A few days ago the Chris Hedge’s Fan Club posted a leaked memo from Applebee’s which definitely shows that in the current economic crisis, we are definitely not ‘all in it together’. Chris Hedges is a powerful left-wing American journalist and broadcaster. I think he might be an ordained Presbyterian minister. Certainly his father was, before he was thrown out by his congregation for backing gay rights. This was obviously at a time when the gay rights movement was just beginning and still massively controversial. Hedge’s himself was one of the few journalists to cover the wars in Central America in the 1980s from the front line, and he has talked about the atrocities committed by Fascist groups like the Contras in Nicaragua. This were the same Fascist death squads and torturers to whom Reagan sold arms and provided other aid, while allowing them to finance their campaigns of terror by exporting cocaine to America. Where it helped further devastate desperately poor Black Americans. The same butchers Reagan declared were the ‘moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers’. Some patriotic Americans could feel their country was being insulted. Other left-wingers might be more worried that it’s true.
A few days ago the YouTube channel devoted to him and his analysis of capitalism and contemporary politics got hold of a leaked memo from Applebee’s. We don’t have it in this country, but I gather that it’s a chain of restaurants across the Pond. The memo talked about using the current crisis, with petrol prices rising and inflation expected to explode generally, as an opportunity for treating people badly. ‘Because their desperate’.
This is grubby, and I realise that not all businesses are like it. But this is the predatory face of capitalism, and unfortunately it’s companies like this that are bankrolling the political parties on both sides of the Atlantic. The right regard capitalism as patriotic, but there is nothing patriotic about this. It’s anti-social profiteering, pure and simple.
We need to end corporate donations in politics, and drive through legislation to protect workers and consumers from such cynical exploitation.
Mike over on Vox Political has just put up a piece reporting and commenting on a private police force, My Local Bobby. This was first introduced in three of the wealthiest boroughs in London, and is now set to be unrolled nationally. He makes the point that we’ve known for a long time that the Tories have wanted a private police force. Now they look set to have one, while the real police are being run down and starved of funds and officers. He states that this looks like a protection racket to him, and asks what his readers think.
This another issue I really can’t let go. The Tories have been planning to set up a privatised police force since the late 1980s and early 1990s. I can remember Virginia Bottomley, one of Major’s cabinet, raving in the Mail on Sunday about how wonderful it would be.
It’s another idea that the Tories have taken straight from the Libertarians. It comes from the demented ideas of their leader, Rothbard, who would also like to privatise the courts. The Libertarians see themselves as Anarchists, though I think genuine Anarchists would vehemently dispute this. Especially as the Libertarians themselves have their own history of anti-Semitism. In the mid ’70s their journal in the states, run by one of the Koch brothers, ran an edition dedicated to denying the Holocaust. This included articles by some of the most notorious of the country’s real neo-Nazis. The purpose behind it was to attack Roosevelt. The Libertarians hate the minimum welfare state Roosevelt introduced with the New Deal. But Roosevelt is also popular for taking America into the War and helping to defeat the horrors of Nazi Germany. World War II is seen as a good war, because of the Shoah – the Holocaust. And so the Libertarians decided that to undermine the New Deal, they had to try and discredit Roosevelt generally. Thus the publication of the vile lies to try to convince people that the Holocaust never happened.
Then Ronald Reagan got into power, who supported the Libertarians. Finding themselves suddenly in the mainstream, they decided to bury their anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial to avoid this coming back to discredit them.
As for a private police force, there are several arguments against them. Firstly, justice must be the preserve of the state. Those who take the law into their own hands without the proper sanction of authority are vigilantes. And Fascist regimes have also incorporated right-wing paramilitary organisations as part of their police and military. The radical American journalist Chris Hedges, talked about how the Nazis did this with the SS. He predicted that Trump would do something similar with the paramilitary racist groups in the Alt Right, such as the violent, White supremacist ‘Proud Boys’. The private police here aren’t racist, but they are a private organisation carrying out police functions, and so somewhat like those predicted by Hedges. Which leads to the question: the Tories are deeply racist, as shown by Tweezer’s deportation of the Windrush migrants. How long will it be, if the Tories get away with this, before they start to give police powers to real, openly racist groups?
According to Mike’s article, these new private bobbies can use citizen’s arrests. Well, so can anybody. But the One Show a while tackled the issue, and it’s not as clear cut as it may appear. There are very strong legal restrictions on how they can be made. Put simply, you can only make a citizen’s arrest if there is a danger that the perp may escape before a real copper gets there. So these fake police are still dependent on the real thing.
Then there’s the argument from morality and efficiency. According to this scheme, you’re given the protection of this private police force, if you pay £200 a month. But what happens if not everyone in the area agrees to pay that, and some don’t sign up? Clearly, they don’t get police protection, which means they become at risk from crime. This is unjust. But it’s also a danger to the other residents. Say, for example, someone outside this scheme is murdered, and their home taken over by violent thugs. The private cops don’t move against them, because that person didn’t pay his £200 a month. But the occupation of his house by the gang also puts everyone else in the street or area in danger.
Private police are a rubbish idea. They don’t work and they’re immoral. Which is why this morally corrupt government backs them. This lot sound like a bunch of corporate vigilantes. And the fact that the scheme was tried out in three of London’s richest boroughs shows how classist this scheme is. The rich get policing, while the real police keeping the rest of us safe are deprived of staff and funding, making our streets much less safe.
Which is the Tories all round. It really is one law for the rich under them, and another for the poor.
After the Fascistic policies and behaviour of the Israeli state and its advocates over here, there’s the return of Fascism proper to Europe. I found this Channel 4 report into the Italian Fascist party, CasaPound, on YouTube. CasaPound is a miniscule Fascist party, which takes its name from the American Modernist poet and Fascist, Ezra Pound. Casa is Italian for ‘house’, so I suppose you could translate the party’s name as ‘Pound House’ or ‘House of Pound’. They seem to have been founded by an extreme right-wing rock singer, shown growling out his wretched songs at one of his concerts. The party holds rallies, at which their squadristi respond with the Roman salute. And the iconography of Italian Fascism – the Fasces – the bundle of sticks with the axe projecting from it – and Mussolini’s ghastly fizzog are everywhere.
The reporter is shown round their headquarters by a woman. On one wall, when you go in, are the names of various prominent Fascists, written in different colours and sizes. The reporter’s guide tells him that they have this put there, as their counterpart to the Roman household gods that guarded their homes. One of the names on the wall is that of the notorious British Fascist, Oswald Mosley. The building also acts as a hostel, putting up the homeless – but only if you’re Italian. By which, presumably, they mean ‘White Italian’. The party also runs food banks and provides free medical care, such as health check-ups and electro-cardiograms. Again, only for Whites. As the woman explains in the video, only full Whites can be members of the organisation. A White person married to an immigrant cannot be a member, each of whom pays a subscription to the organisation. Along with the names of prominent, infamous Fascists, there’s also their flags and insignia, including that of the infamous Golden Dawn, responsible for the beatings and murder of immigrants and leftists in Greece.
The reporter comments that the place is very military, like a barracks. And it almost goes without saying that Casapound is viciously anti-immigrant. There’s a clip of a rally at which one of their speakers states he wants two ships in the Mediterranean to intercept the migrant vessels and send them back to Libya. The reporter also makes the point that they are trying to exploit the death of a young girl for their political gain. It’s not certain whether the girl died of a drug overdose, or was murdered, but three immigrants were arrested in connection with her death after her dismembered body was found deposited in two suitcases. The next day, a man with very extreme right-wing views opened fire and killed six migrants. The stormtroopers of CasaPound state very clearly that they don’t want immigrants coming to Italy bringing drugs and crime, and that if they had been in power, the girl would still be alive.
At the moment, CasaPound are politically negligible. They need to get three per cent of the vote before they get anywhere the Italian parliament, and there are many other Fascist parties. But the video does show the return of the blatantly Fascist right into Italian politics, even though it’s currently at the fringes.
The video’s important, not just for showing the re-emergence of proper Fascism in Italy, but because it also shows and confirms some of the observations the American radical journalist, Chris Hedges, has made about the way Fascism returns after the liberal elite abandon the working class. Hedges stated that the new Fascism in America took the form of complete little worlds, in which a person could become completely immersed. He was talking about the religious right, and the megachurches, which provide a more-or-less complete environment separate from the secular world outside. CasaPound offers much the same. It’s a lifestyle, as much as a political party.
As well as watching the emergence of Fascism in America, Hedges himself saw it appear during the civil war in Yugoslavia. He states that when the liberal elite abandon the working class to pursue neoliberal policies, which benefit only the business elite, the working class not only turn against them, but against the liberal values of multiculturalism, anti-racism, feminism, gay rights and so on. And again, you can see that here. The welfare services provided by CasaPound for the racially pure show this clearly. Healthcare has been cut, so that many Italians cannot get a doctor. So CasaPound provides one. The party’s squadristi state that the Communist party used to do this, but they don’t appear in the communities any longer. And so their place has been filled instead by CasaPound. Again, the organisation is providing a total social environment, including welfare support, that the state and the supposed parties of the Left have retreated from under the assault of neoliberal free trade dogma. This also affected the Communist Party in Italy, which in the 1980s began to explore other paths to power rather than the methods dictated by Russian experience. In doing so, they became much less radical, despite their Marxist ideology. I can remember the Financial Times in the 1990s stating that they were no more left-wing than the SDP in Britain, the right-wing Labour splinter group that amalgamated with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems.
I don’t know how much of a threat Fascism actually poses in Italy. It’s certainly there, at the margins. But CasaPound are nowhere near as powerful as the Alternative fuer Deutschland, who are also real Nazis with a bitter hatred of Jews and immigrants, and which have just managed to get themselves into the Bundestag. At the moment the major populist force in Italy seems to be Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star Party. But this does indicate the way the country could move, if something is not done to bring down the rise in xenophobia and anti-immigrant hostility on one hand, and destroy the neoliberalism that is impoverishing people across the world, and creating such anxieties on the other.
The following comments below are mine only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mike Sivier or his blog, Vox Political.
Mike this week put up a long blog post describing the results of his hearing for alleged anti-Semitism before the Labour Disputes Committee. It was not encouraging, and shows how these committees are nothing but Kafkaesque travesties of justice, designed to protect the mendacious and intolerant, and persecute their ideological adversaries.
To recap, last year Mike put up a series of posts on his blog defending some of the Labour and Momentum supporters, who had been accused of anti-Semitism, such as Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone. Livingstone was historically correct when he said that Hitler initially collaborated with the Zionists to send Jews to the nascent Jewish colony in Palestine. It was part of the Ha’avara agreement, which is mentioned in mainstream textbooks and on websites connected with the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem in Israel. You can find mementoes, such as medal, struck by the Nazis in commemoration of the agreement and the visit by a Nazi to the colony over at Tony Greenstein’s website.
It is not anti-Semitic to point this out. But it annoyed and terrified the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, a badly misnamed Zionist organisation, that was formed in 2014 to counter public opposition to Israel after the bombardment of Gaza. To do this, they followed the standard Zionist tactic of spuriously connecting this to anti-Semitism. So does the Jewish Labour Movement, which decided that Jackie Walker was an anti-Semite last year, because she didn’t go along with their tortured definition of anti-Semitism, which also connects it to opposition or criticism of Israel.
Mike wrote a pamphlet about this, and sent it off the Labour party. Then some little snitch decided to complain and accuse him, in turn, of anti-Semitism.
Tony Greenstein, the very Jewish anti-racist, Socialist and anti-Zionist, posted a little snippet on his blog showing this to be unJewish. Medieval Jewish law was firmly against Jews informing on other Jews to the authorities. Okay, Mike’s a gentile, but very many of those accused of anti-Semitism by this squalid organisations are god-fearing, Torah observant, or secular, self-respecting Jews. And this issue affects gentiles as well as Jews. Greenstein came out with the Jewish dictum prohibiting informing. It’s in Biblical Hebrew or perhaps Talmudic Aramaic, so it sounds very grand. But it essentially boils down to ‘snitches get stitches’. As you’d expect from when it was written. The Middle Ages were a period of terrible persecution for the Jews, and the authorities would find any excuse to terrorise Jewish communities.
Mike was called in to a disputes hearing to answer the charge. And here it becomes very Kafkaesque. In Kafka’s great novels The Trial and The Castle, the hero is arrested and tried. But he does not know who his accuser is, nor what the charges against him are. It was a terrible prefiguration of the perversions of justice in Nazi Germany and the Fascist states, and Stalin’s Russia. As well as the secret courts Blair, Cameron and Clegg, and Tweezer want to set up in this country.
It’s also unBritish. And I mean this in an inclusive sense, as part of the core British values that should protect all Brits, regardless of creed and ethnicity. Under British law, you are innocent until proven guilty. Unlike the continent, where you are guilty until proven innocent. You are also supposed to know who you are accuser is, so you and your lawyer can cross-examine them and you can defend yourself. This has been the case ever since Magna Carta and the Middle Ages. Under medieval law, you could only be tried if there was an accuser. So quite often county sheriffs would round up the local neerdowells and crims, lock them up in their castles, and then appeal for someone to come forward and accuse them of a crime, so that they could be tried.
Then there were the accusations themselves. Mike stated that it was clear that they had not read his pamphlet or articles, but just relied on the accusation, which was simply quotes ripped out of context. One of these numbskulls asked Mike why he called the JLM, formerly Paole Zion, a Zionist organisation. Mike replied quite truthfully because that’s how they define themselves in their constitution and their mission statements, and quoted them. On another point, he was asked why he made a particular statement, and could he not understand how that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. So Mike pointed out that the answer was to be found elsewhere in the text. Hadn’t the official read it. Well no, actually he hadn’t. He’d been told only to read the bits highlighted. This raises the question of who gave him this instruction. It sounds like a deliberate move to find Mike guilty by stopping his interrogators reading the evidence to the contrary.
Mike’s case then went to Labour’s constitutional committee. Jon Lansmann, one of the leading lights in Momentum, who does not know Mike, argued strongly in his favour. Others wanted Mike passed along to another committee, so that he could be expelled. Another suggestion was that he should be given a warning, and made to do a training day with Paole Zion, I mean, er, the Jewish Labour Movement. Mike rejected this, because he’s innocent and does not want to do anything that may indicate that he accepts that he is guilty. As more Mike saying that Paole Zion, or the Jewish Labour Movement, does not represent Jews – this is a fair comment. The Jewish Labour Movement accepts gentiles as members. Moreover, many Jews, including an increasing number in America, are becoming increasingly estranged and hostile to Israel because of the barbarous and inhuman way it treats the Palestinians. This includes young Jews, who have been on the heritage tours the Israelis organisation for Jewish Americans, and those who have personally suffered anti-Semitic abuse or worse. So with gentile members, and the opposition of many Jews to its support of Israel, it’s a fair question whether it does represent Jews, or whether it exists to defend Israel disguised as representing them.
They also accused him of anti-Semitism when he talked about a conspiracy involving the Israelis. Was this, they asked, referring to all the stupid, murderous Nazi lies about a worldwide conspiracy by Jews to control and exterminate the White race? No, replied Mike, this was about Shai Masot at the Israeli embassy being filmed by Al-Jazeera discussing how they wanted various Tory MPs removed from office. This is a conspiracy, and it is odious and disgusting that the Zionists should try to make discussion of it off-limits, by accusing those who do of anti-Semitism through connecting it to historic lies about them. But it’s also very, very much par for the course for Zionists.
Mike has also commented on the ant-gentile racism of the comments he was subjected to by the Campaign Against Anti-Zionism. Many of them made needling, niggling comments about gentiles. This was probably done to provoke an anti-Semitic reaction, so they could go running to the authorities screaming ‘See, we were right! He is an anti-Semite!’ It’s the actions of the bully in school, who hits you just before the teacher comes into the room. When you retaliate, the bully screams out ‘Miss! He hit me!’ in order to get you into trouble. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if these Zionists really didn’t believe that their Hebrew ancestry made them superior to everyone else. A few years ago, the IDF found itself in hot water and having to apologise to the world after they published a pamphlet claiming that Jews were racially superior to gentiles. But what do you expect from a White colonial settler state, where only Jews, and preferably only full-blooded Jews, can become full citizens. When it was suggested a few decades ago that people, who were only half-Jewish, but who had converted to Judaism and made the profession of faith, could become citizens, the Jewish Right in the country was horrified.
This seems to be the attitude of the Campaign Against Anti-Zionism, and it is directly opposed to mainstream Halaskah – Jewish Enlightenment – Judaism. They have been keen to play down and remove any notion that their ancestry as God’s chosen people make them in any way superior to others. Rather, it means that Jews are God’s servant nation. Moses Mendelsohn, one of the founders of the Jewish Enlightenment in the 18th century and the grandfather of the composer, Felix, dreamed of uniting Jews and Christians in a single, Platonist monotheistic faith. It’s impossible, as the religions are too different, although some Christians remained on the fringes of the Jewish community as late as the 4th century, when some historians believe that the split between Jews and Christians finally occurred. And absolutely none of the Jewish people I, Mike or any of my family have met, have ever experienced any kind of racial animus from their Jewish friends. Far from it. Dad remembers with affection the kindness he was shown by his Jewish mates in the army.
At the moment Mike’s left in the air, while the inquisitors in the Labour party ponder what to do with him. I wonder who did make the complaint. It looks like someone connected with the Campaign Against Anti-Zionism, I mean, er, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, but it could equally well be the Blairites or the Jewish Labour Movement. Blair was heavily involved with the Israel Lobby. He was supported by the Labour Friends of Israel, while one of his staunchest supporters, Lord Levy, supplied him with money from Jewish Zionist businesspeople in Britain, money that made him independent of the trade unions and which ultimately allowed him to attack them. Does anyone remember when he was threatening to cut trade union ties just before he took power?
This all seems to be another tactic of the Blairites and Zionists. The American socialist journalist, Chris Hedges, remarked in one of his speeches attacking Israel for its maltreatment of the Palestinians about how they infiltrated groups like the one he was speaking to, to pass on reports to Zionist organisations and the Israeli embassy. But the situation was being reverse. Those, who skulked in darkness were being dragged into the light.
So should these anonymous snitches, liars and false accusers. Back in ancient Rome, those who made a wrongful accusation against someone had the letter ‘K’ for ‘Kalumniator’ – libeller – branded on their forehead. This is how it should be with these people.
What is frustrating is that there seems to be no-one to complain to about this kangaroo court. The Blairites presently in control of the Labour party aren’t interested, and have effectively closed off any chance Mike has of defending himself. And the press don’t want to know. They hate Corbyn and Momentum with a passion, and have used every opportunity to smear him and them as anti-Semites. Because Corbyn wants to do something for working people, and has sided with the Palestinians in their struggle. While also making it very clear that he isn’t automatically against Israel, as was pointed out by a commenter on here. And with the Blairites losing power, and the Tories losing patience with May, you can expect more of these vile smears in the future.
But enough’s enough. This has got to stop. The finest elements of British legal tradition are against such kangaroo courts. I want to know who accused Mike, and I want a proper hearing, where he is told what the charges against him are, rather than vague waffle about ‘anti-Semitism’, by people who’ve actually read everything he’s written. And are actually able to take what he says on board, rather than lie in their official report that his answer were vague – they weren’t – and he didn’t seem to understand that what he’d written could be considered anti-Semitic. No, he dealt with that at the kangaroo hearing as well. More lies from people determined to find him guilty. I wonder what their names are, so an accusation can be made against them.
Until those, who make such libellous smears against the critics of Israel, both gentile and Jewish, are dragged into the light, and forced to defend themselves before those righteous individuals they’ve besmirched, disciplinary hearings like Mike’s will always be kangaroo courts. It is not Corbyn who’s a Stalinist, but these grotty Blairites and Zionist Fascists.
This is another little piece from RT America discussing Congress’ withdrawal of their press accreditation. In this snippet, their anchorman talks to Daniel McAdam, of the Ron Paul Institute. Ron Paul is the leading Libertarian in Congress, so presumably this is a thinktank founded by him to support his ideology. In which case, it’s very definitely not socialist, and in fact very anti-. But Libertarians can also be fierce critics of American imperialism and radically opposed to the NeoCons.
Here McAdams states that the removal of RT America’s accreditation following reassurances that the demand for the network to register under FARA as a foreign agent would not impede the network in anyway is just part of the way Congress operates. He compares it to the ‘sense of Congress’ motions. These are always presented as non-binding. It’s just Congress’ opinion. But they provide the basis for further action.
McAdams goes on to say that the NeoCons hate RT because it gives good, patriotic Americans, like himself, a platform to criticise American foreign policy. And he states that they can’t tolerate this, because the arguments against American imperialism are so compelling.
The anchor then asks him what message this sends the world about free speech in America. McAdams states that he’s been to Washington several times, and met the staff at RT. He states their young, hardworking, perhaps a trifle idealistic. But this measure sends the message to young journalists that the government will persecute you and try to control what news people watch. He compares it to the worst periods of totalitarianism in the last century, when governments had the audacity to consider that their perfect systems were too fragile to allow free speech.
The anchorman ends by thanking McAdams for his time and his comments about RT’s staff, but gently chides him for missing out one quality: guts. It takes guts to tell the truth.
Yes, it does. Chris Hedges, one of the radical journalists, who has his own show on RT, got sacked from the New York Times because he dared tell the truth about the carnage the Iraq invasion would cause. Phil Donohue was forced off his show because he did the same, and the network, CNN, then came out with a totally bullsh*t story about how he was sacked because of low ratings. He wasn’t. In fact, his show was the highest rated the network had. And you can find a long list of others.
As for RT’s staff, Abby Martin, who used to work for RT, states that the staff at RT America are leftists and socialists, who are there because it is the only network that provides a space for their beliefs. They’re not working there because they’re admirers of Putin.
And Jimmy Dore has pointed out very sarcastically that it’s vast, growing poverty, the lack of free healthcare, the destruction of America’s welfare net, the privatisations and the massive profiteering by the corporate elite, that’s causing discontent in America. It ain’t propaganda from Putin that’s causing people to demonstrate, or join protest groups like Black Lives Matter.
But RT’s a convenient scapegoat. It, and the other radical or alternative news networks are being singled out because the elite can’t argue against what these news programmes are showing. So all they can do is lie and try to close these networks down.
And once they’ve done it to those broadcasters on the margins – like Al-Jazeera, RT, Press TV, The Young Turks, Jimmy Dore Show, the Real News, Democracy Now! and so many others, they’ll move into the mainstream.
This is how the colossal propaganda machines of Goebbels in the Nazi Germany and Mussolini in Italy started. And they all used the same excuse: they were protecting the citizens of their country from ‘fake news’ spread by the regimes’ enemies.
Welcome to the beginning of Corporate Newspeak. It’s Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment, brought to you by the Republicans and Clintonite Democrats, with the assistance of Google and funded by the Koch Brothers.
The campaign to close down RT America continues. In this piece, the Russian funded network reports on the removal of their press accreditation by the Congressional committee responsible for the press gallery. They have been instructed to hand in their press accreditation and then leave the capitol.
Basically, they’re banned from Congress.
The speakers on the clip point out that this gives the lie to the assurance RT was given a week or so ago, when they were told they had to register as foreign agents, that this would not interfere with their business. They also briefly comment on the lack of support from the professional organisations, that are supposed to be defending press freedom and journalists in America. The presenters note that this came from the Democrats and the Clinton camp trying to divert attention from Killary’s corruption, but it has snowballed, so that now there isn’t anything too wild that can’t be said about RT. For example, the head of NBC declared that RT was like al-Qaeda and ISIS.
They also make the point that very many other countries also have state-funded broadcasters in America. Like the Beeb. Does this mean that the BBC will also have to register as a foreign agent, or have their accreditation revoked?
The presenter then talks about this latest attack on RT with Lionel, of Lionel Media. Lionel remarks on the sheer hysteria behind this move. He also points out that it’s having the opposite effect. Whereas a few years ago he had a hard time telling anyone, who RT was, now everyone knows about it, because it’s constantly being pushed in front of people as a kind of media ‘forbidden fruit’.
The radical journalist, Chris Hedges, once remarked that if you’re a journalist, and the people in power don’t hate you, then you’re not doing your job. Hedges himself certainly did do his job, and suffered from it. He lost his job at the New York Times because he opposed the Iraq War. It’s why he, and very many other journalists, are at RT.
Abby Martin, who presents the Empire Files on TeleSur English, was also at RT. She has said in an interview on the Jimmy Dore Show that she never said anything in praise of Putin, but was there simply because there was nowhere else to go. And that was true of very many of the broadcaster’s staff. RT had many leftists and Socialists working for it, not because they were fans of Putin, but because it was the only network that allowed them to express their opinions.
She also made the point that she saw the attack on RT coming way back in 2007 when the Conservative establishment and the news media began attacking Al-Jazeera as foreign propaganda.
This isn’t about foreign propaganda. This is about clamping down on free speech. The Republicans and Corporatist, Clintonite Democrats hate RT because it covers the issues that the mainstream media doesn’t, and shows the bitter reality of neoliberal policies in America: the rising mass poverty, the misery and deaths caused by lack of affordable healthcare, the massive political corruption caused by corporate political funding, the destruction of America’s beautiful natural environment through fracking and the oil industry; racism and Black Lives Matter, and the horrors and atrocities committed by American imperialism.
It’s because RT covers these issues, that Congress wants to close it down. And as Martin and Dore point out, once they’ve finished with RT, they’ll go after the other news media, even the mainstream networks.
Donald Trump has said several times that he’d like to suspend the broadcasting license of those networks that criticise him, like MSNBC. Congress’ removal of RT’s press accreditation just brought that highly illiberal, dystopian possibility just a bit closer.
This is another very interesting piece from RT America’s Lee Camp. Camp is a comedian and the presenter of Redacted Tonight, a satirical show that uses comedy to take a deep, critical look at American politics and current affairs. In this piece, Camp shows the double standards behind the recent decision to force RT America to register as a foreign agent under FARA, while the real foreign lobbying groups of the type the Act was set up to regulate, AIPAC and John Podesta’s lobbying organisation, are allowed to get away free.
FARA was set up in the 1930s to force lobbyists working for Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and imperial Japan to register with the American treasury, so they could have their government sponsors identified, and would have to reveal their sources of incomes.
Camp then states that AIPAC is Israel’s foreign lobby arm in the US. This shouldn’t be controversial: it’s exactly how AIPAC describes itself, as Camp shows with the masthead from their webpage. It says ‘America’s Pro-Israel lobby’. He then produces a quote about how AIPAC is the most powerful lobbying organisation in America, or at least, more powerful than other very well-organised and funded groups like the gun lobby.
He also plays a piece from former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, describing how, before she had even taken up her seat in Congress, AIPAC sent her a document they wanted her to sign pledging her support. She replied that before she would, she’d have to read about the issues first. She then states that she learned that the operatives for the Israel lobby control women’s organisations, environmental organisations, peace organisations. Every aspect of the political process is controlled by people associated with the Israel lobby.
Camp then goes on to describe how $705 million was given to Israel by America in the latest military budget. And AIPAC has solidly been behind, and indeed urging America on in its wars in the Middle East. AIPAC pushed for the Iraq invasion. They pushed for the war in Syria. They also met with a Democrat party thinktank, the Centre for American Progress, to suppress rumours by their own journalists that AIPAC is pushing for war with Iran.
AIPAC also flexes its clout at the UN. Here there’s a clip of US ambassador Nicky Haley, speaking at an AIPAC gathering, talking about how they got the UN to withdraw a report that made the ‘outrageous’ – but entirely correct claim – that Israel is an apartheid state. And then the UN Secretary General resigned. She also shows how she’s absolutely fine with people wanting to impose sanctions on North Korea and Syria, but really doesn’t see why they should be imposed on Israel.
Camp then points out that AIPAC are actively trying to make it illegal to promote the boycott of Israel, a move that is supported by around 50 senators.
He then goes on to describe the origins of AIPAC. It was set up by a former member of the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs, who then worked for the American Zionist Council. In 1962 the AZC was ordered by Robert Kennedy to register under FARA and open up their financial records. In December the AZC’s president, Rabbi Irving Miller, asked for a delay. In January the following year, 1963, AIPAC was founded. Then in March the AZC’s lawyers claimed that the Council should not have to register. They then continued to delay and stonewall sending in the required paperwork. The efforts to force AIPAC to register seem to have ended with the deaths of JFK and Robert Kennedy. Basically, AIPAC never got round to registering. In 1967 AIPAC applied for federal tax exemption. This was granted and backdated to 1953. In 1986 the lobbyist then began creating political action groups, in direct contravention of its tax-exempt status.
Camp explains that AIPAC’s purpose is pro-Israeli propaganda, termed ‘hasbara’, a word which literally means ‘explanation’. This is to get America to ignore Israel’s war crimes. Which, as Camp points out, doesn’t mean that all Israelis are terrible people. America commits war crimes, and he likes some Americans. AIPAC is responsible for trying smear those who criticise and protest against Israel as anti-Semites. But despite their best efforts, a growing number of young and older people around the world are standing up for the Palestinians. For the first time a bill for Palestinian human rights has been introduced into Congress. It was introduced by Representative Betty McCollum, and seeks to prevent the US from funding the detention and prosecution of children in Israel’s military courts. And of course, AIPAC are trying to crush it.
Camp makes the obvious point that if FARA was set up to control and regulate foreign lobbyists, then AIPAC is precisely the type of foreign lobbyist it is set up to regulate.
He then moves on to talk about John Podesta and the lobbying organisation he set up with his brother, Tony. John Podesta was one of Hillary Clinton’s aides. It should have registered with FARA, but didn’t, when it was lobbying on behalf of the Russian-owned company, Uranium One, from whom it collected $180,000 in fees in 2012, 2014, and 2015.
Camp then goes on to point out that this all shows that the decision to force RT to register as a foreign agent is entirely political. It’s a way to further suppress and marginalise dissenting voices like Chris Hedges and Jesse Ventura, and reinforce the stories about Russian interference. This is a story concocted by the Democratic National Convention so that it doesn’t have to look at its own corruption. The oligarchy running the country know that they don’t have the solutions to working peoples’ problems, and so are forced to resort to trying to push dissent further to the margins, and force people into an even smaller space of acceptable opinion.
Camp then points out that RT has not broadcast Russian propaganda. It has covered the Dakota pipeline, police brutality and Camp himself covered electoral fraud last year. It has even won an Emmy award for its coverage of the Occupy movement. He ends by stating that it looks like propaganda only if you buy into the corporate bullsh*t coming from CNN.
I’m not sure, but I wonder if Cynthia McKinnon was the Black, Green party politico, who lost her seat because she wouldn’t kowtow to AIPAC. When she refused to follow their line, they smeared her as an anti-Semite, and poured their funding into her political rivals, so that she would lose the election.
AIPAC are a nasty, bullying organisation that is utterly ruthless in trying to shut down any criticism or dissent about Israel. But it certainly does not speak for the majority of Jewish Americans. According to polls, American Jews tend to be politically liberal, and traditionally have been utterly indifferent to Israel. They were always far more keen to build lives for themselves as equal and respected citizens of the US. Just as they have been in Britain and very many other countries. Hence the determination of Zionist groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to give the false impression that hatred of Jews in Europe is at the same level as Germany just before the Nazi seizure of power. And that all Muslims, or nearly all Muslims, are also bitter anti-Semites and a threat to western democracy.
However, as Camp points out, an increasing number of people are becoming more critical of Israel, including young Jewish Americans. Many of them have become even more hostile to the country after going there on the ‘heritage’ tours that the country sponsors amongst American Jews to gain their allegiance and goodwill. The Jews, who have been so alienated from Israel, include those, who have been victims of anti-Semitism. Clearly the experience of being a victim of prejudice and abuse is not leading Jewish American young people to wish to support the abusive Israeli state.
Yesterday, RT America was forced to register as a foreign agent under FARA, the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act, a piece of legislation that dates from the 1930s, and which was set up to regulate foreign lobbyists and propaganda outlets.
The move has been condemned by Alexandra Ellerbeck, the North American co-ordinator of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists.
Compelling RT to register under FARA is a bad idea. This is a shift in how the law has been applied in recent decades, so we have little information about how its reporting requirements might affect individual journalists. We’re uncomfortable with governments deciding what constitutes journalism or propaganda.
The presenter then interviews Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and dissident, Chris Hedges, the presenter of RT America’s On Contact. Hedges states that the head of American national intelligence said that RT was a threat, not because it broadcast Russian propaganda, but because it gave a platform to anti-imperial, anti-capitalist voices, and covered issues and movements that the country’s elites would rather not be covered, such as the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and fracking.
As for the question whether Americans should have a choice in their media, Hedges states that it would be true, if America had a functioning media which actually did its job and covered dissent. But it doesn’t. The media has been taken over by corporate interests, including the most retrograde of those in the form of the Koch brothers.
He also points out that this move is a major threat to press and political freedom generally. The elites, which he describes as kleptocrats, are resorting to censorship because they now realise that they have no arguments to support neoliberalism. They are desperate to suppress the reporting of the growing inequality, which has produced such an uprising in both the Democrat and Republican parties. And so they are trying to suppress the reporting of the growing poverty in America as foreign propaganda, and claim that the increasing dissent and discontent is due to foreign interference.
This is going on at the same time that Google and other internet companies have developed algorithms to take searchers away from left-wing and dissenting news sites.
He notes that the organisations that are charged with protecting the freedom of the press have largely ignored this issue and have not objected to RT America’s registration under FARA. But he warns that this will only be the beginning of a greater assault on press and media freedom.
Once the elites have finished suppressing marginal, alternative media and journalists that they have pushed to the sidelines, such as himself, they will move on to the mainstream media.
This isn’t just about RT America. The British government and Theresa May has also started baying about how Russia is interfering in British politics. Here the main issue seems to be Brexit at the moment. May seems to be trying to use the Russians as a scapegoat for her own failure to secure any kind of deal with the EU.
Other alternative news programmes, that have nothing to do with Russia, are also being hit by Google’s algorithms. These are shows like The Young Turks, the David Pakman Show, Sam Seder’s Majority Report, and Democracy Now! And left-wing British bloggers like Mike over at Vox Political have also suffered problems with some of their material mysteriously vanishing from Facebook, or people finding it difficult to log on. One of the commenters to this site posted that she had had difficulty getting on to Mike’s page in response to an article I put up about how I found it impossible to get onto Mike’s site on Saturday, when he wrote a reply demolishing the claims of a Tory councillor that Journalists’ reporting of the immense harm done by the government’s policies to the disabled was ‘inflammatory nonsense’.
John Kampfner wrote a book about ten years or so ago, Freedom for Sale, about how governments all over the world, including Blair’s, were cracking down on freedom of speech. He considered it part of a deal they had made with their peoples. They would give them prosperity, but the other side of the bargain was that they would not tolerate any criticism. Now, ten or so years later, that bargain has gone. These governments are not bringing prosperity. Quite the opposite. Poverty has expanded massively under the Tories. But they are continuing to clamp down on freedom of speech and the press.
All in the name of protecting us from the Russians. Or terrorists like ISIS. Or anyone else they can use as a handy pretext for regulating and narrowing media freedom even more.
The American media and political establishment have launched a witch-hunt against left-wing alternative media, and especially RT, because of the way these news outlets are becoming increasingly popular. People are becoming disenchanted with the lamestream media, just as they are heartily fed up with establishment, corporate politicians. And that has got the media-industrial-political complex very worried.
RT is being particularly targeted for suspicion, ’caused it’s owned by the Russian state, and so must be part of a terrible plot by Putin and his minions to undermine America and destroy capitalism by, er, doing their job as reporters properly and holding government to account. Which means covering Killary’s corruption.
Now the New York Times has joined the witch-hunt with an article attacking RT.
In this clip from RT America, Ashley Banks and the media commentator, Lionel, of Lionel Media, discuss this story. They make the point that it’s based fear much in fear of Russia, and that RT is doing nothing more than every other media outlet. They’re expanding, yes, but every media outlet wishes to pursue excellence. RT has 2.1 billion views worldwide, and 2.2 million subscribers. But Pewdiepie has 57 million subscribers. Lionel goes on to say that the NY Times article is ‘confused and envious’, embarrassing, and looks like it was written by someone, who has only just found out what the Internet is and that it helps people. It’s like the Saturday Night Live sketch about the caveman, who says he just a simple man and doesn’t understand your modern ways.
He also makes the point that perhaps if the New York Times paid the same attention to their own affairs and developing their audience, they wouldn’t now have to sell off several of the floors in their 8th Avenue office block.
The Republicans hate the New York Times, as they somehow perceive it as a ‘liberal’ paper. But Counterpunch has repeatedly shown how it has a very corporatist, very pro-War bias. It was consistently for the Iraq invasion, and Chris Hedges, the Socialist journo and war correspondent, was sacked because he wrote opposing the War. Much of this new ‘Red Scare’ about supposed Russian interference comes from the corporate Democrats trying to find a scapegoat for Killary’s failure to win the American presidency, supported by some very unpleasant, extremely right-wing organisations. Like the Von Mises Institute, which used to publish pro-eugenics material and argued that Americans shouldn’t have a welfare state, because it would just keep the biologically unfit alive. Like Blacks. You won’t be surprised to hear that they also subscribed to pseudo-scientific racism, and so put out article which supposedly showed how Blacks were thicker than Whites etc. These are the people that Killary and her supporters have now allied with in their determination to close down RT and other left-wing or alternative media news outlets.
In this clip from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano, the Miserable Liberal, discuss the use of convict labour supplied by the American prison system by businesses and the state. Many of the fire fighters now tackling the fires raging in California were female cons. Dore points out that this is skilled, dangerous work. But nevertheless, these women were sent to do it, and some of them have been killed doing so. He goes on to discuss Kamala Harris, who repeatedly refused to release prisoners when their time was up and they were due to go back to civil society. Eventually, she was sued and said in court that the reason she wasn’t releasing them was because they were too useful as workers. Now Steve Prettor, the sheriff of Caddo County in Louisiana, has appeared to tell the American public why he doesn’t like releasing good, Black prisoners either: because they’re too useful as workers for the prison system.
Dore calls this system exactly what it is: slavery. And there is a whole slew of firms using unfree, unpaid convict labour. These include McDonald’s, Walmart and a contractor for Starbuck’s. Dore makes the point that this is what used to happen in Communist countries like North Korea, which we – the West – denounced. Now it’s being done by capitalism in America.
In one of the many interviews with the radical American journalist Chris Hedges on YouTube, Hedges talks about the massive poverty and unemployment created by capitalism and neoliberalism. He states that in American towns which have particularly suffered, the prison population has expanded immensely. This is because the state and capital have no use for these men in normal business. However, they are immensely valuable as a source of contracts for the private prison system.
And Dore is exactly right when he compares unfree convict labour in America with the forced labour systems of the Communist bloc. I’ve blogged about this before. Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union using the forced labour of millions of Soviet citizens. Businesses and enterprises needing particular types of worker would send shopping lists of how many they needed to the KGB, who would then round them up as traitors and enemies of the Soviet state, and then send them to the Gulags. Where they would be put to work building some new industrial plant.
The Nazis also had a similar system using Jewish slave workers in the concentration camps. Skilled Jewish craftsmen were put to work in a company owned and operated by the SS producing luxury products. They even produced a catalogue.
As neoliberalism privatises and takes over more of the functions of the state, so contemporary capitalism increasingly takes on the features of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century.
I don’t think we in Britain have any cause to be complacent about this, as I can see the same system easily taken over by the outsourcing companies like G4S and Serco in Britain’s privately run prisons.
This is not justice, not punishment nor rehabilitation. It is simply capitalism and slavery. And needs to be stopped.
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