Powerful individuals and corporations routinely tap specialized consultants to edit Wikipedia for more favorable entries, often through anonymous accounts designed to appear organic.
Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show that he made continuous efforts to airbrush his image and the Wikipedia articles associated with his Ukrainian benefactors.
The outreach by high-priced consultants making stealth edits to Wikipedia, for a period, paid off.
In 2014, working at the time with FTI Consulting, a major public relations and lobbying firm, Hunter sought changes to his personal Wikipedia entry.
“Ryan- below is a start. Eric is my partner and cc’d- he’s going to make additional edits,” wrote Hunter to FTI’s Ryan Toohey in May 2014, referring him to Eric Schwerin, the president of Hunter’s firm Rosemont Seneca. Hunter forwarded along edits seeking the deletion of unflattering lines in his Wikipedia biography, such as his ties to disgraced Ponzi scheme financier Allen Stanford.
The well-rewarded bootlicker has always been the mainstream character of New York, exemplified in many, including New York hero Alexander Hamilton, so lauded that he has a play named for him and his bootlicking existence. I will take a gutsy John Kass any day.
One day, Mike Royko was all done. Mike Royko was on the second page of The Chicago Tribune. Boy did he write some good politics. He cut down the Daleys in his writing like nobody’s business.
He played softball — 16 inch, like a true Chicagoan. 16 inch is the kind of softball you can play with no mitt on one hand and a can of Old Style beer in the other hand. The ball is soft. The home runs are fun. The thing just lobs off the bat through the air.
He was culturally of Chicago — a Polish mom and Ukrainian dad. Though he was a journalist, he was very much a working class man. And through a combination of playful characters, telling snapshots of life, and observations on Chicago corruption he wove together a world that his readers could enjoy.
There was a Saturday Night Live skit in the 1980s about a place they called the Olympia Cafe on the show. “Cheezborger. Cheezborger. Cheezborger! No fries, Cheeps! No Pepsi, Coke!”
Look it up and watch it if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
This skit was about the real life Billy Goat Tavern. It was (and still is) located on Lower Michigan Avenue, an underground street in Chicago, that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to open a business on. You had to step past bums in cardboard boxes to get there. It was steps away from the two headquarters of the two rival newspapers in town, so the Billy Goat was where the rough-around-the-edges Chicago journalists would often hang out.
Saturday Night Live has a history of being a New York City show that relied on edgy Chicago talent. Wealthy Manhattanites have a long history of slumming it in Chicago when they want a truthful slice of life. They just couldn’t get that the same way from their fellow New York bootlickers, which gets to the heart of why Saturday Night Live has become unwatchable — no guts, all bootlicking.
Before Saturday Night Live’s writers got wind of the Billy Goat and made it famous, it was Mike Royko who wrote about it and made it the thing of legends: that place, its owner Bill Sianis, “the curse of the Billy Goat” (which gave the Chicago Cubs one nightmare of a losing streak), and a lot more.
Royko knew how to write politics, but he also knew how to grab you by the heart.
Royko wrote a brutal book, called The Boss. It introduced me to a side of Chicago I never knew I was part of, but I always had a feeling I was a part of. “The best book ever written about an American city by the best journalist of his time,” said Jimmy Breslin, a New York columnist. In it Royko describes Chicago’s culture of corruption and absolutely ridicules the corrupt mayor and his henchman.
The unapologetic ridicule is the best part.
Though few today have heard of it, the book is so powerfully effective, that just this past Saturday, during a class I was teaching to about fifty conservative activists in California, a woman brought up the book to me during the question and answer session. She said it taught her so much.
Ridicule, truth, guts, and good writing is a hard combination to beat.
Royko left his job in 1984 when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. Tokyo commented at the time “No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper”, and said about Murdoch, “His goal is not quality journalism. His goal is vast power for Rupert Murdoch, political power.” Royko switched to a rival newspaper to continue his writing — The Chicago Tribune.
Boy was he a writer and one who so exposed the corruption of Chicago, shining an uncomfortable light in the dark places. But he wasn’t my guy. My guy is named John Kass. That is the best journalist you’ve never heard of.
John Kass was awarded the coveted place Royko once held, on the second page of the The Chicago Tribune, the top third of the page. For many Chicagoans, that was Royko’s place and for me that was John Kass’s place. He wrote powerful, revealing articles about Chicago culture and Chicago politics, and he did so with intelligence, bluster, humor, and working class sensibility.
And to this day, I’m not sure why someone has not yet killed the guy for some of the things he wrote — such as observations he would write while attending mob funerals. Bad enough he was even at the mob funeral taking notes in his little journalist notepad during such a private moment, observing who came to pay their respects — but he went further. He would write about it in the newspaper.
The man understood the weapon he had and used it. He continues to do so.
Far from being a Mike Royko understudy who lives in the shadow of a great man, Kass is in a category all his own. Kass is not just a political columnist, but a brilliant, hardly-known, literary figure, in an era that would never call him such a thing as literary, but that he is.
Politically, he is too far on the fringes for him to win literary accolades, but on the fringes is where the best thought and experimentation can take place. The lack of relationship with the fringes of acceptable thought is, again, exactly why Saturday Night Live has grown stale.
John Kass wrote an article one day in the late 1990s, or early 2000s, that set him in stone as my favorite newspaper writer for life. Because the era of the print journalist is behind us, I suspect he will forever hold that spot.
That article he wrote was in the style of Ring Lardner, a classic columnist of the past, a style probably not 1-in-10,000 readers of his column could appreciate, and boy did he get it spot-on. It was like an Easter egg. He didn’t overtly state that he was writing in the style of Ring Lardner, but to anyone who knew Ring Lardner, it was evident and so well done — a wonderful little surprise for the right readers. This was in the days before comments under online articles were the norm. It was in the days before internet searches were the norm. A journalist takes a lot less risk today writing such an article, because someone in the comments will inevitably explain what the writer was doing.
On the surface, quite a few governments – most notably First World governments – have been passing a plethora of laws for which there is no victim but for which the government is the recipient of damages. (Emphasis MCViewPoint)
As if coincidentally, these same governments have been going in precisely the opposite direction with regard to crimes in which there most definitely is a victim.
“Do not encroach against others or their property.”
The above principle is a simple one, yet it’s the basis for all criminal law. In turn, criminal law is the basis for Common Law, the legal system for English-speaking peoples and much of the rest of the world.
The idea is a simple one: If party A aggresses against party B, party B is entitled under the law to restitution or compensation to be paid by party A to party B.
Well, that seems straightforward enough. But at some point along the way, two fundamental changes have been made that don’t reflect the original principle.
First, convicted offenders started to be ordered by the court to pay the court as punishment. Of course, the offense was not against the court, but the government of the day wanted to get in on the action. Surely, if a crime against a given party had been committed, the state was entitled to dip its beak, so to speak.
Over time, fines payable to the state became the norm. And for those who couldn’t pay the state, jail time.
Along the way, another extension to the concept came into use: victimless crimes. Increasingly, laws were passed by governments to make actions unlawful when there was no harm to an individual or his property.
Recent surveys have shown that a majority of Americans could not afford to cover a sudden $1,000 emergency. Will Americans connect the dots and realize that the reason they can’t find that $1,000 for an emergency is because the neocons have already sent it to Ukraine?
Ukraine has long been known as among the most corrupt countries on earth and not long ago investigative journalist Seymore Hersh wrote that Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky has embezzled at least $400 million in aid from the American people.
I am not a big fan of Federal Government disaster relief. Too much of the time the money never gets to those who need it most, and too often Washington’s armies of disaster “experts” are more interested in pushing people around than helping them.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine. How can this Administration continue to justify tens of billions of dollars for this losing war that is not in our interest while the rest of the United States disintegrates?
After ninety-nine years in business, Yellow, one of the nation’s biggest trucking companies, shut down. The company has more than twelve thousand trucks and employed thirty thousand, with twenty-two thousand of those jobs held by Teamsters.
If you are a taxpayer, you know all this, your government being a 29.6 percent shareholder of Yellow and all. The Trump administration’s Coronavirus, Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act dished out $500 billion to businesses, states and municipalities as a result of the coronavirus. Yellow Corporation received $700 million of the $735.9 million set aside for national security loans.
The loan had two tranches, tranche A was $300 million to cover union healthcare and pension liabilities, plus lease and interest payments. Tranche B was for tractors and trailers. Interest for tranche A was the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) plus 3.5 percent (1.5 percent of it to be paid in cash and 2.0 percent in kind) and interest for tranche B was LIBOR plus 3.5 percent (all cash). These attractive terms are the reason the government required equity in the firm as a condition of the loan.
“Since the CARES Act did not define the term ‘business critical to maintaining national security,’ the Treasury had virtually unfettered discretion to define this term,” says a special report of the Congressional Oversight Commission that investigated the loan.
Back in 2020, the Defense Department figured other trucking companies could replace Yellow’s government work should the company go out of business, so the department was going to recommend a no to issuing the loan. But “one day after Defense Department officials notified the Treasury that the Defense Department would likely not certify Yellow as critical to maintaining national security, the Treasury requested an urgent call with Secretary Esper, which took place on June 26, 2020.” After Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin called the defense secretary, “Esper certified Yellow as critical to maintaining national security the same day as the call, June 26, 2020, and the Treasury finalized the loan to Yellow on July 7, 2020.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Esper declined to comment. He has previously said he made the certification at the recommendation of Pentagon staff.”
According to the special report, Yellow spent $570,000 on lobbying in 2020 but nothing the year before. The company had been in close touch with the White House and “had discussed how the company employs 24,000 drivers who are part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (“Teamsters”) union.”
Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa allegedly “had reached out to the Trump administration and . . . was seeking a meeting with the Secretary of Defense to advocate for Yellow’s national security loan application.”
Magical thinking is all around us. It is difficult to escape from it, wherever we turn.
Wokesters who favor the minimum wage can typically be relied upon to also champion foreign aid. But this is a downright self-contradiction. For if they were correct in the first of these positions, there would simply be no justification for the latter. People in poor countries, “developing” ones too, could simply be told that the foreign aid spigot was being turned off, and that they should all implement a minimum wage law, and keep raising its level until poverty was eradicated.
There is the fact that nations such as Cuba, Venezuela, several in Africa and south Asia, are commonly characterized as “developing.” In some cases, this is an accurate description as to what is really going on. Others of them are stuck in a rut, neither improving nor worsening. Life goes on there as it always has. But in all too many examples, this appellation is the very opposite of the truth: they are actually retrogressing.
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Why, then, call them “developing?” The hope, presumably, is that this nomenclature will affect reality. One might as well call a rainy day “sunny” in the expectation that the weather will change. If there is a dry spell, one might as well do a rain dance in order to impact the climate in that direction.
Ms.
Nor can we ignore “Ms.” in this context. At one time in our past women were referred to as Miss or Mrs. What was this distinction based upon? Marital status, of course. The former were married, the latter, not. But this distinction was seen as invidious by the forces of political correctness. Women should not be defined by marital status. Marriage, presumably, exploited women, and this was one way of reducing the sway of that evil institution.
In any case, no such distinction was made for men. Well, there was Mister for married men, Master for the unmarried ones but very few people even knew about this. The latter had to go, for obvious reasons (as are, now, grandmaster in chess, master bedroom, etc., now under attack).
First of all we should point out the irony of an outlet like The New York Times publishing an article accusing anyone of being involved in propaganda. The New York Times has supported every US war and has been run by the same wealthy family since the late 1800s, and it has an extensive history of peddling McCarthyite red scare propaganda throughout the years.
Apparently Rubio has no probs with AIPAC not being registered. In Rubio’s defense neither does anyone on the AIPAC dole (most of congress).
Citing a recent McCarthyite smear piece by The New York Times, Senator Marco Rubio published a letter on Wednesday that he’d sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for the investigation of American leftist antiwar groups, claiming they are “tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and operating with impunity in the United States.”
Rubio listed nine organizations that he said should be investigated “for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.” Included in Senator Rubio’s blacklist of suspected Chinese foreign agents is the renowned peace activism group Code Pink, which has been drawing attention to the destructiveness of US warmongering, militarism and economic warfare for decades.
“According to the New York Times, many progressive organizations have received funding from Neville Roy Singham, a leftist U.S. citizen who lives in Shanghai and has ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” Rubio writes. “Yet, none of the entities tied to Singham have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The U.S. must enforce its laws more fiercely in the face of foreign adversaries who abuse our open system to advance their malign interests.”
Rubio’s letter is just the latest in the rapidly escalating push within the US government to use FARA to persecute antiwar activists, Chinese nationals in the United States, and those deemed insufficiently hostile toward China. As Amanda Yee recently observed with Liberation News:
“Under Biden, FARA has been invoked to target Black liberation activists like the African People’s Socialist Party for criticizing U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war and Chinese American hotel worker and organizer Li Tang ‘Henry’ Liang for advocating peaceful relations between the United States and China.”
It’s worth taking a close look at the New York Times piece referenced by Rubio, because the ridiculousness of its arguments and the hypocrisy it accidentally exposes are worth drawing attention to.
The main difference between US presidents often comes down to the narratives that the empire managers who they surround themselves with will use to explain why they need to advance the interests of the empire. Progressive president? You need to kill Syrians to advance human rights. Conservative president? You need to kill Syrians to protect national security.
One has to be careful on their uptake from a Wikipedia entry. The same with NYT, but you already knew that.
Neville Roy Singham’s Wikipedia page is now a mirror of the NYT piece.
None of this was accidental. This was a blatant imperial narrative management operation. There will be more. The New York Times is a shitty militarist propaganda rag that somehow wound up setting the news agenda for the entire western world.
McConnell defends the proxy war in Ukraine: "We haven’t lost a single American… Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons… So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead." pic.twitter.com/xjd3RcVoRb
If people really understood just how much suffering and destruction is unleashed by US foreign policy, they’d stop making such a big deal about the minor differences between two political parties who always come together to support the most destructive US foreign policy decisions.
The human suffering caused by the minor differences in domestic policy between Democrats and Republicans is dwarfed by the suffering caused by foreign policy bipartisanship by orders of magnitude. The ways they are the same are vastly more significant than the ways in which they differ.
The main misconception about US presidents is that they are proactive leaders when they’re really reactive facilitators. They’re not proactively leading the government in accordance with their vision and ideology, they’re responding to and facilitating the various needs of the empire from year to year. That’s what the empire managers in their administrations are doing with their daily intelligence and national security briefings: explaining to them what the needs of the empire are on that day and what must be done to facilitate those needs, using whatever language will make a given president receptive.
The main difference between US presidents often comes down to the narratives that the empire managers who they surround themselves with will use to explain why they need to advance the interests of the empire. Progressive president? You need to kill Syrians to advance human rights. Conservative president? You need to kill Syrians to protect national security.
MCViewPoint 