Propaganda Analysis

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Clinton-Friendly Media Forced Ouster of Paul Manafort from Trump Presidential Campaign In A Very Cynical Way

Hillary Clinton's media allies used a blatant double standard to force Donald Trump to jettison Paul Manafort.

Manafort is one of those types referred to variously as a "lobbyist" or a "political strategist" or a "consultant." Whatever you call them, this class of creatures are parasitic leeches embedded in the corrupt U.S. political system of corporate oligarchic rule, a system manifested domestically in repression and exploitation, and abroad in imperialism, war, and various crimes against humanity, and recognizes no rights anywhere, just excessive privileges for those in the elite in-crowd. They basically function as fixers, shills, and influence-peddlers for clients, whether corporate or governmental, seeking advantages within the U.S. power structure. Sometimes they give political advice to foreign rulers about handling their affairs in their home country. This is what Manafort apparently did for the former president of Ukraine.

Manafort was attacked by much of the U.S. establishment media for selling his services in years past to the U.S.-ousted former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yauokovych, whom he helped elect. The fact that Yanukovych was the legal and democratically-elected president was irrelevant. The crime is he was "Russian-backed." (Not quite. The Russians had to pressure him to opt out of a trade pact with the EU that deliberately excluded Russia. And they didn't intervene to save him from having to flee for his life from the violent fascist rabble that the U.S. egged on to overthrow him, similarly to what they did in Iran in 1953.) [1]

Those of Manafort's ilk typically sell their services to various foreign governments, including despotic and tyrannical ones. No one raises an eyebrow over American shills promoting Saudi Arabia here, one of the most repressive and medieval regimes on earth. And Manafort couldn't gaze into the future to see that the U.S. would decide to overthrow his client and retroactively label that client an official Bad Guy. (We don't know if the U.S. was even then covertly moving against Yanukovych. Maybe someday WikiLeaks can tell us. The U.S. government certainly will never voluntarily tell. That's called "transparency" in the Orwellian language of U.S. political elites.)

But the successful assault on Manafort was more than just a case of singling out someone who is typically treated with discretion and respect by the establishment propaganda system. In fact it's the height of chutzpah. Because this was done on behalf of Hillary Clinton, and it just so happens that another member of Manafort's class of hustler, Lanny Davis, is a moral leper, propagandist for tyrants, P.R. man for the Honduran coup supported by Clinton and Obama, and a close associate of the Clintons, former special counsel to the last president Clinton. So where do the media allies of Clinton and those merely desperate to Stop Trump At All Costs get off with such a blatant double standard?

Davis charged a cool $100,000 a month to defend Ivory Coast dictator Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to leave office at the end of his term and murdered people to cling to power. (Unlike Yanukovych who offered to step down early to try and mollify the fascist mob that was setting cars, buildings, and policemen on fire in the streets. (Go watch the youtube videos- they literally lit policemen ablaze.) He also sold his services to the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. And there was his assiduous shilling for the Honduran coup. For pay, of course .[2]

One useful conclusion we can draw about Trump from his willingness to throw Manafort overboard is this: contrary to the image he tries to project as a fearless tough guy who never backs down, we see that he is indeed susceptible to pressure, and willing to reverse course. More evidence of that are his verbal about-faces and two-steps when he gets a certain amount of heat for his statements. I predict that if he becomes president, the very powerful "national security" state- that is, the military-secret police combine- will be able to twist him like to pretzel to serve their goals.

After all, Trump has no real interest in foreign policy, no principles, and no goals except his own increased self-aggrandizement. So no impediments will be placed in the way of the Pentagon or the massive, multi-tentacled secret police apparatus (euphemistically called "the intelligence community").

But then, there are barely any limits placed on them now. And with all the rich blackmail material the secret police must have on Hillary, there won't be limits under a restoration of the Clinton reign either.

Paul Manafort gets tripped up.

Lanny Davis. "Money is my God. You got a problem with that?"

1] Not that Manafort has democratic scruples. He also worked for U.S.-backed Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and CIA-supported Angolan terrorist leader Jonas Savimbi. But maybe his worst crime was working for Reagan. For background on Manafort from an establishment media viewpoint, see. "Paul Manafort has guided dictators and strongmen, but can he manage Donald Trump?," Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2016. Notice how precipitately was Manafort's fall, coming soon after this piece.

For Manafort defrauding a Russian businessman out of $19 million, plus more on Trump and links to articles, see Swindler Trump's Presidential Campaign Run By a Swindler- U.S. Media Acts As Accomplices
July 27, 2016.

2] You can watch Davis speciously justifying his propaganda work for Honduran anti-democrats on Democracy Now! For the charge sheet against Davis see" Loathsome Lanny Davis Has More Blood On His Hands," December 28, 2010.

Clinton-Friendly Media Forced Ouster of Paul Manafort from Trump Presidential Campaign In A Very Cynical Way

Paul Manafort gets tripped up.

Lanny Davis. "Money is my God. You got a problem with that?"

Clinton-Friendly Media Forced Ouster of Paul Manafort from Trump Presidential Campaign In A Very Cynical Way

Paul Manafort gets tripped up.

Lanny Davis. "Money is my God. You got a problem with that?"

Clinton-Friendly Media Forced Ouster of Paul Manafort from Trump Presidential Campaign In A Very Cynical Way

Paul Manafort gets tripped up.

Lanny Davis. "Money is my God. You got a problem with that?"

Monday, August 29, 2016

Media Lays Groundwork for Another Colombian Extermination Campaign by Blacking Out History

The last time the FARC disarmed, thousands of its members were slaughtered. Is that about to happen again?

Sometimes history doesn't repeat as farce, but as yet another tragedy. Of course, one person's tragedy can be another's cause for celebration. (The Nazis and the Jews- and hopefully now most of the rest of humanity- had very different feelings about the Holocaust, for example.)

You wouldn't know it from establishment media "reporting," but the just-announced ceasefire between the Colombian rulers ("government") and the rebel force FARC, under which FARC will disarm and become a political party and presumably participate in elections, is the second time we've been here.

The same agreement was made back in 1984, the so-called La Uribe Agreement, FARC disarmed and came out into the open. The following year, FARC got together with various leftist and communist groups to create a new political party, the Union Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP). The UP sought terribly evil political reforms, such as a revised constitution, democratic local elections, political decentralization, and most unforgivably, an end to the hegemony over Colombian politics by the Liberal and Conservative parties. They called for desperately needed health and education spending, favored nationalization of foreign businesses, Colombian banks, and transportation, and public access to the oligarchy's media. They even had the effrontery to pursue land redistribution! (Hundreds of thousands of rural families were rendered landless by people like Alvaro Uribe, father of the fascist death squads and the previous president of Colombia before the current one.)

Needless to say, all this was unacceptable, so the rulers unleashed their death squads, which dutifully murdered not just one, but two UP presidential candidates, numerous UP public office-holders and officials, and as many as 6,000 people all told between 1986 and 1990. In 1989 a single landholder had over 400 UP members murdered. (Notice that rich Colombians all have an individual license to kill.) And in 1990, every single presidential candidate from all the center-left parties were assassinated. Apparently merely stealing an election is too humdrum for the Colombian "elite." (Most of the UP ranks were not from FARC, but from socialist and labor groups.)

Will this time be any different? Given the bloodthirsty history of the Colombian ruling class and its military and auxiliary fascist death squads (euphemistically referred to in Western media as "right-wing paramilitaries," when they're mentioned at all), there is reason for grave concern. This new Colombian ceasefire may well be a prelude to yet another ruling class extermination campaign against its class enemies.

You would think this very germane antecedent would bear at least a mention, but no. This part of history conflicts with the propaganda narrative of Western media, so it is simply ignored completely, as if it never happened. [1]

Instead, we are now being fed false and grossly misleading propaganda like this from the U.S. Government's NPR, and the British Government's BBC (every half hour around the clock from the BBC): "historic ceasefire," as if it's a first; the ceasefire is "to put an end to five decades of war..." (if you don't count the years 1984-1990- although I guess in a sense most of those years was a war, if a one-sided one, like the "war on drugs," or the Nazi "war against the Jews) "...and turn them [FARC] into a legal political movement;" FARC will become a party and "will try to gain political power in Colombia through democratic means," as if they never tried that before. As if the problem is violent leftists who don't believe in democracy, not a ruling class that doesn't allow the vast majority of people to participate except to rubber-stamp two ruling class parties!

And the same aforementioned propaganda outfits keep telling us that 220,000 or 260,000 people were "killed in the conflict." That neatly sidesteps the fact that the vast majority of those killed were unarmed civilians slaughtered by the government's military and the rulers' death squads. It also avoids mentioning the mass grave found outside at least one army base, of local civilians murdered for bounties. The government had the brilliant idea of paying bonuses for dead "guerrillas." So grab a poor peasant and murder him- easy money!

The BBC put on an American polemicist and unreconstructed imperialist named Steven Pinker, a hustler originally from Canada who now bills himself as a "cognitive scientist" and wrangled a perch for himself in the psychology department of Harvard University, a school that is sort of a Ground Zero for U.S. imperialist ideology. Pinker instructed that the Colombian civil war (bourgeois media never call it a civil war) "is the last remnant of the Cold War," which can only mean that FARC was a cat's paw of the Soviet Union, part of the "International Communist Conspiracy," the alibi U.S. imperialists long used to justify their coups, invasions, and imposition of fascistic military dictatorships and various repressive regimes designed to quash democracy and social progress in its sphere of influence- a sphere which they believe ultimately should rightly include the entire planet, the dream of every imperialist who ever lived.

Ask yourself this: in the quarter century since the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, has U.S. behavior changed one bit? To the contrary, NATO, which was created, it was claimed, to defend against a Soviet invasion of western Europe, has since been expanded right up to Russia's borders, and assigned new missions helping fight the U.S.'s wars in far-flung lands. The U.S. is still aiding and abetting coups against democratically-elected governments, as in Honduras, Egypt, Venezuela, and Brazil. It is committed to a relentless expansion of its power. Through the NSA, it attempts to spy on all communications everywhere. It has put in train a trillion dollar buildup of nuclear weapons.

And what about the period before the Soviet Union came into existence in 1917? Over a century earlier, the U.S. invaded British Canada to try and annex those lands for itself. In 1846 it attacked Mexico, ultimately forcing Mexico to cede over half (55%) of its entire national territory to the U.S. (including Texas), with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In 1998 it started a war with the decrepit Spanish empire to seize Spain's colonies, even the Philippines, on theother side of the globe. (The Filipinos had the crazy notion that they were entitled to self-determination and independence, so the U.S. had to beat that notion out of them with the usual methods of torture and mass killing.) The U.S. invaded various Caribbean and Central American nations numerous times in the first decades of the twentieth century. And so on.

Cold War my eye.

Steven Pinker. Even a clown can spout imperialist propaganda.

Let's briefly review how FARC came into existence in the first place. It's not some inexplicable derangement of innately evil people.

In 1948, the ruling classes inaugurated a decade of mass murder with the assassination of popular politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Over the next ten years, a period called La Violencia, (The Violence,), over 300,000 people were murdered, overwhelmingly peasants and poor laborers. Then in 1958, the bourgeois elites of the "Liberal" and "Conservative" Parties, in cahoots with the ever-reactionary Catholic Church and big businessmen, set up a two-party dictatorship they christened the National Front. The two parties would take turns ruling, irrespective of actual election results. "Radical" were frozen out of political life. This oligarchic arrangement, a political monopoly of the upper classes enforced by state repression and violence, lasted until 1990.

In 1959, the U.S. sent a crew of its state terrorists ("counterinsurgency experts") down to Colombia to assess the situation and craft a state terror campaign to crush any reaction to the slaughter of the preceding decade.. The U.S. Army "Special Forces" (aka Green Berets) recommended that "in order to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against 'interventionist' charges any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature," which beneath the jargon is quite sinister. Then in 1962 another "Special Warfare" [i.e. state terrorism] team from Fort Bragg paid a return visit, led by the Special Warfare Center commander himself, one General William P. Yarborough. He recommended to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (notice the high level this conspiracy is operating on) the formation of a "paramilitary" force to carry out sabotage and terrorism against "communists." This plan was duly implemented. The criminal conspiracy was dubbed Plan Lazo.

Under this plot, the U.S. goaded the Colombian government to attack villages that tried to arm themselves for self-defense. In one such operation, 16,000 Colombian troops, backed by U.S. might, attacked the village of Marquetalia, a community of 1,000 souls, 48 of whom were armed. These armed men managed to escape, and led by Manuel Marulanda Vélez, one of their number, founded FARC, which grew from that beginning.

If Colombia had ever been a democracy, if the rulers of Colombia weren't murderous thugs, if they didn't systematically assassinate popular leaders and slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, would the FARC even exist in the first place? No.

The propaganda systems of "Western" nations like to paint FARC as evil and the source of all violence in Colombia. This is a grotesque distortion of the actual history of Colombia, which makes clear that FARC was formed in response to the hyper-violence of the "upper" classes in Colombia against the "lower" classes. Members of the victim classes in fact were forced to take up arms.

Western propagandists also enjoy portraying FARC as a gang of degenerate kidnappers and drug lords. What's rarely mentioned is that they aren't the only ones using drugs as a source of funds. The corrupt Colombian government has plenty of officials involved in protecting the drug trade. The "paramilitaries" partake of cocaine money. And the CIA has profited from drug trafficking almost from its inception. So the high moral dudgeon of Western media rings a tad hollow to an objective person's ear.

The FARC was basically forced into accepting the current dangerous deal, even though it may well be walking into the same deadly trap as it was lured into in 1984, again, thanks to the U.S. Because of massive U.S. military and "intelligence" aid to the Colombian regime, FARC has been crippled and diminished. Under two Democratic Party presidents, Bill "Golden Tongue" Clinton and Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, sinister U.S. operatives from the CIA and military, and large amounts of weapons, were sent in to fight on the side of the regime against the rebellious sectors of its populace. Under Obama, FARC leaders were located and then assassinated. FARC was strategically trapped in a downward spiral of the U.S.' design. So now tell me again, all you "progressive" fellow-travelers, why we should vote for the Democrats!

So under Obama, U.S. "policy" in Latin America has consisted of: a coup attempt in Venezuela, then the probable murder of Hugo Chavez by the CIA; a coup in Honduras; imprisoning women and children fleeing U.S.-created violent hellholes in Central America; approval of a coup by corrupt legislators in Brazil; and a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign in Colombia that has killed thousands. Oh, but he reestablished relations with Cuba, the better to subvert the established order there. (Cuba does need changes, by the way. Say, that "naval base" in Guantanamo Bay, you ever gonna get the hell out of there, U.S.?)

None dare call them imperialists!

The very respectable Alvaro Uribe, Godfather of Death Squads, President of Colombia 2002-2010

1] I've only ever come across one mention of the 1985-90 extermination campaign in the establishment's media that I can remember. It was buried about two-thirds of the way down in a lengthy New York Times article, consisting of a short paragraph or two, very matter-of-fact, and then the article returned to FARC-demonization, as all NY Times articles dealing with FARC do. So is it not correct to call the NY Times imperialist propaganda? That's not a polemical statement, it's a factual one.

"History of FARC," Wikipedia, August 29, 2016.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Swindler Trump's Presidential Campaign Run By a Swindler- U.S. Media Acts As Accomplices

Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is a known swindler who stole $19 million from a Russian businessman. The businessman has been trying to get his money back for eight years now. He had to hire a private investigator just to try and find out where Manafort was hiding.

This is not some crazy "Internet rumor" or "conspiracy theory" from "a blogger sitting in his parents' basement in his underwear," as establishment propagandists like to sneer when they want to discredit (as distinct from disproving) some inconvenient information. This is from the Washington Post, an organ that sits at the apex of the U.S. bourgeois propaganda system. [1]

According to an article in the Post, Manafort and an accomplice, Richard Gates, swindled the Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, by tricking him into "investing" with them. Manafort's mark has been futilely trying to get is money back. In fact, the victim can't even get an explanation of where his money is from the thief Manafort. [2]

Manafort has long been involved with state criminals such as Reagan, Bush the Elder, U.S.-backed Philippine tyrant Ferdinand Marcos, and the recently-ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. You would have thought that this last bit of unsavory business would have occasioned loud denunciations in U.S. media, but naaah. What coverage there is is quizzical and faintly admiring. (Tells you something abut the moral and ethical sewer the U.S. elites inhabit.) Manafort was also a helpmate to Jonas Savimbi's terrorist UNITA, a U.S.- favored Angolan group trying to overthrow the government there until Savimbi finally met his maker. [3]

The curious- and damning- thing is, that despite the prominence and "respectability" of the Washington Post, the rest of the propaganda system has virtually ignored the story. This despite all the hand-wringing about what a disaster a Trump presidency would be. (One must wonder, given how the corporate propaganda system, which likes to call itself "the media," has been doing a bit of hand-wringing over the prospect of a Trump presidency, mainly over his unpredictability, and his failure to get on board the Hate Russia bandwagon. To the contrary, he apparently is quite favorably inclined towards Putin, and is suspected of having prospective business dealings in Russia. The leaking of Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks, proving that Hillary Clinton's handpicked hit-woman, DNC chair and Florida Congresswoman Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, deliberately orchestrated a campaign of sabotage against Senator Bernard Sanders' campaign for the party's presidential nomination, has been blamed, so far without any evidence presented- unless you consider the opinions of unnamed "experts" to be evidence, the few identified ones hedging their identification of Russia as the "culprit,"- this outing of information we are all entitled to, as it affects our lives, by being blamed on Russia, is adduced as more proof that Trump is somehow in Putin's pocket. [4]

It's quite natural that Manafort should wind up at Trump's side. Manafort is a scoundrel with a history of service to corrupt reactionaries, and Trump, even with his idiosyncracies, certainly qualifies as one of those. And both Manafort and Trump are rip-off artists, although from what we currently know, Trump is much more accomplished as one.

There's Trump "University," There's using Polish immigrant construction workers at a fraction of the normal pay, without even providing them hard hats. There's cheating his casino workers out of overtime pay. He didn't pay contractors who built his casinos, causing some of them to go out of business. (Great job creator you are, Trump!) There's fleecing banks by taking out loans and not repaying them.

Trump brags about his numerous bankruptcies. He presents this as a savvy business practice, gaming the system. In other words, he plotted in advance to go heavily into debt and declare bankruptcy,

That means he planned to rip people off by "legally" stiffing them for what they were owed. Contractors, workers, banks, and business "partners."

Trump almost never uses his own money. He started out using his father's money, then went on to using the money of saps who "invest" with him, and of dumb bankers. Conniving, corrupt politicians grant him favorable tax "abatements" (exemptions from what by law he would otherwise pay) and various regulatory preferences.

Trump doesn't even make his own charitable contributions. Others fund his "foundation," and his own "donations" over the years have consisted of letting people use his golf courses gratis for charity events, which he then takes a tax write-off on! He had the chutzpah a few months ago to loudly bray about a million dollar donation to veterans' organizations which he then didn't make, until the Washington Post forced his hand by exposing him. (Naturally he excoriated the Post for this terrible terrible deed they did!)

What I always found most stunning over the decades was how the New York City media relentlessly promoted this obvious egomaniacal hustler. The only exception was the weekly paper the Village Voice, which consistently practiced actual journalism and reported on his scams. [5]

There have long been creeps, immoral con men (Clinton, Obama), and reactionaries feigning a human face (Reagan, Nixon, the Bushes) in U.S. politics, but Trump is new in that he doesn't even wear a mask. The fact that millions of people are drinking his obviously rancid, poisonous Kool-Aid forces one to the conclusion that there are far too many imbeciles in America for comfort.

And America is a nation that threatens the whole world.

Slipping in and out of the shadows: Election manipulator

and swindler Paul Manafort.

Paul is the PERFECT guy for me!

1]  I am writing this from my very own home, and I'm not wearing underwear, I'm BUCK NAKED! Take THAT, bourgie propagandists!

The Washington Post has long been in a permanent rivalry with the New York Times to be at the very top of the media pecking order in terms of status and influence. As it is based in the capital city of the U.S. empire, Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia), it is also a sort of hometown paper for the the imperialist nomenklatura and national political elite.

Its editorial stance is consistently quite reactionary, unlike the New York Times, which is "liberal" mostly and reactionary partly. Its reporting is frequently quite ideological. The people who write it would probably be too self-conscious to do so naked, especially if they knew there were hidden cameras observing them.

2]  "Inside Trump adviser Manafort’s world of politics and global financial dealmaking," Washington Post, April 26, 2016.

3]  "Mystery man: Ukraine's U.S. fixer," Politico, March 5, 2014. The article bemusedly describes Manafort's disappearance, apparently to avoid Deripaska's lawyers, process servers, and investigator.

4] An ideologue/apparatchik by the name of Anne Applebaum pushed this line very hard yesterday on "The Takeaway," a "public" radio show on government network NPR, hosted by John Hockenberry. Applebaum was miffed that people were paying any attention at all to the content of the emails instead of piling on Putin and leaving the Clinton machine out of it. How unfair that Wasserman-Schultz should be targeted. To Applebaum, the only story here is Russian subversion of a U.S. election.

Applebaum is an unreconstructed, career Cold Warrior, as her official bio on the Washington Post website makes clear. The way people like her have dealt with the disappearance of the organizing principle of their lives, the Evil Soviet Union, is by substituting Russia for the SU. Problem solved!

For an example of Hockenberry's journalistic ethics, see "John Hockenberry Illustrates Lying By Omission." To be fair, Hockenberry isn't all bad. He's more of a mixed bag. He "balances" normal, even humane journalism with reactionary crap and power-sycophancy.

5] There are hundreds of articles on the Village Voice website exposing Donald Trump. And Wayne Barrett, who reported for the Voice for many years, wrote an important book about Trump, as have a few other authors. David Cay Johnston has also been on Trump's tail.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Same People Who Lecture Us That "Change Is Good" Suddenly Don't Like Change With Brexit

I notice an irony that those creating it are sure to be unconscious of. The same ruling elites that patronizingly purr at the masses under their feet that "change is good," to pacify those masses and disarm them psychologically when the majority, who increasingly have to struggle to keep their heads above water economically, are under attack economically, those elites suddenly don't like change at all when it's a change they don't want. If "change is good," why isn't a change in the European Union good? Why isn't political change in Britain good?

"Change is good" is the narcotic propaganda fed to Americans when "free trade" treaties directly assaulted their economic interests. Told they had to compete against dirt cheap third world labor, "change is good" was one of the propaganda lines spewed by establishment media. Whenever the government of the rich launch a new salvo in the unending class warfare against the rest of us, we are instructed to take it lying down because "change is good."

Well okay then! If "change is good," then stop your WHINING about BREXIT, bourgeoisie! Shut up and suck it up!

Friday, June 24, 2016

British People Vote To Leave EU: Elites In Shock: Financial Speculators Freak Out

Looks like the financial and political elites of Britain declared victory a tad too soon. After (over) confidently predicting a vote to reject "Brexit" (British exit) in the referendum to leave the European Union by 54% to 46%, the Leave side won instead, 52-48. Turnout was about 72%, quite high. (The latest wrong prediction was based on exit polling by those mega-parasites, hedge funds, leading to giddy rallies in global stock markets and the British currency, the pound sterling. Speculators placed bets presuming their desired outcome in the referendum. Oops!)

Apparently the sky has fallen on the establishment. On the United Kingdom Government's propaganda arm, the BBC, its "World Service" "presenters," as their on-air personnel are called, sounded like attendees as at a funeral, all doleful tones and sad head shakes. There was even talk of the UK breaking up, due to the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU.

"An astonishing victory," declared a BBC anchor. "A political earthquake" declared a co-anchor.

"This is a crushing, crushing day for Britain, and a terrible day for Europe," opined a British politician, saying "it's all over" for the EU and trade. Followed by shocked comments from various European pols. The "consensus," as the BBC presented it, was that the referendum result was a disaster.

Almost all the guests brought on were "Remain" supporters, consisting of politicians and media commentators. So the attendees at the funeral did most of the talking. I monitored the broadcast for about two hours. Almost no supporters of "Leave" were put on-air in that time. In other words, no attempt at balance. This "journalism" consisted of an establishment arm, the British Broadcasting Corporation, crying in its beer over what for that establishment is a "loss."

Some illustrative comments from the BBC "presenters" themselves:

"Whether the United Kingdom exists, five years from now is going to be the big question," (his emphasis).

"All this mayhem you're seeing in the market," exclaimed a female BBC-er.

"It's an absolutely extraordinary act of defiance" by the voters against the political and economic establishment, which all exhorted people on the "right" way to vote, and the disaster that would befall the country if they voted "wrong." That one by the BBC's Rob Watson.

Watson also claimed that the "Leave" side lacked a "plan." "A lot of people are going to say, "Krikey, have you got a plan?'"

Actually, they do. Within the two-year time frame where nothing with the EU changes, negotiate new trade arrangements. You know, trade has gone on for thousands of years.It wasn't necessary for countries to all belong to a superstate to trade. Nor do China and the U.S. belong to the EU, yet they do a lot of trade with it. Funny thing, these facts escape the professional Chicken Littles who are squawking that the sky is falling.

Another Chicken Little on BBC fretted, "This is a recipe for chaos."

Dry your tears, fellows. Even the powerful can't always get their way.

One revealing comment by a BBC co-anchor about the referendum underlined for me the undemocratic nature of the United Kingdom.

"Everyone's vote is equally weighted, and that's unusual in Britain."

Well, it is a KINGDOM, a monarchy, of course no longer an absolute one. Notice that for bourgeois types to truly "arrive" in Britain, one must be granted an aristocratic (feudal) title.

There was talk of "disintegration" of the EU by one Jackie Davis, "commentator on European affairs." "A domino effect," "great consternation" among the political bosses. "How do you show you are listening" to your disgruntled masses while making clear "but leaving is not an option," she says.

How indeed. How to herd the ignorant mass to follow behind their "leaders"? Where are Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays now that you need them? (Lippmann was a theorist of manipulating the masses to obey their masters and keep their ignorant noses out of "decision-making." Among propagandist Bernays' crimes were getting women to smoke, and participating in the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, that established fascist death squad rule there.)

The BBC gang hauled on a German former EU commissioner, who promoted EU enlargement, and pestered him to say that the EU was going to fall apart, which he declined to do.

Various politicians and opinionators were all aflutter, calling the outcome "a political earthquake, a seismic event" and making similarly overwrought comments.

"A sad day for Europe" was the verdict of a Maltese politician, a member of the European Parliament, or MEP, invoking "our forefathers." (??? Yeah, I know, baffling.)

Hour after hour of worried hand-wringing and moaning.

If they keep this up, they're going to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And a Labour MP (Member of Parliament) (the Labour Party strongly backed staying in the EU, whereas the working classes, that Labour supposedly represents, voted to leave, as expected.) said "we have to listen carefully" (maybe you should have done that before!) because the vote was "a roar of defiance against Westminster elites" (like you!) symptomatic of "anger and fears that are out there." (Hey! She noticed!) [1]

As for the speculators who bet on winning the referendum by driving up stock prices and the pound, they immediately went into a tizzy. That global mob of parasitic speculators, aka "the markets," meaning stocks, bonds, currencies, futures, options, all that rot, were caught wrong-footed by the vote outcome. The Japanese futures market at one point tripped a "circuit breaker," meaning trading was halted when a limit to the size of allowable movements was reached.

The British currency, the pound sterling, immediately fell 10%, from a six-month high to a thirty year low. Which is a fine example of the fickleness, and fragility, of the financial markets, which holds the world in their thrall. An obvious, but taboo, thought on that is: the world economy, and the well-being of all of us, shouldn't be captive to the whims of a capricious, arbitrary, and very vulnerable financial superstructure of parasites sitting on top of the real economy. By "real," I mean the actual production of useful goods and services created by work.

It's a bit ironic that one of the leaders of the "Leave" camp, Nigel Farage, got rich as a financial speculator. He's the head of the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. A fast and smooth talker, on the day of the referendum he predicted defeat for his side- not helpful while voting was going on! Now he's celebrating.

But let's put this in perspective. Financial markets are chronically subject to wild gyrations. They swing far in one direction, then back the other way when the stampeding herd of speculators reverses direction on a dime, and on a whim. It's classic manic-depressive behavior.

The pound, having risen to a 6-month high around $1.50 U.S. on premature euphoria by the speculator class, fell about 10% in an instant, to around $1.32. That may be a 30 year low, but it is well above the $1.04 it hit in 1986. And guess where it was in 1991? $2.00, practically double in value against the U.S. dollar. Since then it's zoomed up and down between around $1.38 and $2.10. (You can see a chart, here.) As for the Euro, the currency of the Eurozone, there was moaning on the BBC of it going near parity to the dollar, i.e. worth $1.00. To which I say, get some prspective. The Euro was launched n January 1999 at $1.20, and it promptly went into decline, bottoming out finally at 79 U.S. cents. ($0.79.) Then it began ascending, eventually topping out at $1.60. From there it went into a long decline, until seeming to find a floor just above one buck.

All of which is to say, when you let currency speculators determine exchange rates, there is no way to tell what the actual value of a currency is by its market price. [2]

Well, all those bets on stocks and the pound that went the wrong way are now being reversed in a panic. How far they go down, having gone up on a presumptuous false assumption of another bourgeois victory, will partly depend on the degree of "uncertainty." For as those who make excuses for the behavior of the financial markets whenever the speculators are having a tantrum are fond of saying, "Markets hate uncertainty."

But just who is exaggerating the degree of uncertainty here? The elites themselves. Getting themselves all frazzled. Will Scotland leave the UK now, since Scots voted to remain in the EU? Maybe. What if they do? They came close to voting to become independent (as they used to be) a few years back. You'll deal with it.

And by the way, that referendum isn't legally binding on the British government. So there may be some dirty double-cross in the future. (See Guardian, UK, "Is the EU referendum legally binding?," 23 June.)

A letter carrying the signatures of 84 Tory MPs (Members of Parliament of Cameron's own Conservative Party) who supported Brexit, or leaving the EU, stated that Cameron should stay on as PM regardless of the outcome of the referendum. This letter was made public just before the vote. Apparently it wasn't worth the paper it was written on, as Cameron has announced his resignation.

Let me offer a bit of farm wisdom for the elites: next time, don't count your chickens before they hatch.

There's the sky. See? It isn't falling.

1] The BBC wasn't alone in wallowing in gloom over its dashed hopes. Take the organ of the "respectable" leftish edge of the British establishment, the Guardian newspaper. On the day of the vote it "helpfully" explained that only pathetic people who cling to the past would vote to leave the EU. Then when defeat dawned later the same day, one of its columnists informed that "Brexit earthquake has happened, and the rubble will take years to clear."

Sounds like a great business opportunity for entrepreneurs with bulldozers to rent!

"Last-minute EU referendum polls put remain support ahead," Guardian, 23 June 2016.

The propaganda line was the same on this side of the Atlantic. U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR started the morning with a gloomy take on the referendum outcome. Their Moscow correspondent reported how great it was for Russia, as Britain was the most vociferous voice for economic sanctions against Russia within the EU. (The UK acting as guard dog for U.S. "interests." An example of what Obama meant when he said the UK was more valuable to the U.S. within the EU than outside.) And NPR put on David Rennie, from the reactionary, overtly ideological British rag The Economist, to proclaim a "disaster" for the U.S., and attack the dishonesty of the Leave camp, asserting that they invented facts completely. (There were more than a few invented facts on Rennie's side.) The rest of the commanding peaks of U.S. corporate media see things the same way.

2] Interesting short article on how George Soros made a billion dollars attacking the British pound back in 1992, at the expense of the public treasury, "No Mr. Soros, Brexit Will Not be a Black Friday for the British Pound," 22 June 2016.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Hitler reacts to Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic nomination

On a lighter not: Hilarious parody video on youtube. See at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVjeN3rOBzM

Personally I enjoyed it. Good medicine for me, as the secret police scum of the U.S. (FBI, CIA, and their local police stooges) has victimized me for over 40 years now and in some respects ruined my life.

Friday, June 10, 2016

U.S. Media Focus Mainly on Putin In Panama Papers Theft, Though He Isn't Named In Them, Lets Western Stooges Off Easy

[This was updated today with labels and a search description- and it immediately disappeared entirely. So I am reposting it. Original date April 13, 2016.]

The massive document theft from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca doesn't name Putin. But it names an alleged friend of his, a cellist. That fact has been enough for the U.S. media to take the ball and run with it. Putin is Culprit Number One in the U.S. media's coverage of the stolen documents. [1]

Meriting mostly mere mentions, or no mention at all, are two other "world leaders" (country bosses) who actually have hidden accounts themselves as revealed in the documents: Petro Poroshenko, the president-by-violent-street-riots of Ukraine, and Mauricio Macri of Argentina, who just ripped off his own country for billions of dollars handed over to U.S. hedge fund extortionists. Poroshenko is the U.S.-EU-approved successor to the ousted Yanukovych, said to deserve being violently ousted because he was "corrupt." (But the referendum by which the people in Crimea voted by over 90% to reunite with Russia was dismissed by Western imperialists as "illegitimate," "illegal," "invalid," even "fake"- by Joseph Nye, a career U.S. imperialist apparatchik. What a luxury it is to write your own rules and the rules for everyone else also!) The "King" of Saudi Arabia has also been discreetly unmentioned prominently (or at all) in the U.S. media.

British prime minister David Cameron also got a pass in U.S. media. The most said about him was when he finally stopped stonewalling on Day 6 of the furor and announced that all taxes had been paid on the account in question, which he inherited from his father and which was closed prior to Cameron attaining the premiership. His family successfully avoided a lot of taxes that way. That didn't stop the BBC (the UK government's propaganda network) from putting on a reactionary propagandist from the rightwing British rag the Telegraph to insist that Cameron did nothing wrong and it would all blow over. (In fact it hasn't blown over, even though the BBC has been doing its best to effect that outcome.)

For the first few days, the insignificant nation of Iceland also was useful as a way to virtually ignore the U.S. collaborators Poroshenko and Macri. The Icelandic president was forced out of office as a result of trying to hide his money. You'd think Iceland was a major nation from the play it got, again especially on the BBC. (Bullshit Broadcasting Corporation. Or is it Bombastic Blather Corruption? I forget.)

It probably escaped most people's attention, even though there have been pro forma acknowlegments in passing in the deluge of media shaming, is the fact that "hidden" and "secret" doesn't equal illegal, and that it is unknown how many of those whose financial privacy has been stripped away evaded taxes. In the public mind, offshore has been equated with tax evasion. (As we know from the example of Mitt Romney, and the U.S. corporations that have $2 trillion socked outside the U.S. to avoid paying taxes- legally.)

1] And not just U.S. media. Here's who the leftish Guardian (UK) shines the spotlight on in its central story on the Panama Papers:

Even the left-leaning Guardian (UK) put Putin front-and-center in its coverage of the Panama Papers. Note implication: It's all Putin's money. That's unlikely.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

https://panamapapers.icij.org/

Propaganda Analysis

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Clinton-Friendly Media Forced Ouster of Paul Manafort from Trump Presidential Campaign In A Very Cynical Way

Clinton-Friendly Media Forced Ouster of Paul Manafort from Trump Presidential Campaign In A Very Cynical Way

Clinton-Friendly Media Forced Ouster of Paul Manafort from Trump Presidential Campaign In A Very Cynical Way

Clinton-Friendly Media Forced Ouster of Paul Manafort from Trump Presidential Campaign In A Very Cynical Way

Monday, August 29, 2016

Media Lays Groundwork for Another Colombian Extermination Campaign by Blacking Out History

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Swindler Trump's Presidential Campaign Run By a Swindler- U.S. Media Acts As Accomplices

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Same People Who Lecture Us That "Change Is Good" Suddenly Don't Like Change With Brexit

Friday, June 24, 2016

British People Vote To Leave EU: Elites In Shock: Financial Speculators Freak Out

There's the sky. See? It isn't falling.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Hitler reacts to Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic nomination

Friday, June 10, 2016

U.S. Media Focus Mainly on Putin In Panama Papers Theft, Though He Isn't Named In Them, Lets Western Stooges Off Easy

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