Egypt Wins Prize for Most Journalists in Prison- Arab Division

Egypt currently has 14 journalists in its dungeons. Syria came in second, with 12. Close but not enough- a heartbreaker for fans of Syrian repression.

Germany Dumps Verizon for Government Communications- Damn You Edward Snowden!

The German government, a year after Edward Snowden informed the world that the NSA taps their chancellor’s cellphone and steals massive amounts of electronic data from German citizens (with the invaluable assistance of German secret police agencies) has finally bestirred itself to do something about it, after bleating ineffectually all this time for the U.S. to please promise to stop. [1]

It’s canceling a contract with U.S. telecom company Verizon for providing service to German government agencies.

No doubt U.S. police state apparatchiks and their politician enablers will be fuming at Edward Snowden for this- as if the Germans would have never figured out sooner or later that the NSA was stealing all their communications.

While the Germans are at it, may I suggest they purge their secret police agencies of disloyal types who would rather serve a foreign power than Germany? And physically expel the NSA spyposts from their soil? Otherwise they won’t be accomplishing much.

And don’t listen to U.S. guff about “counterintelligence” and “the war on terror” and “protecting lives.”

You can’t free yourselves if you don’t free your minds first.

But the plodding political hack Merkel won’t do these things, I predict. Let’s see if I’m right.

1] Which the U.S. refused to do. The one tiny concession made by Emperor Obama, who after stonewalling, finally said Chancellor Merkel’s personal cellphone wasn’t currently being tapped. He refused to apologize or even to admit to the tapping. Nor did he rule her office and home phones off limits. Anyway, Obama is a congenital liar, so his word is worthless in any event. He has lied repeatedly about NSA spying; he lied literally dozens of times about his health care act- “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan,” an obvious falsehood since his law mandated requirements for health insurance that millions of plans did not meet; he lied about being committed to so-called “network neutrality;” as a Senator running for president in 2008 he lied about intending to filibuster a bill immunizing telecoms from civil suits for illegally tapping phone and internet traffic for the NSA without warrants; indeed he has lied numerous times both running for office and while in power.

Egyptian Military Dictatorship Convicts Journalists in “Court” of the Absurd

A so-called “court” in Egypt handed down utterly predictable and preordained guilty verdicts of “terrorism” against three Al-Jazeera journalists who have been imprisoned for six months already in one of Egypt’s hellhole jails. The “evidence” consisted of the journalists’ family photos and old news videos of horses and such. (I’m not making that up.) According to foreign journalist witnesses, literally no evidence supporting the baseless accusation was presented, leading them to pronounce themselves “shocked” by the guilty verdict. The sentences were a minimum of seven years. The three are an Egyptian, a Canadian, and an Australian. The Australian, Peter Greste, had been in Egypt for a week on temporary duty when he was seized. The Australian formerly worked for the BBC. For good measure, other Al-Jazeera journalists were “convicted” “in absentia” and “sentenced.” [1]

Their actual “crime” was reporting on Muslim Brotherhood protest rallies.

The “verdict” should have surprised no one. After all, in two recent mass “trials,” close to 2,000 people were “convicted” in a few minutes, and hundreds “sentenced” (condemned) to death, for alleged rioting and for the death of a single policeman.

Thus has Egypt under its newest military dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, sunk lower than ever. Lower even than under his predecessors Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. Thus does an authoritarian system degenerate into more and more grotesque forms of oppressiveness and detachment from reality. Lurid assertions and false consciousness replace acknowledgment of actual facts. [2]

Sisi’s pathetic, cruel farce doesn’t even rise to the level of a show trial. In Stalin’s show trials, the “defendants” read out “confessions” after they’d been tortured into submission. In Nazi political trials, “evidence” was also presented to “prove” the charges. In Sisi’s Egypt, there is no longer even a simulacrum of anything resembling an actual judicial process. There is not even a crude imitation of a trial, just a nonsensical burlesque called a “trial.”

The Sisi dictatorship can’t even be bothered to fabricate fake evidence, coach lying witnesses, or torture false confessions out of their victims. They just accuse and convict. And in a demonstration of just how complicit and supine a privately-owned media can be to state power, the Egyptian media has screamed abuse at the victims and taken their “guilt” as established fact since their arrests in December 2013. This is good enough to make the victims appear guilty for internal Egyptian purposes. Confident of continued U.S. backing for the permanent Egyptian military state, Sisi apparently has concluded that he can contemptuously dismiss international opinion. And he’s right, unfortunately. For one thing, Israel wants a military dictatorship in Egypt that will continue the policy of avoiding conflict with Israel and helping Israel oppress the Palestinians by maintaining the blockade of the Gaza Strip (which borders Egypt on the west of the Strip) to maintain the territory as the world’s largest open-air concentration camp, imprisoning over a million human beings. (Yes, Palestinians are actually human beings, not subhuman “terrorists,” as the American public has been brainwashed into feeling.) That alone would be enough to induce the U.S. to support the Sisi regime, since the U.S. is Israel’s bitch, but it is not the only U.S. “interest” driving the U.S. to back successive Egyptian military dictatorships since Sadat’s rapproachement with Israel. [3]

Because of American establishment hatred of Al-Jazeera, most of the U.S. media has covered the “verdict” very superficially or not at all. Remember, U.S. cable networks refuse to allow Al-Jazeera television to BUY access to American homes, the U.S. military has repeatedly bombed Al-Jazeera offices in Afghanistan and Iraq, murdered Al-Jazeera journalists, taken Al-Jazeera workers captive (one was held for six years in the U.S. military gulag/torture center at Guantanamo Bay on U.S.-occupied Cuban territory, where his captors tried to force him to agree to be a spy inside Al-Jazeera for them), and the U.S. government has repeatedly threatened Al-Jazeera. Al-J has been demonized as “terrorist propaganda” for refusing to be a parrot of the U.S. government and military and to act as cheerleaders for the U.S. aggression in Iraq, as the “loyal” American media did.

And still does to this day. Now the U.S. media, whitewashing history, pretends that the U.S. invaded Iraq out of altruism, not after whipping up hysteria with false claims of “weapons of mass destruction” aimed at the U.S., imminent danger of nuclear, chemical, or biological attack on the American people by terrorists armed with such weaponry. Just yesterday, on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” one of the Sunday morning political propaganda shows that the political elite uses for self-brainwashing, the program ended with a breathtakingly mendacious Iraq segment by Martha Raddatz, who recycled old, discredited U.S. military propaganda claiming that “Iraqis pulled down this statue of Saddam Hussein,” a U.S. military stunt thoroughly debunked, yet Raddatz ignores the facts. Even more egregiously, Raddatz erases the U.S. siege and destruction of Fallujah, substituting a fairy tale of U.S. military humanitarian care and service for the people there! Unbelievably cynical, shameless, immoral, unethical, and a textbook example of how American establishment “journalism” is propaganda.

1] In a bad sign for the Australian journalist in Sisi’s clutches, it was the “opposition” party (the bourgeois party currently out of power) in Australia, not the government, that strongly denounced the “verdict.” (Typical of “western democracies,” Australia has “legitimate” establishment parties that play a game of musical chairs called “elections” in which they compete to sit in the seats of power. But the system can never be voted out of power or changed. That is called “freedom of choice.”) The Australian Foreign Minister issued a mushy, weak, mealy-mouthed statement with the usual bromides about journalistic freedom and blah blah. Tellingly, the statement indicates that until now, the Australian government hadn’t lifted a finger to help their citizen in captivity.

“...we will now initiate contact at the highest levels in the new Egyptian government to see whether we can gain some kind of intervention from the new government and find out whether intervention is indeed possible at this stage.” (My emphasis.) They’re just NOW initiating contact with Sisi over this?? Amazing.*

Australia has an ugly history of abandoning Australian journalists. When the horrible Indonesian military dictatorship of Suharto invaded East Timor back in the 1970s, after getting the green light to do so from U.S. president (and Warren Commissioner cover-up conspirator) Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger in person (the two visited Suharto in Jakarta just before the invasion), among the ultimately hundreds of thousands of East Timorese slaughtered by the Indonesian army was an Australian TV crew, who were murdered by the Indonesians to block their reporting on the crimes of the Indonesians. The Australian government at the time, headed by Malcolm Frasier, helpfully looked the other way, ignoring the overwhelming evidence of the blatant murders of Australian citizens. Oh yes, and U.S. weapons and munitions were used, in violation of U.S. law, in this act of aggression, and in the years of brutal occupation and mass murder that followed. So what? Israel does it all the time. And so do the various terror regimes armed by the U.S., which use U.S. weapons to murder their own citizens, whereas U.S. law requires they be used only in defense from foreign aggression. American law in this case is just for show. Such laws are in fact acts of propaganda, and nothing more. The other main use of U.S. law is to oppress people.

2] Sisi, the latest military dictator, is a former field marshal and head of the Egyptian military. Trained, mentored, and groomed for years in American military “schools,” as is typical of military tyrants and criminals in U.S.-backed regimes, he has long ties with the U.S. military hierarchy. “Officially,” Sisi is a “president,” since he doffed his uniform for a business suit (the uniform of political bosses these days) and staged an “election” (uncontested) in which he “won” 97%. He’s no more a “democratically elected president” than these farcical “trials” he stages are actual trials or these “courts” are really courts. They’re Theaters of the Absurd, political demonstrations of raw power designed to terrorize people into submission to an utterly oppressive reign.

The only reason for a six month delay between “arrest” and “conviction” was so the Egyptian propaganda system (a privately-owned media that has behaved exactly as a military-controlled media would) could firmly brainwash the Egyptian populace in the idea that the journalists are guilty of “terrorism” merely by repeating the lie over and over, repetition being a standard propaganda technique. Thus the dictatorship would in fact have put itself in a bind if it had ultimately acquitted the journalists, since it had already worked so assiduously to create the “fact” of their “guilt.”

Yet another journalist was released after a year in prison with his arm permanently disabled thanks to the brutality and deliberate medical neglect of Sisi’s goons. The same goons who were Mubarak’s goons. The same goons who subject female protesters to “virginity tests,” manual rapes by male military “doctors” while other goons stand around and mock the victims.

Egypt! It’s a great tourist destination! Come see the pyramids! So much local color. Here, take a brochure.

3] In a serendipitous coincidence, after I wrote this this morning, the U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR put on Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the remorseless, brutal promoter of Israeli expansionism, to propagandize at length on the danger of Islamic extremists getting nuclear weapons, etc. The NPR propagandist Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR’s morning “news” program “Morning Edition,” performed the usual dutiful fawning, as is customary and required for US "journalists" to do with Israeli power personages if they want to keep their jobs, and sat at the feet of the Great One as he spewed his hawkish agitprop. Netanyahu was also on U.S. TV yesterday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” one of the self-brainwashing shows of the U.S. political elite, where he attacked the vote of the American Presbyterian Church to sell stock in three criminal U.S. corporations that supply the means of Israeli repression: Caterpillar, Motorola “Solutions” (to the “problem” of political opposition) and Hewlett-Packard. Caterpillar is probably the most notorious of the three. It provides the armored bulldozers that the Israelis have used to demolish tens of thousands of Palestinian homes, and uproot thousands of Palestinian orchard trees. Oh, and one was used to murder American Rachel Corrie. Netanyahu sickeningly couched his mendacious propaganda in terms of morality.

In a last ditch attempt to quash the Presbyterians’ divestment vote, American Zionist agents offered the Presbyterians a meeting with Netanyahu in return for canceling the vote. How’s that for arrogance? Like meeting with Netanyahu to be browbeaten by him and subjected to his agitprop is such a great privilege, a gift, a huge favor! Come, sell out your moral and humanitarian principles for the privilege of being allowed in Netanyahu’s presence. I’m sure the Israelites and their American fifth columnists don’t have the slightest inkling of what a crass insult that was. (The Presbyterians may not have been quite as clueless. The New York Times quoted one of their officials gently saying the “offer” probably had the reverse effect of what the Israelites intended. Gee, I wonder why.)

* Here’s the full statement of Australian FM JULIE BISHOP:

“Peter Greste is a well-respected Australian journalist. He was in Egypt to report on the political situation. He was not there to support the Muslim Brotherhood. We respect the outcome of the recent elections in Egypt, and we will now initiate contact at the highest levels in the new Egyptian government to see whether we can gain some kind of intervention from the new government and find out whether intervention is indeed possible at this stage. I have spoken at length with Peter Greste’s parents. They are considering their legal options, including appeal options. We do not know how long an appeal process would take. But in the meantime, we will provide whatever consular assistance we can to Mr. Greste and, of course, to his family.

“We understand that Egypt has been through some very difficult times and there has been a great deal of turmoil in Egypt, but this kind of verdict does nothing to support Egypt’s claim to be on a transition to democracy, and the Australian government urges the new government of Egypt to reflect on what message is being sent to the world about the situation in Egypt. Freedom and freedom of the press is fundamental to a democracy. And we are deeply concerned that this verdict is part of a broader attempt to muzzle the media freedom that upholds democracies around the world.”

Chinese Swoop In and Buy Up Greece for a Song

You have to hand it to the Chinese. They have a lot of strategic savvy in pursuing their economic interests.

Greece, desperate for foreign money, passed a law allowing foreigners who buy real estate worth at least 250,000 Euros to come live there. So well-heeled Chinese have been doing just that.

The Chinese also bought up Greek government debt on the cheap. And why not? The European Union and European Central Bank are enforcing repayment, loaning the Greeks money to do so while the mass of the Greek people have been driven into economic desperation.

U.S. Political Elite “Shocked” and “Stunned” by Election Defeat of House Poohbah

Republican creep Eric Cantor, the U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader (second highest House post below the Speaker of the House) lost the GOP primary in his Virginia Congressional district to an ideological “economics” professor who opposes the minimum wage and who ran against immigration law reform and “crony capitalism.” This fellow, named David Brat, was promoted by right-wing media extremists such as Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham.

The U.S. media establishment and political elite pronounced itself “stunned” by Cantor’s defeat in an election with a very low turnout (the kind susceptible to victories by motivated cadres of ideologues and small political movements). The words “stunned” and “stunning” have been repeated innumerable times by the corporate broadcast and print media in the U.S. in stories about Cantor’s fall (and on U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR). One factoid they keep mentioning is that it “is the first time since the Majority Leader post was created in 1899 that a Majority Leader lost an election.” Well, if that’s so, it’s about time.

The “stunned” reaction of the elites is a symptom of their smugness. They really believe their grip on power is unassailable, or should be, which is an even worse attitude. They think entrenched members of the political nomenklatura should never suffer the indignity of being voted out of office by mere citizens. Having proclaimed the Tea Party movement dead, defeated by “establishment” Republicans, to the great relief of the establishment, now they’ve changed their tune, and once again see the Tea Party (not an actual party, but a movement with a faction within the Republican Party) as a threat to “establishment” (sometimes called, absurdly, “moderate.”) Republicans. They identify Brat as a Tea Partyer, although Brat himself eschews the label.

The split between “establishment” Republicans and Tea Party types is partly a small capitalist vs. big capitalist split. Turns out that not all capitalists have the same interests. (It’s long overdue that small capitalists realized this. Big capitalists have been playing them for saps for decades.) Cantor’s biggest donors were Wall Street high finance firms. [1]

The Tea Party types, who partly reflect the resentments of small capitalists, hate deficit spending and social programs, and feel the “establishment” Republicans are phonies in their stated opposition to big government debt. But they go farther. They see the massive tax breaks and government subsidies and sweetheart contracts for large corporations, and the indulgence of finance capital and its massive bailout by the government, as causes of the large government debt (which undeniably they are) and as examples of corruption and favoritism that is antithetical to true free enterprise. Tellingly, the very next day after Cantor’s defeat, the stock of Boeing, a large war corporation, plunged, wiping out its gains year to date. The New York Times ran a lengthy article about big business and their lobbyists breaking out in cold sweats over Cantor’s defeat, and rushing money to help reactionary Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran beat back a Tea Party challenger for the GOP Senate nomination in that state. After Cantor’s primary defeat, Washington lobbyists for big corporation held a snap fundraiser for Cockran, raising $800,000 on the spot. (Spare change for their corporate masters.) And Michael Bloomberg Billionaire gave Cockran $250,000 in May, the article reported. [2]

The usual GOP scapegoat for government deficits and debt is social programs that actually help people. These too are bete noires of the Tea Party ideologues. But the TPers aren’t committed to walling off corporate welfare from scrutiny, cuts, and elimination, unlike “establishment” Republicans, nor are they so hot on endless U.S. imperialist aggression, not because they are anti-imperialist (i.e. morally principled) but because they don’t want to pay for it. As colossal military spending is a pillar of the U.S. power structure, this attitude is another “threat” from the perspective of establishment scum.

The “stunning” and “shocking” unseating of Cantor from his Congressional perch (don’t worry about him, he’ll go on to magnificently munificent sinecures, still securely nestled in the bosom of the corporate oligarchic power structure) should be an occasion of glee and joy for the rest of us. Shed not a tear for this hitman for the ruling classes in their endless class warfare against the rest of us. And it’s a class war the U.S. wages globally.

There’s another current event that is discombobulating the U.S. political elite- the sudden seizure of Mosul and other Iraqi cities by the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” a vicious Islamofascist armed organization. But that’s a topic for another essay.

1] The boss of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, went on CNBC, a cable TV channel devoted to fawning over Wall Street executives and acting as a platform for stock shilling, to praise Cantor and call his loss- yes- “stunning.” See “For Business And the GOP, A Cantor Effect,” New York Times, June 15, 2014, page 1.

Goldman Sachs is the preeminent parasitic finance capital firm, and it controls the U.S. Treasury Department. And I mean directly; for example Bush the Younger made the then-chairman of Goldman, Henry Paulson, a man who had amassed a fortune of $700 million while contributing nothing to the human race, Treasury Secretary, from which position he made sure the government made good Goldman’s losses in the financial calamity of 2008 caused by the unregulated mega-speculating and mortgage frauds Goldman itself engaged in and aided and abetted, and helped stampede Congress into voting for the $700 billion bailout for high finance to save it from itself. Both the regimes of Bill Clinton and Bush the Younger filled the power positions in the Treasury Department with corporatchiks from Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs executives planted in key U.S. government positions in the Bush II regime.

2] NY Times, ibid.