Each year, the state forces you to purchase a product which you may not want or need, for a price which it dictates, raises, and confiscates annually. Then, the state often refuses to deliver the product without refunding your purchase price, while forbidding you from purchasing a replacement product elsewhere within its jurisdiction.
Canada’s socialized health care is a failure, as measured against the service the government promised to provide. Tom Kent, the senior government policy person when the Medical Care Act was passed in 1966, described the government’s objectiv : “The aim of public policy was quite clearly and simply … to make sure that people could get care when it was needed without regard to other considerations.”
However, according to a Fraser Institute survey, the median waiting time for patients in Canada from a referral by a general practitioner to the date of actual treatment, was 19.8 weeks in 2018, compared to 9.3 weeks in 1993. Waiting for treatment has deadly consequences: “Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada have noted that patients in Canada die as a result of waiting lists for universally accessible health care.” The Fraser Institute “estimates that between 25,456 and 63,090 … Canadian women may have died as a result of increased wait times between 1993 and 2009.”
When the price of something falls, all else being equal, demand rises. Since socialized health care is funded with debt and taxes, the price at the point of service is zero, and demand explodes. Supply must be rationed because it can never keep pace with demand at a zero price. The government was fully aware of this basic economic principle in 1966. Its promise to provide care “when it was needed” was always a fake promise, a pretense for expanding the power and scope of government at the expense of thousands of dead Canadians.
Canada’s Socialized Health Care – A Simple Definition
Each year, the state forces you to purchase a product which you may not want or need, for a price which it dictates, raises, and confiscates annually. Then, the state often refuses to deliver the product without refunding your purchase price, while forbidding you from purchasing a replacement product elsewhere within its jurisdiction.
In an imperfect world, it is probably true that some people did not receive care when it was needed. However, the increasingly poor performance of socialized health care gives us reason to doubt whether more people lacked access to care under a private system, than under the current system. Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, a medical doctor by trade, wrote:
“Before those programs [Medicare, Medicaid] came into existence, every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility toward the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm. Hardly anyone is aware of this today, since it doesn’t fit into the typical, by-the-script story of government rescuing us from a predatory private sector.”
“… thousands of privately funded charities provided health services for the poor. I worked in an emergency room where nobody was turned away for lack of funds.”
In 2018, Canada’s socialized health care cost approximately $4,389 per capita.
Let’s consider a household of two working parents with two children, and conservatively (high estimate) assume this household had a median income of $100,000 in 2018. Annual income (260 working days) converts to $385 daily income or $193 per worker. Therefore, the cost of socialized health care for each parent is about 23 working days ($4,389 / $193), or about 1 calendar month. And between them, they must work another 46 days to pay for their children’s health care.
The cost of socialized health care in 2018 was twenty-three times the cost of private health care in the early 20th century, measured by how long a person must work to pay for health care. (Again, I am being conservative by not including private costs in 2018 for dentists, alternative practitioners e.g. naturopaths, prescription drugs, private health insurance for non-hospital/physician services, etc., all of which would raise the per capita cost by roughly 50% )…
Curiously, there were some principled politicians amongst our ancestors. In 1851, the medical establishment drafted a bill that would grant them the power of regulating, through licensing, the number of persons who would be legally permitted to practice medicine. Parliament rejected the bill, with one politician proposing a substitute bill, the opening paragraph of which read, in part (Hamowy, p 322):
“… experience has shewn that penal enactments have not deterred unqualified persons from practising Physic, Surgery, and Midwifery, but, on the contrary, such enactments have often had the effect of preventing benevolent persons, well qualified, from lending their aid to relieve physical suffering, and it is therefore expedient and proper to repeal such penal clauses as may exist in any Acts now in force in Upper Canada …”
The medical establishment eventually got what it wanted when principled politicians were relegated to minority status, where they remain today.
Voters, however, seem to believe the government’s performance is superior to that of market entrepreneurs. As long as they continue to ignore the wisdom of their ancestors, Canadian voters are ultimately responsible for the government’s fake promise and deadly stranglehold on health care.
Be seeing you
‘Due to funding cuts, the Government has supplied us with its very own doctor!’
Labour has announced it intends to ban Eton (and other private schools) and I’m really glad.
Eton has produced some of the most egregious, squishy, politically-correct, Remainer surrender monkey, class traitor sellouts in the entirety of the Establishment, including the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby; the Chief of the General Staff Mark Carleton-Smith; Woke Prince Harry; Sir Nicholas ‘Did anyone ever mention I’m Churchill’s grandson?’ Soames; Sir Oliver Wetwin; Dave Cameron; and I’m sure there are plenty more I’ve missed.
Even when you consider the countervailing examples of George Orwell and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the case for abolishing Eton because it has nurtured so many disgusting Establishment pinkos is pretty overwhelming.
But that’s not why I’m glad Labour wants to ban it.
No, I’m glad because it finally removes all doubt that Labour is the most vile, illiberal, hypocritical, envy-filled, foamingly hard-left Opposition party Britain has ever had – and ever will have.
Here is what Labour has decided at its party conference:
The motion passed today calls for private schools to be stripped of their charitable status, to have limits placed on the number of their pupils who can attend certain universities and for their endowments and assets to be distributed in the state education sector.
It states: ‘The on-going existence of private schools is incompatible with Labour’s pledge to promote social justice, not social mobility in education.’
Once you announce, as Labour effectively has with its new ruling, that you’re perfectly comfortable with confiscating private property and redistributing it among favoured recipients then you have entered Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe territory. You no longer have any right to be taken seriously as a potential party of government, not in the United Kingdom, anyway.
There are lots of practical, economic reasons why it won’t work:
Labour’s new schools policy will cost the country billions and do nothing to increase opportunity for the most disadvantaged in society. pic.twitter.com/VlMf0PtH2f
But it is hardly a secret that Labour is economically literate. No, what is likely to do far more damage is the effect it will have on Labour’s middle-class support base.
I know lots of people who are richer than me who yet vote Labour because of the freedom it affords them to act like absolute c***s.
There’s one chap a know, a lawyer by trade, who only really likes to talk about two things – how much he earned from his latest case; how morally repugnant he finds Conservatives, the Conservative party, Boris Johnson, anyone who votes Brexit.
The metropolitan elite is full of such people, lawyers especially. They make shedloads of filthy lucre but the reason they don’t feel guilty about it or want to donate half their salaries to, say, the ‘angels’ who work in ‘our NHS’ is because voting Labour is their get out of jail free.
Problem is, a lot of these rich Labour voters also send their kids to private school — just like Labour’s Diane Abbott did, just like Labour peer Shami Chakrabati does — because obviously they don’t want their kids to get stabbed or made thicker than they already are or to rub shoulders with horrible poor people whose parents voted for Brexit.
This move by Labour may be the final straw for their middle-class support base. Even those who can’t afford private schools may finally realise that Corbyn and co mean business: that they really are as Marxist and anti-private property and redistributive as their Conservative critics have always said.
I don’t think Corbyn’s Labour will recover from this.
“In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.”
My feeling was the nightly news shows generally led with what was on the front page of WaPo and NYT.
John Humphrys, the veteran British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist who helmed its flagship Today programme for 33 years, exposed the publicly-funded broadcaster “institutional liberal bias” within days of his retirement.
Mr Humphrys expressed his relief at being free from “the BBC Thought Police” which he claims has “tried to mould the nation into its own liberal-Left image”, despite the broadcaster’s notional legals requirement to remain balanced and impartial, in memoirs which are being serialised by the Daily Mail.
The 76-year-old Welshman revealed the BBC’s “[great] fear of the politically correct brigade and the most fashionable pressure groups — usually from the liberal Left, the spiritual home of most bosses and staff”, and how the “disaster” of the British people’s vote to Leave the European Union in 2016 — against the advice of the left-neoliberal establishment — sent them reeling:
“The morning of the EU Referendum was different. Leave had won — and this was not what the BBC had expected. Nor what it wanted.
No nods and smiles when the big bosses appeared. No attempt to pretend that this was anything other than a disaster.
Their expressions were as grim as the look on the face of a football supporter when his team’s star player misses the penalty that would have won them the cup.”
Humphrys, though he voted to Remain in the European Union himself, said the result “exposed a fundamental flaw in the culture of the BBC”, and that “Its bosses, almost to a man and woman, could simply not grasp how anyone could have put a cross in the Leave box on the referendum ballot paper.”
He suggested that the public broadcasters was similarly out of touch on issues such as mass migration, and how the efforts of Robin Aitken, a senior BBC journalist, to put together a dossier highlighting the way the corporation had fallen into a “Left-wing agenda [which] was ‘wholeheartedly and unashamedly pro-EU’” were met first with silence and then with an instruction to “f**k off”…
“By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent,” he revealed, referring to two major left-wing, europhile outlets.
“Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover,” he said.
“In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.”
As we mark the 232nd anniversary of the signing of America’s governing charter in 1787, we have ample evidence that it continues to be violated by the federal officials charged with upholding it.
Last month, The Young Turks (TYT) news and talk network obtained the FBI’s 2018-2020 “Consolidated Strategy Guide,” which not only referenced the targeting of so-called “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE’s) but also those designated as engaged in “Anti-Government/Anti-Authority Extremism,” “Abortion Extremism,” or “Animal Rights/Environmental Extremism.” In a House Oversight and Reform subcommittee hearing in June, FBI Counterterrorism Division Director Michael McGarrity had admitted under questioning that the FBI could not cite a single example of a murder that could be linked to any African American activist group, including Black Lives Matter. He also claimed that the Bureau had eliminated the entire category of “Black Identity Extremists” from its lexicon. The document obtained by TYT casts doubt on McGarrity’s claim, particularly given the use of the term “Black Racially Motivated Extremists” (BRME) elsewhere in the Guide.
The Guide does not disclose the precise criteria the FBI uses to label individuals or groups as extremists or alleged threats, but it does discuss in some detail the aggressive “intelligence collection” posture the FBI took against so-called BIE’s. Page 1 of the section on BIE’s contains the following:
“The FBIHQ-led Threat Mitigation Strategy IRON FIST was implemented to mitigate the potential threat posed by the BIE movement at the national level. IRON FlST will accomplish this by identifying actionable intelligence to directly support the initiation of FBI investigations and augment current efforts directed against BlEs. IRON FIST is designed to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing threat posed by BlEs, to proactively address this priority domestic terrorism target by focusing FBI operations via enhanced intelligence collection efforts. ln addition, FBIHQ works to develop potential [confidential human sources] CHSs and conduct assessments on the current BIE CHS base. Many BlEs are convicted felons who are prohibited possessors, therefore the FBI will continue to use their prohibited possessor status as a tactic to assist in mitigating the threat for potential violence.”
Indeed, this “Threat Mitigation Strategy” is a template that the FBI is applying to other groups and individuals designated as “White Supremacy Extremists” (WSEs), as revealed on page 1 of the section on WSE’s:
“The FBIHQ-led Threat Mitigation Strategy SUPREME RENDITION was implemented to mitigate the potential threat posed by WSE movements at the national level and will accomplish this by identifying actionable intelligence to directly support the initiation of FBI investigations and augment current efforts directed against WSEs. SUPREME RENDITION is designed to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing threat posed by WSEs, to proactively address this priority domestic terrorism target by focusing FBI operations via enhanced intelligence collection efforts. ln addition, FBIHQ works to develop potential CHSs and conduct assessments on the current WSE CHS base. Noting that many WSE subjects are convicted felons and are prohibited from legally possessing firearms, the FBI is exploiting the Dark Web or Dark Net to determine whether persons with a WSE ideology are using these non-indexed “hidden” websites and domains to procure firearms, explosives, murder-for-hire, or other illegal services in furtherance of their beliefs. Also, the FBI will use their prohibited possessor status as a tactic to assist in mitigating the threat for potential violence.”
The Threat of an Ideological Test
That the FBI is using an ideological test of its own devising to determine whether a person seeking products or services on “the Dark Web” is a threat raises a host of potential constitutional issues, including whether the monitoring of a person’s online activities based on their ideology runs afoul of the First Amendment or the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision…
Earlier this year, I submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the FBI on 37 groups publicly working on immigration policy issues, some of them direct client-services organizations. Many of these FOIAs remain outstanding or are in varying stages of appeal or potential litigation. However, FBI FOIA responses received to date indicate that at least five of these groups — Chula Vista Partners in Courage, Pangea Legal Services, Immigration Hub, Kids In Need of Defense (KIND), and the Transgender Law Center — may have been targeted for surveillance.
For each of the groups listed above, the FOIA appeal response I received from the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) contained the following language:
“To the extent that your request could encompass any national security or foreign intelligence records, I have determined that the FBI properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of any national security or foreign intelligence records responsive to your request because the existence or nonexistence of any such responsive records is currently and properly classified. See 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1).”
In the world of FOIA, this kind of response is known as a “Glomar” — a reference to a 1981 FOIA case (Phillippi v. CIA, 655 F.2d 1325, 1327 (D.C. Cir. 1981), in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the CIA could refuse to confirm or deny even the very existence of information on a topic if the fact of its existence was itself deemed classified.
The 1981 case revolved around the efforts of a Rolling Stone reporter to get records of conversations between CIA Director William Colby and the heads of various news organizations that had learned about a Tom Clancy-like CIA operation to raise a sunken Soviet sub from the Pacific Ocean. The CIA’s argument, which the Court accepted, was that even the revelation of Colby’s efforts to kill the story would tip off the Soviets that the CIA might, in fact, have managed to salvage at least something from the sunken Soviet sub.
Since that 1981 D.C. appellate court decision, other federal courts have generally upheld executive branch invocations of Glomar responses to FOIA requests. In my view, those ill-considered decisions have now led to a much wider and far more dubious resort to Glomar responses by federal agencies and departments, in this case by the FBI as it relates to immigration policy activism by domestic U.S. groups.
For the five groups in question in my FOIA actions, the FBI is asserting FOIA’s “national security” or (b)(1) exemption in a Glomar context. How can the provision of legal advice, counseling or other services to immigrants represent “a threat to national security?”
A Role for Congress
Congress should investigate whether the FBI is targeting these groups in the absence of a legitimate criminal investigative predicate and is using the Glomar exception (or other dubious FOIA evasion tactics) to conceal that activity from the public and the courts…
Be seeing you
Yes son, you too can grow up to be lying scum and hate black people.
It is baffling, in the light of last week’s attacks on two Saudi oil facilities, that there is so much speculation about Saudi and Iran going to war. Saudi does not “go to war”: it hires proxies, and depends on US gullibility to continue the lie that it is the regional peacekeeper…
Meanwhile, Saudi looks on – as ever, the indulged and unpunished provocateur of the Middle East.
The US is being fooled that it needs to rescue its ally in the Middle East. The Saudis always get others to fight for them
There is a longstanding joke told in the Middle East about Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to fight its own wars. “Saudi Arabia will fight until the last Pakistani,” the punchline goes, in reference to the fact that Pakistani troops have long supported Saudi’s military endeavours.
The punchline has expanded lately to include the Sudanese, a recent addition to the Saudi army’s ground troops. Saudi Arabia is accustomed to buying labour that it deems too menial for its citizens, and it extends that philosophy to its army.
There is always a poorer country ready to send cannon fodder for the right price. The military assault in Yemen is sometimes referred to as “the Arab coalition”, a respectable term for a Saudi-led group of combatants that, in addition to allies in the Gulf, includes forces from Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, as well as Sudanese child soldiers, whose deaths are handsomely compensated for with cash paid to their families back home. When asked what fighting in Yemen under the command of the Saudis had been like, some returning Sudanese troops said that Saudi military leaders, feeling themselves too precious to advance too close to the frontline, had given clumsy instructions by satellite phones to their hired troops, nudging them in the general direction of hostilities. Where things were too treacherous, Saudi and coalition airforces simply dropped bombs from high-flying planes, inflating civilian casualties. This is how Saudi fights: as remotely as possible, and paying others to die.
It is baffling, in the light of last week’s attacks on two Saudi oil facilities, that there is so much speculation about Saudi and Iran going to war. Saudi does not “go to war”: it hires proxies, and depends on US gullibility to continue the lie that it is the regional peacekeeper, and that any threat to the country destabilises the region. The US and Saudi Arabia have repeatedly accused Iran of being behind the attacks, which were claimed by Yemen’s Houthi movement, a group aligned with Iran and fighting the Saudi-led alliance in Yemen’s civil war. The Pentagon has announced that it will be sending hundreds of US troops, in addition to air and missile defence equipment, to Saudi Arabia as a “defensive” move.
Why does a country that was the world’s largest arms importer from 2014 to 2018, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, need so much help?
In 2018, the US provided 88% of all weaponry sold to the country. By the end of 2018, Saudi was responsible for 12% of global arms purchases. It is clearly not in need of more military kit from the US to defend it against drone attacks.
What, then, does a country that is involved in one military campaign, in Yemen, and which appears so vulnerable to attack and in need of constant protection, do with so many weapons? Buying the weapons, rather than deploying them, is the point. These multimillion-dollar purchases maintain commercial relations with western allies from whom it imports arms, and who in return turn a blind eye to Saudi’s human rights abuses, assassinations and kidnappings, because there is too much money at stake. Saudi Arabia’s entire foreign policy model is based on using its wealth to buy friends and silence….
Saudi is currently locked in escalating conflicts with Iran, Qatar and Yemen, propping up military regimes in Sudan and Egypt, messily meddling in Lebanon, and continuing to fund random Sunni hardline endeavours all over the world – and generally getting away with it. Saudi will not go to war with Iran, but the US may do so on its behalf. Meanwhile, Saudi looks on – as ever, the indulged and unpunished provocateur of the Middle East.
When it comes to the impact of automation (robots, AI, etc.) on jobs, there are two schools of thought: one holds that technology has always created more and better jobs than it destroys, and this will continue to be the case. The other holds that the current wave of automation will destroy far more jobs than it creates, but the solution is to tax the robots and use these revenues to distribute the wealth to everyone who no longer has a livelihood.
In either case, we’ll get richer: if technology generates more high-quality jobs, replacing lower-quality jobs lost to automation, we’ll collectively get richer, and if technology destroys jobs but creates immense profits that can be distributed to everyone as Universal Basic Income (UBI), then we’ll get richer via distributing profits to everyone.
But what if neither option is realistic? What if the jobs that are created in the wake of automation are lower-quality, lower pay and far more insecure? And what if automation leads to much lower profits rather than much higher profits? What if there’s nowhere near enough profits to distribute to everyone as Universal Basic Income? If that’s the case, we’re collectively becoming poorer, even if a small percentage of the population is reaping wealth from automation.
Consider this first-hand account from a reader on Facebook (used with permission):
“With almost 40 years in the pipeline business I have seen detecting and locating leaks in pipelines go from 6-8 men, 2-3 trucks, maybe an airplane and take days. With three pieces of equipment (Laser methane detector and a Optical Gas Imaging camera), $300 drone and a 4 X 4 pickup, one person can cover in a few hours what could take days to weeks to find years ago.
The work I do has displaced at least 6 if not more workers plus the capital cost of the equipment. The total cost of all my equipment is less than $200K and labor cost of less than $2K.
A ‘Smart Pig’ can detect, measure and locate a corrosion indication within mm’s. The fixed cost of the equipment is high but the incremental cost per use is low. Manpower and equipment has gone from 12 workers to 4-5 depending on size. The information found can prevent loss resulting in environmental damage and economic loss to the pipeline owner.
Less people doing more work to find problems. Using technology instead of manpower.”
Between half and two-thirds of this workforce has been obsoleted by these technologies. If there is any competition in the manufacture of the equipment, it’s likely prices will fall as components become commoditized and decline in price.
Sectors of the economy many hope will create more jobs are seeing the same dynamics. A friend recently described the technologies being deployed to increase the yields and reduce labor in organic sustainable farming: drones that monitor the water and nutrient needs of crops with sensors and relay the data to drip-irrigation systems.
As for training students to code/program: many of these tasks are being automated as well.
Even as we wring our hands over the potential for individually-targeted advertising to sway elections, we also have to ask: why should any advertiser pay marketing firms to distribute bulk emails and mailers, buy TV/radio/print adverts, etc. when an essentially automated technology can craft a data-driven micro-targeted pitch to individuals?
My point here is that it’s not just blue-collar jobs that are being obsoleted, but well-paying white-collar jobs are increasingly being automated as well.
The jobs that are being created are low-pay, contingent, insecure service jobs that cannot support a middle-class life or accumulation of capital.
If we look at the gig economy that’s arisen to staff on-demand services (Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, etc.), we find low earnings, no benefits and the costs and risks of auto ownership being offloaded from the corporation to individual owners.
These jobs may be “new” (although they look very similar to “old” jobs such as delivering milk) due to the interface of smartphone technology, they lack the security and compensation needed to afford a middle class lifestyle in most U.S. urban areas. In other words, they are not replacing jobs lost with equivalent jobs.
The idea that profits will pay for Universal Basic Income is simply not realistic. Even we taxed all the Big Tech corporations at a rate of 75% (a rate that’s politically unrealistic), that would yield up $100 billion, one-tenth of UBI’s minimum cost.
As I’ve discussed in my books, there’s another crisis of work that UBI doesn’t solve: the majority of people want and need the purpose, meaning and structure of a job–a positive social role, a way to gain self-respect, an avenue of control of one’s life, a source of dignity and a means of getting ahead.
Technology, like natural selection, has no goal. Technology doesn’t have a teleological drive to employ humans, save the planet or any other goal we might choose. In the current socio-political-economic system, technology is mostly aimed at maximizing profits. The surest way to reduce costs is to replace costly humans with automated tools.
If we want technology to help us create gainful work, we’ll have to set that goal, and create incentives other than maximizing short-term profits. Perhaps one first step might be to broaden our definition of “profit” from the purely financial to one that includes “utility” and “value” for local and global communities. That’s the goal of my work…
Jyske Bank said on Friday people with more than $111,100 in their bank accounts will be charged more for their deposits as it seeks to pass on some of the costs of recent rate cuts by the European and Danish central bank.
Jyske Bank, Denmark’s second-largest bank, said it would introduce a negative interest rate of 0.75% for all corporate deposits and for private clients depositing more than 750,000 Danish crowns ($111,100) from Dec 1.
Last week, Denmark’s central bank cut its key deposit rate to minus 0.75%, a record low among developed economies. “It is a lot of money and we have to pass on part of this bill to our customers,” he said. “I don’t hope that we will have to go lower but I don’t dare to promise it.”.
Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank has said it has no plans to introduce negative interest rates on deposits. Switzerland’s UBS has said it will impose a negative rate of 0.75% on clients who deposit more than 2 million Swiss francs ($2 million). ($1 = 6.7559 Danish crowns)
Simple Question
If you live in Denmark and have a bank account in excess of $100,000 or so, why would you have it at Jyske Bank which charges 0.75% while Danske Bank, the country’s largest bank doesn’t?
Possibilities
There is something seriously wrong at Danske Bank and people don’t trust it.
Danske Bank welcomes deposits and can do something with the money. But if so, at what risk?
Any Danish readers care to answer?
Perhaps we have an answer from Bloomberg in the following discussion.
Shares in Jyske closed more than 5% higher marking their best performance since December 2017, as investors calculated the impact that the new policy will have on the bank’s net interest income.
Jyske has “set the ball rolling,” said Per Hansen, an investment economist at broker Nordnet.
Three American journalists decided to do what many of their colleagues have done since the outbreak of the proxy war on the Syrian government: they traveled to the war-torn country to report what’s happening from the ground. But unlike the reporters who have made a name for themselves traipsing through some of the oldest cities in the world recently put under occupation by a miscellany of jihadist groups, these three journalists reported from areas under the control of the government.
For the industry of experts and journalists giving media cover to Syria’s jihadist insurgency, the three of them had once again crossed a line. And so the campaign to deplatform journalists Rania Khalek, Max Blumenthal, and Anya Parampil was renewed, beginning with false accusations that the trip was financed by the Syrian government.
Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, told MintPress News why he went to Syria in the first place:
The Western public has been subjected for eight years to an industrial-grade information war designed to sabotage their critical faculties and inculcate support for military interventions, proxy wars and economic sanctions.
The point is, according to Blumenthal:
To break the information blockade by going on the ground in countries targeted for regime change and ripping the curtain off of elaborate regime-change propaganda constructs. I accepted an invitation to attend the General Trade Union Forum in Syria with that mission in mind, and was able to go off on my own for several days in and around Damascus and hear from actual Syrians about their experiences during the war and how the escalating U.S. economic war was darkening their future.
At this point, the military conflict is virtually over, but U.S. sanctions are doing enormous damage to working class Syrians, while failing to scathe the government and its inner circle.”
Behind the campaign to silence these critical, anti-war journalists was the same cast of characters that have become notorious in progressive circles for the viciousness of their attacks — attacks against Khalek and Blumenthal in particular, but also against anyone willing to come out against regime change in Syria.
Khalek told MintPress News:
The harassment these people inspire and participate in is relentless. It varies from libel and smears to attacks on my physical safety. I’ve been doxxed and had my livelihood threatened. I’ve been deplatformed and fired. That is their goal.”
The tactics employed to silence these reporters have included death and rape threats, spurious lawsuits, threatening phone calls, pressure campaigns to have them fired, and persistent harassment against any institutions publishing their work or hosting their talks, books, or documentary tours. Parampil, who also reports at The Grayzone, told MintPress:
Twitter may seem like the world to some, but when I’m out in the field meeting real people I find that my position represents the majority. Whether in Syria, the U.S. or Venezuela, I’ve found a lot of support and an audience that is hungry for the kind of reporting we do… As long as I can continue to speak with the working people of the world and punch holes in the corporate, pro-war narrative, I am happy. Everything else is background noise.”
But over the week, the illiberal McCarthyite campaign reached a new level of depravity, when prominent media personalities began circulating a forged email accusing Khalek of being paid by a Syrian businessman on the U.S. sanctions list.
“I’m not at all surprised that those attacking me have resorted to posting fake emails. They are nasty and sleazy in their attacks; they continue to sink lower and lower,” Khalek said.
Introducing the Usual Suspects
While this informal group seeking to take down alternative journalists come from an array of think tank and media institutions, many of them — including artist Molly Crabapple and journalists Danny Gold and Oz Katerji — were associated with VICE News, an outlet that celebrated the NATO-backed jihadist assassination of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and whitewashed neo-Nazi overtones out of its work in support of Ukraine’s Euromaidan insurgency. Those profiled in this section have participated in the attacks against the trio of journalists on Twitter.
Khalek told MintPress:
I’m being accused of supporting the Syrian government because I challenged the U.S. regime-change machine’s narrative and policy that sought to collapse the Syrian state and hand it over to a bunch of Islamist gangs, as was done with Libya. Anyone who questions the mainstream pro-war consensus should expect to be smeared and libeled. That is what the other side does to maintain hegemony over the discourse.
My approach to covering Syria has been my approach to all subjects: to challenge power, to challenge propaganda, and to challenge war They want to hide the reality that I’m trying to expose.”
But chief among the gaggle of prominent young regime-change propagandists is Charles Lister, whose role at the Middle East Institute (MEI) think tank in Washington has seen him vet so-called “moderate rebels” who have formed alliances with al-Qaeda. MEI, for its part, is funded by the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf petro-monarchy that has helped supply al-Qaeda with weapons in Syria. For Lister’s part, he has maintained that “al-Qaeda has really got it right” in Syria. He, like many of the other people who pounced on Khalek over the fake email, spent years promoting a now-suspended Twitter account, @ShamiWitness, as an expert on the Syrian conflict. The account, it turns out, belonged to ISIS and was used to recruit young men on the platform.
The email purporting to show Khalek on the payroll of an individual sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department was published by a Syrian regime-change activist based out of Quebec named Noor Nahas. Its publication by Nahas appears to coincide with a hit piece in Tablet Magazine against an NGO worker in Damascus who has advocated for ceasefire agreements in the country, who is also accused of receiving illicit funding in the fake email.
Lister promoted both the hit piece and the forged email on his Twitter account, but deleted all of the tweets focusing on the fake email. In those deleted tweets, Lister could hardly contain himself and even attempted to tag the U.S. Treasury on Twitter in order to alert them to the alleged violation of U.S. sanctions by Khalek, an American citizen and journalist. After deleting the tweets, Lister removed himself from the discussion.
God, I’m tired of all this social media nonsense. Leave me out of it.
Journalist Danny Gold, another former promoter of the @ShamiWitness account, retweeted a number of attacks against Khalek over the forged email, on one occasion writing “this thread is a wild ride, and leads to documented evidence of some of the favorite Assadist reporters taking money from the regime to whitewash their crimes.”
Gold is infamous as among the most vicious of his associates. But he is no impartial voice on the Syrian conflict, given his affinity for having geeky conversations about a high-fantasy television series with al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al Nusra.
Molly Crabapple has cultivated a reputation as a bohemian artist fighting for freedom alongside the world’s oppressed. She got started with the Occupy Wall Street movement, but over the years a pattern emerged wherein she repeatedly championed State Department causes and narratives. Over the years she has painted portraits of everyone from Oz Katerji; to the neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer, or “Weev;” to Syrian refugees.
Crabapple was indeed so pained by the plight of Syrians that she once doxxed a United Nations aid worker in Erbil, Iraq for writing about the war. She has also falsely accused this reporter of participating in a protest against the White Helmets that I was there to cover.
Crabapple falsely accused Parampil, Khalek, and Blumenthal of “prancing around Syria on a government luxury tour,” calling it “some Goebbels shit.”
Oz Katerji — like Crabapple, who is a former burlesque dancer — seems to have little prior background in international affairs. Katerji, once a Dubstep artist, went from writing profiles for VICE of “The Strangely Uplifting Tale of the Cam-Girl with No Vagina” to articles like “The Syrian Regime Is Using DIY Barrel Bombs Against Its Citizens.” For that piece, he interviewed Elliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, an outlet funded by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. Katerji’s own ties to Bellingcat, where he was considered an official contributor, were left unmentioned in the piece.
Another Bellingcat member, senior investigator Nick Waters, homed in on a picture of Khalek in Damascus, writing that she was posing for the camera “only a couple of degrees away from the infamous Saydnaya prison, where tens of thousands of people have been tortured and executed.”
But that widely reported figure (it even made its way into the New York Times and an Amnesty International report) is credited to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a state-funded pro-opposition front group based out of Qatar, a country that has also fueled the crisis in Syria. The Syrian Network for Human Rights has lobbied the U.S. for military intervention.
Katerji has also promoted the ISIS Twitter recruitment account. As Kevin Gosztola points out at Shadowproof, Katerji has sworn to “never rest while” journalists countering the narrative on Syria “are given platforms or publishing opportunities.”
Idrees Ahmad is another journalist who has spent the past few days on Twitter relentlessly attacking Khalek, Blumenthal and Parampil, even getting a piece published on al-Jazeera attacking the trio. That’s the Idrees Ahmad whose blog has published attacks on this outlet and this reporter for raising questions about Jorge Ramos and his interview with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro; a story later vindicated as multiple holes emerged in Ramos’ story. Ahmad, unsurprisingly, also promoted the @ShamiWitness account.
CNN reporter Clarissa Ward tweeted about the trip:
Started to read a certain ‘journalist’s’ thread from inside Damascus this AM, then found myself getting palpitations which progressed into spasms of rage. How can anyone be so blindly credulous? Are narcotics involved? It is such a disgrace.”
Ward’s fury may have been over the perceived credulty of the reporters on the trip, but it is more likely that she has an axe to grind against Blumenthal, who exposed how she had previously hired al-Qaeda propagandist Bilal Abdul Kareem to guide her through jihadist strongholds, where the “heroes” are “on the ground.” Kareem’s propaganda is so overt that he has even whitewashed a group of men on motorcycles waving ISIS flags as “civilians protesting.”
Alexander Reid Ross — a geography teacher who has made a name for himself in anti-fascist circles by attacking the likes of Blumenthal and Khalek over nebulous ties to fascists, using the tired “red-brown” technique — also participated in the Twitter pile-on.
Blumenthal told MintPress:
My ability to convey this reality back to the U.S. public was apparently such a threat to an unusually vocal echo chamber of regime-change fanatics that I was branded a Nazi (by Molly Crabapple), a drug addict (by a CNN correspondent), and told that I should have my life ruined (by a reactionary suburban doofus-turned-professional white Salafi ally). Their attacks were part and parcel of the Western campaign to isolate Syrians from the rest of the world, and all because their government held off a multi-billion dollar proxy war that would have transformed their country into an even more harrowing version of Libya if it had succeeded.”
Lamentably, VICE News is not the only hip, left-leaning news outlet decidedly on the side of regime change in Syria. Mariam Elba, a fact checker at The Intercept, an outlet owned by a billionaire oligarch with prior ties to human trafficking, scoffed at Blumenthal and Khalek’s trip. “Neither of them speak Arabic, yet they claim to be ‘talking’ to many Syrians there.”
This is yet another false allegation, as Khalek does speak Arabic.
Breaking the media blockade
For Blumenthal, Khalek and Parampil, all of this — as well as the lawsuits and deplatforming campaigns — is a distraction from doing real, independent investigative journalism. In Syria, where Western reporters have flocked to Islamist-held regions, the story that has not been told, in their view, is that of the average Syrian. According to Parampil:
This group of Syrians represents the vast majority of the country, despite the fact that we never hear from them in corporate media. It is my job, as a U.S. journalist with the privilege of working independently, to visit countries and speak to people impacted by the policies of Washington, particularly those who are excluded from the mainstream narrative. Unless we hear from these people, the U.S. public will be more willing to support military and economic war against the Syrian people. That is why CNN and other outlets act as though they’re invisible. The media has been weaponized against the Syrian people.”
Khalek expanded upon the situation many Syrians currently face, arguing that people are much safer now that the fighting has mostly ended and the government came out with a victory:
Except for Idlib, the bombs and mortars have stopped falling, allowing people to return to some sense of normalcy. But things aren’t normal, because the U.S. is economically suffocating the country with crippling sanctions that have devalued the Syrian currency and made it impossible for people to rebuild or plan for a decent future. Everyone wants to leave Syria because of the economic strangulation. The war on Syria continues. In place of funding proxy death squads, the U.S. has launched a campaign of economic terrorism against the country.”
Asked what lessons she took away from her trip to the country, Parampil said:
I was most shocked to see how close foreign-backed extremist militants came to taking control of the Syrian capital. They were meters away from capturing the old city, the ancient heart of Damascus. When I rode into Damascus for the first time and saw the large Syrian flag still waving above the city, I was reminded that many of my colleagues in U.S. media were supporting a war that would have seen that banner replaced with one belonging to ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
The fact they failed is something all of humanity should celebrate. I spoke with people who described the hell they were forced to live in under the rule of foreign-backed militants. They were happy to be liberated by the Syrian military. They have every right to be heard in U.S. media, which is why I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to travel to Syria and meet them at the invitation of the country’s working people.”
The Facts:Retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski writes in an article posted at Lew Rockwell’s website that Julian Assange is receiving the same treatment as suspected terrorists while in captivity at “Her Majesty’s Prison Service” at Belmarsh.
Reflect On:Why has the mainstream media been silent regarding the treatment of Julian Assange? Why do they just slander him and not tell the truth about what’s really happening, and why he was taken?
JFK warned the citizenry about “an announced need for increased security” that would be “seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.” Today, this is known as “national security,” and it’s a term used to justify unethical and enormous amounts of secrecy that do not protect the public, but protect those in power and their corporate, financial and political interests. Theodor Roosevelt said that, “JFK warned the citizenry about “an announced need for increased security” that would be “seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.” Today, this is known as “national security,” and it’s a term used to justify unethical and enormous amounts of secrecy that do not protect the public, but protect those in power and their corporate, financial and political interests.”
This is exactly what Julian Assange did, and many others have and are doing, like independent alternative media outlets.
Transparency is what Julian Assange was all about, and the American empire, or more so the global empire, has been desperate to keep its secrets and prosecute anyone or anything that threatens their secrecy. That’s what this is all about. And they proved that with Chelsea Manning.
It’s not just people like Assange who are being demonized and hunted, it’s alternative media as well. The war on ‘fake news’ that’s been happening for the last little while has forced alternative media outlets that are presenting credible information to be deemed as ‘fake.’ Any media outlet who even questions a controversial issue has been made out to be ‘wrong’ or ‘fake.’ Who has been hired to do this work? One example is news browser extension NewsGuard, which promises to help readers pick out fake news. However, NewsGuard is funded and run by individuals tied to the CFR, Atlantic Council, and other prominent elite figures.
Below is a tweet from Australian journalist and BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker John Pilger, who made comments last month that shed some light on how Assange is being treated.
I recently came across a post written a few months ago by Karen Kwiatkowski.
The FBI, Pentagon, and CIA are “interviewing” Assange. Kwiatkowski writes:
Interviewing is the wrong word.I’d like to say doctoring him, because it would be more accurate, except that word implies some care for a positive outcome.Chemical Gina has her hands in this one, and we are being told that Assange is being “treated” with 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ.
BZ is a powerful drug that produces hallucinations…
A great quote by Edward Bernays, who was known as the father of public relations, comes to mind here:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. (source)
The ability for this powerful group to manipulate our minds is clearly fading, but we still have a lot of work to do.
