrationalities and insanities of it. He is "safe" in that respect, which is why he is feted by what neofascists insist is the "liberal" media. On the other hand, a Randy Credico is marginalized and persecuted by the police with impunity.

I laughed at Stewart's stuff. It was mostly well done, if rather broad and at times crass. Like many others, I found needed satisfaction in seeing barbs aimed at well-deserved targets. We will see what the new host will do.

Stewart isn't the only person in establishment media doing this. John Oliver is another comedian who does the same thing, on HBO.

But in terms of actually changing the U.S., only an organized movement can do that. The Obama regime and various city governments moved with alacrity to crush the Occupy Movement in the latest example of how the rulers of America systematically work to prevent the emergence of any movements that can change the status quo. Currently the Black Lives Matter movement, an unorganized movement of people mostly venting, is their target, as the recent false arrest and probable murder of the outspoken Sandra Bland in Texas demonstrates.

1] In July of 2014, McCain had the gall to stand reality on its head and say of Stewart, "when he says things...that are absolutely wrong, he gets away with it." This is yet another example of how reactionaries project. Of course it is reactionaries like McCain who say factually false things DAILY which the corporate oligarchy's media treats as reasonable. ["McCain Fires Back at Jon Stewart: 'Gets Away' With Being 'Absolutely Wrong;' Jabs Media," "Media Research Center" (sic), 7/21/14.]

Ironically, the source I just cited is a reactionary propaganda sewer.

Or you can view the same story at Talking Points Memo. 

BBC Blackout Propaganda

The BBC “World Service” took a look at factory conditions in Bangladesh to see “if things have changed” since the collapse of the Rana Plaza sweatshop a year ago, causing massive loss of life of the workers there. [1] First a three-minute piece light on facts. We're told at the end of that segment that the monthly minimum wage was raised from $40 to $68. UNMENTIONED: is it actually enforced.

Also not so much as a hint about the violent government repression of labor organizers. There aren't unions among the garment workers because labor organizers are viciously and systematically repressed by the government, including being subjected to torture and murder. For example, a prominent Bangladeshi labor organizer, Aminul Islam, was brutally tortured and murdered by the Bangladeshi “security forces” in 2012. And just to be clear which side “the West” is on, New Zealand's version of the NSA (which is intimately connected to the NSA as part of the “Five Eyes” inner clique of electronic surveillance secret police agencies of the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) aids and abets the Bangladeshi secret police, with whom it has a cooperative relationship operating inside Bangladesh. This is supposedly an “anti-terrorism” op. Which of course is what the Bangladeshi state murderers call their crimes too. Obviously the Bangladeshis expect something in return for cooperating with the New Zealand eavesdroppers, like, oh, “sharing intelligence” (passing along the communications of targeted labor organizers, in other words). [2]

After the three-minute “reporting” piece by host Ed Butler, which provided atmospherics but scant hard information, BBC and Butler served up a business-centric roundtable discussion. Workers' rights and the violent suppression of attempts to organize them, which is KEY to improving conditions and wages, went unmentioned. No garment workers or labor organizers were included in this lengthy chitchat. It was an entirely top-down discussion. (A Bangladeshi factory owner was included, who claimed he was not only paying way over minimum wage, but paying medical costs for his workers, and for schooling for worker's children- which sounds extremely dubious.) This went on for 14 minutes, then aother piece of reportage by Butler, about a Cambodian garment worker, and their decrepit living conditions, was put on. This segment was under two minutes, and featured Butler allegedly in the home of a poor Cambodian garment worker, where he comments that the house stinks (smells bad), then back to the roundtable talking.

The focus now was around the accord that Western fashion companies hammered out to avoid more bad publicity building collapses and fires.

After two minutes of that, the BBC put on a tape of their regular Irish comedian to deliver a stand-up routine. The thrust of it was materialism and discarding possessions. The upshot: what would happen to the global economy without consumerism?

Then the discussion resumed, with the comedian joining in. They all scratched their heads over the conundrum of how the poor need the richer nations to consume for the livelihood of the poor. (The idea of poor workers producing for their own needs and consumption didn't arise.) Mass production for ultimate discarding is presented as inescapable.

“Is it going to take consumer movements or is it going to take government regulation?” to change things, asks the reporter/roundtable leader Ed Butler at the end. The answer he gets from one participant is “outside pressure.” Once again, the idea of workers themselves being active agents in any of this, as opposed to objects of sympathy, is unthinkable. Twenty-five minutes in total is taken up with mostly empty blather and chin-stroking by business reps and a “consumer advocate.” No labor voices at all, even though the show was ostensibly about them.

Of course, if you have to cover up the violent repression of mere attempts to start a workers' movement, you can't start talking about unions or organized labor, because then you'll have to ask why Bangladeshi labor IS so totally unorganized, and you'll come smack up against the fact of the Bangladeshi government's policy of repression, torture, and murder in order to force their people to work cheap for Western corporations. (A policy that the U.S. and its allies enforce in numerous countries, sometimes resorting to fascist military coups to implement. Of course, without willing implementers in the target countries, the U.S. couldn't do this.)

No “consumer movement” in the West is going to meaningfully confront the murderous Bangladeshi government. And a government that is in cahoots with sweatshop owners, that allows massive construction of death-trap buildings, that tortures and murders labor organizers, shows what a sick charade it is to posit “government regulation” as a solution.

What the Western corporations and their image-advisers want is no more collapsing buildings or mass immolations by fire. The routinized hyper-exploitation of the poor for their labor, enforced by secret police torturer-murderers, is perfectly acceptable since THAT is something that can be kept out of (Western) sight and thus out of mind.

1] “In The Balance” with Ed Butler, BBC, April 18, 2015. In an almost half hour segment, no mention was made of how many people died in the building collapse of the sweatshop factory on April 24, 2013. It was 1,134, a slaughter. Hundreds of others were injured, some losing limbs and thus being maimed for life. (The Bangladeshi government treats poor cripples as human refuse, providing no benefits.)

2] See “New Zealand Spy Data Shared With Bangladeshi Human Rights Abusers,” The Intercept, April 15, 2015.

NBC Gives Their Star Propagandist Brian Williams the Heave-Ho (For Now)

When, after a week, the “controversy” over the NBC “news” anchor’s pathetic and juvenile false story about being in combat in Iraq in 2003 didn’t die down (he claimed to have flown in a helicopter hit by an insurgent rocket-propelled grenade), the NBC bosses decided to cut their losses and try and erect a moat around the damaged “credibility” of their propaganda operation. NBC has announced a six-month “suspension” of Williams, without pay.  This leaves Williams’ dangling in the wind for now. NBC wanted to separate itself from Williams’ in the public mind. [1]

 

After a week of public opprobrium heaped on Williams’ head by citizens, not by the commentariat, [2] which mainly concerned itself with the careerist insider-gossip question of whether Williams would “survive” (as if losing a plum job and key position in the establishment firmament is death), NBC’s poohbahs ultimately opted not to stand with Williams’ implausible excuse that he merely was confused by some oddly-recurring memory malfunction.  Deborah Turness, president of NBC News, intoned, “This was wrong and completely inappropriate for someone in Brian’s position … As managing editor and anchor of Nightly News, Brian has a responsibility to be truthful and to uphold the high standards [sic] of the news division at all times.” The Big Boss at NBC Universal, Steve Burke, unburdened himself of a tongue-lashing directed at Williams; “By his actions Brian has jeopardized the trust millions of Americans place in NBC News. His actions are inexcusable and this suspension is severe and appropriate.” [3]

Hell hath no fury like a boss who perceives his property is damaged by an employee.

You see, “credibility” is a very valuable “asset” of “news” operations, really the key asset on which their power to manipulate the masses rests- and in turn their commercial viability too.

In the week since Williams’ belated outing as a liar, he fell from 23rd to 835th on a list of the most “trusted” people in the country maintained by Celebrity DBI. Oh yeah, and the ratings of NBC’s Nightly News fell 27% in less than a week. I think that’s all the explanation one needs for NBC’s decision, and its timing. Pay a guy $10 million a year whose public image is plummeting straight down to the core of the earth? Not good business.

But if one wants to explain away Williams’ narcissistic and self-aggrandizing lying as the product of a temporary brain glitch, one has plenty more to excuse. Not just the fact that Williams told the Iraq War (fish) story repeatedly, in public, most recently on his “news”cast January 30, but his history of lying and self-promoting exaggerations and tall tales. Williams lied from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He had another close call in his own mind in 2007, when he claimed that while cheerleading for the 2006 Israeli ravaging of Lebanon he was in a helicopter when Hezbollah rockets flew underneath. [4] Williams even claimed he once “looked down the barrel of a .38” handgun as a teenager, when he says he was robbed in Red Hook, NJ. Conveniently he didn’t report the “robbery” to the police. Residents of the area in question don’t believe Williams story, saying the neighborhood is very safe.

Mark my words: the next act for Williams will be a show of “self-reflection” and “learning from this experience” and how “it’s up to me to regain people’s trust” and how awful he feels that he “let people down,” all in an attempt to claw his way back up to his privileged perch. It probably won’t work, but he’ll land in another cushy, if less exalted, position somewhere in the power structure. The Establishment looks after its own. [5]

An unethical society like America is prone to having con men, fabricators, fabulists, and sociopaths rise to prominence, wealth, and power. Williams is an insignificant example, and only became widely iced because things finally, after years, went awry for the hustler.

“Poor Widdle ME! It’s so unFAIR!” Brian Williams now gets to wallow in self-pity, the usual reaction of the narcissist when bad luck strikes. (Don’t be fooled by the play-acted public “apology” that contained more lies, about faulty memories and confusion. That was nothing but a desperate ploy to hang onto his TV anchor chair.)

1] Undoubtedly various clauses in Williams’ contract with NBC were invoked to suspend Williams AND suspend his salary. Notice the difference from when murderous cops are suspended due to public outrage- they’re invariably suspended with pay. U.S. police departments virtually always stand in iron solidarity with the sadists and killers in their ranks. Suspensions with pay is a tactic to wait for things to blow over.

2] Williams’ chronic self-puffing lies only caught up with him only after years of egotistical prevaricating, when the newspaper Stars and Stripes, a publication aimed at military personnel, interviewed eyewitness soldiers who had been griping on Facebook about Williams’ bullshit and ran a story, which spread knowledge of Williams’ sleaziness among the armed forces generally and from there to the larger public. For more details on Williams’ deception and the larger context of this scandale du jour, see “Why 50 MillionDollar NBC Liar Brian Williams Thought He Could Get Away With aSelf-Aggrandizing Bald-Faced Lie,” posted below.

Ironically, Williams is an assiduous promoter of U.S. militarism, which is camouflaged in U.S. propaganda as “supporting the troops.” What’s actually being supported, indeed powerfully promoted, is U.S. aggression and imperialist domination. In this, Williams was just doing his job. (Unlike Phil Donahue, who had the top-rated show on MSNBC, yet another arm of the NBC octopus, back in 2003 when his show was canceled because he refused to drink the Bush regime’s Kool-Aid and pound the war drum like everyone else in the establishment media. There’s your “free press” and “freedom of speech” and “diversity of viewpoints.” Now we’re seeing the same thing over Ukraine. But I digress.)

3] Steve Burke summoned Williams to Burke’s palatial Manhattan aerie (one of his homes) to inform him of his being cut from the propaganda roster. Burke is chief executive of NBC Universal, a giant media combine that owns many subsidiary corporations in the U.S. propaganda system in both the “news” and “entertainment” arms of that system, including NBC, in which is nestled another corporation, NBC News. NBC Universal itself is owned by yet another corporation, the giant and widely hated cable company Comcast. These corporations are like a series of Russian dolls nestled inside one another.

As for the “high standards” of NBC’s “news” division that its boss Turness indignantly huffed Williams had besmirched, like all U.S. TV operations, NBC has a history of participating in CIA disinformation campaigns quite willingly, as well as spreading FBI propaganda and various lies of “officials.” It also is dedicated to presenting a false picture of reality generally in order to indoctrinate and manipulate the American population. One could catalog thousands of obvious falsehoods purveyed by NBC (and the rest of U.S. corporate media) which conclusively prove the cynicism of Turness’ self-righteousness.

4] He fed this fantasy to a student interviewer at a Connecticut college in 2007. Was she a pretty coed he wanted to bed? There’s a question for investigating. Oddly, during 2006, when he described his Lebanese exploits on war the NBC News blog, he never mentioned this hair-raising close call. Hey, maybe the guy’s problem is he’s too MODEST! Do you suppose? [“NBC’s Brian Williams told varying versions of rocket fire in Israel-Hezbollah war,” Washington Post Style section, February 8th, 2015.

Williams’ stories get better with each retelling by him. The real tragedy in all this is now we’ll never get to hear the version of the Iraq helicopter war story where the pilot is wounded and unconscious and Brian seizes the controls, attacks and destroys the “terrorists” on the ground, and saves everybody.

 

5] No less a personage than Burke unmistakably signaled this ultimate outcome, by saying, even as he was excoriating Williams, this: “He deserves a second chance and we are rooting for him. Brian has shared his deep remorse with me and he is committed to winning back everyone’s trust.”

Turness too, in her statement, turned on a dime from a vituperative rebuke to soothing words promoting Williams: “By his actions, Brian has jeopardized the trust millions of Americans place in NBC News. His actions are inexcusable and this suspension is severe and appropriate. Brian’s life’s work is delivering the news. I know Brian loves his country, NBC News and his colleagues. He deserves a second chance and we are rooting for him. Brian has shared his deep remorse with me and he is committed to winning back everyone’s trust.” Apparently not permanently inexcusable.

Turness forgot to mention that which Brian Williams loves most: Himself. (I assume he capitalizes Himself in his mind.)

A fellow self-promoting media hustler, the British import Piers Morgan, ran defense for Williams: “We surely need to get a collective grip and gain some perspective on all this.” Morgan is another ethics-free, media mountebank who oversaw phone hacking in Britain for a rival newspaper to Murdoch’s rags. The man has a point. Williams already explained all this! As he said, “This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran” by fabricating a self-glorifying ersatz “heroic” narrative oh-so-subtly lionizing himself. Just lighten up, everybody!

Why 50 Million Dollar NBC Liar Brian Williams Thought He Could Get Away With a Self-Aggrandizing Bald-Faced Lie

Well why wouldn’t he think that? It’s not as if American propagandists don’t lie all the time, and get away with it. And the negative consequences are virtually always nonexistent. In fact, the liars’ careers are frequently advanced by their lying! And a guy like Williams, who lies for a living, parroting U.S. propaganda, doesn’t even think about it when he lies. It’s a habit. What happened this time was that he told a totally self-serving lie, AND it was possible for people to call him on it, thanks to the Internet.

Williams falsely claimed that he was in a helicopter in Iraq in 2003 that was hit by insurgent fire while in flight. In fact he’s been telling increasingly embellished versions of that lie since 2003, to the frustration of U.S. soldiers who knew he was lying but whose voices were like unheard cries in the wilderness.

Until now. Things are different now, in the Age of the Internet, especially with the advent of Facebook and Twitter and the massive proliferation of blogs. The U.S. corporate propaganda system no longer has a monopoly in America on perceptions of reality. For the first time, the propagandists can be effectively challenged. [1]

The soldiers who knew that Williams was lying were especially galled since part of Williams’ shtick is acting as a cheerleader for U.S. militarism and aggression, disguised as caring about “the troops.” The fact that he puts on a show of “honoring our brave soldiers” (in the vernacular of U.S. propaganda) while at the same time draping himself in the mantle of combat (if only passively- that is, he got shot at, he bragged) rather sharply revealed Williams’ utter cynicism and contempt for actual “warriors.”

And then, when Williams finally couldn’t get away with his self-mythologizing War Story anymore, he followed it up by claiming that he somehow misremembered what happened. Well! I would have thought that being in a helicopter hit by an RPG (rocket propelled grenade, according to the Legend of Williams The Valiant’s personal War on Terror) would make rather a strong impression and stick out in one’s mind, and be hard to confuse with merely riding in a helicopter. If Williams’ mind really is so easily fooled as to what’s real and what’s imagined, if his brain is that addled, I wonder how qualified he is to be a “journalist,” let alone one “worth”$50 million. 

So Williams “apologized” for his “mistake.” (By “mistake” he means he erroneously said something untrue, in all good faith, not that in his arrogance he thought that he could get away with such a brazen, implicitly boastful lie, and with repeating it again and again. And lie is obviously what it is, not an honest error.)

Let’s take a look at another recent lie by a major media front person, the former Nixon gun moll and blond honeypot Diane “Pink Lips” Sawyer, one of the Big Talking Heads on the ABC propaganda network. Last year, while Israel was laying waste to the Gaza strip open air concentration camp for the third time in six years, she pushed a picture of a destroyed home in our faces and claimed it was an Israeli house destroyed by Hamas rocket fire. In fact it was a Palestinian home (one of tens of thousands) wrecked by the remorseless Israeli war on the Palestinian people and UN facilities in Gaza. Caught in the lie, Sawyer also “apologized.” We are to believe that there was some mixup, somehow, unexplained.  Consequences for Sawyer? A bit of egg on the face which was quickly wiped off.

ABC and Diane Sawyer wanted you to believe that this scene of devastation was in Israel, not Gaza. How implausible. What contempt for people's intelligence that shows! And thus is reality inverted and the victimizer made the victim, and vice versa.

Of course Sawyer's lie was a lie in the service of the U.S. political and ideological system (which Israel has successfully colonized) whereas Williams’ lie was mainly in the service of his own self-glorification- some of which rubs off on NBC of course, which is why they tolerate that sort of egomaniacal fibbing. They want their “star” to shine! Shine On Brightly, oh Brilliant Brian! 

Then there are entire campaigns of lies, like “Yellow Rain,” the claim that bee feces Southeast Asia were Soviet chemical attacks on villages. Or the fake “Pope Plot,” asserting that the Turkish fascist Grey Wolves terrorist Agca, who shot and wounded John Paul II, was a Bulgarian-KGB agent. Marvin Kalb, a Big Deal TV “journalist” at the time, assiduously promoted this CIA disinformation campaign. (He went to his reward later, a sinecure at Harvard, from which perch he can groom future propagandists and act as a recruiting scout for the CIA, no doubt.) Or the article in the ragazine U.S. News and World Report some years back titled “50,000 Marxist professors on U.S. College Campuses.” (Really? 50,000? You counted?) U.S. “News” also once ran a photo of a sea buoy on a beach with a Boy Scout troop standing around smiling. Emblazoned in large letters on the so-called buoy were the initials U.S.S.R.  U.S. “News” provided only a caption, explaining that the “buoy” was a Soviet spy buoy that had washed ashore.  I thought- how very nice of the Soviets to identify their spy device so people would know exactly where it came from. Not very professional, of course. And so helpful of them to write it in English. Because in Russian, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is CCCP. As it was on all their insignia and banners and so on. 

One could compile a list of literally hundreds of thousands of examples of U.S. media mendacity, large and small, especially in support of U.S. crimes like mass exterminations by the death squad regimes the U.S. is so fond of.

Currently the U.S. corporate propaganda system is quite cynically distorting the situation in the Ukraine- and the causes of the conflict there- to an extreme degree. [Search “Ukraine” on this webpage to find examples of gross Western dishonesty on this issue. The search box should be near the top of the page on the side, next to that small orange B.]

So given how lying is part and parcel of the daily work of the American power establishment “journalist,” how easy it must be for a habitual purveyor of lies like “Brian Williams” to slip on a banana peel. Damn that Internet! 

This “Brian Williams” creature is a typical type that succeeds in the hypercompetitive milieu of the U.S. corporate propaganda system’s “news” sector.  He’s utterly bland in appearance, a clichéd version of an American “White Man,” ruthlessly ambitious and without any ethical scruples to hamper him, and utterly shameless in promoting whatever propaganda the system requires of him. (Even his name couldn’t be any more generic if it was “John Doe.”)

On the other hand, genuine journalists have a hard time of it in the so-called “journalism profession” in the U.S. Examples include I.F. Stone, George Seldes, Gary Webb, Robert Parry, and others, who struggle to get by (or ultimately don’t, in Webb’s case). And it’s no different in the “entertainment” wing of the propaganda system, where MSNBC canceled its own top-rated show, Phil Donahue’s, before the 2003 Iraq invasion because he wouldn’t toe the party line and beat the war drum, or the case of Ed Asner, whose popular TV series was given the axe because Asner had the temerity to condemn U.S. crimes in Central America. And oh yes, there was that little thing called the “blacklist,” that lasted about twenty years all told, the post-World War II purge in the entertainment industry of those with suspect political attitudes. While a certain range of thought and opinion is permitted within the U.S. propaganda system (and this range expands or contracts depending on political conditions and challenges the U.S. oligarchy faces, same as in China, say) there is definite enforcement of basic ideological tenets. No one is allowed to say “U.S. imperialism,” for example. All must demonstrate fealty to the Warren Commission fairy tale about the JFK hit. Add to that the demand that one at least pretend to believe that two planes caused three massive steel structures to suddenly implode on September 11, 2001. And that a clique of rich elitists called “the Founding Fathers” created a perfect democracy, not a tightly-controlled oligarchy ruled by these slave-owners themselves. And that a two-party dictatorship is a democracy. And much more. 

As far as the “news business” goes, the worst rise to the top of the propaganda system, always. 

1] And they don’t like it one little bit. See “The Petulant Entitlement Syndrome of Journalists,” [sic], the intercept, Jan. 28, 2015. 

The article has a quote by, of all people, the one and only Brian Williams himself! In 2007 he revealed his supercilious contempt for those he works so assiduously to manipulate and dupe, the common people, namely those who dare to criticize Brian Williams:

“You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years.”

Love Me, Love My Propaganda, is Williams’ demand. Oh Brian, FYI, I don’t wear a bathrobe, or pajamas, during the day, and I don’t live in an efficiency apartment, or with my parents. And your “credentials” consist of years of incessant misrepresentation of reality, regurgitation of official propaganda and ideology, and omissions and lies, in the service of global corporate hegemony and U.S. imperialist crimes against humanity. Not as impressive as YOU like to tell yourself you are, (and that the sycophants surrounding your ilk are required to jabber at you, reflecting your glory back on yourself).

So behold “Brian Williams,” who because of his super-white-bread name and mien, we’re supposed to identify with as an avatar of Everyman.

By the way, Williams has a contract paying him $10 million a year for five years. Now NBC is stuck with tainted goods. Serves them right. (No wonder Brian has such contempt for the rest of us! He makes so much more MONEY than us, he must be far far BETTER than we are!)

A brief note on the history of NBC: Like the other two original broadcast TV operations, ABC and CBS, it was founded by a Jewish mogul, then later bought by RCA (a big military contractor) which in turn was bought by General Electric (an even bigger military contractor), which owned it until a few years ago, when it sold it to the crooked and abusive cable TV giant Comcast. (MSNBC, the cable network, is part of NBC. It was originally a joint operation of NBC and Microsoft.) Comcast changes the billing names on customers who complain to “Asshole” and “Bitch.” It got some bad publicity for that and thus had to remove the miscreant employees, but the fact that employees would do that speaks volumes about the corporate “culture” (attitude and ideology) of Comcast, which is one of the most hated corporations in America, according to surveys, in fact probably the most hated. But since I don’t even own a television, and would never pay for the privilege of watching propaganda, I don’t actually give a damn about Comcast myself.

Ah, a typical blogger-loser “rant”! I love rants, don’t you?

For the New York Times, Obituaries Are Perfect Places for Propaganda

I know that sounds far-fetched, but it’s true. This organ has a consistent habit of blatantly distorting reality in its obits to conform to its ideological predilections and political goals. 

There are examples of this every week. Here’s one from the Sunday paper of February 1st.

The obituary is for Reies Tijerina, whom the Times describes as a figure in “a radical Chicano property rights movement.” [1] 

The second paragraph says “He never achieved his goal of reclaiming – for Mexicans, Indians and descendants of the original Spanish settlers -  the millions of acres that changed hands when northern Mexico became the American Southwest in the mid-19^th century.”

That opaque description of the actual history is all you get. What exactly occurred “in the mid-19^th century” that caused “northern Mexico” to magically “become” “the American Southwest” and making “millions of acres” “change hands?” 

A little thing called the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, when the U.S. invaded Mexico, conquered it, and ripped off half of Mexico as the spoils of war. Not exactly a normal real estate transaction, as NYT propagandist Sam Roberts, or one of his invisible power-munchkin editors, has it.

How dishonest can people who call themselves “journalists” be? Is this really a “news” paper, or a propaganda platform?

It would be sort of like reading an obituary in a German publication and coming across a sentence saying “the Jewish population of Europe underwent a sharp decline in the mid-20^th century.”  True, sure, but SO misleading, evasive, and dishonest as to qualify for the word, “lie.”

I have come across numerous similar examples of blatant, mendacious political propaganda stuffed into NYT obits over the years. As I say, you can find examples during any week. And it’s not just in obits about political figures, although they’re the worst, as one would expect. I will present more as I have the time to do so.

[For political, sociological, and psychological analyses of this pathological planet, see my main blog at jasonzenith.blogspot.com.]

1] “Reies Tijerina, 88: Led Fight for ChicanoLand Rights,” Feb. 1, 2015, page 16, by career NYT hack Sam Roberts. [Posted on nyt.com Jan. 27th.]

Decoding U.S. Vocabulary

"Stability”- maintaining a status quo the U.S. favors, which usually comes down to backing repressive regimes.

“Instability”- a potential threat to some repressive regime the U.S. supports.
 
“Promoting stability”- installing or strengthening U.S. influence and dominance in a nation or region.
 
“Promoting instability”- a rival power attempting to increase its influence in a nation or region or trying to install a regime friendly to it.

BBC Rushes To Defend CIA Torturers- Again

The morally revolting things the BBC news does more than cancels out the interesting pieces they run. [1] 

They were at it again this morning. The occasion was the Senate “Intelligence Oversight” [sic] Committee finally getting up the backbone to release its own report on the CIA torture program. (Usually euphemized as “harsh interrogation program” allegedly to “protect us” from “terrorism.” There’s one way to get a scaredy-cat populace to endorse systematic government kidnapping and torture, in violation of treaty obligations and U.S. law.)

The BBC anchor said the report contained “details of harsh CIA interrogation” [hey BBC, can you pronounce “torture”?] during the “CIA’s campaign against Al-Qaeda.” At least, that was the excuse given. (Just keep in mind that it was secret police types who planted the explosives that blew up three (not two) buildings in lower Manhattan in 2001. [2]) (I didn’t catch the anchor’s name, but he’s a regular, a male with an African accent. There’s only one who hosts their overnight radio broadcast to the U.S.)

After this muddled intro, he brings on just ONE person- a “former CIA counterterrorism analyst.” (Rather like bringing on the axe-murderer’s lawyer to discuss the matter!) This man spouted such rhetoric as the “CIA’s sort of harsh methods,” (sort of harsh!) and “certain techniques” (unspecified) of the “enhanced interrogation program.”

The BBC man helpfully exclaimed that the report was old news, there wasn’t anything new about the [torture, the word they won’t say] in it. (In fact that was a flat lie, as the report DOES contain new details of the types and methods of torture.) The BBC creep also dismissed the whole thing as just “political.” “So what is the point of releasing this report? Is it political?” (Odd attitude for an alleged journalist! Who needs official records? Just keep everything secret! Is he angling for a job as CIA spokesman?) The CIA man happily agreed that the report is “a political football for those who have already made up their minds.” He also rebuked “the fecklessness of the Democratic Party who have tried to make the CIA a scapegoat.” “All of this was approved” by the White House, the lawyers [like John Yoo!], the CIA’s lawyers, he says. Well then no problem torturing people! Hey, your lawyers said it’s okay. (By the way, the Nazis had lawyers say the same thing about Hitler’s crimes. It means nothing.)

By the way, the report is 525 pages, but the BBC anchor already knows there’s nothing in it. No news here folks, move along!

Grotesque.

The BBC is acting as if it‘s a U.S. government propaganda agency. Oddly, even the U.S. government radio network NPR didn’t do that. The 12 noon (U.S. east coast time) NPR newscast called the report “scathing.”

Even secret police groupie and conduit for U.S. secret police propaganda Dina Temple-Raston, officially titled “NPR’s national security correspondent,” had to admit the report, even after CIA and Obama regime censorship, painted a pretty awful picture. Torture methods included days or weeks of sleep deprivation, and contrary to CIA lies, “Abu Ghraib-style” brutality, such as dragging their prisoners naked down hallways, Temple-Raston reports. But she made sure to end her brief news story with the CIA line that CIA says the report is all wrong. (The U.S. media has been parroting that CIA lie ad nauseam every time the story of the long-suppressed report has come up.)

Dina likes to imagine she's a secret agent. Exciting!

One thing the report asserts definitively is that NO plots were foiled by torture, Osama bin Laden WASN’T captured thanks to torture (a lie promoted by the movie Zero Dark Thirty, made with the help of illegally released “classified” info by the CIA and Obama White House), and in fact useful information was not obtained. The CIA of course contradicts all that- but they would, they’re the torturers. Oh, and they illegally broke into the computers of the Senate Committee staffers who were working on the report, a Federal felony (dozens in fact, the way the Federal government charges people) for which not only was no one prosecuted, but Eric “Due Process Means We Decide to Kill You” Holder, Jr., Obama’s Attorney General, refused to even investigate.

Obama and the CIA dug in their heels and resisted like mules the release of the report. Idiotically, the Senators let the CIA censor the report. And after months of Obama doing all he could to squelch the Senate report, his chief mouthpiece, Josh Earnest, had the nerve to say Obama very much wanted the report to be released.

Later the BBC World “Service” puts on “former” CIA dog Bob Baer, an arch reactionary who is one of the CIA’s public faces. Baer insists the only point of releasing the report is as a Democratic partisan attack on the Bush regime. Oh, and the details of torture “puts people’s lives at risk.” The old “sources and methods” mantra. Oh, and the Geneva Conventions are irrelevant because Al-Qaeda never signed them! (But the U.S. has, jackass. And anti-torture conventions too.) As for torturing innocent people, “that’s no different than the British police,” who arrest and release people. And he used “3,000” killed on 9/11 as justification. (Ironic, that, given the fact that most of them were killed because of the demolitions planted in advance by agents of the U.S. secret police deep state.)

Do they have Nazis on to discuss the Holocaust?

Hey, maybe next time there’s a U.S. torture scandal, ask a human rights lawyer! (This particular report, by Rebecca Kesby, did include a short description by a torture victim of what he suffered.)

NPR has a decent, succinct overview of the history of the development of the Senate "Intelligence" Committee torture report, which refutes the CIA’s and BBC’s bullshit, "Report Says CIA Misled Senate, White House On Interrogation Program," Dec. 9, 2014.

1] This is nothing new for the British government’s propaganda outfit. See for example “The BBC: Cover Up Central,” “Why Is The BBC Defending Chinese Computer Hacking?,” and “BBC, NPR Ignore Egyptian Seizure of Aljazeera Journalists.” for some absolutely breath-taking examples of egregious BBC propaganda that grossly distorts reality and covers the butts of some awful state criminals. (Which states might surprise you. In one case they hid Chinese computer hacking aimed at the U.S. Apparently their desire to suck up to the Chinese rulers so British capitalists could try to make a buck there outweighed even their slavish subservience to the U.S.A.!)

2] A thoroughly documented fact supported by over a thousand architects and engineers, plus demolitions experts. See for example “9/11: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out (Full)” and “9/11: Blueprint for Truth-The Architecture of Destruction-114min.”

Iran Making Major Concession on its Nuclear Program: Not “Newsworthy” To U.S. Media

U.S. corporate establishment propagandists have a host of ready-made, specious justifications for their suppression of important news. “The public isn't interested” is one. (Of course, that doesn't stop the propagandists from hammering away at things “the public” isn't interested in when they have a covert political or ideological agenda to promote. And the propagandists know how to make things “interesting,” that is, attention-grabbing. They also fill their airtime and pages with mountains of trivia which they think people are interested in.) “We already covered that,” is another excuse- meaning they once made a tiny, fleeting mention of an important fact or significant event.” “It's complicated,” implying it's too hard for us to cover, is another pathetic alibi they offer for themselves at public panels on “the media.” And then there's the “not newsworthy” line, an all-purpose contemptuous brush-off.

Iran is redesigning its nearly-completed heavy-water Arak reactor to reduce by 80% the amount of plutonium it can produce. This will delay the start of operations by three years. (The U.S., which is waging economic warfare against Iran, which it forces foreign nations and companies to participate in, isn't paying for the expensive alterations of course- Iran is.) Iran claims the purpose of the reactor is to produce medical isotopes. (Yeah, that sounds fishy. Spend billions of dollars to produce something that could be purchased abroad for probably tens of thousands of dollars a year? For “national pride”? Maybe for insurance, to be able to make nuclear weapons the next time the U.S. instigates some nation to attack Iran, as it did when it got the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. Or to be able to deter Israel and/or the U.S. from attacking Iran, which Israel constantly threatens to do, and which commits assassinations and sabotage inside Iran.)

But the 80% reduction in plutonium-production capacity isn't good enough for the U.S. and its fellow travelers; they want a near-zero plutonium-production capacity. (Plutonium can be used to make atomic weapons, as can enriched uranium.)

The reactor is open for inspection and verification by international experts from the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN organization dominated by the U.S., especially under its current boss, a Japanese stooge very obedient to U.S. orders. Iran also posted a video on a government website about the reconfiguration.

Given all the hysteria over the so-far-imaginary Iran “nuclear threat,” a media propaganda campaign that has assiduously promoted the Israeli-created lie that “Iran has threatened to blow Israel off the face of the earth” and that ignores repeated findings by the U.S. “intelligence community” that Iran DOESN'T HAVE a nuclear weapons program, but a uranium-enrichment one (which produces concentrated forms of uranium that can be used as reactor fuel for energy production or, with further enrichment, as material for atomic bombs), one would think that the story of a major reconfiguration of the Arak reactor, whose dismantlement the U.S. has demanded (Israel prefers the U.S. bomb it), and a reduction in its projected plutonium output to only one-fifth it was previously, not to say a three year delay in the reactor coming online, would at least be worthy of being reported by U.S. media. But for the most part, no. It hasn't been mentioned on any New York City radio stations, for example. (NYC being the “media capital of America.”) Nor on the U.S. government's domestic propaganda network, NPR. (Nor, for that matter, on the BBC, the British government's main propaganda arm, at least not on its “world service,” the stuff it broadcasts abroad.)

The common establishment propaganda response to someone pointing out such glaring omissions is to sneer “conspiracy theorist,” by which they mean “crackpot.” But facts are not disproven by mere ridicule. And this isn't a conspiracy. It is lock-step political and ideological discipline imposed by the managers of the corporate media. Why would such obviously relevant and significant news, related to an issue this media has made such a big deal about over a period of years, be in effect suppressed?

Some establishment “media critics” promote the alibi that “the” media in such cases is just being “lazy,” or “careless,” or “failing to do its job.” At best such idiotic and implausible explanations are naive. There may be more venal or sinister explanations for why such “critics” invent these ridiculous excuses for the corporate propaganda system's obvious suppressions and blackouts of important information. How could all these different corporations all be lazy? All be careless? All “fail to do their job”? (I should say, “virtually all,” as there are a handful of exceptions, speaking generally. McClatchy's Washington bureau has consistently reported damning information about the U.S. government, for example, that the rest of the corporate media refuses to tell anyone about.) These pet critics ignore the obvious political and ideological motives and agendas that easily explain the “oversights” and “lapses.”

In this case, since the policy of the U.S. corporate oligarchic establishment, including its government and media, has been to present Iran as a devil country starting in 1979 with the overthrow of the dictator the U.S. installed in the CIA coup of 1953, the “Shah,” (“King”), showing Iran making large concessions simply won't do. That doesn't make Iran look “bad.” Likewise, Israel is determined that the U.S. should wage war on Iran, and large swaths of the U.S. media are in thrall to Israel (as is the U.S. government).

Against Euphemism II

“Authority”- Power systems and those in those systems who wield power.

“Underprivileged”- The American poor. Shitty schools go with that. (That really IS a “disadvantage.” A crippling one, in fact.) Term applied to domestic “racial minorities” on the bottom rungs of the U.S. socio-economic ladder.

“Disadvantaged”- Oppressed and repressed U.S. domestic “racial minorities” on the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

“Free Enterprise”- Laissez-faire U.S. capitalism overlaid with a patina of sham regulation.

“Security:” Power and domination. As in “national security,” (the power of the nation-state),
“U.S. security,” “Israel's security,” etc.

“Pro-Israeli”- Pro brutal repression of the Palestinians. Anti-Palestinian.

"Reform"- Making something worse. As in “reforming Social Security,” or “reforming teachers' tenure,” or “reforming public workers' pensions.”

"Strengthening"- Making more brutally repressive. In the context of the military, wasting even more money on, increasing the militarization of U.S. society.

“Bring to justice-” Take revenge on. For example, after the “Islamic State” executed a captured American freelance journalist in retaliation for U.S. bombing attacks on them in Iraq, the U.S. Attorney General, Eric “Due Process Means We Kill You If We Feel Like It” Holder, Jr., angrily vowed that the perpetrators would be “brought to justice one way or another.” Meaning; capture and execute, or just execute. Likewise, the assassination by military commandos of Osama bin Laden was described by government officials from Obama on down as having “brought [him] to justice.”

“A challenge” or “challenges”- Problems.

“Police tactics”- police violence, brutality, and repression. Example: “On Staten Island, Thousands Protest Police Tactics,” (New York Times headline, Sunday, August 24, 2014, page 17). They were protesting the “tactic” of choking to death Eric Garner, on the street, for the “crime” of selling single cigarettes without giving the government its cut (“tax”). Basically what the poor have to do to survive in America is defined as criminal, including begging.

See also: “Against Euphemism.”