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. 

U.S. Using Slave Labor on a Massive Scale: What, You Don’t Believe It? Read On...

It was on the top of page one of the Sunday New York Times May 25^th, so why the skepticism? No, the Times didn’t use words like “slave,” “slavery,” “slave labor,” but that is what it described. The Times is an inveterate user of euphemisms to sugar-coat the crimes of the system that it is in large part a mouthpiece for. So let’s take a look at the article. [1]

The headline reads, “Using Jailed Migrants As a Pool of Cheap Labor.” Very, very, very cheap, in fact. So cheap as to be no different from slavery. But you have to figure that out for yourself. Which is easy to do, if you just read the subhead: “Detainees Resist a U.S. Program That Puts Them to Work for $1 a Day or Less.” Note the sugar-coated euphemism for prisoner, “detainee.” A “detainee” is someone held for a brief time. But starting with its use as a euphemism for the permanent prisoners in the U.S. military gulag at Guantanamo Bay (on occupied Cuban territory) the word has been perverted in an Orwellian way so it no longer denotes a temporary holding of a person, but actual imprisonment. The U.S. government and propaganda system don’t want to admit they have untried and unconvicted prisoners, I guess, so they pretend their captivity is brief and temporary by misusing the word “detainee.” [2]

According to the Times, in county jails no money at all is paid. Instead the prisoners are “paid” with candy bars and soda. Like the way you would “pay” a donkey or an ox. But those are the lucky ones. Some prisoners in the awful county jails of the U.S. work “free,” says the article. So no qualification at all is necessary for the word, “slave.” A word the Times assiduously avoids.

There are tens of thousands of these slave laborers, captured non-citizens in the clutches of the U.S. government (and its partners in oppression, county jails which are run by local sheriffs’ departments, and private companies in the prison business) held every year in involuntary servitude. The Federal government pays the sheriffs and private prison corporations to “house” (imprison) the bulk of the “detainees” (prisoners). The Times says there were 60,000 slave laborers in this particular slave labor “program” last year.

Now. these aren’t convicts. Of course there’s also a massive system of slavery in American prisons for citizens. This story is about “illegal immigrants,” “civil detainees” the Times calls them, swept up in the massive Obama roundup that has been going on for five and a half years now (2 million captured and counting), who are awaiting adjudication of their fate by immigration courts. According to the Times, “roughly half” of those who appear in court “are ultimately permitted to stay” in the U.S. (But not all go to court. Some “agree” to be deported to get it over with, to escape their imprisonment and separation from their families who they cannot support while imprisoned.) And that statement by the times doesn’t strike me as accurate. Most immigration prisoners have no attorneys to represent them, for one thing. [3]

One case the article highlights was a chef, forced to cook for a dollar a day, who was in the U.S. legally but was imprisoned for 19 months as a slave anyway! Seems his work visa was canceled because of a “clerical error.” 19 months imprisoned as a slave laborer because of a clerical error. That’s the kind of story that Americans would cluck their tongues at if it happened in a “backward” country like India.

The cook, interestingly, is from Guatemala, a country turned into a fascist hellhole by the U.S. coup in 1954 ordered by Eisenhower, that destroyed democracy in that country and has been a terror state ever since. For Guatemalans, there is no freedom in the “Free World.” It’s the terrible economic and political conditions in their homelands, mainly Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, that drive these immigrants to the U.S.

Both the U.S. Government and private “contractors” that now run prisons use immigrant slave labor. In some private prisons, the victims have organized resistance by refusing to work and by hunger strikes. Their corporate oppressors have responded by throwing them into solitary, which is not only a vicious punishment and attempt to break their spirits, but cuts them off from those outside trying to draw attention to the plight of the slaves. [4] (Democracy Now! reported this before the NY Times did. The Times rarely breaks news, by the way. Sometimes they refuse to report news for years and years, as in the case of 30,000 Argentines murdered by the military junta there.)

The U.S. government and media love to carry on and on about how oppressive adversary countries are. And those countries certainly are in some cases (but not others, like Venezuela and Ecuador, which are demonized because of the social and economic policies adopted by popular leaders there). But the U.S. is actually a very repressive country itself. Quick Quiz: what nation has the world’s largest prisoner population? Why, it’s the Land of Freedom, the USA. The closest competitor is CHINA, with over FOUR TIMES the population of the U.S. Well, that’s one objective measure of oppressiveness. Four percent of the world’s population, with 25% of the world’s prisoners. Amazing. And one out of nine of state prisoners are doing life, a third of those without the possibility of parole. (Most prisoners are prisoners of one of the 50 states, not Federal prisoners, which number roughly 10% of total inmates.) The U.S. has thousands of prisoners doing life for non-violent “offenses,” typically “drugs” (outlawed inebriants).

The U.S. is a country where people have been sentenced to life in prison for, among other trivial crimes: shoplifting a pair of socks; shoplifting a t-shirt; stealing a slice of pizza. (All three cases, and numerous similar ones, occurred in “liberal” California under that state’s draconian “three strikes” law, mandating a sentence of life for a third criminal conviction. Under that law, the most common “crime” resulting in a life sentence has been marijuana possession. What, the U.S. is a repressive country? What kind of anti-American propaganda is that? And California isn’t the only state with such a law. In many states, words considered “hate speech” or “terroristic threats” can land one in jail for a decade, for example.)

Actually there are many ways in which, viewed objectively, the U.S. is one of the most repressive countries on earth. The massive size of the prison population. The percentage of the adult population imprisoned. The draconian penalties under its laws- and many of the laws themselves being unjust. Selective prosecution of the “lower” classes and of political dissidents. Massive surveillance of the population. Total lack of personal privacy. Institutionalized use of torture, not just by the CIA and military, but of civil prisoners, including solitary confinement for years and even decades. Routine use of police perjury and fabricated evidence to convict people of crimes. Murder of journalists, both overseas and inside the U.S. (Danny Casolaro, Michael Hastings, and possibly Gary Webb, to name some killed stateside.)

But not to worry. After quadrupling its prison population in the last few decades, part of the media (including the NY Times) are informing us that the “trend” of “increasing incarceration” is reversing, or about to reverse, or is set to reverse, or is being “rethought.” I feel better already. Of course, the millions of people branded felons can barely get a job, are legally barred from many professions, cannot vote in many states, cannot live in public housing (so they can’t rejoin their families in many cases), cannot get public benefits like food stamps, or student loans, and on and on with a lengthy list of lifetime punishments. Whatever. They can always curl up into big balls and just die, I guess.

Maybe this awful system of power is what needs to die.

1] The online version is “Using Jailed Migrants as a Pool of Cheap Labor,” posted a day earlier, May 24, and is mostly the same as the print version.

2] Other sugar-coating euphemisms in this vein are “detention facility” for prison, “corrections” for punishment, and of course the notorious “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, sometimes rendered with a whiff of disapproval as “harsh interrogation techniques,” a term that still shields the torturers from the proper moral opprobrium that is due.

[3] Just to be clear, the word “court” is a bit misleading. These are not independent judicial forums. The “judges” are actually administrators. You can guess which side usually wins. Hell, in actual Federal courts, the government wins over 90 of cases it tries. Similarly in state courts, prosecutors win at a similar rate. The “courts” are actually part of the Department of “Justice.” That is, the prosecutors and the “judges” are part of the same organization.

The so-called Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is an office of the United States Department of “Justice” and is responsible for adjudicating immigration cases. EOIR oversees immigration “courts” in the United States through the Office of the Chief Immigration “Judge,” a “Justice” Department employee. Additionally, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which hears appeals from immigration “courts,” is part of EOIR. The establishment then pretends that this gigantic sham constitutes a fair and impartial judicial process. In fact it’s just an administrative process by the prosecutorial arm of the U.S. Government, the Do”J.”

The chief function of EOIR is to conduct removal proceedings, which are administrative proceedings to determine the “removability” (euphemism for deportation) of individuals in the United States. Removal proceedings are conducted in immigration “courts.” As of 2008, there were fifty-two immigration “courts” throughout the U.S.

[4] While the slaves aren’t doing so well, the corporations and their shareholders are holding up ok. The stock of “Corrections [sic] Corporation of America” has risen in from $3 a share to $30 over the past decade, a tenfold increase, or a 900% rise. Investing in repression is a smart investment!

A Myth Stronger Than Arithmetic: The “Stolen” 1960 Election

There’s a myth about the U.S. presidential election of 1960: that Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election by “stealing” Illinois. (Specifically that the Richard Daley Democratic political machine, which controlled Chicago, the most populous city in Illinois, cheated.)

People as varied as the reactionary numbskull playwright David Mamet, to disillusioned former CIA officer John Stockwell, believe this myth: Mamet out of ideological fanaticism, and Stockwell I assume out of carelessness. [1]

But this myth is ludicrously easy to refute, namely with simple arithmetic.

People hear this myth so often, it probably never occurs to them to check the most obvious fact on which it must rest- that if Illinois' electoral votes were given to Nixon instead of to Kennedy, Nixon would have won. But simple arithmetic shows this isn’t so. All one has to do is perform a mathematical exercise that a first grader could perform: subtract Illinois’ electoral votes from Kennedy’s original total and add it to Nixon’s, and see which number is larger. The larger number is the winner.

So let’s do what the U.S. media has apparently lacked the resources to do in 54 years.

You can confirm these numbers yourselves very easily online. Kennedy’s electoral college total was 303. Nixon’s was 219. Illinois had 27 electoral votes that year, all of them going to Kennedy. Now concentrate, here comes the tricky part: 303 MINUS 27 EQUALS 276. So if Kennedy had “really” lost Illinois, he would have had 276 electoral college votes. Now ADD 27 to Nixon’s 219, and you get 246.

Now here’s the really hard part. 276 is a BIGGER NUMBER than 246. Since the person with the BIGGER NUMBER has MORE VOTES, that person WINS. So Kennedy with 276 STILL BEATS Nixon with 246.

David Mamet, Richard Nixon’s skeleton, all you right-wing conspiracy theorists, and corporate media parrots who uncritically repeat rightwing political agitprop: go back to first grade and retake elementary arithmetic.

The people who started this myth must have either been extremely cynical, or kindergarten drop-outs.

It probably never occurs to people that mythmakers would be so brazen as to fabricate such an obviously fictive claim. Who would have the nerve? But reactionaries follow the Hitler-Stalin method: nothing is too brazen; in fact, the more whopping the lie, the better, because small lies meet with more skepticism than big ones. People assume that a whopping lie must be true, because no one would dare try to pull such a thing. [2] Also, most people could never see how completely unscrupulous Nixon was- thanks to the U.S. corporate propaganda system consistently covering for him, even after the Watergate burglary, or rather the one Watergate burglary (it wasn't the first one the “Plumbers” committed against the practically unguarded Democratic National Committee offices- not even an alarm? or did the CIA-trained burglars, including JFK assassin E. Howard Hunt, disarm an alarm?)

And Nixon, true to his utterly cynical nature, actually put it about for years afterwards that he didn’t challenge the election results for the good of the country! Chutzpah, forevermore thy name is Richard Milhous Nixon. And notice how his slimy move served a dual political function. He deflects right-wingers who might be angry at him for “caving in,” and he presents himself to everyone else as noble, high-minded, self-sacrificing for the good of the nation, a man so loyal he let himself be cheated out of the presidency to serve the higher purpose of protecting the stability and perceived legitimacy of the political power structure! Nixon, one of the most selfish men who ever lived! A man who spent his life playing every angle for self-advancement and self-aggrandizement. The cynicism is supremely ironic.

Meanwhile, the Zombie Myth of the Stolen 1960 Presidency will never die, it seems. The U.$. media is assiduous about heaping ridicule on true conspiracy accounts, such as the assassinations of the Kennedys and King, and the 9/11 attacks, but this one gets a pass, as do most right-wing conspiracy theories. None Dare Call It Bias and Hypocrisy.

1] Not too many years ago, the idiot reactionary Mamet was given space in the Village Voice (an allegedly “alternative” weekly paper) to spout this impossible conspiracy theory. I sent the Voice a letter pointing out the math, but the “leftist” paper didn’t run it, nor did they run a correction so their readers wouldn’t be disinformed by the falsehood.

2] Hitler explicitly stated that a big lie was better than a small one because the average person wouldn’t imagine that anyone would be so brazen as to tell such an obvious untruth, whereas they are more suspicious of small lies because these are the kind they’re familiar with (and that they themselves tell). But he didn’t mean HE lied. He said JEWS used this technique to evade responsibility for losing World War I for Germany. You see, the Jews were guilty of blaming the German General Staff. Ironically, Hitler’s example of the Big Lie technique was itself a big lie.

From James Murphy's translation of Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”):

“But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

“All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X.

The Awfulness of the Olympics

Corrupt scam run for years by a fascist. Rampant bribery and insider dealing. Cynical multibillion dollar business that exploits naïve young athletes who are “paid” in “glory” and “dreams.”

Citizens forced to involuntarily subsidize the cynical, manipulative spectacle to the tune of billions of dollars for the benefit of the Olympics business and politicians who get to preen on “the world stage” for a few days.

Ever since Hitler used them for political propaganda, politicians everywhere, from heads of state down to mayors vying to be “host” cities, have seen the Olympics as a chance to polish their own images. Politicians leech billions from their subjects for the politicians' vanity projects, “hosting” the Olympics. (The politicians and media propagandists prefer the word “prestige” to vanity.) “Hosting” means bribing the Olympics' poohbahs individually, and politicians spending billions on stadia and gussying up their towns, to provide venues for this business that provides entertainment for two weeks or so once every two years.

An event that is explicitly nationalistic, promotes nationalism and competition between nations. The spectators' role is to cheer for “their” nation's athletes, not for athletes per se, athleticism, or individual sports.

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thousands of poor people are being forced from their homes and permanently relocated miles away, far from their former jobs and transportation, to make way for the Olympics. Ripped from their communities, they are more human tumbling tumbleweeds blown hither and yon by an inhuman power system.

German Government Reaffirms Status as BootlickingToady to U.S.

The regime of Chancellor Angela Merkel has barred Edward Snowden from coming to Germany to testify before a Parliamentary committee. This despite the fact that Snowden revealed not just massive spying on German citizens by the NSA, with the help of the German secret police, but deliberate targeting of Merkel's own cellphone, starting before she became Chancellor.

Her regime apparatchiks informed the committee in writing that allowing Snowden in to testify would "run counter to the political interests of the Federal Republic" and "put a grave and permanent strain" on US-German relations. Unlike tapping their Chancellor's phone, apparently. Which speaks volumes about Germany's relationship to the U.S., and the hollowness of German “democracy,” since a parliamentary committee can be stymied in its work in this high-handed fashion.

Merkel has been summoned to the capital of the Empire, Washington, D.C., to “confer” about forcing Russia to abandon Ukraine, and to get Europe to agree to a trade deal to the U.S.' liking. (The U.S. has the upper hand in such negotiations not only because of its superior power, but because it knows exactly what the other side in the negotiations are thinking, strategizing, and the minimums they'll accept, thanks to the NSA tapping and bugging all European governments' and pan-European institutions' computers, phones, and offices, which we also know now thanks to Edward Snowden.) Apparently they don't trust phones so they need to speak in person. And notice who goes to see who. The subservient one is summoned into the presence of the superior one.

The U.S. has even refused to agree to stop spying on allies like Germany, as Germany has asked.

To add insult to injury, it only took a mere U.S. Assistant Secretary of State to bar Germany's pick for Ukrainian leader from even entering the puppet government (the boxer Vitali Klitschko), as we know from the infamous “Fuck the EU” phone call between the imperious Victoria Nuland and the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine, the smarmy Geoffrey Pyatt. [See “U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion.”]

The Green Party leader, Simone Peter, had this to say of Merkel: "Merkel is displaying cowardice towards our ally America. We owe the Americans nothing in this respect. The government must at least make a serious effort to safely bring Snowden to Germany and let him give evidence here. But Merkel doesn't want that."

Merkel will do as she's told about Ukraine. A Good German, she is an authoritarian who obeys superiors. And the U.S. president is clearly her superior. The only opposing force is the economic interests of German business that is invested in Russia, trades with Russia, buys fuel supplies from Russia. That puts her in a squeeze between opposing forces.

The mystery is why the German people chose to be ruled by this dull matron. There is a Green Party, and a Left Party, whose members in parliament were miffed by the blocking of Snowden from appearing to help parliament do its job. They were overruled by the government, a coalition of the right-wing “Christian Democratic” party (Merkel's party) and the fake-liberal “Social Democrats.”

Of course, Snowden can still testify from Russia by remote video connection, for example. That will enable the NSA to record the testimony in real time. Another victory for America! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Annals of Newspeak

In George Orwell's famous classic of totalitarianism, 1984, the ruling dictatorship had its own vocabulary, called Newspeak, which basically meant inverting words to mean the opposite of their previous meanings. For example, Slavery is Freedom.

Barack Obama and his minions have shown themselves to be assiduous disciples of the principle of Newspeak; to invert the meanings of words. Examples are legion: here are two recent ones I happened to notice.

In Ukraine, a violent mob overthrew the elected government, and the U.S. installed replacement “leaders.” These people Obama refers to as “democratic leaders.” Unelected, yet somehow “democratic.” Capitalists better no longer sneer at Bolshevik misuse of the word “democratic.” [1]

Another recent example is Obama's secret police henchman John Brennan. Obama wanted Brennan to replace Democratic Party apparatchik Leon Panetta as CIA head a few years back, but Brennan's involvement in CIA torture programs scuttled that back then. So Brennan was brought to Obama's side to run Obama's drone assassination program for him. So beloved by Obama is Brennan, that Obama last year once again moved to install Brennan at the top of the CIA, and this time he succeeded.

Brennan, as you'd expect of a career secret police type like him, can barely open his mouth without lying. But he has a habitual phrase whenever he utters a real howler. It's “Nothing could be further from the truth.” So during his Senate confirmation hearings for CIA Director, in denying that the drone death program ever harmed a hair on an innocent person's head, he used the phrase. [2]

Now that he was caught spying on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers and stealing documents off their CIA-provided computers, he once again denies what is proven fact with the phrase “Nothing could be further from the truth."

You can be guaranteed that if John Brennan says of something that “Nothing could be further from the truth,” it's true. It's like a tell by a poker player, a dead giveaway.

1] See “Obama Dictates Terms to Russia To Keep Its Naval Base in Crimea.”

2] See “Jeremy Scahill: Assassinations of U.S. Citizens Largely Ignored at Brennan CIA Hearing,” democracynow.org, February 8^th, 2013.