Favorite Targets the BBC Loves To Bash (Under the Cover of "Journalism")

After several years of monitoring the British government's global propaganda arm, the BBC (British Broadcasting Government), what leaps out at me are the following objects of hate at the BBC:

-The Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolas Maduro

-The Colombian rebel movement FARC

-The defunct secret police agency the STASI of the defunct nation East Germany (they just bashed this one again September 14)

-The defunct Soviet Union

-Russia

-Vladimir Putin

Now by "bashing" I mean gratuitous stories that are slanted and grossly unbalanced.

For example, in attacking the Venezuelan govenment, they never give the government's viewpoint, nor that of the millions of Venezuelans who support it. You ONLY hear those Venezuelans attacking the regime, and the foreign governments trying to overthrow it (namely the U.S.). Even worse, while constantly portraying the Maduro government as violently repressive, they have completely hidden the facts that the so-called "protesters" are in fact violent thugs who set fires, attack motor vehicles, burn cliinics, murder policemen, and have burned alive dark-skinned poor people who the "protesters" presume are Chavistas, based on their pigmentation and economic class. But that's not bad enough for the smarmy and dishonest propagandists at the BBC. They cynically add in the people, including police, murdered by the thugs the BBC portrays as brave oppressed people fighting for democracy, with the street goons who get themselves killed while committing felonies in the streets, in one total, which they mislead listeners and viewers into believing are all victims of government violence.  They talk about "protesters," then give a number of people killed to date, sneakily aggregating deaths on both sides without telling you.

NPR, a U.S.-government domestic propaganda network, is the same as the BBC in regards to how it "covers" Venezuela.

You don't have to be a supporter of the Maduro regime- I'm not- to see that this vulgar propaganda is merely a political operation to prepare public opinion in the U.S., UK, and wherever in the world people are stuck relying on the BBC for their "news," for the overthrow of the "evil" and "repressive" Venezuelan government, in the name of "restoring democracy."

Yeah, the U.S. and UK are so in love with democracy that both are shoveling armaments in the Saudi Arabian regime''s hungry maw as fast as they can. Saudi Arabia, one of the two most repressive countries on earth (North Korea is the other) is using those weapons to destroy Yemen. They are butchering its people, starving them with a naval blockade, and causing an uncontrolled cholera epidemic which has sickened over 600,000 Yemenis and killed several thousand already. All to try to put in power a so-called "president" who has so little indigenous support that like the South Vietnamese generals who ruled that ersatz country, are totally reliant on foreign military power to try and subjugate the populace. (One group, the Houthis, were able to put the fake Yemeni government to flight in Saudi Arabia.)

Western guff about "human rights" and "democracy," SOO cynically dishonest, has done much to discredit those essential concepts. Just as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and going down the scale of degeneration, the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia (or "Kampuchia" as it was styled when his psychopaths, the Khmer Rouge, ruled it) and Robert Mugabe in Ziimbabwe and others, have discredited and destroyed the very words "communism" and "socialism" with their cynical misappropriation of those terms for their own base power manias, so are human rights and democracy being delegitimized by the scumbag imperialists of "the West."

The BBC (and the entirety of Western power-establishment media) has been so grossly twisted on the question of Ukraine, and Crimea, that it merits a separate essay. Just coincidentally, an example of deranged BBC distortion of reality occurs as I write this. According to the BBC, Russia is now holding military exercises "close to NATO's frontier." In other phrasing, they "report" breathlessly "Russian military operations near NATO's border- is it cause for alarm." That is to say, inside Russia on Russia's own border. It just so happens that NATO has pushed itself RIGHT UP TO THE RUSSIAN BORDER. So now if Russia stations its OWN MILITARY INSIDE ITS OWN BORDERS, that is deemed to be a "Threat" to NATO! Amazing.

I don't like Russia, and Putin is a sinister autocrat. But I don't throw objectivity and reason out the window because of it.

But then, I'm not a propagandist.

In Surprise Upset, Egyptian Military Dictator Wins 97% of "Vote" In "Presidential Election"

Barely a peep out of U.S. establishment media about it. Which provides a stark and very politically revealing contrast with how they went on and on about the "so-called election" of Putin, just concluded. Putin ran against 7 opponents, and received 76% of the vote.  Sisi imprisoned and intimidated all of his opponents, and ran against a ringer who said he was supporting Sisi!

It's true that there were reports of ballot box stuffing in Russia. And the West's choice for Russian president, Viktor Navalny, was barred from voting. However there is no reason to doubt that Putin would have won in a fair election against Navalny, if by a less impressive margin.

Western media gave Putin another demerit for the "low" turnout of 64% in Russia. (It was only 40% in Egypt- of course that was lightly skated over.) I suppose the media hacks forgot that turnout in U.S. presidential elections is only 54-55%!

The elephant in the room here is how U.S. media barely mentioned the Egyptian pseudo-election, and the ongoing, horrible repression in Egypt. It is another example of the blatant, hypocritical, double standards Western media apply. The lack of objectivity is what distinguishes journalism from propaganda.

Payment Extracted From Russian Government for Liquidation of Aleppo

As the murderous Assad regime snuffs out the last pockets of resistance to its evil reign in the city of Aleppo, Syria, a 22-year-old Turkish policeman took it upon himself to impose a small price on Russia for its aerial bombardment of the city, including all of the hospitals. Shouting " Don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria!" the off-duty cop shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, at "a posh art gallery" in the Turkish capital of Ankara. [1]

A video of the incident aired on Turkish media showed the man, a riot policeman named Mevlut Mert Altintas proclaiming in Arabic  "We are the descendants of those who supported the Prophet Muhammad, for jihad." We see once again that it often takes a zealot or fanatic to have the courage (and indifference to his personal fate) to sacrifice oneself and attack into the teeth of Power. (Some reports say Altintas was killed. If not, he's in for some savage torture. For one thing, the Erdogan regime will want him to “confess” to “the conspiracy” that Erdogan and Putin have already posited led to this killing.)

Edward Snowden in a way fits the description of a self-sacrificing zealot, but of course his action was non-violent and very beneficial, if ultimately as futile as the assassination of the ambassador. But in both cases, at least some cost is imposed on the oppressors of humanity. That is worthwhile.

The day before the assassination, the Russian, Turkish, and Iranian foreign and war ministers met in Moscow to conspire on the ongoing crushing of the rebellion of the Syrian people against the despotic and ultra-cruel regime of Bashar al-Assad, an absolute dictator who inherited the dictatorship from his mass murderer father Hafez. (No slouch in the killing department himself. Like father, like son, apparently.)

With utter predictability, the state terrorist Russian president Vladimir Putin, Karlov's boss, immediately branded the killing terrorism, and vowed revenge. “The only answer to the murder of the Russian ambassador to Turkey must be the intensification of the struggle against terrorism,” Putin said darkly on Russian national television. “And the bandits will feel it,” he added menacingly. (No doubt to the approval of Donald Trump, who admires "strength." That makes Trump an authoritarian, of course, since fetishizing power is a key aspect of authoritarianism. But then Trump's authoritarianism has been on display for years, in his role as a Business Boss.) the Kremlin foreign ministry also weighed in with the"T" word, calling it “a terrorist attack,” I'd call it retribution for Russian crimes against humanity.

Showing he understands nothing, Putin also misunderstood the avenging gunman's motive entirely, even though the assassin said quite clearly what his motive was. Putin framed the killing in conspiratorial terms, seeing a “provocation aimed at rupturing ties between Russia and Turkey” in the act. "The crime that has been committed is undoubtedly a provocation aimed at derailing the ties between Russia and Turkey, as well as the peace process in Syria," Oh, undoubtedly. and I just love your "peace process" in Syria! Nothing like bombing people into submission to achieve "peace."

Yes yes I know, there are jihadists in Syria. But the 80% of the Syrian population that oppose Assad are not "jihadists" and "terrorists." This uprising began with street protests inspired by the Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia. The Assad regime responded by murdering protesters in the streets, and kidnapping and torturing people. THEN people took up arms, when they had no choice to defend themselves. Obama and his minions intoned "Assad Must Go," but Obama didn't want to support the rebellion with the necessary arms, especially anti-aircraft small arms, in part out of fear they'd end up in jihadists' hands. After a year or two, jihadists did appear in Syria, so Obama could rationalize, See? I was right.

The mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, hopped on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, opining that the killer's intent was to disrupt Turkish-Russian relations. Why not take the gunman at his word? He said, shouted why he did it!

I guess politicians, being cold, callous beings, cannot imagine that there are people motivated by the suffering of others. That is just beyond their ken. So they must fabricate imaginary conspiracies and convoluted political conjectures. (The U.S. media and other elite sectors do that all the time too. For example, J. Edgar Hoover, the now-deceased longtime FBI secret police chief, thought that the movement for black civil rights was a "communist conspiracy." And president Lyndon Johnson thought that the massive popular movement against his war on Vietnam was being created in Moscow! He ordered the CIA to uncover this "plot" that somehow turned millions of Americans into zombie puppets of the Kremlin. I kid you not. That is how blind our rulers are to their own criminality- that they have to deny any possibility of fault by themselves that is provoking opposition from normal humans. Positing malign conspiracies is one way rulers evade facing up to their own responsibility for the reactions provoked by their crimes and oppression.)

The destruction of Aleppo, which has included the systematic bombardment of every hospital in the city and targeting of schools, among other atrocities, is characterized as a "liberation" from "terrorists" by the cynical Russian and Syrian governments, rhetoric adopted by knee-jerk anti-Americans in Western countries whose human rights principles are apparently lower in priority than their need to assume that whatever side the U.S. opposes are Good Guys. This stems from their simple-minded, lazy habit of seeing the world in binary terms. (Readers of this blog will have no trouble discerning that I am unsparing in my criticism of the U.S. for its crimes. Those who cannot see other sources of evil in the world have a most peculiar blind spot) Even though the U.S. has been largely AWOL in Syria, these ideologues blame the U.S. for the Syrian tragedy. They also consider Hillary Clinton a "warmonger" for wanting to intervene. Had the U.S. supported the rebellion in the first year, the Syrian people would have had a fighting chance to free themselves of the gothically cruel Assad regime. A bombing campaign to destroy Assad's air force would have stopped the dropping of barrel bombs and chemical agents, for example. Russia only sent in its air force to assist Assad in his slaughter a year ago. (The uprising is now five years old.)

The Washington Post claims that "Russian authorities vowed to reveal a larger plot — and some [UNNAMED] in Moscow suggested that the West was to blame for its support of moderate rebel factions in Syria." Unlike how it treats with ridicule discussion of actual conspiracies by the U.S. Deep State, this fanciful conspiracy theorizing is reported respectfully by U.S. media like the Post.

"Putin stopped short of that, [i.e. of blaming the West] saying only, 'We need to know who guided the hand of the murderer.” That is, who to take out our rage on. [3]

There he goes again, with a conspiracy theory. As if passionate (or obsessive, if you want to put a negative spin on it) individuals need to be someone else's puppet to act. Not everyone on earth is a puppet or a puppet-master, Putin.

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, already "knew" it was a conspiracy, and what it was about: “We know [sic] that this is a provocation aiming to destroy the normalization process of Turkey-Russia relations,” Erdogan said immediately in a speech he rushed to give. “But the Russian government and the Turkish republic have the will to not fall into that provocation.” It must be nice to be able to "know" things without having to investigate or discover actual facts. Makes life so much easier to just assume that whatever you want to believe is true. [4] 

Note Erdogan's repeated use of the word "provocation," a favorite word of Russian conspiracy-mongers that traces back to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and probably earlier. Do I detect pandering to the Russians?

Erdogan called Putin to offer condolences, and the two reportedly pledged cooperation against "terrorism." "Terrorism" being code for opposition to state power, including non-violent opposition or even just protest. That's also the U.S. function definition, by the way, as the FBI, DHS, et al routinely brand protesters considered "left wing," such as the Occupy Movement, "terrrorists." So see? Even enemies can agree on something!

Here's a bet, Turkish autocrat Erdogan will blame Gulen for the assassination, or else the Kurds.

One more thing. A single man, motivated by conviction, has imposed more of a cost on Russia for its crimes in Syria than the Mighty Superpower Tough Talking U.S. The U.S. has only jawboned and condemned Russia over Syria. It hasn't even imposed economic sanctions, as it did to punish Russia for interfering with the U.S. takeover of Ukraine. That speaks volumes about actual U.S. "values" and goals. It doesn't care one whit about human rights, self-determination, or freedom.

Unwanted politics intrudes at "a posh art gallery."

A minion of autocracy bites the dust. He won't be dining on caviar tonight.

1]  "Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov shot dead in Ankara," Aljazeera, December 20, 2016. Aljazeera quotes the gunman thusly:

"'Don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria,' the attacker said in Turkish after gunning down the ambassador, as seen on a video shared by Turkish media from the scene.

"'Whoever took part in this cruelty will pay the price, one by one... Only death will take me from here,' the man said while holding a pistol.

"He then continued in Arabic, saying: 'We are the descendants of those who supported the Prophet Muhammad, for jihad.'"

2] "Turkish police officer, invoking Aleppo, guns down Russian ambassador in Ankara," Washington Post, December 19, 2016. The New York Times quoted Putin in almost the same words,  but claims he made the remarks "in an emergency meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and other top officials." The Times version of the quote is  “There can be only one answer to this — stepping up the fight against terrorism, and the bandits will feel this.” "Russian Ambassador to Turkey Is Assassinated in Ankara," NY Times, December 19. The Times quoted the gunman as declaiming,  “God is great! Those who pledged allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!” The Post has him yelling, “We are those who pledged jihad to Muhammad!” Referring to Syria, he added, “Every single person who has a share in this atrocity will pay for it!”

3]  Washington Post, ibid.

4] New York Times, op cit. Funny thing, the guy who messed up Turkish-Russian relations was Erdogan himself. About a year ago, he had his jets shoot down a Russian fighter-bomber over Syria next to the Turkish border (the Turks and U.S. media falsely claimed or implied it was shot down overflying Turkey- it had strayed for a few seconds over the border but was shot down over Syria) because Erdogan was unhappy that the Russians were bombing ethnic Turkmen Syrian rebels. The Russians responded by cutting off the lucrative traffic of Russian vacationers to Turkey. This changed Erdogan's attitude, so he mended fences with Russia. 

Turkey's role in Syria is a mass of contradictions, and shows what a treacherous sea of boiling cross-currents "the conflict" there is. Turkey mainly wants to destroy the Kurds, which the U.S. supports in the Kurds resistance to Assad. But the U.S. makes distinctions between "terrorist" Kurds and "moderate" (i.e. "Good Guy") Kurds, which the Turks don't. Turkey for a long time supported jihadists in an underhanded fashion, allowing them to cross the Turkish border and obtain supplies through Turkey. Jihadists are U.S. enemy Number 1, or maybe Number 2, after Russia, these days, depending on which American ideologue/polemicist/apparatchik/or general you ask, and the day of the week.

Assad has shelled and bombed Turkish border villages several times, and Turkey semi-wants to see Assad gone. Russia is backing Assad in a major way, along with Iran, which has sent troops to help Assad crush the Syrian people, and the Lebanese "terrorist" (to the West) militia Hezbollah is also fighting on Assad's behalf. (Or rather it's the militia arm of Hezbollah, which is a religious/political organization and movement.) So U.S. ally Turkey, where the U.S. has air bases, is bombing U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria, and Assad foe Turkey is getting friendly and cooperative with main Assad backer Russia, whose air force is pulverizing rebel-held cities and towns. 

To make things more interesting, various Arabian peninsula Sunni autocracies- and the U.S. is good buddies with all those repressive monarchies, and supplies them with weapons and munitions and training- are funneling weapons and supplies to the jihadists in Syria-  the jihadists the U.S. wants to exterminate.. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are known to be doing this. 

But no hard feelings: the U.S. is currently helping the Saudis and other associated oil monarchies wage an aerial bombardment campaign of terror against Yemen. They've bombed 58 hospitals so far, with the jets the U.S. sold them, dropping the bombs the U.S. sold them, and flying to and from their targets with the aid of U.S. tanker planes refueling the jets dropping the bombs. And U.S. officers are in the Saudi command posts helping pick targets.

Is that all clear now?

Swindler Trump's Presidential Campaign Run By a Swindler- U.S. Media Acts As Accomplices

Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is a known swindler who stole $19 million from a Russian businessman. The businessman has been trying to get his money back for eight years now. He had to hire a private investigator just to try and find out where Manafort was hiding.

This is not some crazy "Internet rumor" or "conspiracy theory" from "a blogger sitting in his parents' basement in his underwear," as establishment propagandists like to sneer when they want to discredit (as distinct from disproving) some inconvenient information. This is from the Washington Post, an organ that sits at the apex of the U.S. bourgeois propaganda system. [1]

According to an article in the Post, Manafort and an accomplice, Richard Gates, swindled the Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, by tricking him into "investing" with them. Manafort's mark has been futilely trying to get is money back. In fact, the victim can't even get an explanation of where his money is from the thief Manafort. [2]

Manafort has long been involved with state criminals such as Reagan, Bush the Elder, U.S.-backed Philippine tyrant Ferdinand Marcos, and the recently-ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. You would have thought that this last bit of unsavory business would have occasioned loud denunciations in U.S. media, but naaah. What coverage there is is quizzical and faintly admiring. (Tells you something abut the moral and ethical sewer the U.S. elites inhabit.) Manafort was also a helpmate to Jonas Savimbi's terrorist UNITA, a U.S.- favored Angolan group trying to overthrow the government there until Savimbi finally met his maker. [3]

The curious- and damning- thing is, that despite the prominence and "respectability" of the Washington Post, the rest of the propaganda system has virtually ignored the story. This despite all the hand-wringing about what a disaster a Trump presidency would be. (One must wonder, given how the corporate propaganda system, which likes to call itself "the media," has been doing a bit of hand-wringing over the prospect of a Trump presidency, mainly over his unpredictability, and his failure to get on board the Hate Russia bandwagon. To the contrary, he apparently is quite favorably inclined towards Putin, and is suspected of having prospective business dealings in Russia. The leaking of Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks, proving that Hillary Clinton's handpicked hit-woman, DNC chair and Florida Congresswoman Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, deliberately orchestrated a campaign of sabotage against Senator Bernard Sanders' campaign for the party's presidential nomination, has been blamed, so far without any evidence presented- unless you consider the opinions of unnamed "experts" to be evidence, the few identified ones hedging their identification of Russia as the "culprit,"- this outing of information we are all entitled to, as it affects our lives, by being blamed on Russia, is adduced as more proof that Trump is somehow in Putin's pocket. [4]

It's quite natural that Manafort should wind up at Trump's side. Manafort is a scoundrel with a history of service to corrupt reactionaries, and Trump, even with his idiosyncracies, certainly qualifies as one of those. And both Manafort and Trump are rip-off artists, although from what we currently know, Trump is much more accomplished as one.

There's Trump "University," There's using Polish immigrant construction workers at a fraction of the normal pay, without even providing them hard hats. There's cheating his casino workers out of overtime pay. He didn't pay contractors who built his casinos, causing some of them to go out of business. (Great job creator you are, Trump!) There's fleecing banks by taking out loans and not repaying them.

Trump brags about his numerous bankruptcies. He presents this as a savvy business practice, gaming the system. In other words, he plotted in advance to go heavily into debt and declare bankruptcy,

That means he planned to rip people off by "legally" stiffing them for what they were owed. Contractors, workers, banks, and business "partners."

Trump almost never uses his own money. He started out using his father's money, then went on to using the money of saps who "invest" with him, and of dumb bankers. Conniving, corrupt politicians grant him favorable tax "abatements" (exemptions from what by law he would otherwise pay) and various regulatory preferences.

Trump doesn't even make his own charitable contributions. Others fund his "foundation," and his own "donations" over the years have consisted of letting people use his golf courses gratis for charity events, which he then takes a tax write-off on! He had the chutzpah a few months ago to loudly bray about a million dollar donation to veterans' organizations which he then didn't make, until the Washington Post forced his hand by exposing him. (Naturally he excoriated the Post for this terrible terrible deed they did!)

What I always found most stunning over the decades was how the New York City media relentlessly promoted this obvious egomaniacal hustler. The only exception was the weekly paper the Village Voice, which consistently practiced actual journalism and reported on his scams. [5]

There have long been creeps, immoral con men (Clinton, Obama), and reactionaries feigning a human face (Reagan, Nixon, the Bushes) in U.S. politics, but Trump is new in that he doesn't even wear a mask. The fact that millions of people are drinking his obviously rancid, poisonous Kool-Aid forces one to the conclusion that there are far too many imbeciles in America for comfort.


And America is a nation that threatens the whole world.

Slipping in and out of the shadows: Election manipulator 

and swindler Paul Manafort.

Paul is the PERFECT guy for me! 

1]  I am writing this from my very own home, and I'm not wearing underwear, I'm BUCK NAKED! Take THAT, bourgie propagandists!

The Washington Post has long been in a permanent rivalry with the New York Times to be at the very top of the media pecking order in terms of status and influence. As it is based in the capital city of the U.S. empire, Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia), it is also a sort of hometown paper for the the imperialist nomenklatura and national political elite.

Its editorial stance is consistently quite reactionary, unlike the New York Times, which is "liberal" mostly and reactionary partly. Its reporting is frequently quite ideological. The people who write it would probably be too self-conscious to do so naked, especially if they knew there were hidden cameras observing them.

2]  "Inside Trump adviser Manafort’s world of politics and global financial dealmaking," Washington Post, April 26, 2016.

3]  "Mystery man: Ukraine's U.S. fixer," Politico, March 5, 2014. The article bemusedly describes Manafort's disappearance, apparently to avoid Deripaska's lawyers, process servers, and investigator.

4]  An ideologue/apparatchik by the name of Anne Applebaum pushed this line very hard yesterday on "The Takeaway," a "public" radio show on government network NPR, hosted by John Hockenberry. Applebaum was miffed that people were paying any attention at all to the content of the emails instead of piling on Putin and leaving the Clinton machine out of it. How unfair that Wasserman-Schultz should be targeted. To Applebaum, the only story here is Russian subversion of a U.S. election.

Applebaum is an unreconstructed, career Cold Warrior, as her official bio on the Washington Post website makes clear. The way people like her have dealt with the disappearance of the organizing principle of their lives, the Evil Soviet Union, is by substituting Russia for the SU. Problem solved!

For an example of Hockenberry's journalistic ethics, see "John Hockenberry Illustrates Lying By Omission." To be fair, Hockenberry isn't all bad. He's more of a mixed bag. He "balances" normal, even humane journalism with reactionary crap and power-sycophancy.

5]  There are hundreds of articles on the Village Voice website exposing Donald Trump. And Wayne Barrett, who reported for the Voice for many years, wrote an important book about Trump, as have a few other authors. David Cay Johnston has also been on Trump's tail.

NY Times Obsessed With Plight Of Dissidents- But Only In Certain Countries

The New York Times has run full-length articles for four days in a row now, about the prosecution of the Russian female punk rock band Pussy Riot. These articles appear in the main news section, not Arts, for example.

Pussy Riot is being prosecuted for performing an anti-Putin and "sacrilegious" song in a Moscow cathedral of the arch-reactionary Russian Orthodox Church. (That church has the same kind of relationship to the Russian State as the Roman Catholic Church has to the New York State and City governments, that is, very close and influential.) Of course I don't think they should be prosecuted. (Wonder what would happen if some punk rockers performed a raucous, anti-Catholic and anti-U.S. Government song inside St. Patricks's Cathedral, say? Think they'd be prosecuted?)

However, unmentioned in all the Times' lavish coverage of the fate of three formerly obscure punk rockers in Russia, are the U.S. antecedents and precedents. The U.S. has a long history of persecuting rock musicians and other entertainers who run afoul of the establishment. The U.S. media keeps reminding us that the Russian punk rockers face a possible maximum of 7 years in prison. (All indications are that they won't get that. Putin himself publicly signaled as much.) Under the Nixon regime, radical band MC5 frontman John Sinclair was lured into giving two joints to an undercover agent of the U.S. police state, for which he was sentenced to ten (not seven) years.* And more recently, the Los Angeles County D.A. went after the scalps of the Dead Kennedys. The charge?  "Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors" Despite being acquitted, their albums were subsequently banned from large chain stores. The Dead Kennedys broke up under the pressure. The D.A. openly announced his political intent: to "send a message" to the underground/alternative music scene that their expression would not be tolerated. (See http://www.alternativetentacles.com/bandinfo.php?band=jello&page=3. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Kennedys and   http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/dead+kennedys/biography.html )

When "Communists" (Bolshevik hacks) still ruled Czechoslovakia, the U.S. media liked to hold up that state's persecution of the band Plastic People of the Universe as an example of how repressive and unfree their Cold War enemies were, by implication in contrast to the allegedly "free" "West." What ludicrous, bald-faced hypocrisy. But the propaganda works, because the corporate media is as disciplined and uniform as the state media of any totalitarian system, so the fate of persecuted musicians and dissidents in America is completely unknown to the vast majority of the populace, since the propaganda system never reports it. (Or rarely, and only in the way that Soviet or Chinese media reports the persecution of their dissidents, in a way that portrays the victims as guilty, weird, different, dirty, depraved, sexually libertine, on drugs...gee, sounds familiar!)

While the NY Times gives loving coverage to every time Chinese artist Ai Weiwei sneezes (and I certainly think the Chinese regime is loathsome and should be overthrown, unlike what the U.S. elites think, for all their tut-tutting about dissidents there!) you'd be hard-pressed to find anything about the persecution of peace activists and "leftist" protesters in the U.S. It has long been routine to repress demonstrations against the WTO, NATO, the two corporate stooge parties, and so on. They are targets in advance for raids, arrests, infiltration, entrapments, bugging, wiretapping, the entire panoply of state repression. Obama imprisoned environmental activist Tim deChristopher for two years for bidding at a Federal auction for oil leases. (By contrast, James, O'Keefe, the reactionary libel-artist, who was caught red-handed trying to bug the offices of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, was let off scot-free, as I predicted, despite committing Federal felonies, including conspiracy. Because even Democrats don't prosecute reactionaries, only progressives.)

Here's another example of the NY Times obsession with harassment of dissidents in other places, from today's nytimes.com:

THE LEDE BLOG

Kremlin Critic Debugs Office. Tweets About It.

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Aleksei Navalny, a blogger and anticorruption crusader in Russia, arrived at work on Monday to find that his office had been bugged.

Gee, we never get bugged here! You bastards never report that.

And check out the first paragraph of this article on the Times website dated today (8/8/12):

 A Russian court reduced the prison sentence for a business partner of the oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky on Wednesday, a rare show of leniency amid a spate of criminal cases against opposition leaders. ["Russian Court Lowers Jail Term for Oil Tycoon’s Associate."]

"Rare show of leniency"? Speaking of which, in the U.S., there's no Federal parole. It was abolished years ago. And their are harsh mandatory minimum sentences- like ten years for a few grams of crack cocaine. (Lately the NYT has editorialized against some mandatory minimums, out of pragmatism. The U.S.is absolutely demented in its punitive penal policies, imprisoning far more people as a percentage of population than any country on earth. And the deranged "war on drugs" is as irrational and zealous as Nazi anti-Semitism.

And U.S. Presidents and Governors have gotten more and more merciless in refusing to dole out pardons to prisoners.

As for "criminal trials against opposition leaders": well, of course the U.S. has a very long history of persecuting leaders of dissident political movements, and lately the GOP has used the legal system to persecute Democrats, with barely a whimper from that supine party. Remember how the Bush/Gonzalez gang fired 9 U.S. attorneys for refusing to bring bogus criminal charges against Democrats? Nothing ever came of that. Imagine if Democrats had done that! A Democratic President doing that would have been impeached (with the "liberal" media leading the charge). And Craig Unger, author of a new book, Boss Rove, about "Turdblossom"-that's George Bush's nickname for him- Karl Rove, says that the GOP takeover of the judiciary has led to criminal prosecutions of "hundreds" of "up and coming" Democratic politicians on questionable or spurious charges, citing specifically the persecution of ex-GA Governor Don Siegelman. [Radio interview: "The Influential Karl Rove," Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC, 8/7/12.]

        

*John Lennon, through his very public drumming up of protests against the imprisonment of Sinclair, was instrumental in getting Sinclair freed early. This was yet another black mark against Lennon in the minds of the U.S. secret police and reactionary politicians like Nixon. Ultimately the CIA arranged Lennon's assassination through its MK-Delta program of hypno-programmed assassins.