Heat Gets Too Hot For D.C. Lobbyists Of Egyptian Military Oligarchy

The heavy-hitting lobbyists of Washington, D.C. [capital city of the U.S. Empire] hired by the Egyptian military dictators to spread their propaganda among the movers and shakers of D.C. and protect that oppressive regime's “interests” (namely keep the money for weaponry flowing and don't impinge on how they run their country) have resigned their “Egyptian account” after a son of a U.S. cabinet secretary and 5 other Americans working for U.S. organizations recently raided by the Egyptian military, were prevented from leaving Egypt. Apparently the lobbyists felt they went as far out on a limb for this particular gang of killers as they could. Holding a child of a U.S. cabinet secretary hostage- hard to tap dance around that one. [On Monday January 30^th it was reported that 2 of the Americans are hiding out in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.]

The lobbyists were taking heat already for trying to defend the original raids on the U.S. organizations, which are U.S.-funded and supposedly support development of “democracy.” Seems their “talking points” didn't go over too well among the D.C. elites. Obviously their ability to “advocate” on behalf of other clients would be compromised by the stench of disloyalty arising from defending a regime that is targeting U.S. agents. [On Sunday January 29^th, a gaggle of Egyptian generals flew into Washington to do their own lobbying of the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. Government.]

The lobbyists are the “Livingston Group,” based around influence-peddling former Lousiana GOP Representative and adulterer Robert L. Livingston; the “Moffett Group,” the kernel of which is former Connecticut Democratic Toby Moffett, an alleged liberal; and the “Podesta Group,” which revolves around Tony Podesta, a Clinton gang henchman who currently is tight with the Obama regime, and who is rated by the NY Times as “one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington.” [Source: article referenced at end.] These 3 Musketeers of amorality formed a joint operation for the purpose of protecting Mubarak by keeping the U.S. in his corner, called the “PLM Group.” (Gee, wonder what those clever initials stand for. Probably not Pusillanimous Loathsome Motherfuckers.) According to filings required by law, this “group” raked in about $4.5 million since 2007 doing this dirty work.

Moffitt is a “liberal,” and Livingston a “conservative,” and I guess Podesta would be ”moderate” or “centrist.” Which just goes to show how those ideological distinctions can actually be meaningless.

The embargoed son in question is Sam LaHood, spawn of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The organizations the military raided a few weeks ago were “Freedom [sic] House,” a cold war organization which specialized in anti-Soviet propaganda, and which even today is mostly funded by the U.S. Government through the State Department; and two “Institutes” affiliated with the two corporate oligarchic U.S. parties; the “International Republican Institute,” and the “International Democratic Institute.”  (You probably can guess which is affiliated with which party.) Both are entirely funded by Congress (i.e. we taxpayers), and were created to outsource the kinds of political operations the CIA used to perform. Since those operations were thoroughly exposed over time, the U.S. decided  that, what the heck, let's just be brazen and do them openly. Doing them covertly highlighted their illegitimacy (interfering in internal political affairs of sovereign countries, often to subvert existing governments). Doing it overtly is not only easier and more efficient than having to set up multiple cut-outs and conduits and engage in serpentine maneuvers to hide what they're doing, it also enables the U.S. to act like it's perfectly natural to interfere in the political affairs of other nations.

Of course, the U.S. doesn't allow foreign governments to run such operations in the U.S., but that's different, because the U.S. are the Good Guys. (An analogous situation would be a foreign government funding and advising the despised Occupy movement, for example.)

As for the reasons the U.S. spends some pocket change to finance these beachheads of U.S. ideology in Egypt in the first place, one is to hedge its bets on who's up and who's down in Egypt, and second is to feign sympathy for people struggling for democracy in the Arab world, while continuing to prop up the dictatorship with $1.5 billion a year in aid, mostly for weapons, and tear gas to use on demonstrators, “rubber” bullets to shoot out their eyes with, etc.

 In response to holding the Americans semi-hostage and exposing them to the tender mercies of the Egyptian legal system, such as it is- at least they (probably) won't be “tried” in military “court”- the U.S. let out a low growl, hinting that it might suspend the payout to the Egyptian military (an ongoing bribe for staying pacific towards Israel, selling it cheap natural gas, and helping oppress the Palestinians in the Gaza strip, which it has a history of doing anyway, before Israel conquered the territory in 1967).

Technically of course the Egyptians are correct: the U.S. groups really are “subverting” the military government with their mostly verbal support for greater democracy in Egypt, since more democracy can only undermine the military's power. That's what subversion is- eroding the basis of rule for rulers. Thus the Occupy movement in the U.S. is indeed subversive, whatever it's conscious intent, and the politicians are “right” in a strictly utilitarian sense to unleash their police punishers on them all across the nation. Of course, from a human perspective, this is totally immoral and vicious and underlines the illegitimacy of the rule of these creeps. The creeps would disagree, of course, but that's the beauty of living in a “free” country- we can disagree about that and the worse that happens to us is we get pepper sprayed, and beaten, and arrested, and jailed, and have our property stolen/destroyed by the state, and once in awhile we get murdered. And much fewer of us are blinded by the police- or brain-damaged as the Oakland police did to that military vet for the crime of standing at a protest- than in Egypt.

I should say- much fewer so far.  (1)

One note about “Freedom House” before I move on: its main propaganda stunt was issuing maps of the world that rated countries as “free,” “partially free,” or “unfree.” Of course the U.S. was “free.” All socialist countries were “unfree.” U.S.-backed dictatorships, like the murderous regimes of Latin America, were “partially free.” There's a lot more that demonstrates that “Freedom House” was nothing but a cold war propaganda mill, but that makes the point sufficiently for now. Castro never killed thousands of Cubans with death squads, never tortured prisoners, etc. Dictator, yes, but those a thousand times worse got an indulgence from “Freedom House.” Of course the very word “freedom” was long ago appropriated as a banner for U.S. ideology, used in ideological warfare against U.S. enemies.

We know, thanks to WikiLeaks, that these three groups have long been sore points with the Egyptian rulers, who complained to the U.S. Also they were actually illegal under Egyptian law, insofar as they were unregistered. (Kind of like AIPAC being an unregistered lobbyist for Israel.) During the raids, computers, cellphones, documents were seized. This is of course reminiscent of how progressive dissidents have been treated for years in the U.S., most recently during the destruction of the Occupy Wall Street movement's encampment at “Liberty” nee Zuccotti Park in New York City, during which the regime of Michael Bloomberg Billionaire seized and destroyed tens of thousands of dollars of personal property, deliberately smashing  seized laptops and ruining 5,000 books the occupiers had assembled for their library (unlike the Egyptian military, which apparently did not destroy the seized property); and the Obama regime's repression of Midwestern peace activists, whose homes have been raided and their computers, personal papers, etc. seized by the FBI pursuant to an “investigation” by political hitman, Chicago-based U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. A grand jury has been empaneled to force activists to provide intel on peace activities. See, dissent IS a crime in America,. All these activists ever do is protest nonviolently. Of course in many ways Obama has been more repressive than his predecessor, but that's a topic for another essay. In any event, I have written a good deal about his various crimes against human rights.

Speaking of repressive raids, these predate the Palmer raids after World War I, going back to the 19th century. And under FBI instigation, police conducted raids with premeditated murder in mind against Black Panther Party headquarters in various cities. So the Egyptian raids on the U.S. operatives is really kid glove stuff compared to what the U.S. does,  regardless of the outraged squawkings of the U.S. media and government. (As usual, it's redundant to add “hypocritical.” The U.S. establishment is virtually always hypocritical.) In any event, it's been standard procedure for the last decade at least for police to “preemptively” raid the headquarters of protesters they don't like to confiscate (steal) their equipment, banners, puppets, sound equipment, etc. Oftentimes bogus “terrorism” or other criminal charges are fabricated. This occurs at attempts to protest WTC meetings, political conventions, whatever. Mass roundups are common, and of course the usual teargassing and clubbings to “disperse” protesters. The FBI is engaged in an ongoing criminal conspiracy with other Federal repressive agencies and state and local “law enforcement” to conduct this repression and fabricate criminal charges, commit premeditated acts of violence, and make false arrests.

Egypt has been a military oligarchy since officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the King and ended the monarchy in the early 1950s, becoming the first military dictator of the modern era. He was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, hailed by the U.S. for splitting the Arab bloc against Israel by trading peace and recognition of Israel for getting back the Sinai peninsula. (Although the Israelis tried to chisel the Egyptians by holding onto a desirable resort location at Taba, which they ultimately had pried loose from their fingers.) After Sadat was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalist soldiers angered by the rapproachement with Israel, as they marched past Sadat during a military parade, his right hand man and “Vice President,” General Hosni Mubarak, formerly head of the air force, became “President.”

We don't see a fourth overt dictator now- instead  we have an oligarchy, a group or class dictatorship, whose informal head is the ranking senior officer, one Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, longtime self-effacing backer of Mubarak until it became expedient to chuck him overboard. Maybe the generals were chafing under 30 years of Pharaonic pretensions by Mubarak, and the apparent plan to have his son inherit his dictatorship, a la the Sadats of Syria. Maybe the Mubarak clique was getting too greedy too. Anyway, with winks and nods, the U.S. and the military signalled to each other to withdraw support from Mubarak. (Cynical, opportunistic American rights now excoriate Obama for “abandoning a loyal U.S. ally” and opening the door to fundamentalists, blah blah. What can you say about such assholes? They talk out of both sides of their mouths, prattling om about “freedom,” “democracy,” “liberty,” -but never human rights, tellingly- while backing any and all dictators who will play ball with the U.S. and oppress their own people to the putative benefit of American “interests” (rarely spelled out, although doing what Israel wants is invariably one of these “interests “in the Middle East, it seems).

Of course, nobody likes the title “dictator” these days. They prefer to pretend they're democrats.  As is the custom for modern dictators, Mubarak, over his 30 year tyranny, periodically staged “elections” in which he “won” “reelection” to another “term.” Since no opposition was ever allowed to organize enough to build a big enough following to really challenge him (and fools who actually ran against him were usually clapped in prison after the “elections,” which tended to deter anyone of real stature from challenging him) he may even have “won.”  Certainly his election-stealing went more smoothly than the 2000 stolen U.S. presidential election.  (The GOP managed to steal 2004 under the radar, in Ohio.)

Egypt certainly is a dictatorship. The military rulers control the broadcast media, which they have used to blatantly lie about the current unrest and deny all the killings, maimings, and woundings they've been committing. In the year since Mubarak got his walking papers, 12,000 dissidents have been sentenced in military “courts” to prison, often bloggers guilty of “insulting” the military. This is more than were railroaded by these courts during Mubarak's 30 year reign. Also torture is routine, which means it is institutionalized, as is sexual degradation of female prisoners. (They “inspect” their vaginas, for example, calling this “virginity tests.” Very important to check women for virginity. See how virtuous the military goons are?)

[“Beltway Lobbyists Drop Egypt's Government As Client,” NYTimes, 1/29/12.]

[“2 Americans Take Refuge In Cairo Embassy," “U.S. Embassy in Cairo Shields 2 Americans,” NY Times, 1/30/12.] 

(1)   The U.S. power structure just underlined my point the very day I wrote this, Sunday 1/29/12. The police in Oakland, CA, and New York City made mass arrests of Occupy movement people and reporters on the scene. In New York 300 were arrested, mostly using the standard bogus catch-all charge of “disorderly conduct” as the excuse. (The ones the cops beat up were charges with “assault,” also standard operating procedure.) In Oakland, the police went on another violence spree with their flash-bang grenades, beanbag projectiles, tear gas, etc., and arrested 400 people to prevent the movement from establishing a base in an abandoned building. This illustrates the usually invisible use of “Property rights” as a means of repression. You don’t have the right to actually be anywhere without capital to purchase space in the world. The  Oakland political machinery already has ruled the parks and streets- public spaces- off limits for the movement. They are determined, as are all the ruling powers in the U.S., to prevent this movement from taking hold. They see what happened in Egypt in elsewhwere. And the U.S. has plenty of experience smothering nascent movements in their cradles. [Of course the corporate media mostly blacks it all out, except for brief mentions that justify the police “actions” and demonize the protesters as violent, unruly, even filthy. An example of covering the butts of their thug enforcers is on page one of the Wall Street Journal the day after, January 30^th: “Violence flared in Oakland, Calif., between authorities and Occupy protesters in a planned showdown.” No, violence didn’t “flare between.” The police violently attacked the protest movement. And “planned showdown” is a sinister falsehood, positing a criminal conspiracy by protesters to confront police. You have to go to genuine journalists to find out what happened, such as at democracynow.org,  “Occupy Oakland: Over 400 Arrested as PoliceFire Tear Gas, Flash Grenades at Protesters,” 1/30/12.] 

Predictably, an Oakland pol has already played the terrorism card, calling the attempt to set up a base in an abandoned building “domestic terrorism.”* That's a signal to the police, like telling a dog “sic ‘em!” Branding dissent “terrorism” is a standard move from the repression playbook. With the draconian laws pushed through using the 9/11/01 attacks as justification- the American rulers’ very own Reichstag fire, not just their “Pearl Harbor” to justify invading Iraq and waging permanent global “war,”- they now have the means to strip people of all rights and imprison them indefinitely, even without trial in military gulag, as per the “defense approrpriations” bill just signed by Obama. (“Liberal” Senator Carl Levin was behind the indefinite imprisonment without trial, charges, legal representation section of the bill.)

*[Oakland City Council member Ignacio de la Fuente: “It’s an escalation with our—I think that basically what, in my opinion, amounts to kind of a domestic terrorism, when these people start taking buildings, and they start costing the city incredible amount of resources.” Cost “them” money- taxpayer money, which protesters are forced to pay too- and you’re a terrorist. The definition of “terrorism” just keeps expanding. Pretty soon looking at one of these oppressors wrong will be a “terrorist act.” I mean, what if they got scared? That’s terrorism!]

Latest Evidence That Trying To Appease Reactionaries Is Pointless

A segment of the bourgeois commentariat is always berating Democrats to “compromise” and makes a fetish of “bipartisanship.” (If the two parties agree on everything, which is what “bipartisanship” is, then what’s the point of even having two parties? Then there isn’t even the illusion of a choice. Might as well go straight to one-party dictatorship and be done with it.) Obama has wasted three years making nice to the GOP and bending over backwards to try and appease them, which never works. Reactionaries always interpret concessions as weakness and push for more.  (This was the lesson of Munich: appeasement doesn’t work with reactionary fanatics.)

Well, here’s another illustration of the futility of appeasement: Obama has deported more “illegal aliens” than any President, setting new records yearly. He’s also added yet more enforcers to the Mexican border. So what do we hear from Republicans?

Obama is soft on illegal aliens. Not a single Republican politician or any of the GOP media backers like Murdoch’s Minions deviate from this demagogic, mendacious, slanderous line.

For example, Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona (“The State That Hates Hispanics!”- I think it’s on their license plates) ambushed Obama on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport to stick her finger in his face and hector him for the photographers, a grandstand play aimed at the cheap seats of the white racist reactionary peanut gallery. She took the opportunity she grabbed for herself to promote her vicious hate-speech tome, Scorpions for Breakfast (a title that seeks to make a virtue out of her personal nastiness), a work of lying libel that claims Obama turns a blind eye to illegal immigration in order to woo Hispanic voters. She also lies about a meeting she had in the White House- Obama was stupid enough to invite her! And get this- on the tarmac, she handed him a letter inviting him to meet with her again. Well, who knows, maybe he’s stupid enough to do it, like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy over and over not to pull away the football at the last minute when he’s running up to kick it. Some people are slow learners.

Like I say, in the context of fools who were chumped by Obama in 2008 and might fall for his rhetoric a second time, Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Anyway, since reactionaries ignore facts and invent their own “facts” and constantly say blatantly false things with podium-pounding conviction, following the dictum of Ronald Reagan (“Fact are stupid things”) and the rank and file reactionaries are self-brainwashed deluded jackasses who daily fill up their brains with the rantings of the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, Ingraham, Counter, Savage, et al, such blatant dishonesty and distortion works for them. And no amount of appeasement (“compromise”) will change that.

So you might as well do the MORALLY RIGHT thing, because it’s ALSO politically pragmatic. Amoral hustlers like Obama think it’s clever to sell out common decency. Now he’s hoist on his own petard.

Maybe he was misled by the fact that it seemed to work so well for Clinton. But Clinton was in a different situation and time. That requires a somewhat lengthy analysis that is off the point of this brief essay. Anyway Clinton was no liberal. He was one of the main men of the “Democratic Leadership Council,” rightists whose goal was to make the Democratic Party into a more explicitly rightwing party, which they succeeded in doing. Oh, and the GOP impeached him anyway.

[“Heated Exchange on the Tarmac,” NY Times, 1/26/12, print edition.]

Such Fine Words! Obama Launches Operation Con Job 2

Here we go again. With utter predictability, Obama is rerunning the con game that got him elected in the first place, cruelly playing on people's hopes and thirst for progressive change in America. The same fraudulent political feints, empty promises, heartfelt-sounding attempts to mislead. 

Obama's “State of the Union” would have been a great speech, if it had been delivered by someone running against Obama. As it is, it takes breathtaking gall for Obama to deliver it. Some examples:

“And tonight, I’m asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorney general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis.  (Applause.)  This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Tonight? You’ve had three years to do that. This is a problem that predated your election, pal. Obama has protected the banks for the last three years. Even megacrook Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide infamy got a pass. What about all those junk mortgages packaged as AAA investment grade, with the connivance of the (pseudo-)rating agencies? Obama’s been yammering about “assistance to homeowners” for years now, with next to no action. He’s already set up several phony “assistance” programs for show, to issue press releases. Come to think of this, his entire speech read like one long press release.

And there’s picayune stuff like this:

“Some of this has to do with the corrosive influence of money in politics.  So together, let’s take some steps to fix that.  Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress; I will sign it tomorrow.  (Applause.)”

Sure, that’s a good idea. But insider trading by Congressmen is hardly the main problem. Obama in 2008 opted out of the Federal funding system for candidates so he could raise unlimited funds- he proceeded to raise hundreds of millions. This time he’s aiming for even more. The focus on Congress exempting itself from insider trading laws is a minor bit of corruption. The real problem is that money rules the U.S. Not that Obama could change that even if he wanted to. This is a bit of rhetorical flimflam, yet another attempt to con people into thinking he’s on their side and against the “fat cats.” Obama’s regime has been staffed with agents of the top financier class, like Geithner, Orszag, Summers. Obama himself is Exhibit A in the case of how money controls politics.

[For more on Obama’s utter complicity with high finance, see "Obama Signals Green Light for Stock Fraud," TheStreet.com, Gary Weiss, 9/13/11.] 

The speech sounded like it should have been his inaugural address. In fact, some of his tropes, like invoking his grandfather, date back to his 2004 Convention speech that launched him into the big leagues. Every couple of years he rummages through his closet and hauls out his tired old anecdotes and stories.

Of course, with Obama, his words are always misleading whenever he's in his “inspirational” mode. You have to admit, for a Chicago Daley-machine political hack, he's quite the orator when he needs to be to rope in gullible voters. After all, what is the purpose of rhetoric? To convince. In Obama's case, it is to convince saps to vote for him; indeed, to invest in him their desperate hopes for change in this oppressive system that is slowly eating them alive, economically and spiritually.

This is a particularly pernicious con job, as those hopes are thus neutralized by the system by having that energy poured into a catch basin that renders them politically impotent. Worse, the resulting disillusionment hasn't led to rage, but to resignation and feelings of hopelessness. This is what happens when people's minds are trapped in the psychic box prepared by the oligarchic system, a box that prevents them from thinking of challenging the entire setup, the two-party dictatorship that fronts for big corporate rule.

I was on to Obama when he launched himself onto the national political stage with his 2004 peroration at the Democratic Party Convention, a speech that filled me with disgust. I knew even then his words were phony. And I'd seen the same sham “liberal uplift” act before, with Mario Cuomo, who also never fooled me.

Cuomo was a Democratic New York State Governor, an alleged “liberal,”  but besides silken rhetoric, the sole evidence of Cuomo's “liberalism” was his opposition to the death penalty, a much less “courageous” stance in NY State than Cuomo, his shills, and sections of the media made it out to be.

In practice Cuomo had a nasty record; his environmental record, for one thing, was awful. The sole lasting mark he made on the state was building more prisons. So I suppose he was “liberal” in the vein of “liberal” Republican Governor Nelson “Butcher Of  Attica” Rockefeller. Ah, for the days when there was common ground between the two oligarchic parties!

Obama is actually a lot more sinister than he seems. He has spent three years serving the interests of high finance while increasing the repressiveness of the system and setting up a system of global assassination.  All the while he covers his tracks with bullshit pretending he's trying to resist the evil designs of Republicans, when in fact he aids and abets them, seeking only slight modifications in the GOP's demands. Both parties in fact are bas[“Reform is code for CUT. Social Security has already been gradually whittled down in recent years, a fact never mentioned by the propaganda system-pardon, “the media.” [Recent example: the GOP wants to cut the maximum duration of unemployment insurance from 99 weeks to only 59. The Dems counteroffer? Cut it to 79! Wow, sure is great having the Dems “fighting for” the working class! With “friends” like these...]

How many times do progressives and assorted do-good interest groups need to be betrayed before decisively breaking with the Democratic Party? Like a wife-batterer or an abusive boyfriend swearing his enduring love, the Democratic Party leads on and exploits progressives and anyone who yearns for a more humane United States (really an oxymoron for an Empire, as Empires as innately anti-human). Various progressives consider themselves lucky to get a meeting with White House or Congressional aides. Mere “access,” a few times a year, is their payoff for slavishly delivering their votes to the Dems. If only they had a tenth of the militancy of the GOP's reactionary “base”! GOP party leaders prostrate themselves trying to appease the radical right. Of course, it helps to elect true believers. Where are the leftwing versions of the Tea Party House members?

One thing I should take note of- the speech was very militaristic. Obama devoted paragraphs at both the beginning and ending of the speech to militaristic chest-thumping, extolling the systematic extermination of Al-Qaeda targets and so forth. He couldn’t seem to get enough of the tough talk, in fact.

taboo-truths.blogspot.com

jasonzenith.blogspot.com

Mitt Romney's Death Squad Money

Seems whenever you scratch the surface of U.S. appearances, you end up unearthing some horror. Atrocities and crimes against humanity run like an underground plume of toxic waste hidden just below the surface of American society.

A Salon.com reporter dug a little into Bain Capital- something you'd expect many reporters to be doing, assuming they're actual journalists and not propagandists- and didn't have much trouble discovering that Romney, who was in charge of starting up Bain Capital (what he calls “an entry level job”) raised a large sum of Bain's capital from the ruling rich fascist families of El Salvador, the ones on whose behalf the death squad army and various “security forces” of that country murdered tens of thousands of people (the overwhelming majority helpless civilians, including the Archbishop of the country, Oscar Romero). Well, why not? The U.S. was the armorer, trainer, and ideological indoctrinator of those state terrorist forces.  [“The roots of Bain Capital in El Salvador’s civil war”]

Another question: how come none of his rivals have mentioned this? They all have large “opposition research” operations” to dig up dirt on their rivals.

Because anything that touches on the crimes of U.S. Imperialism is a deep, dark taboo in American politics. Why, mentioning it would be like saying the CIA killed the Kennedys. Anyone who said it would instantly be hurled into outer darkness by the collective political-media system.

Anyway, the Salvadoran mini-Holocaust was a great success as far as the U.S. elites are concerned. Eight rich families were kept in charge in El Salvador, pesky humanist academics and labor organizers were killed, and tens of thousands of superfluous peasants and workers were wiped out. Another “Communist beachhead in our hemisphere” was averted. (So four Maryknoll women were raped and killed on orders from higher ups- what were those do-gooder fellow travelers doing there in the first place, trying to help poor people? Who gave them the right to meddle?) This is what is called “freedom and democracy” in U.S. parlance.

Megaupload Bust Proves SOPA & PIPA Unnecessary

We were told by the bourgeois media that the poor little giant entertainment corporation were losing hundreds of billions of dollars (a bullshit lie, obviously) because foreign websites were "stealing" their content and were beyond reach of U.S. law.

At exactly the same time, the U.S. got New Zealand to arrest the proprietor of file-sharing site Megaupload and his top assistants. New Zealand also seized his property, cars, and cash. The U.S. seized his website, even though it's based in Hong Kong.

As part of the trial and conviction by the media, we were told internal emails proved their guilt. (No explanation of how the U.S. got hold of those emails.)

So why, exactly, are even more draconian laws needed? Bad enough that copyright infringement is no longer a civil matter when the complainants are giant corporations. (See if you can get the FBI to arrest anyone for violating your copyright!) Bad enough that websites are destroyed and assets seized before any trial. Now the Disneys and News Corps of the world want the power to shut websites on their mere say-so. They want to be able to force search engines and advertisers and banks and paypal etc. to blacklist websites on demand, without a trial.

The existing laws are already far to repressive and give dominant corporations too much power.

Iowa's Messy Denouement, and the Fecklessness Of The Corporate Media

Now it turns out Santorum really “won.” By 35 votes.

But a number of precincts cannot be counted. The votes are “missing.”

And these caucuses are just a glorified opinion poll anyway.

This is the mess the corporate media made so important.

Now the third hurdle is yet another hard right wing white electorate, in South Carolina.

Who are religious fanatics to boot.

The truth is, most people in the U.S. have no representation under the U.S. two-party dictatorship fronting for corporate oligarchy. That is the lesson to learn from all this.

Taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Jasonzenith.blogspot.com

U.S. Tries To Tell China Not To Buy Iranian Oil (Good Luck With That)

Timothy Geithner, U.S. Boy Secretary of the Treasury and long-time agent of the big banks, was sent on an errand to China and Japan to cajole/order those countries to join in the U.S.-European embargo of Iranian oil, said embargo being an arm-twisting move designed to make the Iranian economy scream, thus forcing the mullahs to say “uncle” and abandon their uranium enrichment program.

Generally, when the U.S. tells Japan “jump,” their Japanese stooges say “how high?” That indeed was the initial reaction from the Japanese Finance Minister, who immediately promised to damage the Japanese economy by cutting back on the 10% of Japanese oil consumption coming from Iran. (Japan has no oil and so must import all it uses for its cars and factories.) Later, however, the Prime Minister cleared his throat and said not so fast, we'll see. [“JapanDelays Decision on Iran Oil Sanctions” -NY Times]

Meanwhile, in China, which is an independent nation not inclined to let the U.S. tell it what to do, Geithner got a decidedly less propitious reception.

The U.S. thinks that Iran's oil output can somehow be replaced by other countries. It's doubtful that it can be entirely replaced, even with Saudi help. The Saudis of course are enemies of Iran, so they'll no doubt be cooperative. And wouldn't you know, just a few months ago the U.S. “foiled” a “plot” to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.! What a lucky coincidence! For sure, that makes the Saudis like Iran even less! (Maybe the U.S. thought it needed a little “insurance” so it bought itself some with a cooked-up “plot.” The “plot” was so ridiculous on its face- a total loser ex-used car salesman was going to hire “Mexican drug cartel assassins” [U.S. government agents] to do in the Saudi ambassador- that even major U.S. propaganda organs like the NY Times and Wall Street Journal let some skepticism creep into their accounts- unlike their boosterism of other “plots,” and Saddam Hussein's “weapons of mass destruction” and “mobile bioweapons labs” and “yellowcake” and all the other fraudulent bullshit fabricated as a pretext to invade Iraq.)

I have a funny feeling that Venezuela, whose current ruler, Hugo Chavez, the U.S. and its media have been demonizing ever since he became President, won't be increasing its output just to do the U.S. a favor. In fact, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just visited Venezuela in a demonstration of friendship- shoring up Iranian defenses against the U.S. economic warfare move.

Nigeria? The country is coming apart at the seams. President Goodluck Jonathan just eliminated the subsidy for fuel, instantly doubling the prices and causing riots, which he met with lethal force. Now the country's oil workers are striking in response. Oh, did I mention that Christians are starting to retaliate against Muslim civilians for Boko Haram's terrorist attacks on churches?

Anyway, the U.S. has threatened to destroy any bank doing business with Iran's central bank, which processes payments for Iranian oil. Since the U.S. controls the world financial system, being frozen out by U.S. diktat would be death for any defiant financial institutions. (Remember how the U.S. stole billions of dollars of Iran's money when the U.S. embassy “hostages” were seized? Then the money was parceled out to big banks that had loaned money to the Shah's regime, and to foreign businesses- mainly American- to “honor” contracts that the Shah had signed. Of course, since Iran was considered in violation of the contracts, the businesses in many cases got money for nothing. Sweet deal!)

By the way, it actually is legal under Iran's treaty obligations (it's a  signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike Israel) for Iran to enrich uranium for non-military purposes, which is what it claims to be doing. And the U.S. “intelligence community” concluded (unanimously by the 16 agencies involve) that Iran halted trying to develop nuclear weapons in 2003. And they have not revised that conclusion. Plus, Secretary of Offense Leon Panetta just admitted on one of the Sunday morning blather shows for the nomenklatura (CBS' Face the Nation, 1/8/12) that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons. But from the impression you get from the U.S. media, you sure wouldn't know any of this. When Iran just announced that it had enriched uranium to 20%, for medical use, it said, the U.S. media (BBC too) all said this was “alarmingly” or “dangerously close” to weapons' grade. A flat lie. While fuel grade is only 5%, weapons grade is 90-95% enriched. So 20% is far away from weapons' grade. And the enrichment process is slow, difficult, and laborious. (Especially with people murdering your scientists, blowing up your facilities, infecting your centrifuge controllers with malicious worms, etc.) It involves using thousands of centrifuges (which Iran has had to bury in deep underground facilities to avoid aerial bombardment by guess-who) spinning uranium gas for months to get to higher levels of concentration. And the U.S.-Israeli stuxnet computer worm is thought to have destroyed maybe a third of Iran's centrifuges, which are expensive and hard to come by, by causing them to spin too rapidly, while hiding this fact from the operators.

It is true that the technology Iran is developing can be used for weapons development. And Iran has been consistently evasive with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors. I think most likely Iran is trying to creep up to a point from which it can then rush to make some weapons. Which would alter the balance of power in the mideast, which is intolerable to the U.S. and Israel.

Now we're reading about U.S. and Israeli war preparations. But we're told that it's Iran that is being “threatening.”

Hope you filled up your backyard fuel storage tanks with gasoline and heating oil. Either an embargo or military clashes will surely cause oil prices to rise sharply. Surprisingly, they haven't risen much yet.

Taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Jasonzenith.blogspot.com

The New York Times’ Ongoing Vendetta Against Keith Olbermann

Beneath the grey, prissy, precious façade of low-key “objectivity” of the New York Times lurks seething rage and resentments mere mortals can only guess at.

For example, the New York Times has these weird vendettas against certain people. Invariably there’s a political-ideological motive. For months now they’ve been after the head of Keith Olbermann. It’s just one hatchet-job after another, whenever there’s a career move by Olbermann, or a contract dispute, or a rumor to “report on.” The articles always really say just one thing:

Keith Olbermann has a rotten personality, and doesn’t get along with people.

Ok, I was wrong. That’s two things.

Don’t know why that’s newsworthy. Don’t know why it bears repetition. Don’t know why it’s worthy of full article treatments, over and over, when so much critical news is relegated to those tiny “Briefs” items, or total blackout. But there it is.

Only real reason I can discern is that Olbermann has been pushing back against the reactionary media consensus in this country, a consensus which despite misleading appearances and feints, the NY Times is very much a part of. 

Latest installment in the Get Keith series ran in the Business Section January 5, 2012 on the front page. [“Olbermann In a Clash AtNew Job.”] (All these attacks on Olbermann have run on the first page of the Business Section, a sign of their importance to the editors.) The “news” here is that Olbermann was annoyed at “technical difficulties” that the Times claims have “plagued” his show on Current TV, so he didn’t want to host “special election coverage” of the Iowa caucuses. [I.e. obsessive media overattention to the insignificant preferences of 120,000 old, white, reactionary Iowan ideological fanatics choosing among a field of seven extremist GOP presidential candidates- this isn’t even a selection of convention delegates, by the way.] So they made arrangements without him. But Keith held a staff meeting anyway! And then the channel’s president wrote a memo to Olbermann’s staff about it! And then his show went back on the air as before! And Keith griped in Twitter posts and to The Hollywood Reporter! And And And!

In other words, the usual trivial office politics, now fodder for malicious NYT gossip. (Nothing like that ever happens at the august NY Times, I’m sure. Personality conflicts? Where, here?)

Strange indeed that this workplace trivia merits a front page Business Section article. But who am I to second-guess Times editors? They’re professional journalists [sic]. I’m just some scummy little blogger [in their contemptuous view]. 

But wait, there’s more! Did you know that the Olbermann-free Current TV Iowa caucus coverage “was derided by online commentators”? (Like, say bloggers?) Who, praytell?

The Times only cites one actual person:

Jonah Goldberg of National Review.

Oh really. How odd that an extreme reactionary writing for a notorious neofascist rag would deride a “liberal” TV channel! Guess that proves your point, Times!

Tellingly, the [utterly predictable and meaningless] Goldberg dismissal that the Times cites as evidence of Current TV’s shabbiness has nothing to do with actual content, but appearance, to wit: “the production values were only slightly better than local public access” says Goldberg. And most scathingly, Goldberg pronounced it “hilarious,” quotes the Times.

[Wonder how James O’Keefe’s “production values” rate?]

Well, a negative review by Jonah Goldberg! That’s definitive for sure! He’s an authority, after all. At least, the “liberal” NY Times seems to think so. [See footnote 1 below.]

 I guess Current TV needs a multimillion dollar set, eye-candy computer graphics, and constant “WHOOSH” sound effects a la Murdoch’s Fox “News” to have “credibility.”

Before I digress into the nature of National Review and the NY Times kinship with it, here’s a couple of other examples of NYT vendetta targets: [See footnote 2 for more on the kinship.]

Director Oliver Stone was another victim of an NYT vendetta. His crime: making the movie “JFK,” which questioned the Official (totally preposterous and disproven over and over) Version of the assassination. The movie itself was inept and misleading in my view, but that’s besides the point. Anyone who threatens the Official Line on the JFK assassination poses an implied threat to the legitimacy of the U.S. system by exposing a domestic coup in which the major media are accomplices to this day, since they perpetuate the lies and cover up. You’d be reading a food column for example and the hack would take a gratuitous swipe at Oliver Stone, like “the foie gras was full of off notes, like something prepared by chef Oliver Stone,” and you’d be like “where did that come from?” Apparently every scrivener at the Times was trying to curry favor with their superiors in this way, a real junior high schoolish pile-on. This vendetta continued for years. (I haven’t checked recently but it wouldn’t surprise me if they still take snarky swipes at Stone. Ideological watchdogs tend to reflexively bark at their targets forevermore.)

Or Julian Assange, the besieged founder of the now-destroyed WikiLeaks website/repository for dirty state secrets. You’d think the Times would be grateful for the numerous articles they got courtesy of WikiLeaks documents. But nooo. The Times has to have its cake and eat it too. While using WikiLeaks-provided documents for their own “scoops” and referencing them in numerous other articles, the Times is in high dudgeon over WikiLeaks “irresponsibility” and putative lack of ethics. (The Times has very high moral standards, don’t you know.) Assange comes in for constant attacks in the Times, an obviously-organized campaign. The former Big Boss Editor, Bill Keller, seemed to particularly loathe Assange, commandeering the cover of the rag’s Sunday Magazine section last year for a completely juvenile, insulting hatchet-job on Assange written by Keller himself. [see my previous essay on this at “Bill Keller's Character Assassination Hatchet-Job on Julian Assange” ]

Inexplicably, Keller fancies himself a Deep Thinker. Actually it’s not inexplicable. He’s an egomaniac whose success in climbing the career ladder as an apparatchik of the bourgeois propaganda system has convinced him of his own brilliance. This is a common phenomenon among meritless elites drunk on their own power and “success.” Now that he’s been succeeded as Chief Honcho Editor by Jill Abramson, Keller is Senior Gasbag at the Times. In this capacity he had the hypocritical and probably completely unconscious gall to reference WikiLeaks in a long, boring expectoration about something or other- frankly I don’t even remember the putative topic! Must’ve been important, though, ‘cause it was long, it was in the Times and on its website, and it was by Bill Keller. Whatever. Point is, he knifed the WikiLeaks founder, who is in a desperate struggle to avoid imprisonment in a U.S. dungeon for political prisoners, over and over, and yet he still uses WikiLeaks without apology or gratitude. Nice. Remind me to NEVER EVER help the New York Times with anything. WikiLeaks helped inform Keller about the world, and Keller’s repayment is to join in the campaign to destroy WikiLeaks and persecute Julian Assange. Too bad there’s no Hell, because Keller deserves a special place in it.

1] Ordinarily I ignore the bylines on NYT “news” articles, because those people are institutional drones who are really interchangeable, and no one cares about what they’re writing because they wrote it, but only because the New York Times is “saying” it. In other words, in general their names are insignificant and will never be remembered after they die, or maybe not even after they leave the NYT, and I’m not in the business of helping promote their personal “brands,” to whatever insignificant degree a mention by me might do so. [Obviously it’s different with propagandists of some import, like Keller, or in the case of op-ed type pieces which presumably are a more personal expression of the writer’s mentality and put forth as speaking for themselves, not for the institution.] But in this case I’ll make an exception to help you see patterns in future “work” by this particular hatchetman. His name is Brian Stelter.

2] Jonah Goldberg, for those who’ve forgotten, which is probably most everyone outside the propaganda nomenklatura, is the spawn of Lucianne Goldberg, a pathological reactionary. [How pathological? In a long, friendly interview with a rightwing freebie New York City rag grandiloquently named NY Press some years back she made explicit, vulgar remarks about Chelsea Clinton’s vagina. This was when Chelsea was about 12 years old or so. Not that if Chelsea had been an adult that would have excused it. NY Press changed owners since then and has evaporated into an empty shell for advertising.] Goldberg, a “literary agent,” was in effect the handler for GOP mole in the Clinton regime Linda Tripp, who entrapped hapless naïf White House intern Monica Lewinsky, taping her confidences about her affair with Clinton and setting Lewinsky up for the full police state squeeze treatment by rightwing hitman “special prosecutor” Kenneth Starr with his Grand Jury and FBI thug “investigators.” Which is not to excuse Clinton’s loutist, caddish, and criminal behavior. [THE PRESIDENT'S ACQUITTAL: THE AGENT; Tripp Friend Says She's Proud of Her Role]

National Review is a fascist rag that relentlessly promotes any and all fascist killer regimes on the planet, although there are fewer these days with the changes in Latin America. The New York Times also promoted those same regimes, for example, both it and NR celebrated the 1973 Chilean military coup instigated by the CIA and Pentagon under Nixon’s direct orders. The NYT even employed a reactionary propagandist by the name of Shirley Christian to crank out pro-Pinochet propaganda pieces (and anti-Sandinista ones).

For decades, the NYT refused to report the murder of 30,000 human beings by the Argentine terrorist military tyranny. When they finally started reporting, they claimed only a few hundred were butchered. The “coverage” was dry as dust, no humanity given  to the victims, which the NYT does so well went they want sympathy for the victims- mainly when the perpetrators are U.S. official enemies, or not “friends.” Gradually over several years they eventually got up to the true number, before cutting it back down again. Now it’s usually just a vague “thousands” or “many.” (They’d never treat the Holocaust 6 million like that.)

During the exterminationist “civil war” in El Salvador in the 1980s, which of course NR was a cheerleader for (in the spurious name of “anti-Communism”) the NY Times under the vicious gay-hater A.M.Rosenthal put in his boot after a story, on the El Mozote massacre of a thousand defenseless villagers by an “elite” U.S.-trained battalion (the worst of the worst are always U.S.-trained, and more importantly, U.S.-indoctrinated, that is, infected with fascist ideology), displeased the Reagan regime, Rosenthal rode herd on his reporters to make sure all the “news” on El Salvador in future was pro the state terrorist regime there, and systematically covered up or downplayed the numerous, horrific atrocities sponsored by the U.S.

In the ginning up of war hysteria to enable the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the NYT was on board and complicit in the disinformation. (To be fair, they did print an op-ed by Joseph Wilson, who exposed the fictiveness of the Niger uranium “connection.” That led to the Bush regime burning his wife, undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.) Later, when the war and the lies were discredited, to wipe the egg off its face the NYT made their long-time agit-propagandist Judith Miller the fall gal for that, for being a conduit for Ahmed Chalabi disinfo and etc. As if the paper had no control over what they published under her name. These days Miller is letting her rightwing freak flag wave higher than ever in overtly reactionary venues.

Oh, and guess who edits the NYT “Book Review”? Sam Tanenhaus, rightwing hagiographer of NR boss William F. Buckley, Jr. (Tanenhaus and the other glorifiers of Buckley, who in life, as after death, was treated with universal approbation by the bourgeois media, elide the fact that Buckley’s lifelong mission amounted to rehabilitating the reputation of fascism after the damage Hitler did to it. One method was to harp on Bolshevik crimes and oppression, real, exaggerated, and occasionally imagined, as Buckley himself did in his “novels.”) Of course, the “Book Review” does review books, so technically that title is correct, but it’s really a vehicle for subtle ideological suasion. Read it carefully and see what I mean.

To be sure, there are differences between the NYT and NR, of course. National Review, and its erstwhile, finally dead proprietor, the fascist scion of inherited wealth William F. Buckley, Jr., sided with the white supremacist terrorist racists of the South against blacks who wanted to to eat in a restaurant, ride on a bus, or register to vote without being murdered. The NYT did not. The NYT was even sued for “libel” [i.e. truth] by some white racist officials in a case that the Times had to take to the U.S. Supreme Court to win. [They’d probably lose today. Especially with the black-hating black Clarence Thomas newly influential on the Court.] Later on, NR went to bat for racist supremacists in Rhodesia and South Africa (as did other publications, such as U.S. News [sic] and World Report). And of course the Times doesn’t hate all Government social spending, which you can view as compassionate, pragmatic, or both. Probably some of both, at least if we take their editorial words at face value. Hence the “liberal” sobriquet.

In a neofascist country, the non-deranged is “leftwing.”