Friday, March 31, 2017
Blaming Russia for Everything
March 31, 2017
Exclusive: The Senate
Intelligence Committee launched its Russia-gate investigation by inviting some
“experts” in to rant about how everything that goes wrong in the United States
is the fault of the Russians, observes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
It’s almost getting comical
how everything that happens in the United States gets blamed on Russia! Russia!
Russia! And, if any American points out the absurdity of this argument, he or
she must be a “Moscow stooge” or a “Putin puppet.”
When Sen. Marco Rubio’s
presidential campaign fails seemingly because he was a wet-behind-the-ears
candidate who performed like a robot during debates repeating the same talking
points over and over, you might have cited those shortcomings to explain why “Little
Marco” flamed out. However, if you did, that would make you a Russian “useful
idiot”! The “real” reason for his failure, as we learned from Thursday’s Senate
Intelligence Committee hearing, was Russia!
When Americans turned against
President Obama’s Pacific trade deals, you might have thought that it was
because people across the country had grown sick and tired of these neoliberal
agreements that have left large swaths of the country deindustrialized and
former blue-collar workers turning to opioids and alcohol. But if you did think
that, that would mean you are a dupe of the clever Russkies, as ex-British
spy Christopher
Steele made clear in one of his “oppo” research reports against Donald
Trump. As Steele’s dossier explained, the rejection of Obama’s TPP and TTIP
trade deals resulted from Russian propaganda!
When Hillary Clinton boots a
presidential election that was literally hers to lose, you might have thought
that she lost because she insisted on channeling her State Department emails
through a private server that endangered national security; that she gave paid
speeches to Wall Street and tried to hide the contents from the voters; that
she called half of Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorables”; that she was a
widely disliked establishment candidate in an anti-establishment year; that she
was shoved down the throats of progressive Democrats by a Democratic Party
hierarchy that made her nomination “inevitable” via the undemocratic use of
unelected “super-delegates”; that some of her State Department emails were
found on the laptop of suspected sex offender Anthony Weiner (the husband of
Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin); and that the laptop discovery caused FBI
Director James Comey to briefly reopen the investigation of Clinton’s private
email server in the last days of the campaign.
You might even recall that
Clinton herself blamed her late collapse in the polls on Comey’s announcement,
as did other liberal luminaries such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
But if you thought those thoughts or remembered those memories, that is just
more proof that you are a “Russian mole”!
As we all should know in our
properly restructured memory banks and our rearranged sense of reality, it was
all Russia’s fault! Russia did it by undermining our democratic process through
the clever means of releasing truthful information via WikiLeaks that provided
evidence of how the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process
against Sen. Bernie Sanders, revealed the contents of Clinton’s hidden Wall
Street speeches, and exposed pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation in
its dealings with foreign entities.
You see the evil Russians
undermined American democracy by arming the American people with truthful
information! How dastardly is that! Could Boris and Natasha do any better or
worse? And although the Soviet spies in FX’s “The Americans” were in their prime
in the 1980s and would be pretty old by now, do we know where they are in the
present day? Though WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails – the
DNC’s and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s – from the Russians, have we
ruled out that the emails might have been slipped to WikiLeaks by the FX
characters Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, presumably in disguise?
Oddly, too, when similar
factual revelations come from Western-favored leaks, such as the purloined
financial records of a Panamanian law firm known as the “Panama Papers,” we
hail the disclosures regardless of the dubious methods that were used to steal
them, especially if the contents can be spun to undermine disfavored
governments like Russia (while also inconveniently embarrassing a few
unimportant “’allies”).
But if you make that
comparison or you note how the U.S. Agency for International Development and
the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy have supported
various “independent” journalists and news outlets to advance U.S. propaganda,
that makes you guilty of “moral equivalence,” another serious offense.
Crazy Talk
So now that you know how the
game is played, you had the Senate Intelligence Committee eliciting testimony
from people like media watcher Clint Watts, who seems to believe that any
criticism of a U.S. government official (at least anyone he likes) must be
directed by Russia!
“This past week we observed
social media accounts discrediting U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan,” said
Watts, who is
billed in The Washington Post as “an expert in terrorism forecasting
and Russian influence operations.”
Gee, I know you might say that
you went on Facebook last week to criticize Ryan for bungling the “repeal and
replace” of Obamacare by proposing a scheme that managed to alienate both
right-wing and moderate Republicans as well as all Democrats. But that only
proves you are indeed a Russian disinformation agent! (Watts also claimed that
Sen. Rubio’s presidential bid “anecdotally suffered” from an online
Russian campaign against him.)
As Watts describes these
nefarious Russian schemes, they are so nefarious that they don’t have any
discernible earmarks or detectable predictability. In his view, the Russians
don’t want to help any particular person or group, just undermine America’s
faith in its democracy.
As Watts puts it, Russians
attack “people on both sides of the aisle … solely based on what they [the
Russians] want to achieve in their own landscape, whatever the Russian foreign
policy objectives are. They win because they play both sides.” In other words,
any political comment that an American might make might just prove that you’re
a traitor.
But Watts singled out
President Trump for special criticism because he supposedly has tweeted about
Russian-planted conspiracy theories. “Part of the reason active measures have
worked in this U.S. election is because the commander-in-chief has used Russian
active measure at times against his opponent,” Watts said, citing Trump’s bogus
claims about 2016 voter fraud and his earlier silliness about President Obama’s
Kenyan birthplace. Yes, as we all know, every goofy idea is manufactured in
Russia. Americans are incapable of developing their own nonsense.
Watts then suggested that some
kind of Ministry of Truth is needed to stamp out unapproved information. “Until
we get a firm basis on fact and fiction in our own country, … we’re going to
have a big problem,” Watts said. He warned of a dangerous future from Russian
information: “Somewhere in their cache right now there’s tremendous amounts of
information laying around they can weaponize against other Americans.”
Perhaps what is even more
frightening than the Russians letting Americans in on how Washington’s
political process really works – by somehow slipping WikiLeaks some evidence of
Democratic Party bigwigs tilting the Democratic primaries to ensure Clinton’s
nomination and revealing what Clinton told those Wall Street bankers – is the
idea that the U.S. government should be enlisted to enforce what Americans get
to see and hear.
The PropOrNot Smear
Watts and his alarums showed
up in another context in the weeks after the 2016 election when The
Washington Post ran a front-page story highlighting the claims by an
anonymous group, PropOrNot, which was pushing a blacklist of 200 Internet news
sites, including such independent sources of information as Counterpunch,
Truthdig, Naked Capitalism, Zero Hedge, Truth-out and Consortiumnews.
Though the Post granted
PropOrNot anonymity so it could safely slander independent-minded journalists,
the Post turned to Watts to bolster PropOrNot’s case. “They [the Russians] want
to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government
interests,” Watts said. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The
problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”
The Post then linked to an
article that Watts had co-authored entitled, “Trolling
for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” which, in
turn, cited as proof RT articles that mentioned Hillary Clinton’s health
problem last September (which was later acknowledged to be a bout with
pneumonia) and that discussed the vulnerabilities of the Federal Reserve (in an
age of escalating public and private debt). Both might seem to you like
reasonable topics for journalists, but you must understand that RT – because it
is Russian-sponsored – has become the favorite whipping boy of anyone trying to make
the case that America is besieged by Russian propaganda. And don’t you dare
mention that almost no one in America actually watches RT or you might end up
on PropOrNot’s list, too.
Watts and his cohorts
continue: “Social issues currently provide a useful window for Russian
messaging. Police
brutality, racial tensions, protests, anti-government
standoffs, online
privacy concerns, and alleged government
misconduct are all emphasized to magnify their scale and leveraged to
undermine the fabric of society.”
And, we know for sure that
you’re a Russian agent if you express any concern that the heightened tensions
between the U.S. and Russia might lead to nuclear war. As Watts and friends
write, “More recently, Moscow turned to stoking fears
of nuclear war between the United States and Russia” – and their
“proof” was a link not to RT but to the financial Web site, Zero Hedge, which
already had made it onto PropOrNot’s black list.
So, let’s see if we got this
right: We are not to worry our pretty little heads about nuclear war or a
future financial meltdown or police brutality toward racial minorities or race
relations in general or armed right-wing clashes with authorities or spying on
our Internet use or any government wrongdoing at all or even citizen protests
against that wrongdoing. Because if we debate such issues – if we even read
about such issues – we are playing into Vladimir Putin’s evil plans.
What Democracy?
Which makes me wonder what
kind of “democracy” these brave “defenders of democracy” have in mind. The New
York Times, The Washington Post and some establishment-approved Internet sites
already have begun work on establishing standards for what information the
American people will be allowed to see and hear – with disapproved sources of
news marginalized by Internet search engines or prevented from earning any
money by exclusion from Google and other ad programs.
Presumably, the 200 or so Web
sites on PropOrNot’s black list would be the first cut for the new Ministry of
Truth since many of them have published articles that raised questions about
the accuracy of claims made by the U.S. State Department or they have expressed
the belief that there may be two sides to complex issues – when Americans are
supposed to hear only the side that Official Washington wants them to hear.
Some of these “Russian
propaganda” Web sites – prior to the Iraq War – even raised doubts about the
U.S. government’s certainty that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of WMDs. Thank
goodness the Internet wasn’t as widely used back then or perhaps many Americans
would have doubted the truth-telling by The New York Times and The Washington
Post, which dutifully passed on the U.S. government’s pronouncements about
Hussein’s secret WMDs.
Surely, in 2002-03, the
Russians must have been behind the resistance by those few Web sites to the WMD
group think that all the respectable people just knew to be true. How else can
you explain the skepticism? And maybe Russia was responsible for the U.S.
government’s failure to find any of those WMD stockpiles. Curse you, Russia!
With the Senate Intelligence
Committee’s hearing on Thursday, this determination to squelch any dissenting
American views as “Russian disinformation” moved up a notch, beyond some
think-tank chatter, some newspaper articles or some initial planning for private-sector
censorship.
The craziness has now become
the focus of an official Senate investigation into Russian “meddling” in
American political life. We have taken another step down the path of a New Cold
War that blends a New McCarthyism with a New Orwellianism.
[For more on this topic, see
Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Orwellian War on Skepticism” and “How
US Flooded the World with Psyops.”]
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen
Narrative, either in print
here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Who will control this digital space merged with our brain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZJSmUExU6M
At AIPAC Protest, Young American Jews Voice Rejection of Israeli Policies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTK6bDRGYRE
Does Washington Want to Start a New War in the Balkans?
March 29, 2017
With Monday’s procedural
vote in the U.S. Senate to allow Montenegro into NATO, the Washington elite
proved once more that heightening tensions with Russia might not just be
inevitable, but actually desirable. With the exception of Rand Paul (R-KY) and
Mike Lee (R-UT), the entire 100-strong body of the Senate rallied behind the
motion that would see the tiny Adriatic state admitted into the Atlantic
alliance over the objections of many Montenegrins . The vote set off a 30-hour
countdown, during which Senators will debate before putting the issue to a
final vote.
If you needed more proof
that US foreign policy is misguided, just look to what happened to Rand Paul
after his earlier decision to block Montenegro’s accession. The Kentucky
senator was subjected to a barrage of insults from fellow Republican John McCain,
who flatly accused
Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.” McCain warned Paul that objecting to the
tiny Balkan state becoming the 29th member of the alliance would play straight
into the hands of the Russian president. While certainly unkind, Paul’s
retort that the 80-year-old might be “past his prime” and perhaps “a little
bit unhinged” was not entirely wide of the mark.
While Montenegro’s accession
to NATO bafflingly enjoys popular support in the Senate chamber and among
NATO’s 28 member states, 25 of whom have already finalized
their approval of the country’s membership of the alliance, criticism of Paul’s
veto is as grossly misguided as any assertion that he is somehow in the pocket
of the Kremlin. Correctly arguing that the U.S. is already spread far too
thinly militarily in dozens of countries all over the world with little to show
for it, Paul questioned
the wisdom of expanding the monetary and military obligations of America at a
time when it is already drowning in debt. He had previously voted against the
matter in a vote last December.
McCain represents a
mercilessly hawkish wing of the Republican Party that would be quite happy to
risk war with Russia and harm to U.S. interests over such a strategically
irrelevant country. Paul, on the other hand, takes a more pragmatic position on
the country’s NATO ambitions, as should anyone in full possession of the facts.
To begin with, the Montenegrin people themselves display little interest in
their country joining NATO. Polls there consistently show that no more than 40%
of the public favor NATO membership, with support for accession dropping
considerably below that figure among older people. Many remain suspicious of
the alliance after it bombed Yugoslavia, of which Montenegro was part, in 1999.
Distrust for the military alliance is so strong that anti-NATO
demonstrations regularly take place across the country. To press ahead with
Montenegro’s NATO accession would fly directly in the face of the will of its
people.
Worse, Montenegro’s October
parliamentary election was marred with exaggerated charges that a Russian coup
was in the works. If it hadn’t been for some last minute intelligence from
Serbia and the country’s own agencies, so the story goes, Russian GRU spies
would have assassinated Djukanovic and would have installed a puppet
government. In fact, the pro-Western Podgorica government has successfully used
the specter of Russian influence in order to detain and unlawfully harass
opposition leaders. Just last week, Marko Milacic, a pro-neutrality campaigner,
was “pre-emptively
detained” after campaigning in favor of a referendum that would have
allowed Montenegrins to vote on whether they want indeed to join NATO.
Aside from the lack of
public support, Montenegro has very little to meaningfully contribute to the
alliance. Indeed, its accession would seriously undermine the democratic
principles on which the transatlantic community was ostensibly founded. The
country’s government is widely accepted to be riddled with corruption. Former
Prime Minister Milo Dukanovic was named Man of the Year in Organized
Crime by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) in
2015, and has been accused of cigarette smuggling on a grand scale in collusion
with notorious organized crime groups from Italy, among a litany of other
offences any mobster would be proud to have on their resume. Since standing
down from his role as Prime Minister last year, Djukanovic has managed to
cleverly maneuver
the domestic political sphere by intimidating opposition leaders, while
skillfully managing to avoid accusation of a “political crackdown” that would
have ignited wide-spread civil unrest.
Montenegro’s accession to
full NATO membership should also be viewed as no-brainer from a financial
perspective. The fact remains that Podgorica currently spends just 1.6%
of its GDP on defense and has a miniscule army. As the Senate Armed
Services Chairman, John McCain has been busy campaigning for a greater military
budget of $640
billion for 2018 to entangle U.S. forces in further conflicts abroad,
proving once more that the former Presidential candidate is stuck in a Cold War
mentality, as evidenced by his suggestion that Paul is some sort of Kremlin
plant.
Republicans and the White
House must look beyond this bluster and carefully consider the ramifications of
allowing Montenegro’s NATO accession. Accepting a country with a failing
economy and corrupt government into the alliance will do nothing to further U.S
interests either at home or abroad. On the contrary, allowing Montenegro to
join NATO would jeopardize both regional and U.S. security, and perpetuate the
mistakes of past administrations that have been too quick to bomb foreign countries
on a whim and play geopolitical games.
McCain’s tired brand of
rampant interventionism should be consigned to the dustbin of history, while
the rest of the Senate should take careful note of Paul’s important points. He
is one of a rare breed of lawmakers brave enough to criticize America’s
imperialism abroad.
"Cultural Imperialism never had any problem with cultural diversity"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzhPySUw4O8
Call for Papers: Imaging a ‘Middle East’
International Symposium
6 – 7 July 2017
An ICI Event organized by Saima Akhtar, Walid
El-Houri, and Banu Karaca in cooperation with Europe in the Middle East – the
Middle East in Europe (EUME), a programme at the Forum Transregionale Studie
Orientalism – and its images – are far from
dead. Despite Edward Said’s forceful critique of Orientalism as a regime of representation
that dominates and structures an ambiguous ‘East’, its discourse persists.
Representations, in the form of paintings, drawings, photography, films, and
maps, have been powerful means by which the ‘Middle East’ has been pictured in
the last two centuries, and, as such, have animated imperialist projects,
fueled Orientalist and self-Orientalist fantasies, and upheld reductive and
essentialized understandings of the region and its people. Since September
2001, Orientalist imagery has undergone a political and social intensification,
which is now compounded by the ‘refugee crisis.’ This intensification has been
made apparent in discourses that easily interchange the ‘immigrant’ for the
‘refugee’ and ‘Muslim’ in Europe and the US, but also in tropes of Arab, Muslim
or Oriental otherness used by political actors in the region itself.
This symposium examines the continued
seductiveness that Orientalism seems to hold over the production of images of
the contemporary ‘Middle East’, both inside and outside of the region. How are
(self) Orientalized images and imaginaries translated into perceptions of
authenticity and identity? How do such images figure into the policies and
politics in the ongoing ‘global war on terror’? How do modes of contemporary
image-making engage with, resist, or respond to tropes of Orientalism in the
current political moment?
Presentations in English, limited to 20
minutes. Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short
biographical profile (150 words max) to imagingmiddleeast@gmail.com by 23
April 2017. As with all events at the ICI Berlin, there is no registration fee.
Assistance in securing discounted accommodation for the conference period can
be provided.
Trump says trade gap will make China meeting 'a very difficult one'
By David Brunnstrom
and Christian
Shepherd | WASHINGTON/BEIJING
U.S. President Donald Trump
set the tone for a tense first meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping next
week by tweeting on Thursday that the United States could no longer tolerate
massive trade deficits and job losses.
The White House said Trump
would host Xi next Thursday and Friday at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida. It
said Trump and his wife, Melania, would host Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at a
dinner next Thursday.
In a tweet on Thursday
evening, Trump said the highly anticipated meeting between the leaders of the
world's two largest economies, which is also expected to cover differences over
North Korea and China's strategic ambitions in the South China Sea, "will
be a very difficult one."
"We can no longer have
massive trade deficits and job losses," he wrote, adding in apparent
reference to U.S. firms manufacturing in China: "American companies must
be prepared to look at other alternatives."
Despite a string of
U.S.-China meetings and conversations that have appeared aimed at mending ties
after strong criticism of China by Trump during his election campaign, U.S.
officials have said the Republican president will not pull his punches in the
meeting.
General Electric Co Chief
Executive Officer Jeff Immelt urged Trump on Thursday to maintain the country's
economic relationship with China, saying the United States had much to gain
from globalization.
"The country loses if
we don't trade. The relationship with China is key," Immelt told an
aviation panel hosted by industry group the Wings Club. "If you give up on
trade, you give up on the best lever that the president of the United States
has in negotiating around the world. I just think that President Trump is too
smart to give up on that."
The U.S. Commerce Department
said earlier that Beijing must change its trade practices and the way its state
enterprises operate.
"China and others need
to realize the games are over – continuing their unfair trade practices and
operation as a non-market economy will have serious consequences,” it said.
The department said it was
launching a new review of China’s status as a non-market economy, which allows
the United States to maintain high anti-dumping duties on cheap Chinese
imports, but the designation is widely expected to remain in place.
Chinese Foreign Ministry
spokesman Lu Kang stressed the need to see the big picture while fostering
mutual trade interests.
"The market dictates
that interests between our two countries are structured so that you will always
have me and I will always have you," he told a regular briefing.
"Both sides should work
together to make the cake of mutual interest bigger and not simply seek fairer
distribution."
'BIG ISSUES'
Trump administration
officials say the need for China to do more to rein in the nuclear and missile
programs of its neighbor and ally North Korea will top the agenda, along with
trade. The U.S. side is also expected to criticize Beijing for its pursuit of
expansive claims in the South China Sea.
White House spokesman Sean
Spicer told a news briefing the meeting would be an opportunity for Trump
"to develop a relationship in person with President Xi."
"He's spoken to him on
the phone a few times, but we have big problems ... everything from the South
China Sea, to trade, to North Korea. There are big issues of national and
economic security that need to get addressed."
Asked if the administration
had a vision, or a description for its China policy like the "pivot"
or "rebalance" to Asia touted by former President Barack Obama,
Spicer said: "Right now we're not worried so much about slogans as much as
progress.
"There's a lot of big
things that we need to accomplish with China, and I think that we will - we
will work on them."
U.S. Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson agreed in Beijing this month to work with China on North Korea and
stressed Trump's desire to enhance understanding.
China has been irritated at
being told repeatedly by Washington to rein in North Korea's nuclear and
missile programs, or face U.S. sanctions on Chinese businesses trading with
North Korea, and by the U.S. decision to base an advanced missile defense
system in South Korea.
Beijing is also deeply
suspicious of U.S. intentions toward self-ruled Taiwan, which China claims as
its own, after Trump, as president-elect, broke with decades of U.S. policy by
taking a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and saying Washington
did not have to stick to a "one China" policy.
Trump later agreed in a
phone call with Xi to honor the long-standing policy and has also written to
him since seeking "constructive ties."
(Reporting by Christian
Shepherd in Beijing and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Additional reporting by
Matt Spetalnick and D
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