Please do read this piece very carefully. It is relevant to our access to
the kinds of journalism and opinion pieces that Sylvie used to post and that
I currently post. All of the journalists and thinkers whom I value are
slowly being silenced. All of what Hedges describes, I've seen reported in
pieces in other articles, aside from the statistics which show that Google
and Face Book have made it impossible for people to search for information
on certain subjects and individuals.
Miriam
The Silencing Of Dissent
Fish-Tree-of-Knowledge-17Sep2017-850x765
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
September 19th, 2017
Above Photo: Mr. Fish
The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate
capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual
credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to
their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting,
censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and
purveyors of fake news.
No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas
that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to
resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This
ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who
attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large
numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda,
but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.
The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to
protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the
mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the
population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the
New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and
corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party
leadership, have decided to quash public debate. The tactic they are using
is as old as the nation-statesmearing critics as traitors who are in the
service of a hostile foreign power. Tens of thousands of people of
conscience were blacklisted in this way during the Red Scares of the 1920s
and 1950s. The current hyperbolic and relentless focus on Russia, embraced
with gusto by liberal media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC,
has unleashed what some have called a virulent New McCarthyism.
The corporate elites do not fear Russia. There is no publicly disclosed
evidence that Russia swung the election to Donald Trump. Nor does Russia
appear to be intent on a military confrontation with the United States. I am
certain Russia tries to meddle in U.S. affairs to its advantage, as we do
and did in Russiaincluding our clandestine bankrolling of Boris Yeltsin,
whose successful 1996 campaign for re-election as president is estimated to
have cost up to $2.5 billion, much of that money coming indirectly from the
American government. In todays media environment Russia is the foil. The
corporate state is unnerved by the media outlets that give a voice to
critics of corporate capitalism, the security and surveillance state and
imperialism, including the network RT America.
My show on RT America, On Contact, like my columns at Truthdig, amplifies
the voices of these dissidentsTariq Ali, Kshama Sawant, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Medea Benjamin, Ajamu Baraka, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Margaret Flowers, Rania
Khalek, Amira Hass, Miko Peled, Abby Martin, Glen Ford, Max Blumenthal, Pam
Africa, Linh Dinh, Ben Norton, Eugene Puryear, Allan Nairn, Jill Stein,
Kevin Zeese and others. These dissidents, if we had a functioning public
broadcasting system or a commercial press free of corporate control, would
be included in the mainstream discourse. They are not bought and paid for.
They have integrity, courage and often brilliance. They are honest. For
these reasons, in the eyes of the corporate state, they are very dangerous.
The first and deadliest salvo in the war on dissent came in 1971 when Lewis
Powell, a corporate attorney and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote and
circulated a memo among business leaders called Attack on American Free
Enterprise System. It became the blueprint for the corporate coup détat.
Corporations, as Powell recommended in the document, poured hundreds of
millions of dollars into the assault, financing pro-business political
candidates, mounting campaigns against the liberal wing of the Democratic
Party and the press and creating institutions such as the Business
Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato
Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Federalist Society and Accuracy
in Academia. The memo argued that corporations had to fund sustained
campaigns to marginalize or silence those who in the college campus, the
pulpit, the media, and the intellectual and literary journals were hostile
to corporate interests.
Powell attacked Ralph Nader by name. Lobbyists flooded Washington and state
capitals. Regulatory controls were abolished. Massive tax cuts for
corporations and the wealthy were implemented, culminating in a de facto tax
boycott. Trade barriers were lifted and the countrys manufacturing base was
destroyed. Social programs were slashed and funds for infrastructure, from
roads and bridges to public libraries and schools, were cut. Protections for
workers were gutted. Wages declined or stagnated. The military budget, along
with the organs of internal security, became ever more bloated. A de facto
blacklist, especially in universities and the press, was used to discredit
intellectuals, radicals and activists who decried the idea of the nation
prostrating itself before the dictates of the marketplace and condemned the
crimes of imperialism, some of the best known being Howard Zinn, Noam
Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Ward Churchill, Nader, Angela Davis and Edward Said.
These critics were permitted to exist only on the margins of society, often
outside of institutions, and many had trouble making a living.
The financial meltdown of 2008 not only devastated the global economy, it
exposed the lies propagated by those advocating globalization. Among these
lies: that salaries of workers would rise, democracy would spread across the
globe, the tech industry would replace manufacturing as a source of worker
income, the middle class would flourish, and global communities would
prosper. After 2008 it became clear that the free market is a scam, a
zombie ideology by which workers and communities are ravaged by predatory
capitalists and assets are funneled upward into the hands of the global 1
percent. The endless wars, fought largely to enrich the arms industry and
swell the power of the military, are futile and counterproductive to
national interests. Deindustrialization and austerity programs have
impoverished the working class and fatally damaged the economy.
The establishment politicians in the two leading parties, each in service to
corporate power and responsible for the assault on civil liberties and
impoverishment of the country, are no longer able to use identity politics
and the culture wars to whip up support. This led in the last presidential
campaign to an insurgency by Bernie Sanders, which the Democratic Party
crushed, and the election of Donald Trump.
Barack Obama rode a wave of bipartisan resentment into office in 2008, then
spent eight years betraying the public. Obamas assault on civil liberties,
including his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, was
worse than those carried out by George W. Bush. He accelerated the war on
public education by privatizing schools, expanded the wars in the Middle
East, including the use of militarized drone attacks, provided little
meaningful environmental reform, ignored the plight of the working class,
deported more undocumented people than any other president, imposed a
corporate-sponsored health care program that was the brainchild of the
right-wing Heritage Foundation, and prohibited the Justice Department from
prosecuting the bankers and financial firms that carried out derivatives
scams and inflated the housing and real estate market, a condition that led
to the 2008 financial meltdown. He epitomized, like Bill Clinton, the
bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Clinton, outdoing Obamas later actions,
gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the dismantling of
the welfare system, the deregulation of the financial services industry and
the huge expansion of mass incarceration. Clinton also oversaw deregulation
of the Federal Communications Commission, a change that allowed a handful of
corporations to buy up the airwaves.
The corporate state was in crisis at the end of the Obama presidency. It was
widely hated. It became vulnerable to attacks by the critics it had pushed
to the fringes. Most vulnerable was the Democratic Party establishment,
which claims to defend the rights of working men and women and protect civil
liberties. This is why the Democratic Party is so zealous in its efforts to
discredit its critics as stooges for Moscow and to charge that Russian
interference caused its election defeat.
In January there was a report on Russia by the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence. The report devoted seven of its 25 pages to RT
America and its influence on the presidential election. It claimed Russian
media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as
the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while
consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton.
This might seem true if you did not watch my RT broadcasts, which
relentlessly attacked Trump as well as Clinton, or watch Ed Schultz, who now
has a program on RT after having been the host of an MSNBC commentary
program. The report also attempted to present RT America as having a vast
media footprint and influence it does not possess.
In an effort to highlight the alleged lack of democracy in the United
States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third party candidate debates
and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates,
the report read, correctly summing up themes on my show. The RT hosts
asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at
least one-third of the population and is a sham.
It went on:
RTs reports often characterize the United States as a surveillance state
and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality,
and drone use.
RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency
policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RTs
hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted
that government corruption and corporate greed will lead to US financial
collapse.
Is the corporate state so obtuse it thinks the American public has not, on
its own, reached these conclusions about the condition of the nation? Is
this what it defines as fake news? But most important, isnt this the
truth that the courtiers in the mainstream press and public broadcasting,
dependent on their funding from sources such as the Koch brothers, refuse to
present? And isnt it, in the end, the truth that frightens them the most?
Abby Martin and Ben Norton ripped apart the mendacity of the report and the
complicity of the corporate media in my On Contact show titled Real
purpose of intel report on Russian hacking with Abby Martin & Ben Norton.
In November 2016, The Washington Post reported on a blacklist published by
the shadowy and anonymous site PropOrNot. The blacklist was composed of 199
sites PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, reliably echo Russian
propaganda. More than half of those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven
ones. But about 20 of the sites were major left-wing outlets including
AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig,
Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. The blacklist and
the spurious accusations that these sites disseminated fake news on behalf
of Russia were given prominent play in the Post in a story headlined
Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during the election,
experts say. The reporter, Craig Timberg, wrote that the goal of the
Russian propaganda effort, according to independent researchers who have
tracked the operation, was punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping
Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy. Last
December, Truthdig columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote a good piece about
PropOrNot, which to this day remains essentially a secret organization.
The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, also the founder and CEO of
Amazon, has a $600 million contract with the CIA. Google, likewise, is
deeply embedded within the security and surveillance state and aligned with
the ruling elites. Amazon recently purged over 1,000 negative reviews of
Hillary Clintons new book, What Happened. The effect was that the books
Amazon rating jumped from 2 1/2 stars to five stars. Do corporations such as
Google and Amazon carry out such censorship on behalf of the U.S.
government? Or is this censorship their independent contribution to protect
the corporate state?
In the name of combating Russia-inspired fake news, Google, Facebook,
Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence
France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by
evaluators, that hunt for key words such as U.S. military, inequality
and socialism, along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura
Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Googles vice president for search
engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 evaluators to determine
the quality and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on
Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites such
as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York
Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this
censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders
for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are
struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an
economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt.
The World Socialist Web Site reported in July that its aggregate volume, or
impressionslinks displayed by Google in response to search requestsfell
dramatically over a short period after the new algorithms were imposed. It
also wrote that a number of sites declared to be fake news by the
Washington Posts discredited [PropOrNot] blacklist
had their global
ranking fall. The average decline of the global reach of all of these sites
is 25 percent.
Another article, Google rigs searches to block access to World Socialist
Web Site, by the same website that month said:
During the month of May, Google searches including the word war produced
61,795 WSWS impressions. In July, WSWS impressions fell by approximately 90
percent, to 6,613.
Searches for the term Korean war produced 20,392 impressions in May. In
July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions. Searches
for North Korea war produced 4,626 impressions in May. In July, the result
of the same search produced zero WSWS impressions. India Pakistan war
produced 4,394 impressions in May. In July, the result, again, was zero. And
Nuclear war 2017 produced 2,319 impressions in May, and zero in July.
To cite some other searches: WikiLeaks, fell from 6,576 impressions to
zero, Julian Assange fell from 3,701 impressions to zero, and Laura
Poitras fell from 4,499 impressions to zero. A search for Michael
Hastingsthe reporter who died in 2013 under suspicious
circumstancesproduced 33,464 impressions in May, but only 5,227 impressions
in July.
In addition to geopolitics, the WSWS regularly covers a broad range of
social issues, many of which have seen precipitous drops in search results.
Searches for food stamps, Ford layoffs, Amazon warehouse, and
secretary of education all went down from more than 5,000 impressions in
May to zero impressions in July.
The accusation that left-wing sites collude with Russia has made them
theoretically subject, along with those who write for them, to the Espionage
Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires Americans who
work on behalf of a foreign party to register as foreign agents.
The latest salvo came last week. It is the most ominous. The Department of
Justice called on RT America and its associateswhich may mean people like
meto register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the
corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents,
meaning we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the
intent. The government will not stop with RT. The FBI has been handed the
authority to determine who is a legitimate journalist and who is not. It
will use this authority to decimate the left.
This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this
contest. It will do what all despotic regimes dogovern through wholesale
surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed
censorship and, eventually, violence.
