John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY WHITNEY WEBB IN MINTPRESS

 

“The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent

“Given the Trust Project’s rich-get-richer impact on the online news landscape, it is not surprising to find that it is funded by a confluence of tech oligarchs and powerful forces with a clear stake in controlling the flow of news.’

 

https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-trust-project-big-media-and-silicon-valleys-weaponized-algorithms-silence-dissent/259030/

 

Thanks, another solid piece from Whitney Webb.

Of course, America’s big hi-tech media companies and corporate press are not in the nasty business of misrepresenting what is true simply out of their convictions, although they are able to stage a rather impressive piece of mass theater with each of them having speaking parts claiming heroically otherwise.

Multi-billionaire companies and people are very little concerned with philosophical questions such as, “what is truth?” or with fundamental matters such as scrupulous honesty.

Oh, yes, they are much concerned over the appearance of honesty, the appearance of concern for truth, but that is another matter entirely.

Otherwise, they simply would not be billionaires. Becoming exceedingly wealthy requires a steady focus on very different matters. There are no high rates of financial return for honesty or principle.

I don’t see why anyone would doubt that, especially in light of America’s present extremely aggressive efforts to bend the entire planet to its will – in the Middle East, in Russia, in China, in South America, and in Europe.

Threats, illegal sanctions, wars, coups, proxy armies, lies, and a high general level of hostility and arrogance all play a role, day-in and day-out. America simply insists on applying American law to the entire planet, ignoring the laws of other nations and the laws of international organizations. Which, of course, in the end, comes down to gaining an immense benefit for America’s corporations and its power establishment.

America’s foreign policy now intimately serves its establishment in securing economic advantages through force and concessions, advantages the establishment seems unable to secure through traditional product excellence and fair competition. American foreign policy today has little to do with diplomacy.

After all, what is “the American power establishment” but a collection of America’s wealthy corporations and individuals, supported by a compliant Congress and such intimidating and powerful agencies as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA?

That combination of power is something many people struggle to find proper language to describe, using terms such as the Dark State, the unelected secret government, or even “the swamp.” Millions instinctively understand that something real is at work influencing events, though they may not have a good name or definition for it.

In the end, it comes down to America’s plutocracy supported by powerful agencies supplied by a completely accommodating national government.

Despite centuries of intellectual ferment and struggle and reform and revolution in the West around human rights, freedoms, and democracy, we remain pretty much ruled by wealth, just as people in 18^th century, pre-revolutionary France were.

The centuries of struggle have produced an elaborate stage play of democracy, not the actual thing. Oh, there have been gains, such as it no longer being acceptable for a nobleman’s carriage to run down a peasant in its way on the road or for a nobleman to rape a peasant’s daughter, claiming Droit du seigneur. The gains are about civility and behavior, not about governing.

 Money’s dominating politics, with the only serious source for that money being the wealthy, tells you who still calls the shots. The situation is identical for both political parties in America, and it is no different in Western Europe.

We really have no record of our corporate press ever deeply concerning itself over journalistic integrity. Lip service, yes, of course. But experience over time demonstrates the opposite in its normal practices.

There is clear self-interest in all the new schemes to certify “what is true and what is not” in the press and media, and the only truth about those schemes is that what ordinary people and philosophers mean by “truth” has nothing to do with any of it.

It’s sad how such schemes so readily gain a solid foothold in American society, gain a kind of ersatz reality, much as with Russophobia, which has been just another tactic in the power establishment’s efforts to secure global supremacy.

Please notice the complete contradiction between all the earnest stuff about truth and the quiet acquiescence in persecuting Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, people who gave us indisputable and great truths.

I have a personal theory as to why that is so, one I think with a good deal of substance.

It involves the role and influence of Puritanism in American history, which is extensive, going back at least to “the Pilgrim Fathers.” Now, those were people who always ferociously believed that they had the truth, and to the total exclusion of all others. They were also people who very much believed that wealth and material success were signs of God’s approval and special blessing.

Note the very terms used today, as “The Trust Project” or “News Guard” or “Election Guard” are dead giveaways of Twenty-First Century Puritanism.

Readers might enjoy this:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/john-chuckman-comment-some-history-of-puritanism-in-america-it-explains-a-lot-of-todays-wars-and-belligerence-and-close-mindedness-they-werent-quite-the-nice-folks-a-benign-name-like-pilgri/

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MATT TAIBBI IN ZEROHEDGE

 

“Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war …”

 

A good piece, capturing some fundamental truth about America’s power establishment.

In the early summary of the costs of the War on Terror, however, we find this:

“What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million?”

Well, it is far greater than that.

Just in Syria, at least that many have been killed.

The total for the invasion of Iraq, including all the aftershocks set off by it, is perhaps a million souls.

Then there’s Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and several lesser spots.

I think a fair rough number is around 2 million.

And the number of hopeless refugees?

Many million. At least 3 million are in camps in Turkey. Germany took around a million. Terrible old Syria took about 2 million originally from Iraq.

No, the consequences of this American insanity are immense and will affect people for a couple of generations.

Meanwhile, the expenses-paid lunches in Washington likely swelled to record amounts.

It’s called the abuse of power.

It’s also called corruption, and Lord Acton had it so right with his words about power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

America’s power establishment arrived at that last point in the dictum quite some years ago.

The amazing thing for me is how any American can believe his country would be free of these basic forces shaping human society?

Americans are somehow purer of heart? I do think there is some of that. Remember George Bush’s pathetic, blubbering Sunday School teacher words about America when some of the military’s war crimes came to light?

Take a bunch of privileged and ambitious insiders, give them hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on questionable projects with no well-defined purpose, give them all the secrecy they demand, give them no real accounting for their acts, and give them a blizzard of favorable propaganda to cover whatever they do.

What possible other results could you get?

The naivete of average Americans in just accepting this from their (bought-and-paid-for) politicians and never questioning what’s in their (bought-and-paid-for) corporate press is astonishing.

Astonishing but a fact.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK BUCHANAN IN ANTIWAR

 

“Will Trump Hold Firm on Syrian Pullout?”

 

Well, it is hard to see Trump being “firm” on anything, except in statements admiring himself.

He is a fickle man.

And he has amply demonstrated cowardice. We’ve seen that quality over and over, and especially in his bullying.

Apart from Trump’s fickleness and the powerful opposition already hard at work against this decision – you can tell from various leaks, such as the one intended to embarrass him that the decision was taken without any consultation with advisors and cabinet and allies – this whole affair may prove a kind of elaborate hoax.

There were reports yesterday that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are sending troops and weapons to Kurdish areas American forces now occupy.

We also shouldn’t forget that France has forces in the area, and they’re not leaving as far as we can tell.

Could it be that we are just seeing substitutions for the departing American forces?

That’s an entirely different matter than a clean break with the illegal and murderous activity America has been engaged in.

It would amount only to a “technical” fulfillment of Trump’s campaign words.

One fact that tends to work against this idea is the sudden resignation of Mattis, but even that could fit. He may have opposed such an effort at substitution. He is not known as an especially imaginative man.

I have been pretty sceptical about the whole matter because it so clearly opposes two very active and powerful forces at work in Washington.

One is the American establishment’s new drive for global power with all that stuff about “full-spectrum dominance” from the Pentagon.

And the other is the Israel lobby, which carries a great deal of weight in Congress, at the Pentagon, and with Trump. He has come to be viewed as a great benefactor to Israel. It is difficult to see Trump having the backbone to deal with them as opponents, and they are very much opposed to this decision.

Netanyahu has relished the war in Syria, grinding away at people he hates, Assad and his Iranian allies, always wanting to make the Syrian territory occupied since 1967 on the Golan Heights an integral part of Israel, and at one point he was even eager to grab another slice of land next to the Golan.

But having largely lost the proxy war to the Syrian Army and Russia and Iran, I’m pretty sure he was counting on a back-up plan of de facto separation of the Kurdish region in the northeast which would significantly weaken Syria for the future, given that region’s oil wealth. Independent Kurds there would also be natural allies on another Syrian border.

That’s I think the main reason why the American troops were put there. Of course, this plan comes into direct conflict with Turkey, which has no tolerance for a Kurdish state anywhere near its borders. Turkey’s Erdogan accuses Kurds fighting in Syria of just being a branch of the Kurdish separatist movement inside Turkey, a movement he has brutally suppressed.

Trump said that the United States would no longer be the “policeman of the Middle East,” but it has never served the role of policeman, except in its own imagination.

Its role has been as praetorian guard to regimes it favors and as open threat to those it does not favor. Police enforce laws, but the only “laws” that the United States enforces in the region are its own political biases.

Every regime America defends is at least as lawless and brutal as any it opposes, and I certainly count Israel in that category because the rule of law does not exist on the territory it occupies and is ignored in all of Israel’s efforts to bolster its position in the region, from several thousand assassinations to illegal bombing sorties by the hundreds in neighboring countries.

Law is in great part about stability and legitimacy, and Israel’s efforts have done little beyond promoting instability for others. That indeed has been a goal for much of Israel’s activity, to render others unstable or even chaotic while it sits in a heavily-armed crusader fortress. And where instability hasn’t been a goal, it has supported the relative comfort of absolutism in its neighbors, as in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

The long war in Syria and several other ugly matters in the Middle East are largely Israeli projects, carried out in covert cooperation with Saudi Arabia and America and Britain and France. Syria’s War is not a true civil war.

Of course, there were originally elements of legitimate opposition, but their relatively small numbers were drowned out by mercenaries and foreign intervention by bombing, missiles, and special operations. Assad has always been supported by all the powerful segments of Syrian society and by a majority of people. He is a unifying and stabilizing force. Just look at the army’s long, grueling loyalty through all of this. And minorities, such as Christians, tend to see Assad as their protector.

Ever since Afghanistan, America has regularly adopted a strategy of using proxies. The Northern Alliance – the pre-existing local political opposition to the Taleban, one, mind you, containing much of the same brutality and backwardness as the Taleban – did most of the fighting on the ground in Afghanistan while the United States did what it does best, bomb people. Variations on the theme have been used in Libya and Syria.

The events at Benghazi, Libya, so embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, also were related to this concept of proxy war. The American Ambassador was involved in recruiting cutthroats and shipping weapons from war-torn Libya to promote more hell in Syria. Some of the cutthroats saw the Ambassador himself as a good target for whatever reason. That is the real reason the attack has never been scrutinized for the public.

In Syria, we have several phony jihadi groups, who are in fact paid mercenaries. Any genuine Islamic radicals would have had as their first targets Israel and the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia, but we never see that. We see these groups – ISIS, al-Nusra, others – attacking only people Israel hates.

We also see weapons caches of stuff from Israel and the United States discovered, time and again, by the Syrian Army as it advances. We’ve even seen Israeli and American helicopters move some of the leaders of these thugs at critical moments. Some of the wounded have been treated at hospitals in northern Israel.

And we have the phony White Helmets, aligned with al-Nusra and effectively in the business of promoting increased American and British bombing through propaganda films and provocative acts, all done while carrying on with a much-publicized image of brave rescuers. This dirty outfit was formed by France and is financed by Britain, two governments pretty much as heavily influenced by the Israel lobby as the government of the United States.

It would be wonderful if the withdrawal proves honest, but powerful groups in Washington don’t just fold their tents and ride off because a proven erratic President makes a sudden decision against their interests.

 

AFTERNOTE:

I notice in news the next day a story on Trump’s having spoken of “the slow and highly coordinated pullout of U.S. troops from the area” as reported of a telephone conversation with Turkey’s Erdogan. That’s a rather worrying, courtroom-lawyer kind of phrase. We’ll see.

ADDITIONAL AFTERNOTE:

On the day after Christmas, Trump, making a visit to troops in Iraq said:  “In fact we could use this as the base if we wanted to do something in Syria,”  The United States has several bases in Iraq and is said to have about 5,000 troops.

The number being withdrawn from Syria is about 2,000. Whether they also will go to Iraq is not known, but NATO fairly recently called for a larger effort at stabilization in Iraq.

ADDITIONAL FOOTNOTE:

It has been reported that the American military recently built two new bases in Iraq along the Syrian border.

So, it does appear that Trump’s controversial decision about leaving Syria has a lot less to it than meets the eye.

But that would be in keeping with the noise and lack of substance of virtually everything the man does.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RUPERT CORNWELL IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Donald Trump can criticise the ‘mainstream media’ all he likes, the press will continue to do its job brilliantly”

Rupert Cornwell, if that is doing things brilliantly, well, then you must be one of our great political writers.

But your record speaks for itself, actually rather shabby, a life of scribbling propaganda and calling it political analysis.

In fact, the corporate press is suffering its worst time in ages. The industry, a mature one, is plainly in economic decline. In some cases, it plainly doesn’t have the resources to do the job well, as by having numerous foreign correspondents as it once had, even if doing the job well were its aim.

At the same time, new technology and new means of advertising are driving the creation and growth of new models for the distribution of news on the Internet.

In addition, the declining corporate press has been found openly colluding with various special interests, which sure removes the shine that supposedly comes with the word journalism. And even a child can see that it has acted out of immense negative bias against Trump.

There is almost no such thing as journalism and journalistic principles anymore in America or in much of Europe – that’s clear to many, not just Trump supporters.

The days of the Cold War also gave the press a special protective and nurturing environment, an environment of the forces of darkness versus the forces of light, the press being widely regarded as part of the forces of light.

That is gone, although the United States’ establishment – always including the corporate press as an intimate part of that establishment – is trying with its every fiber to re-create it, realizing what it has lost in many spheres, from unquestioned authority and playing the role of good guy – getting the role of Jimmy Stewart opposing Yuri Andropov – to facing new forms of competition. For the power establishment, peace and peaceful competition are not always the same good things most humans being accept them to be.

Who wants, people in Washington ask themselves, people in Europe using Russian natural gas or reading RT? And, so, ipso facto, Obama’s regrettable legacy of re-kindling the Cold War with everything from a shameless coup against a democratic government in Ukraine to tanks rumbling through Europe’s villages and towns to be emplaced threateningly in entrenchments on the Russian border and charming enforcers like Victoria “Fuck Europe!” Nuland being given high posts of influence there.

Well, that wasn’t even true then, as we know from the existence of things like unreported and unquestioned dark operations by a totally unethical CIA, everything from the civilian killings in Western Europe under Operation Gladio to the relentless terror conducted against Cuba or the manipulation of elections in Europe by secret payments to leaders and parties and to the over-throw by coups of even democratic governments not to America’s liking – all went unreported and unquestioned.

And it certainly not true now, perhaps, the only big difference being that now much of the activity has been exposed to the bright light of day. On the domestic front, things like the release of the DNC e-mails provide the kind of investigative reporting we’ve never experienced before from all those self-congratulatory journalists of yesteryear. On the international front, CIA allied dirty operations, like those in Syria, are actually being exposed to the light by news sources from abroad.

The days of the heroic journalistic duo in All the President’s Men are gone, completely gone. The book today almost seems a silly story on a level with “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” yet in its day, it seemed anything but. To my mind nothing better demonstrates some of the underlying and fundamental changes that have taken place.

It wasn’t Trump’s doing, but he is sure putting a high seal of approval on the fact, and lots of people are applauding. His approach, as at press conferences where the old privileged gang is feeling discomfort, will help speed the change underway towards something new, making him a genuine agent of change.

Journalism for the corporate press is a profession in dismal decline, having in most cases reduced itself willingly to paid publicity flacks and propagandists for the state.

Something entirely fresh is emerging using the new technology and forms of advertising. Its complete form is not yet clear, but it will deal the death blow to your industry, just as surely as Amazon ended local bookstores.

I don’t know whether it will be better or not – all great changes come not without drawbacks and flaws as viewed from some perspective – but I applaud its coming because your crowd has been shown to be utterly without principle and are well gone with your false assumptions and unwarranted privileges.