What It's Like
Due to family activities, relatives not usually in town being in town, I haven't followed the news for the past week. I don't know what Trump has tweeted, but I've heard he's in Switzerland with other representatives of wealthy nations determining the course of world history.
Davos, Switzerland. The most well-protected gang of motherfuckers on the planet talking about how to run the world. If a giant could pick up Switzerland and shot-put it into outer space the world would lose the conference participants, including the leaders of the world's top economies; the people who decide for us.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, "the richest man in history," got that way by preying on ordinary people, folks working for him with low-paying jobs without benefits, Bezos your basic sweatshop factory owner, but on a massive scale, owning the Washington Post, consulting with the CIA and Defense Department, getting into our food. Give him a telecommunications company plus access to the NSA, along with a mercenary army, and he'll be more powerful than anyone at the Davos conference.
Bezos doesn't pay appreciable taxes, either. A bald monster who resembles Lex Luthor continues to be fed with cash and some people think that's just fine, even "ordinary" folk who don't have more than a hundred thousand a year to be proud of. Bezos built that brand from the ground up, he's an American success, capitalism, no matter what form it takes, is the best and only sensible way.
Not paying attention to news causes me to focus more on my own problems. That's not necessarily a good thing. I have a lot on my mind in my personal life, it's difficult to sleep sometimes. News is usually a hobby. Mainstream news media indulge in corporate propaganda in service to the state, pure fascism. Donald Trump is a TV show. Twitter prides itself lately on cracking down on accounts that spread maliciousness, but they don't cancel Trump's Twitter feed. He's responsible for a consistent stream of poisonous horseshit in the form of ungrammatical tweets mused upon and debated about on cable news nearly every day. He's treated like an ancient Greek oracle, except that his words are so badly assembled into the kinds of sentences one would expect from a dumbass who never learned the basics of writing in English, hinting at Trump's true academic accomplishments, which, whatever the letter grades, must've been short of mediocre.
I say don't talk about his tweets, don't talk about his hair, his enmity towards Robert Mueller, the Russia investigation (which is largely bullshit), but rather talk about Trump's policies, his EPA director Scott Pruitt, for example, a climate change denier responsible for numerous rollbacks of pro-environment policies--a man assisting in the annihilation of the human race, thus someone who would be in prison in a country with sane leaders.
News that doesn't cover what's important, what's really going on, is purposefully produced to deceive.
The Washington Post doesn't do exposes of its owner, Bezos. MSNBC, owned by Comcast, doesn't do anti-war programming. War profiteering corporations advertise on that network, Comcast is a war profiteer with cheerleaders like Brian Williams praising the Tomahawk missiles shot at Syria last Spring, a decision made by Trump--owner of Raytheon stock. Raytheon's stock went up after that attack, Trump made money bombing Syria and killing the people who died in that attack.
If an ordinary person were to kill someone and make money from that act, would the police ignore that person?
Our society is one that allows killing of certain people. It's okay to kill Black people in America as long it's a cop doing the killing. Anybody with a heart says, "Black Lives Matter." Others say, "All lives matter," or "Blue [cop] lives matter," another way of saying "Black lives don't matter."
The Us versus Them couldn't be more blindingly delineated. Bezos, the economic forum at Davos, the Defense Department, Scott Pruitt, the shitty bicameral political parties serving only money, are clearly the enemy of 99% plus of the American people.
This condition will last a while longer. It takes time and key sudden groundbreaking events to make change start. Judging from history's many examples, things can shift and then we'll see the militarized police get really bad, becoming even more like Nazi stormtroopers than they already are.
Will there be an American Spring? If so, how will the news networks spin that?
Vic Neptune
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Friday, January 12, 2018
People Who Promoted Donald Trump as Celebrity and Candidate Are Worse Than He Is
Eight years ago an earthquake devastated Haiti, killing approximately 300,000 people, 100 times as many human beings as died in the 9/11 coordinated attack caused by CIA meddling in Afghanistan during the Reagan Administration, with U.S.-backed fundamentalist Muslim forces fighting the Soviet Union becoming al-Qaeda.
I mention Afghanistan in relation to Haiti because they're both very poor nations kept miserable from U.S. manipulations. At war in Afghanistan for sixteen years, U.S. foreign policy machinations during the George W. Bush Administration also overthrew the Haitian government, kidnapped its President and flew him to another country. These are the kinds of loathsome activities powerful American decision-makers practice regularly, with little coverage in U.S. corporate news media.
Donald Trump's presidency, characterized daily on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, and PBS, with a relentless tumble of information about the man's boorishness, his unfitness for the office, his "problems with the truth," his mental instability, his insensitivity toward people of color, toward women, toward non-Americans, his ignorance, his lack of curiosity, amounts to a reality show about one grotesque character in American life who happens to be President of the United States. As a character he brings ratings; his "show" has become the most popular in America--this didn't start on Inauguration Day 2017, it started much earlier when he began to question regularly on cable news President Obama's citizenship.
Given generous airtime, even several years ago, he promoted a preposterous and easily disproven theory that Barack Obama isn't a U.S. citizen. News networks on supposed "opposite ends of the spectrum," like Fox News and MSNBC, provided Trump with a platform to promote this nonsense. Throughout the 2015-2016 presidential campaign "season," during which Earth traveled around the Sun almost twice, the networks mentioned in the previous paragraph provided Trump with unlimited free coverage: reality show host became reality TV presidential candidate, characterized by an obvious lack of intellect, stupider even than George W. Bush, and, once Trump got into the swing of typical presidential activities, as willing a killer of civilians and waster of foreign landscapes and infrastructure as his predecessors, including Obama.
The world control agenda of U.S. foreign policy hasn't abated. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies continue to do horrible, anti-Constitutional things. America's role in Haitian problems going back many decades hasn't been mentioned since Trump brought up that country during an immigration-themed meeting with lawmakers yesterday. Instead, his use of an expletive dominates cable news airtime. From The Washington Post, January 12, 2017:
"President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal...
"'Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?' Trump said...
"Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday [January 11]. The president...also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.
"In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal...
"'Why do we need more Haitians?' Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. 'Take them out.'"
It would be difficult to convince Norwegians to move to the United States. Trump doesn't know it, because he doesn't bother spending ten seconds looking it up as I just did, but in 2016, 362 Norwegians became permanent U.S. residents out of that year's total of approximately 1,180,000 from nations worldwide. His suggestion that the United States "bring more people" from Norway (i.e. White people) would be thwarted by the typical Norwegians' lack of desire to move from a country where they have it good to a country where they wouldn't.
The news broadcasts have deemphasized and mostly not mentioned Trump's interest in seeing more Asians coming to America. Instead, it's the "shithole countries" comment receiving worldwide attention. Haiti, El Salvador, and many African countries have been fucked with by U.S. foreign policy. U.S. military and intelligence forces infest Africa now. During the Obama Administration, Libya was destroyed in a NATO mission designed to gain access to oil regions and also to a vast fresh water storage program initiated by Gaddafi, who received a bayonet thrust into his rectum by a NATO -supported rebel. Recall Hillary Clinton's cackle when she found out about Gaddafi's death and vomit in your mouth if you voted for such a vile person because you were afraid of another vile human being, Trump.
Before President Trump, U.S. foreign policymakers, including, of course, Presidents, have manipulated events around the world, bombed countries illegally, overthrown governments. El Salvador (one of Trump's "shithole countries"), was ravaged by the activities of death squads armed and supported by the Reagan Administration. Reagan never spoke of El Salvador as "a shithole," but his actions in support of mass murderers roaming that country's landscapes in the 1980s make him one of the shits causing chaos and strife in the world, a destabilizer acting in perfect concord with all the other motherfuckers past and present ruining lives and smashing the infrastructures of countries on several continents.
The word "shithole," in its full uncensored text, appeared in the CNN banner at the bottom of the TV screen during Wolf Blitzer's afternoon program. Talking with his panel of pundits and journalists, Blitzer would say, "I won't say the word," when referring to Trump's expletive. Despite the word itself being on display for anyone to read, Blitzer got precious about using it in speech. If you need further proof of our nation's insanities, notice how we're supposed to get bent out of shape that the word "shithole" came out of the President's mouth, but a major news network, while condemning Trump's language, puts the dirty word itself on the screen!
Trump's brazen stupidity aside, it's important to recognize also that the same commentators pooh-poohing insults towards Haiti, like Bill Kristol on MSNBC today, don't really give a shit about the Haitian people, anymore than the corporate officials running the major news networks care about a nation whose President in the last decade was overthrown with silent assent from U.S. news media acting in lockstep with George W. Bush-era U.S. foreign policy.
Vic Neptune
Eight years ago an earthquake devastated Haiti, killing approximately 300,000 people, 100 times as many human beings as died in the 9/11 coordinated attack caused by CIA meddling in Afghanistan during the Reagan Administration, with U.S.-backed fundamentalist Muslim forces fighting the Soviet Union becoming al-Qaeda.
I mention Afghanistan in relation to Haiti because they're both very poor nations kept miserable from U.S. manipulations. At war in Afghanistan for sixteen years, U.S. foreign policy machinations during the George W. Bush Administration also overthrew the Haitian government, kidnapped its President and flew him to another country. These are the kinds of loathsome activities powerful American decision-makers practice regularly, with little coverage in U.S. corporate news media.
Donald Trump's presidency, characterized daily on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, and PBS, with a relentless tumble of information about the man's boorishness, his unfitness for the office, his "problems with the truth," his mental instability, his insensitivity toward people of color, toward women, toward non-Americans, his ignorance, his lack of curiosity, amounts to a reality show about one grotesque character in American life who happens to be President of the United States. As a character he brings ratings; his "show" has become the most popular in America--this didn't start on Inauguration Day 2017, it started much earlier when he began to question regularly on cable news President Obama's citizenship.
Given generous airtime, even several years ago, he promoted a preposterous and easily disproven theory that Barack Obama isn't a U.S. citizen. News networks on supposed "opposite ends of the spectrum," like Fox News and MSNBC, provided Trump with a platform to promote this nonsense. Throughout the 2015-2016 presidential campaign "season," during which Earth traveled around the Sun almost twice, the networks mentioned in the previous paragraph provided Trump with unlimited free coverage: reality show host became reality TV presidential candidate, characterized by an obvious lack of intellect, stupider even than George W. Bush, and, once Trump got into the swing of typical presidential activities, as willing a killer of civilians and waster of foreign landscapes and infrastructure as his predecessors, including Obama.
The world control agenda of U.S. foreign policy hasn't abated. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies continue to do horrible, anti-Constitutional things. America's role in Haitian problems going back many decades hasn't been mentioned since Trump brought up that country during an immigration-themed meeting with lawmakers yesterday. Instead, his use of an expletive dominates cable news airtime. From The Washington Post, January 12, 2017:
"President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal...
"'Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?' Trump said...
"Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday [January 11]. The president...also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.
"In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal...
"'Why do we need more Haitians?' Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. 'Take them out.'"
It would be difficult to convince Norwegians to move to the United States. Trump doesn't know it, because he doesn't bother spending ten seconds looking it up as I just did, but in 2016, 362 Norwegians became permanent U.S. residents out of that year's total of approximately 1,180,000 from nations worldwide. His suggestion that the United States "bring more people" from Norway (i.e. White people) would be thwarted by the typical Norwegians' lack of desire to move from a country where they have it good to a country where they wouldn't.
The news broadcasts have deemphasized and mostly not mentioned Trump's interest in seeing more Asians coming to America. Instead, it's the "shithole countries" comment receiving worldwide attention. Haiti, El Salvador, and many African countries have been fucked with by U.S. foreign policy. U.S. military and intelligence forces infest Africa now. During the Obama Administration, Libya was destroyed in a NATO mission designed to gain access to oil regions and also to a vast fresh water storage program initiated by Gaddafi, who received a bayonet thrust into his rectum by a NATO -supported rebel. Recall Hillary Clinton's cackle when she found out about Gaddafi's death and vomit in your mouth if you voted for such a vile person because you were afraid of another vile human being, Trump.
Before President Trump, U.S. foreign policymakers, including, of course, Presidents, have manipulated events around the world, bombed countries illegally, overthrown governments. El Salvador (one of Trump's "shithole countries"), was ravaged by the activities of death squads armed and supported by the Reagan Administration. Reagan never spoke of El Salvador as "a shithole," but his actions in support of mass murderers roaming that country's landscapes in the 1980s make him one of the shits causing chaos and strife in the world, a destabilizer acting in perfect concord with all the other motherfuckers past and present ruining lives and smashing the infrastructures of countries on several continents.
The word "shithole," in its full uncensored text, appeared in the CNN banner at the bottom of the TV screen during Wolf Blitzer's afternoon program. Talking with his panel of pundits and journalists, Blitzer would say, "I won't say the word," when referring to Trump's expletive. Despite the word itself being on display for anyone to read, Blitzer got precious about using it in speech. If you need further proof of our nation's insanities, notice how we're supposed to get bent out of shape that the word "shithole" came out of the President's mouth, but a major news network, while condemning Trump's language, puts the dirty word itself on the screen!
Trump's brazen stupidity aside, it's important to recognize also that the same commentators pooh-poohing insults towards Haiti, like Bill Kristol on MSNBC today, don't really give a shit about the Haitian people, anymore than the corporate officials running the major news networks care about a nation whose President in the last decade was overthrown with silent assent from U.S. news media acting in lockstep with George W. Bush-era U.S. foreign policy.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
Anti-Integrity
Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night did a story about net neutrality, how the three Republicans on the FCC Board of five bigwigs voted recently to kill it, a move designed to limit small time internet users while benefitting corporations, like Comcast, Maddow's employer.
Maddow didn't mention Comcast. Unlike a villain in The Lord of the Rings, she doesn't seem proud to work for the Dark Lord. The less said about her capitalist overlord the better. The less said about the war machine supported by her overlord the better, for her. She makes many thousands of dollars per day not dwelling upon stories relevant to American lives. Every time I tune in to her primetime show (to check out its monotonous lousiness) I don't hear her speaking about the noxious Republican tax bill--which she and her overlord benefit from--nor do I hear her condemning U.S. assistance to Saudi Arabia as the latter country annihilates Yemenis.
She does speak excessively about Russia, a country made out to be our primary adversary, when the evidence points to big money Wall Street, unlimited money in politics, and warmongering interests as ordinary Americans' chief enemies.
Predictably, Maddow last night began her story about net neutrality by not taking a position on it. The ruination of free use of the internet for ordinary Americans doesn't seem to irk her emotions. She shifted her story quickly to the thousands of comments sent to government agencies before the FCC made its decision. Many of the comments seem to derive from Russia, or have been made to seem so. They often have a curious halving quality, half for net neutrality, half against. Some of the comments are from dead people whose identities have been borrowed. It's similar to elections in this country, when data gets manipulated by unseen hands in favor of one candidate over another.
Maddow's conclusion amounted to the Russians are at it again. But she blamed the Trump Administration, too, for its alleged coziness with the Russian government. The someone in America messing with comments about the FCC's impending decision about net neutrality must, Maddow insisted, be connected with Trump's operations, which, according to the MSNBC narrative (in full compliance with numerous U.S. intelligence professionals offering opinions on the channel) are in line with Moscow.
In response to Maddow's what is going on? look in her eyebrows I can only say, given the "evidence" offered in her story, that the massive number of phony comments, so easily deciphered as to origin, related to the FCC's impending decision was part of a U.S. intelligence operation meant to smear Russia, a habit indulged in during the last year and several months by U.S. intelligence operatives, former and current, appearing as pundits on CNN and MSNBC. Maddow, like her colleague Chris Hayes, has turned her show from a useful purveyor of information with a Progressive slant to a hackneyed propaganda broadcast in service to her corporate overlord. Comcast, owner of MSNBC, participates in the corporate/military industrial/congressional/entertainment complex that perpetuates war and income inequality, a goal achieved over the last thirty-six years by the wealthy against the interests of their serfs, us.
What makes Maddow so disgusting is that she used to be somebody true and honest, caring for ordinary people, but something happened--her salary went way up, turning her into a rich slave doing the bidding of the elites ruining this planet. Her integrity wasn't strong enough, she couldn't say no to the money or the TV platform, which just got shittier and shittier the more she focused on Russia (a story meaning nothing to ordinary people struggling economically). In obsessing on Russia, she did manage to divert attention away from important things, like health care, perpetual war, police violence against civilians, the need for a national minimum wage increase, gun violence, the opioid epidemic, the obscenity of the recent tax bill, Trump's anti-environmental policies, income inequality, the lowering of life expectancy in America, Flint's continuing water problems, the endless misery of Puerto Ricans due to U.S. government neglect.
None of the above-mentioned serious problems degrading American lives have anything to do with the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, but are all specifically American problems not being dealt with by our greedy and immoral leaders, those propped up by the lack of transparency afforded them whenever journalists like Maddow don't expose their inadequacies and destructive actions but rather focus attention, as she has spent the past year doing, on fevered speculations about Trump and Russia.
The creation of new enemies is an old practice by governments. World War Two had its Nazis and Japanese. Once Germany and Japan were defeated, post-war America under Harry Truman looked to demonize the Soviet Union and Communism generally, with the People's Republic of China added to the list. Once the Cold War ended, terrorism became the new enemy; an absurdity since going to war against a tactic makes no sense, especially when the United States itself practices and supports terrorism covertly and overtly, relying on the news media to frame our violence against innocents in bland, gutless ways.
The Global War on Terror, our big conflict of this century, is now sixteen years old. Russia as an enemy was thought up at the right time to revitalize at least some interest in news and intelligence circles, providing a new bugbear to link with a new villain, the sick fuck clown Donald Trump, a man whose real ties to Russia could actually be related to owing lots of money to oligarchs, rather than alleged collusion with Putin to steal the 2016 election. That election, like those in 2000 and 2004, has suspicious qualities pointing to voter purges that tilted certain key districts to Trump. If this is the case, nefarious Republicans in America didn't need Putin to subvert democracy anymore than did Republican government officials in Florida in 2000 or in Ohio in 2004. We don't need Russia to fuck ourselves.
Rachel Maddow's segment on net neutrality, so lacking in information about net neutrality and why it's important for our democracy, shows that serving her master's intelligence agency-provided views on America's newfound enemy Russia is more important to her than being honest about something deeply important to American freedoms. Thus, she's a propaganda artist serving a dubious intelligence operation turned against Russia, meant, ultimately, to continue perpetual war for the benefit of arms dealers and the national security state. Had she been a citizen of Nazi Germany she would've fit right in, a conformist preaching the necessity of war with the Soviet Union.
She's not alone in this. Contemporary cable news journalism is replete with examples of journalists behaving faithfully like good servants of corporatist propaganda news outlets. Yesterday on MSNBC, anchor Stephanie Ruhle (a former Deutsche Bank employee) had a segment on the current popular unrest in Iran. One of her guests, President of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, had it out with another guest, neoconservative warmonger and Iraq War fomenter Bill Kristol, a Fox News pundit who makes the rounds too of CNN and MSNBC, proving that all three networks want to hear the words of liars.
After Kristol praised the Iranians' desire for freedom, Parsi countered, "With all due respect, Bill, you've been arguing to bomb Iran for so long so I don't know if you're really respecting the Iranian people. You've been advocating killing Iranians. I don't think you or the Trump Administration [Trump tweeted support for the protestors] have the credibility to now say that you care for the Iranian people."
Gasp. Kristol got more heated than I've ever seen him get. He yelled. He doesn't like being called a warmonger, doesn't like it when his own viewpoints, as expressed extensively in his Weekly Standard publication, get thrown back at his sneering face, which means he really isn't interested in defending some of his own ideas, making him a despicable coward who won't stand up for what he believes whenever someone challenges him authoritatively; in other words, a slave to power.
Stephanie Ruhle, employee of a war-promoting news network, defended Kristol frantically, "Bill Kristol is not advocating killing anyone! Let's make that very clear!"
Parsi replied calmly, in nice contrast to Kristol: "No, on the contrary, there's been an argument [Kristol's and others'] for taking military action against Iran, instead of having this nuclear deal that has been working."
Ruhle offered Kristol the last word; he declined. He knows Parsi is right about his own positions on Iran. I looked up just one Weekly Standard article written by Kristol in 2006. He expresses his opinion that Iran's nuclear facilities should be bombed, adding, "Why not? Yes, there will be consequences, but they will be good ones."
Consider, too, Kristol's propaganda role in advocating for the destruction of Iraq and the Middle East in general for the favorable benefit, supposedly, of the U.S. His bloodthirstiness can be read in print and heard on television--that's been the case for two decades. In spite of that, Stephanie Ruhle defended Kristol, a man who has spent much of his life advocating the mass slaughter resulting from invasive warfare, rather than defending Trita Parsi, who spoke truthfully about the warmonger on her show.
Imagine Hermann Göring on trial at Nuremberg, his lawyer insisting stridently, "My client is not anti-Semitic! And what's more, he did not want to bomb England!"
Black is white, up is down, net neutrality should be understood in terms of Russia, Bill Kristol is a humanitarian.
MSNBC journalists complain on air about Trump's gripes about "fake news," but what are we to make of a network so committed, like CNN and Fox, to not recognizing the relevance of what's real and verifiable, as opposed to indulging every day and night on speculation about Russia-oriented bullshit, with misinformation thrown in, plus omission of what's most important in truly valuable news content. Isn't that kind of news the dream of a totalitarian state?
Vic Neptune
Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night did a story about net neutrality, how the three Republicans on the FCC Board of five bigwigs voted recently to kill it, a move designed to limit small time internet users while benefitting corporations, like Comcast, Maddow's employer.
Maddow didn't mention Comcast. Unlike a villain in The Lord of the Rings, she doesn't seem proud to work for the Dark Lord. The less said about her capitalist overlord the better. The less said about the war machine supported by her overlord the better, for her. She makes many thousands of dollars per day not dwelling upon stories relevant to American lives. Every time I tune in to her primetime show (to check out its monotonous lousiness) I don't hear her speaking about the noxious Republican tax bill--which she and her overlord benefit from--nor do I hear her condemning U.S. assistance to Saudi Arabia as the latter country annihilates Yemenis.
She does speak excessively about Russia, a country made out to be our primary adversary, when the evidence points to big money Wall Street, unlimited money in politics, and warmongering interests as ordinary Americans' chief enemies.
Predictably, Maddow last night began her story about net neutrality by not taking a position on it. The ruination of free use of the internet for ordinary Americans doesn't seem to irk her emotions. She shifted her story quickly to the thousands of comments sent to government agencies before the FCC made its decision. Many of the comments seem to derive from Russia, or have been made to seem so. They often have a curious halving quality, half for net neutrality, half against. Some of the comments are from dead people whose identities have been borrowed. It's similar to elections in this country, when data gets manipulated by unseen hands in favor of one candidate over another.
Maddow's conclusion amounted to the Russians are at it again. But she blamed the Trump Administration, too, for its alleged coziness with the Russian government. The someone in America messing with comments about the FCC's impending decision about net neutrality must, Maddow insisted, be connected with Trump's operations, which, according to the MSNBC narrative (in full compliance with numerous U.S. intelligence professionals offering opinions on the channel) are in line with Moscow.
In response to Maddow's what is going on? look in her eyebrows I can only say, given the "evidence" offered in her story, that the massive number of phony comments, so easily deciphered as to origin, related to the FCC's impending decision was part of a U.S. intelligence operation meant to smear Russia, a habit indulged in during the last year and several months by U.S. intelligence operatives, former and current, appearing as pundits on CNN and MSNBC. Maddow, like her colleague Chris Hayes, has turned her show from a useful purveyor of information with a Progressive slant to a hackneyed propaganda broadcast in service to her corporate overlord. Comcast, owner of MSNBC, participates in the corporate/military industrial/congressional/entertainment complex that perpetuates war and income inequality, a goal achieved over the last thirty-six years by the wealthy against the interests of their serfs, us.
What makes Maddow so disgusting is that she used to be somebody true and honest, caring for ordinary people, but something happened--her salary went way up, turning her into a rich slave doing the bidding of the elites ruining this planet. Her integrity wasn't strong enough, she couldn't say no to the money or the TV platform, which just got shittier and shittier the more she focused on Russia (a story meaning nothing to ordinary people struggling economically). In obsessing on Russia, she did manage to divert attention away from important things, like health care, perpetual war, police violence against civilians, the need for a national minimum wage increase, gun violence, the opioid epidemic, the obscenity of the recent tax bill, Trump's anti-environmental policies, income inequality, the lowering of life expectancy in America, Flint's continuing water problems, the endless misery of Puerto Ricans due to U.S. government neglect.
None of the above-mentioned serious problems degrading American lives have anything to do with the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, but are all specifically American problems not being dealt with by our greedy and immoral leaders, those propped up by the lack of transparency afforded them whenever journalists like Maddow don't expose their inadequacies and destructive actions but rather focus attention, as she has spent the past year doing, on fevered speculations about Trump and Russia.
The creation of new enemies is an old practice by governments. World War Two had its Nazis and Japanese. Once Germany and Japan were defeated, post-war America under Harry Truman looked to demonize the Soviet Union and Communism generally, with the People's Republic of China added to the list. Once the Cold War ended, terrorism became the new enemy; an absurdity since going to war against a tactic makes no sense, especially when the United States itself practices and supports terrorism covertly and overtly, relying on the news media to frame our violence against innocents in bland, gutless ways.
The Global War on Terror, our big conflict of this century, is now sixteen years old. Russia as an enemy was thought up at the right time to revitalize at least some interest in news and intelligence circles, providing a new bugbear to link with a new villain, the sick fuck clown Donald Trump, a man whose real ties to Russia could actually be related to owing lots of money to oligarchs, rather than alleged collusion with Putin to steal the 2016 election. That election, like those in 2000 and 2004, has suspicious qualities pointing to voter purges that tilted certain key districts to Trump. If this is the case, nefarious Republicans in America didn't need Putin to subvert democracy anymore than did Republican government officials in Florida in 2000 or in Ohio in 2004. We don't need Russia to fuck ourselves.
Rachel Maddow's segment on net neutrality, so lacking in information about net neutrality and why it's important for our democracy, shows that serving her master's intelligence agency-provided views on America's newfound enemy Russia is more important to her than being honest about something deeply important to American freedoms. Thus, she's a propaganda artist serving a dubious intelligence operation turned against Russia, meant, ultimately, to continue perpetual war for the benefit of arms dealers and the national security state. Had she been a citizen of Nazi Germany she would've fit right in, a conformist preaching the necessity of war with the Soviet Union.
She's not alone in this. Contemporary cable news journalism is replete with examples of journalists behaving faithfully like good servants of corporatist propaganda news outlets. Yesterday on MSNBC, anchor Stephanie Ruhle (a former Deutsche Bank employee) had a segment on the current popular unrest in Iran. One of her guests, President of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, had it out with another guest, neoconservative warmonger and Iraq War fomenter Bill Kristol, a Fox News pundit who makes the rounds too of CNN and MSNBC, proving that all three networks want to hear the words of liars.
After Kristol praised the Iranians' desire for freedom, Parsi countered, "With all due respect, Bill, you've been arguing to bomb Iran for so long so I don't know if you're really respecting the Iranian people. You've been advocating killing Iranians. I don't think you or the Trump Administration [Trump tweeted support for the protestors] have the credibility to now say that you care for the Iranian people."
Gasp. Kristol got more heated than I've ever seen him get. He yelled. He doesn't like being called a warmonger, doesn't like it when his own viewpoints, as expressed extensively in his Weekly Standard publication, get thrown back at his sneering face, which means he really isn't interested in defending some of his own ideas, making him a despicable coward who won't stand up for what he believes whenever someone challenges him authoritatively; in other words, a slave to power.
Stephanie Ruhle, employee of a war-promoting news network, defended Kristol frantically, "Bill Kristol is not advocating killing anyone! Let's make that very clear!"
Parsi replied calmly, in nice contrast to Kristol: "No, on the contrary, there's been an argument [Kristol's and others'] for taking military action against Iran, instead of having this nuclear deal that has been working."
Ruhle offered Kristol the last word; he declined. He knows Parsi is right about his own positions on Iran. I looked up just one Weekly Standard article written by Kristol in 2006. He expresses his opinion that Iran's nuclear facilities should be bombed, adding, "Why not? Yes, there will be consequences, but they will be good ones."
Consider, too, Kristol's propaganda role in advocating for the destruction of Iraq and the Middle East in general for the favorable benefit, supposedly, of the U.S. His bloodthirstiness can be read in print and heard on television--that's been the case for two decades. In spite of that, Stephanie Ruhle defended Kristol, a man who has spent much of his life advocating the mass slaughter resulting from invasive warfare, rather than defending Trita Parsi, who spoke truthfully about the warmonger on her show.
Imagine Hermann Göring on trial at Nuremberg, his lawyer insisting stridently, "My client is not anti-Semitic! And what's more, he did not want to bomb England!"
Black is white, up is down, net neutrality should be understood in terms of Russia, Bill Kristol is a humanitarian.
MSNBC journalists complain on air about Trump's gripes about "fake news," but what are we to make of a network so committed, like CNN and Fox, to not recognizing the relevance of what's real and verifiable, as opposed to indulging every day and night on speculation about Russia-oriented bullshit, with misinformation thrown in, plus omission of what's most important in truly valuable news content. Isn't that kind of news the dream of a totalitarian state?
Vic Neptune
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