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The Cold War Racket Is Back

Posted by M. C. on March 8, 2023

The modern war racket started in 1913 with Fed and never left.

by Jacob G. Hornberger

https://www.fff.org/2023/03/07/the-national-security-establishments-renewed-cold-war/

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has issued a direct critique against the U.S. government’s policy of containment when it comes to China. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the critique is unusual in that it comes directly from China’s leader rather than indirectly through governmental spokespersons. 

The Journal article quotes Shirley Martey Hargis, fellow at the Washington think tank Atlantic Council, who suggests that Xi might just be shifting the blame for economic problems in China. “It’s either take the blame or shift it,” she said. 

Notwithstanding China’s economic problems, however, the fact is that Xi is right. There is no denying that U.S. national-security establishment, led by the Pentagon and the CIA, have been pursuing a Cold War policy of containment against China, with the aim of renewing its old Cold War racket. 

Of course, as the Russians will attest, the Pentagon and the CIA have been doing the same with them — doing everything they can to gin up their old Cold War racket against Russia, just as they are doing against China.

Take a look at this map. You might be shocked, or maybe not. It displays the number of U.S. military bases near China. Tom Orsag, a freelance leftist journalist, points out that “China is effectively encircled by US bases all across the Pacific.” Orsag adds, “The U.S. is the biggest bully in the Pacific, with rings of military bases blocking and threatening China.”

Now, take a look at this map. It depicts the number of Chinese military bases near the United States. Number? Zero! In fact, according to an article at Eurasia Times entitled “Over 750 Military Bases Across 80 Countries: How US Military Overshadows China In Projecting Power Overseas,” China has the grand total of one foreign military base — in Djibouti, which is more than 7,000 miles away from the United States.

Take a look at this map. It shows the number of U.S. military bases near both Russia and China. 

See the rest here

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The Consortium Imposing the Growing Censorship Regime — and Our New Live, Prime-Time Rumble Program

Posted by M. C. on November 1, 2022

The lesbian activist Jaimee Michell was notified by PayPal last month that the account of her activist group, Gays Against Groomers, was being immediately canceled due to unspecified rules violations. Moments later, the group — created by gay men and lesbians to oppose attempts by trans activists to teach trans dogma and highly controversial gender ideology to young schoolchildren — was notified that their account with PayPal’s subsidiary, Venmo, was also canceled immediately, leaving them with few options to continue to collect donations.

But Cloudflare’s refusal to capitulate to censorship advocates infuriated NBC News’ Ben Collins — whose primary purpose in life is to agitate for greater and more repressive control over the internet to stifle views that deviate from establishment liberalism — and, along with his NBC colleague and fellow censorship advocate Kat Tenbarge, used the massive corporate platform of NBC News to pressure Cloudflare to obey, claiming Cloudflare’s refusal to censor on command endangers trans people.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-consortium-imposing-the-growing?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Glenn Greenwald

Clockwise from top left: UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology speaks during the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Forum in Dubai, on March 28, 2022 (Photo by KARIM SAHIB/AFP via Getty Images); U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images); Google headquarters (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images); The Comcast/NBC Universal building in Los Angeles, CA (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images);

The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments.

The Consortium of State and Corporate Power

There has been some reporting — by me and others — on the new and utterly fraudulent “disinformation” industry. This newly minted, self-proclaimed expertise, grounded in little more than crude political ideology, claims the right to officially decree what is “true” and “false” for purposes of, among other things, justifying state and corporate censorship of what its “experts” decree to be “disinformation.” The industry is funded by a consortium of a small handful of neoliberal billionaires (George Soros and Pierre Omidyar) along with U.S., British and EU intelligence agencies. These government-and-billionaire-funded “anti-disinformation” groups often masquerade under benign-sounding names: The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, Bellingcat, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They are designed to cast the appearance of apolitical scholarship, but their only real purpose is to provide a justifying framework to stigmatize, repress and censor any thoughts, views and ideas that dissent from neoliberal establishment orthodoxy. It exists, in other words, to make censorship and other forms of repression appear scientific rather than ideological.

That these groups are funded by the West’s security state, Big Tech, and other assorted politically active billionaires is not speculation or some fevered conspiracy theory. For various legal reasons, they are required to disclose their funders, and these facts about who finances them are therefore based on their own public admissions. So often the financing is funneled through well-established front groups for CIA, the State Department and the U.S. National Security State, such as “National Endowment for Democracy.”

As has always happened with censor-happy tyrants throughout history, the more centers of power inject themselves with the intoxicating rush of silencing their adversaries, the more intense the next hit has to be. Every movement that has wielded censorship as a political weapon tells itself the same story to justify it. In ordinary times, they will casually recite, free speech is a vital value. But these are no ordinary times in which we are living. Our enemies and their ideas are different. They are uniquely hateful, false, inflammatory, and dangerous. The ideas they espouse will destabilize society, cause direct harm to others, deceive people, and incite violence against institutions of authority and their followers. Thus, they reason, we are actually not censoring at all. We are simply preventing evil people from doing harm to society, the government, and to citizens.

Look to any government or society in which censorship prevailed — either today or throughout history. This narrative about why censorship is not just justified but morally necessary is always present. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a censorship supporter. They need to be supplied with a story about why they are something different, or at least why the censorship they are led to support is uniquely justified.

And it works because, in the most warped sense possible, it appeals to reason. If one really believes, as millions of American liberals do, that the U.S. faces two and only two choices — either (1) elect Democrats and ensure they rule or (2) live under a white nationalist fascist dictatorship — then of course such people will believe that media disinformation campaigns, censorship, and other forms of authoritarianism are necessary to ensure Democrats win and their opponents are vanquished. Once that self-glorifying rationale is embraced — our adversaries do not merely disagree with us but cause harm with the expression of their views — then the more suppression, the better. And that is exactly what is happening now.

Banishment From the Financial System

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The Truth Is Surely Baseless | Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on May 8, 2021

The urgent problem: how to squash the Arizona vote audit by branding it as an outlaw action, even though it was ordered under law by the Arizona State Senate. Having failed to stop it so far using the Swamp’s Lawfare cadres in the Arizona courts, the DOJ has called in its Civil Rights Division to get’er done, pretending that it will be an offense against people-of-color if auditors seek to know whether write-in votes correspond to actual addresses, and other particulars of election procedure that may have been violated.

Of course, the Arizona business is only one leak in a giant dike of official deceit built-up over the years to keep any truth from deluging the DC lowlands.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-truth-is-surely-baseless/

James Howard Kunstler

MADDOW: … I think we should see this as the Justice Department putting these whack jobs in Arizona, forgive me, on notice, that what they`re doing is something they`re not going to be allowed to do for very much longer.

O`DONNELL: I think ‘whack jobs’ is now in The New York Times style sheet for describing what`s happening in Arizona.

— MSNBC 5/5/21

What you’re seeing now with the DC establishment are desperate moves to keep the suspicious and yet more pissed-off public from understanding the government crime spree of the past five years that started with the Obama gang using the Department of Justice to disable and terminate Donald Trump and the threat he represented to the network of special privilege and money known as the Swamp, which has managed to put a deep-fake president in office as a last resort to protect itself.

The urgent problem: how to squash the Arizona vote audit by branding it as an outlaw action, even though it was ordered under law by the Arizona State Senate. Having failed to stop it so far using the Swamp’s Lawfare cadres in the Arizona courts, the DOJ has called in its Civil Rights Division to get’er done, pretending that it will be an offense against people-of-color if auditors seek to know whether write-in votes correspond to actual addresses, and other particulars of election procedure that may have been violated.

Of course, the Arizona business is only one leak in a giant dike of official deceit built-up over the years to keep any truth from deluging the DC lowlands. Other leaks are springing in New Hampshire and Michigan, with a wormhole opening up in Georgia. It will be interesting to see if cable TV news can keep painting the truth as something against the public interest. As many times as they style election fraud “a conspiracy theory” and “baseless,” the public relations arm of the Democratic Party still has a hard slog convincing at least 80-million Americans that a detailed review of a contested vote is a bad thing.

Meanwhile, other breaches in the dike threaten to flood the low-lying Swamp zone with existential threats. The DOJ, the FBI, and other agencies are so saturated in crime that the only feasible damage control they can do is to haplessly commit more crimes against the common decency of the republic to cover up their old crimes. Hence, the seizure of Rudy Giuliani’s phones and computers in a 6 a.m. raid last week, leading to the incriminating disclosure that the FBI secretly accessed Giuliani’s iCloud account to spy on his correspondence with Mr. Trump in the fall of 2019 during the first impeachment preliminaries. Are you kidding me? Who gave the order for that? To violate basic attorney-client privilege during a legal proceeding of the highest order? And what was behind the Giuliani raid?

Among other things, the horror show of corruption in Ukraine, starring (but not limited to) Joe and Hunter Biden in their ceaseless quest for grift, but also featuring many of the origins of the RussiaGate hoax and its spin-offs, plus the involvement of State Department personnel such as Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and deputy George Kent, double-plus the shady activities of George Soros and his Atlantic Council in seditious activity working hand-in-hand with the CIA’s “whistleblower” (Eric Ciaramella) to damage Mr. Trump — who was impeached for simply inquiring about what was going on in Ukraine.

Mr. Giuliani had to conduct his own investigation into all that for the obvious reason that the usual US agencies who would ordinarily investigate official misconduct were actually perpetrating it: the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and State Department. And who, at the DOJ now, might be behind the current effort to neutralize Mr. Giuliani? Try Lisa Monaco, the new Deputy Attorney General, formerly one of Barack Obama’s chief White House fixers — i.e., an attorney detailed to shutting down investigations and covering the tracks left by questionable operations — and a protégé of former CIA Director John Brennan. Is the weak and pliable AG Merrick Garland fronting for her running the DOJ now? Joe Biden is going to need a whole lot of fixin’. And, is Lisa Monaco actually still reporting to Barack Obama? He can also probably use a fix or two. Who knows what’s coming down the pike? Just maybe a loaded semi driven by the nearly forgotten John Durham?

MSNBC might have made an unforced error on Wednesday scripting 10 o’clock troll Lawrence O’Donnell to diss former AG William Barr — some jive about Mr. Barr trying to mess with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts back in 2018 to nail Mr. Trump on an obstruction of justice rap. Is this the time to piss-off Mr. Barr? You have to wonder. Is it possible that the FBI concealed its possession of the Hunter Biden laptop from Mr. Barr during those 2019 days of impeachment, when Mr. Trump was attempting to mount a defense for making a phone call to Ukraine? Who might be responsible for hiding that, if it were so? By the way, it was Mr. Barr who, just before resigning in late 2020, made John Durham a Special Counsel, whose work — whatever that might be, maybe nothing at all, maybe something consequential, nobody knows — can’t be blocked by Merrick Garland (or Lisa Monaco).

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The Clampdown – RPI 10 Feb Update

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2021

The Atlantic Council is lavishly funded by war profiteers and the western governments that benefit most from war profiteers. Nimmo, who will decide what is allowed on Facebook and what is not, has a long history of falsely denouncing those who disagree with NATO’s hyper-interventionist goals of being “Russian bots” – including the great Ukrainian-American pianist Valentina Lisitsa – with the intent to silence and disappear critics. His pronouncements closely track with his paymasters in NATO and the military-industrial complex. The result will be the elimination of speech that disagrees with these and other deep state institutions.

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/csaky-115230?e=4e0de347c8

Working for the Clampdown… Dear Friends:

I was on the phone with my RPI colleague Adam Dick this week and in an uncharacteristic comment he captured what I had been feeling for some time: it appears the brakes are off the runaway train of political revengism. That’s not exactly what he said, but he conveyed back to me the same very strong sense of mal à l’aise that I had been feeling. 

From the bizarre spectacle of Impeachment 2.0 to the continuing – and intensifying – Covid crackdown, to the continuing merger of social media with government with the goal of silencing all dissidents outside the extreme center, it appears increasingly likely that the total state is here and it is intent on flexing its muscles.

If you have a different opinion on any of these issues you are not just a political opponent, but a “domestic terrorist” who needs to be silenced, shut down, destroyed, and perhaps incarcerated.

(This is not a partisan attack against Joe Biden because frankly I do not believe Biden is at the helm in any substantive way. Not that his four or so decades in “public service” do not indicate his attraction to the use of force and his embrace of authoritarianism.)

Exhibit one: I have not been watching the Impeachment 2.0 hearings live, but I have been following them on various news and social media sources. I feel fairly well informed of the important bits. House impeachment managers delivered a Resolution to the Senate stating very clearly that it was former President Trump’s speech on January 6th that contained specific phrases that served as an incitement to insurrection and was directly responsible for the melee that occurred at the US Capitol on that day.

They narrowed it down to that one speech.

They proceeded to argue Tuesday at the opening of the Senate trial that Trump’s words such as “fight like hell” and his insistence that the election was stolen were clearly criminal and justified removing him from office (which he does not hold) and barring him from ever running for office again (the real goal).

Surely, they claimed, the use of “fight like hell” was even worse than yelling “fire” in a crowded move theater!

But then something kind of funny happened: because public records are permanent, social media users began finding and identifying the numerous times the Democrats – and even the House impeachment managers – had used the same phrases and had even publicly challenged elections.

Nancy Pelosi in 2017 sounded a lot like Trump in 2020, telling people that the election was invalid and that Congress must “protect our democracy” – presumably by overturning the election.

House impeachment manager Rep. Jeremy Raskin sounded a lot like Trump’s team when he formally objected to the legitimacy of the election of Donald Trump in 2017.

But what about that call to arms “fight like hell”? Surely that was the smoking gun? Nope. 

House impeachment manager Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) vowed to “fight like hell.” House lead manager Jeremy Raskin spoke of the need to “fight like hell.”

House impeachment manager Ted Lieu (R-CA) vowed to “fight like hell” against President Trump.

And in the ultimate blow that using the phrase “fight like hell” opens one up to impeachment for incitement to insurrection, President Joe Biden himself used the phrase in 2019.

Oh no this does not compute! The entire impeachment case rides on a phrase that literally all of the House managers and House leadership have used in the past. What to do?

Lie.

Even though any sentient reading of the House impeachment resolution would conclude that Trump’s January 6th speech was the sole trigger for the charge that he incited an “insurrection,” turning on a dime when caught in their lie, the impeachers then claimed that, c’mon man, it wasn’t that one speech at all. It was the pattern of Trump’s speeches leading up to that speech that inspired the “insurrection.”

This is not a defense of Trump, which our readers and subscribers will recall endured four years of RPI criticism for actual boneheaded policies – like bombing Syria, pulling out of the Iran deal, slapping sanctions on anything that moved, etc. – rather than phony, made-up offenses like “Russiagate.”

The case is a joke.

Exhibit two: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided in September that lockdowns and mask mandates were worthless in fighting the latest coronavirus, so he lifted all the state mandates and forbade local governments from levying fines on their own for such “infractions.” Fauci warned that a major disaster was coming for Florida. Bodies in the street. A bloodbath. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse: nothing. Florida, with no restrictions on businesses, no lockdowns, no mask mandates, did as well – mostly better – on cases per million and hospitalizations per million and deaths per million as California Governor Gavin “French Laundry” Newsom’s hyper-Stalinist gulag regime.

Florida should be a disaster, teeming with the hospitalized and the dead like a third world country. Instead this is Florida:



Not too bad!

The lockdown states were the basket cases, not Florida. So what to do about the obvious success of simply allowing people to choose their own precautionary measures regarding the virus? 

In an unprecedented and bizarre move, the Biden Administration announced today that it might introduce sanctions against…Florida! Yes, Florida’s great success in balancing the need to manage a virus and manage civil liberties and the economy may well be punished by the Biden Administration with “travel restrictions” from the rest of the other 49 states.

No wonder libertarian-minded intellectuals and libertarian organizations are racing to do business with and move to Florida. Secession anyone?

Exhibit three: The social media behemoth Facebook announced that it would be bringing on as “intelligence chief” former NATO press officer and current Atlantic Council senior fellow Ben Nimmo. (BTW: Why should a social media company, which should be all about friends communicating with each other, need an “intelligence chief”?) Nimmo has a history of assassinating anyone who disagrees with the hyper-militarist, interventionist, Russia and China war promoting Atlantic Council as a “Russian bot” or agent of China. In fact his organization put out a policy paper recently calling for “regime change” in China. 

The Atlantic Council is lavishly funded by war profiteers and the western governments that benefit most from war profiteers. Nimmo, who will decide what is allowed on Facebook and what is not, has a long history of falsely denouncing those who disagree with NATO’s hyper-interventionist goals of being “Russian bots” – including the great Ukrainian-American pianist Valentina Lisitsa – with the intent to silence and disappear critics. His pronouncements closely track with his paymasters in NATO and the military-industrial complex. The result will be the elimination of speech that disagrees with these and other deep state institutions.

Yes they are all working for the clampdown. But as alarmed as we are in the short term, as Lenin himself said the worse the better. The more totalitarian they become the more the public will be open to hearing about the principles of liberty. They cannot succeed in the longer term. So our job is to hone our rhetorical skills, to focus on the philosophy of peace and prosperity – which is far outside the bogus Washington left-right continuum – and work with our allies without judging them on issues of limited importance on which we might disagree.

These buffoons are so absurd – far more so than even Trump – that a unique window has opened for our ideas. Let’s work together to take advantage.
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Thank you for your support!
Sincerely yours,

Daniel McAdams
Executive Director
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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Academic Media Censorship Conference Censored by YouTube

Posted by M. C. on February 4, 2021

Perhaps more worrying of all is the increasingly close connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security State. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Late last year, the CIA signed a partnership deal worth tens of billions of dollars with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with the NATO cutout organization the Atlantic Council to help them curate the world’s news feeds. Reddit has also hired Atlantic Council official Jessica Ashooh as its director of policy.

The Atlantic Council’s board of directors includes eight former CIA chiefs, multiple U.S. Army Generals, and high statespeople like Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, meaning that any decisions big tech companies make are only one step removed from the U.S. government. “This is actually [state] censorship by proxy,” Higdon warned.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-censored-youtube/274918/

By Alan Macleod

An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies.

Weeks later, however, the entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — disappeared from YouTube. Organizer Nolan Higdon of California State University East Bay, began receiving worried messages from other academics, some of which were shared with MintPress, who had been using the material in their classrooms, noting that it had all mysteriously disappeared.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” said Mickey Huff of Diablo Valley College, California. “My initial reaction was ‘that’s absurd;’ there must have been a mistake or an accident or it must have got swept under somehow. There is no violation, there was no reasoning, there was no warning, there was not an explanation, there was no nothing. The entire channel was just gone,” he told MintPress. Huff is also the director of Project Censored, an organization that sponsored the event.

Higdon suspected that it was the content critical of big tech monopolies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter that was the reason why the channel was deleted. “Each video was a different panel and every panel had different people from the other ones, so it is not like there was one theme or person or copyrighted content in all of our videos; this seems to be an attack on the conference, not on a singular video,” he said.

“This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users”

The organizers were careful to avoid copyright infringement, with the large majority of their videos in lecture format, essentially a recorded Zoom call. Speakers included some of the best-known names in media studies, with the event sponsored by institutions like Stanford University and UCLA. “This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users: it was an academic conference,” Huff said.

These are pioneering figures in critical media literacy scholarship. It’s mind numbing that all of this was just disappeared from YouTube. The irony is writ large…This is part of a potentially algorithmic way of getting rid of more radical positions that criticize establishment media systems, including journalism.”

Higdon too, suspected YouTube’s action was politicized: “This is the same year we saw big tech trying to influence Prop 22 here in California, so I am not too surprised that they would be aggressive with folks like us who are critical of media corporations.”

Organizers say they attempted to contact YouTube but did not receive a reply.

MintPress spoke to representatives from Google, YouTube’s parent company, who strenuously denied that they would ever remove content from their platforms purely because it was critical of the company, noting that there is a wealth of videos on the website that challenge or attack them.After looking into the matter, Google said they could find only one video and reinstated it (although the video does not appear on the conference’s channel). As for the hours of other footage, that remains an enigma to them, with no record of its existence. Thus, it appears that there will be no closure or a definitive answer to this mystery.

Algorithms take aim

Media literacy, big tech power, and censorship are hot topics right now. In the wake of the dramatic storming of the Capitol Building earlier this month, a host of companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, took actions against Donald Trump, limiting his and his supporters’ ability to communicate online. Perhaps most notably, however, Google, Apple, and Amazon Web Services launched a coordinated assault on “free speech app” Parler, a service popular with the far-right for its lax laws on racism. Together, the three effectively took the service offline around the world.

More recently, the Wall Street Bets subreddit, responsible for intentionally sinking a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, has endured retaliation, its communications channels cut by messaging app Discord, amid calls to immediately criminalize their behavior.

While the pros and cons of such decisions can, and have been, debated, the bigger question of should privately-owned companies be allowed to have the power to regulate who can and cannot speak online, has largely been downplayed.

“On the one hand I understand they have the right to deplatform people,” Huff told MintPress. “On a broader level though, I don’t think they should have achieved this kind of power over our communication systems in the first place, and these should be publicly run platforms regulated the same way our government regulates and enforces the First Amendment.”

Higdon was equally worried about the power amassed by the tech giants. “By empowering these tech companies to decide what is and is not appropriate, they are going to look out for their vested interests, and people who are critical of their business model and practices are going to be targets,” he said, predicting that,

These lefties right now who are advocating for censorship…the outcome of this is going to be on them.”

If history is any judge, he will be proven correct. In the wake of the 2016 election and the allegations that Russian disinformation swung the result in Trump’s favor, social media companies changed their algorithms to help halt the spread of fake news. The main result, however, was a throttling of traffic to high-quality alternative news sites and the promotion of corporate media like CNN and Fox News. Overnight, Consortium News’ Google traffic fell by 47%, Common Dreams’ by 37%, Democracy Now! By 36% and The Intercept by 19%. MintPress suffered similar, unrecoverable losses.

Likewise, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approved the deliberate choking of alternative media, admitting that his company deranked Mother Jones because of its left-wing persuasion (despite Facebook’s assurances that it was doing no such thing). Other, more radical outlets have suffered even greater reductions in traffic.

Anti-social media

Whatever decisions big tech companies make reverberate throughout society. 35, 24, and 17% of Americans get their news from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, respectively, with similar numbers worldwide. This enormous user base makes them by far the greatest and most influential news platforms on the planet, with the ability to highlight stories, bury others, and even swing elections. Huff was extremely worried about the power of these new media monopolies.

“We can’t get away from the fact that Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the whole corporate Alphabet soup of this big tech dystopia have gobbled up the public sphere. This is where people can go to congregate and share their information and it is also where invisible forces decide which voices get heard and which do not. Let’s also not forget that all of this tech was initially funded with taxpayer money.”

Worse still, although we now live in an online world, the public is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate its waters, displaying a shocking lack of awareness and understanding of how they can be manipulated.

A 2016 study from Stanford University found that two-thirds of college-aged “digital natives” — people who grew up using the Internet — mistook native advertising for a genuine news story, even with the words “sponsored content” displayed prominently. “Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak,” the study concluded, leading to calls for more critical media literacy education in schools. “Since we are not teaching people how to use these technologies, or how these technologies use them, they are more susceptible to propaganda and to disinformation. And ironically our conference was designed to combat exactly that problem,” Huff added.

Perhaps more worrying of all is the increasingly close connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security State. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Late last year, the CIA signed a partnership deal worth tens of billions of dollars with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with the NATO cutout organization the Atlantic Council to help them curate the world’s news feeds. Reddit has also hired Atlantic Council official Jessica Ashooh as its director of policy.

The Atlantic Council’s board of directors includes eight former CIA chiefs, multiple U.S. Army Generals, and high statespeople like Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, meaning that any decisions big tech companies make are only one step removed from the U.S. government. “This is actually [state] censorship by proxy,” Higdon warned.

“These companies, we know thanks to Edward Snowden and others, have contracts with the Federal government. There is a revolving door between particularly the Democratic Party and big tech, and there are also various loans and government protections given to this industry. So this is not some independent set of entities making this decision.”

“If 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith were a real character today he’d be a fact checker at Facebook or a content curator at YouTube, relegating to the dustbins of history whatever programmers are told to or whatever keywords our conference triggered,” Huff added.

Big tech has repeatedly acted at the behest of the U.S. government to silence its international opponents, suspending the accounts of foreign leaders like Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro or Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei or deranking foreign media outlets like RT and TeleSUR.

It is in this light that the deletion of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas can be seen; not as a deliberate decision by an angry Google employee intent on revenge, but as the result of a powerful and Byzantine algorithm designed by Silicon Valley executives who are intimately intertwined with both the government and the corporate world. There is little oversight of their power or recourse to their decisions, given their enormous influence over public life today.

Huff was particularly sardonic about the whole affair:

There are layers of irony here that are certainly not lost on us. But I don’t know if the public at large is realizing the attack that is happening against the very people that are the intellectual bulwark against such institutional censorship. I’m not trying to make us out to be martyrs here, but my point is that I think it has a particular irony when the very public intellectuals who try to educate the public about how these systems work are silenced,” he said.

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News | Based on art created for Project Censored

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

Republish our stories! MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

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Facebook Removes News Outlets in Latest Orwellian Purge – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on May 11, 2020

Facebook and its Western government-backed partners will continue to remove accounts each month for engaging in CIB. It will be hard to know if the connections they make to the accounts are genuine. But if the sloppy work they did on SouthFront and News Front is any indication, claims from Facebook and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab should always be met with skepticism.

https://original.antiwar.com/Dave_DeCamp/2020/05/10/facebook-removes-news-outlets-in-latest-orwellian-purge/

by

Over the past three years, Facebook has been removing accounts for participating in what they call “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB). According to Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, the Orwellian term refers to when “groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing.” Facebook takes down accounts for CIB due to “deceptive behavior” not for sharing false information. In the latest purge, Facebook removed accounts from two news outlets, SouthFront and News Front.

The two outlets have no affiliation; the only thing they share besides the word “Front” in their names is content that does not toe the Western mainstream media line. In its effort to remove CIB and limit “disinformation,” Facebook partners with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab). The Atlantic Council is a Washington-based think-tank that receives funding from Western and Gulf State governments, defense contractors, and social media outlets. Some of its top contributors for the 2018 fiscal year include the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Embassy of the UAE to the US, the US State Department, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.

Facebook started releasing monthly CIB reports in March that detail the networks and accounts they take down. On May 5th, Facebook released its CIB report for April 2020. The report says Facebook removed eight networks of accounts, pages, and groups engaging in CIB. SouthFront and News Front are included in the first network covered in the report. “We removed 46 Pages, 91 Facebook accounts, 2 Groups, and 1 Instagram account for violating our policy against foreign interference which is coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign entity,” the report reads.

Facebook claims they linked this activity to “individuals in Russia and Donbass, and two media organizations in Crimea – NewsFront and SouthFront.” In a response to the report, SouthFront says the claim that they are based in Crimea is a “blatant lie” that they are willing to “defend in court.” SouthFront says the organization is made up of “an international team of independent authors and experts,” some of whom are from Russia and post-USSR states. News Front, on the other hand, is based in Crimea, but the organization does not try to hide its pro-Russia bias.

In a press release, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab announced Facebook’s removal of the two organizations. The DFRLab refers to News Front and SouthFront as “two Crimea-based media organizations with ties to the FSB.” The FSB is a Russian security and intelligence agency, a successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB. In its independent analysis of the two outlets, the DFRLab offers little evidence to back up the claim of FSB ties. The analysis only uses a 2017 story from the German outlet Zeit, where a former News Front staffer claims the organization receives funding from the FSB. The DFRLab offers no evidence to link the FSB with SouthFront.

The DFRLab does not make a strong case for Facebook’s removal of the news outlets. The press release says, “While the DFRLab could not corroborate Facebook’s finding of CIB, it also found no evidence to contradict it.”

But using Facebook’s definition of CIB, the DFRLab’s analysis of the two outlets does seem to contradict Facebook’s findings. The pages and users analyzed do not seem to be misleading others or hiding who they are. “Most of the assets that DFRLab had access to did not hide their connection to South Front or News Front. Many of the pages wore their connections on their sleeves, naming themselves as different language versions of the websites,” the analysis reads. News Front is an international news organization with websites in English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, and Georgian and had Facebook pages to reflect that.

The analysis finds what they call “suspicious links” between News Front and ANNA News, another pro-Russia news outlet. But those “suspicious links” are just two former ANNA News anchors who now work for News Front. Facebook removed pages dedicated to the two anchors.

The analysis goes on to address the only connection between SouthFront and News Front, and probably, the real reason why they were removed from Facebook. Both outlets share stories that go against the Western narrative. The example the analysis seems to take the greatest issue with is stories that take into account Russia’s denial in the role in the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The analysis also points out that News Front accounts shared news stories from Russian-state funded media outlets like RT and Sputnik.

Ultimately, the DFRLab does not provide any information linking SouthFront or News Front’s social media activity to the Russian government and does not give examples of the accounts intentionally hiding their identity. The best they can do is mention some connections to the Russian government the founders of News Front have, but it is nothing they are trying to hide.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused an increase in internet censorship. YouTube’s CEO recently said they would remove any videos that go against the World Health Organization’s guidelines for the virus. On top of the Facebook ban, SouthFront’s YouTube channel has also been removed without any explanation. Although most of SouthFront’s content is military analysis, some stories they published on Covid-19 were flagged as “disinformation” by a ministry of the European Union. SouthFront published a detailed response to those accusations, pointing out that only three of the 3,000 stories they published this year were found to be “disinformation” by what they call “pro-NATO propagandists.”

SouthFront posted a video asking their readers for support in the wake of the social media bans. For independent news outlets, reach on social media is vital for their survival. SouthFront’s Facebook page had around 100,000 subscribers, and the YouTube channel had about 170,000. SouthFront publishes multiple news stories each day, mostly following updates on wars in the Middle East. One of the website’s best resources is its frequently updated maps.

Other networks removed by Facebook in April include accounts in Iran, Georgia, Mauritania, the US, and Myanmar. Facebook claims they took down a network of accounts connected to Iran’s state broadcasting company, although they provide no evidence to support the claim. Content credited to this network includes a post promoting former presidential candidate and Texas Congressman Ron Paul from 2012. Another example from 2014 is just a news story about Israeli forces preventing Palestinians from praying in al-Aqsa Mosque.

Facebook and its Western government-backed partners will continue to remove accounts each month for engaging in CIB. It will be hard to know if the connections they make to the accounts are genuine. But if the sloppy work they did on SouthFront and News Front is any indication, claims from Facebook and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab should always be met with skepticism.

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Quincy Conference: A ‘Seat at the Table’…or a Kick in the Teeth?

Posted by M. C. on March 6, 2020

But nothing could be further from the truth. Out of 22 speakers there was not a single non-interventionist in the line-up.

The Republican, Arizona’s Andy Biggs, made the absurd and laughable claim that Juan Guaido was “rightfully elected” president of Venezuela and therefore it is legitimate for the US to install him in office. Though he didn’t say “Guaido” because he clearly did not even know they guy’s name. And as we know, Guaido never even ran for president in Venezuela – he was named president by Mike Pence!

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/march/05/quincy-conference-a-seat-at-the-tableor-a-kick-in-the-teeth/

Written by Daniel McAdams

his article originally appeared as a special update to RPI subscribers. Subscribe for free here.

I hesitate to write this, as I am a fan of the Libertarian Institute. But one of their recent articles has me scratching my head. And though I have never named them before in a critical piece, I notice that one of my articles is linked in their article so I believe I should set the record straight because the topic is so critically important to our movement.

The article in question, “The Quincy Institute: Off to a Decent Start,”  heaps praise on the Koch/Soros collaboration for its first conference, inaccurately titled, “A New Vision for America in the World.”

From the first sentence of the Libertarian Institute article it is clear there is something very wrong with the piece.

It begins, “Non-interventionists are not used to having a seat at the power table.” The implication is clear: with this conference non-interventionists have finally been given their “seat at the power table.” But nothing could be further from the truth. Out of 22 speakers there was not a single non-interventionist in the line-up. So, even though the table was absurdly large, there were still no seats for non-interventionists. Not. One. Seat.

And we are supposed to cheer?

Unfortunately, the piece was littered with some assertions that frankly are hard to explain. For example, the author, in responding to criticism over the speaker line up (where he links to my article on the topic), explains the abysmal selection of speakers by claiming, “The event was pitched as a forum between the Quincy Institute and Foreign Policy…” (emphasis added).

But that is simply not true. Nowhere in the promotional materials on either the Foreign Policy or Quincy website was this conference billed as a debate between Quincy and Foreign Policy magazine, with one favoring “restraint” and the other pushing the status quo. It was billed as a jointly hosted “leadership forum on the future of US foreign policy and national security.”

The whole “this was a debate between FP and Quincy” is revisionism in response to the outcry over the choice to feature the unreconstructed epitome of the “old vision” – David Petraeus – as the lead speaker facing no scrutiny or opposition. As if Quincy had no power to reject the inclusion of Petraeus in its own conference.

Further attempting to exculpate the Quincy Institute for any responsibility over the line-up, the author writes, “Quincy was discernably the junior partner in the conversation.”

Based on what evidence? Presumably being backed by moneybags Koch and Soros, the Quincy Institute picked up the lion’s share of the tab for the event. How does that make one a “junior partner”? More accurately it would suggest they are either grossly incompetent or in on the scam.

And while we’re at it, if you are seeking to launch a “new vision” for US foreign policy, why partner with a magazine that endorsed the bloodthirsty warmonger Hillary Clinton for president in 2016?

Don’t like Trump? Fine. Don’t endorse anyone.

Though it has received less scrutiny, it is worth mentioning that the other major backer for this event was the Pivotal Foundation. For those unfamiliar with that organization, it is among the single largest financial backers of…the McCain Institute! Yes…that McCain.

So we have an event funded by two huge backers of the warmongering Atlantic Council (Koch and Soros) and a major funder of the neoconservative McCain Institute. We have as “senior partner” in the conference a publication that endorsed for president the instigator of the murderous Libya invasion and the author of the plan to arm jihadists in Syria. It is a conference that features not a single non-interventionist on a single panel. Yet we are supposed to jump up and cheer because we finally have a place at the table?

Are we really that desperate for a pat on the head from the Beltway bombardiers and their think tanks?

The author does not go into the actual presentations at the conference beyond the Petraeus debacle, but it isn’t difficult to see that even the “best” speakers are, at best, self-described “realists.”

On the panel ostensibly to demonstrate that “left wing” Members of Congress are getting together with “right wing” Members to push non-interventionism we are treated to the display of BOTH Members of Congress agreeing that Venezuela’s president was a monster who had to go! That’s the real bipartisanship in Washington.

The Republican, Arizona’s Andy Biggs, made the absurd and laughable claim that Juan Guaido was “rightfully elected” president of Venezuela and therefore it is legitimate for the US to install him in office. Though he didn’t say “Guaido” because he clearly did not even know they guy’s name. And as we know, Guaido never even ran for president in Venezuela – he was named president by Mike Pence!

Biggs then further shows his utter ignorance of a country where he seeks US regime change by stating, “I view Maduro as the legitimate leader” before being corrected by a member of the audience and, clearly embarrassed, laughing it off.

This is the best argument for non-intervention: the people “in charge” have no idea what they are dealing with (and the people under them know exactly what they are dealing with).

Realists are not strategic allies of non-interventionists. There may be some tactical alliances on specific issues where there is the joint intent of sucking the oxygen out of the room on a particular intervention, but we should not forget that “realists” believe strongly in US government interventionism overseas. They only quibble with the neocons over the criteria. If it’s “in the national interest” they are all for it. But who gets to determine the “national interest”? Well they do, of course. And as ever check their funders to determine their interpretation of the national interest.

The neocons are Trotskyites determined to use force to remake the entire world in their image. Realists are for the use of force to affect outcomes determined by the masters of the Grand Chessboard.

To paraphrase Michael Malice, realism is just neoconservatism driving the speed limit.

The purpose of the Quincy conference was not to promote non-interventionism. Not a single non-interventionist was allowed to speak. Worse, actual non-interventionists were not welcome even in the audience. Genuine antiwar activist and intellectual Ray McGovern was denied entry to the event because presumably they could not bear having anyone with a history of challenging “King David” Petraeus on his murderous record.

The purpose was, as I said in my original piece, to serve up the old wine of a disastrous foreign policy in the new bottles of “restraint” and other meaningless wooden language phrases. One speaker even expressed the view that we should stop calling war “war” because it implied that there should be an end to the use of US military force overseas!

So this conference was “a good start” for non-interventionists? What’s their next act…a keynote from Bill Kristol?

As Ron Paul has always said, this is at its core a philosophical question. It is not about compromising one’s values or principles. We must stand strong against US government interventionism overseas. Full stop. Anything less and we are, like the Quincy Institute, merely providing cover for the continuation of Washington’s disastrous and anti-American foreign policy.

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Lying Schiff’s Star Witness Alexander Vindman Tied to Ukrainian Arms Dealers, Ukrainian Oil and Gas and the Atlantic Council

Posted by M. C. on February 10, 2020

Vindman also admitted during testimony that he tampered with and tried but failed to alter the transcript of President Trump’s call to the Ukrainian President.

He may be a US citizen but he is also Ukrainian.

Kim Philby was a British citizen. That doesn’t mean that was where his loyalties lay.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/10/lying-schiffs-star-witness-alexander-vindman-tied-to-ukrainian-arms-dealers-ukrainian-oil-and-gas-and-the-atlantic-council/

Joe Hoft by Joe Hoft

We just keep getting more and more pieces to the corrupt puzzle involving the Democrats, the Deep State, foreign actors and the media.  Here’s some more about Alexander Vindman, Lying Adam Schiff’s start witness two days ago.

We reported yesterday that Yesterday Colonel Alexander Vindman was a witness in Adam Schiff’s basement chamber of secrets.  During questioning on Tuesday Colonel Vindman admitted he shared the read-outs of President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Zelenzky with several other secret operatives.

When Rep. Jim Jordan asked him who he shared the readouts with — Rep. Adam Schiff SHUT DOWN the questioning!

FOX News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge reported that Colonel Vindman may have violated the federal leaking statute 18 USC 798 when he leaked the president’s classified call to several other operatives.

Vindman also admitted during testimony that he tampered with and tried but failed to alter the transcript of President Trump’s call to the Ukrainian President.

Yesterday we tied Vindman to Obama’s former Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul who spoke out in support of Vindman.  The fact that Vindman is connected to McFaul is alarming. McFaul was one of the first to attack President Trump’s attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for investigating Ukrainian corruption involved in the Russia collusion scam. During his work, Rudy identified the crimes committed by the Bidens in their pay-for-play scam in the Ukraine.

McFaul is no stranger to controversy or corruption. It goes without saying he was Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, for example.

McFaul has a storied past. D. Manny wrote at Politics Central that McFaul was one of the first individuals to discuss the never verified Russian hack of the DNC –

 

There is a 06/14/2016 article on Politico written by Daniel Strauss entitled, “Russian Government Hackers Broke into DNC Servers, Stole Trump Oppo; The Hackers had Access to the Information for Approximately One Year.” In that article, Strauss includes a comment attributed to Michael McFaul:

Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, called the hack “meddling in our personal affairs.”

“I am sure they intended to do this without being caught,” he told POLITICO. “They wanted to obtain the information without it being detected. That’s a kind of target that would make sense — in terms of them wanting to know things about what is going on here. Whether they were doing it to try to try to [sic] manipulate our political process, I’d have to think about that.”

He added: “Russia has tremendous capabilities, both the Russian government and their proxies and people somewhat affiliated with the government. We always underestimate their capabilities.”

First, such an odd choice from whom to seek a comment. What qualifications or expertise render McFaul an authority on matters such as Russian hacking? A search of Michael McFaul’s history shows he served as US ambassador to Russia two years prior to the Politco article, and what’s more, he previously made the news because Obama assigned McFaul to be an ambassador without having any prior diplomatic skills, to a major country like Russia too.

Manny goes on to state that soon after McFaul was appointed Ambassador in Russia he was visited by a number of Communist leaders from Russia at the US Embassy.

Perhaps the most shocking observation of McFaul is related to his invitation in front of Congress at a Foreign Affairs Committee. Pictures of the event are telling, not necessarily because of McFaul, but rather because of the individual he has sitting directly behind him, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

McFaul’s Congressional hearing occurred eight days after the now famous Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr. This meeting resulted in Donald Jr. being interrogated for hours by Congress over his meeting with Veselnitskaya.

What is more shocking is that Veselnitskaya met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, before and after her meeting with Donald Jr. Fusion is the firm behind the phony Trump-Russia dossier that was never confirmed and very possibly all made up but nevertheless was used by Obama’s Deep State to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on President Trump.

Vindman is also connected to Glenn Simpson. Vindman was in Eurasia, specializing in Russian affairs, at the same region as Glenn Simpson, who was also specializing in Russian affairs was there, as well as Christopher Steele, who was also specializing in Russian affairs at the time. Trey Gowdy uncovered this in Simpson’s testimony in front of Congress –

Today we have more on Vindman, Shifty Schiff’s star witness ==>>

Yorktown Solutions is a lobbying firm that represents some questionable Ukrainian arms companies and the Ukrainian Oil and Gas industry, interested in undermining the Nordstream 2 Project. (Kiev Post)

Daniel Vajdich is listed as the registered agent for the lobbying firm Yorktown Solutions. He just so happens to be a member of the Atlantic Council. The same Atlantic Council Burisma donated heavily to and welcomed Volker, now a Senior Advisor, after he resigned. (Which opens a whole other can of worms regarding his meeting with Burisma board members at the Atlantic Council Event.)

Yorktown Solutions lists Alexander Vindman in its FARA filing –

On what appears to be their first day of U.S. operations, Vindman received his first email from Yorktown, he then met with them in March, and is listed as corresponding with Yorktown Solutions through email every few weeks since. Important to note, March of 2019 is also when Lutsenko began making allegations against Biden per WAPO’s timeline.

In addition, Chairman of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine Stanislav Shevchuk met with the Special Advisor to the President of the USA, Head of the Russian and Eurasian Section of the US National Security Council Fiona Hill, Head of the Eastern Europe and Russia Division of the US National Security Council Alexander Vindman, former US Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Director of the Eurasian Center at the Atlantic Council of the United States John Herbst, partner of Baker McKenzie law firm Thomas Firestone during which a number of urgent issues were raised, in particular, the protection of the Constitution as part of the stability of the legal system and guarantee the effective functioning of democratic institutions.

What the hell were Hill, Vindman and Firestone doing together in Novermber 2018?   No doubt wasting more tax payer dollars working to overturn the 2016 election and the US Constitution.  This whole Schiff Sham is a disgrace.  Let’s hope and pray for justice.

Happy Halloween from the Schiff Sham and its basement chamber of secrets!

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An American Oligarch‘s Dirty Tale of Corruption – NEO

Posted by M. C. on December 26, 2019

Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge of the 1999 bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian soldiers guarding the Pristina International Airport. The Russians were there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia peacekeeping operation supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson refused Clark, retorting, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.”

https://journal-neo.org/2015/06/12/an-american-oligarch-s-dirty-tale-of-corruption/

Author: F. William Engdahl

soros1_1496566bRarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.

What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene manipulation of the most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York billionaire.

In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked “Confidential” Soros outlines a detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, “A short and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine,” the memo from Soros calls for steps to “restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.” To do the restoring, Soros blithely notes that “General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the auspices of the Atlantic Council [emphasis added—f.w.e.] will advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.”

Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training Ukrainian army personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in Ukraine. The Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank.

Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum which does business in Poland.

Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge of the 1999 bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian soldiers guarding the Pristina International Airport. The Russians were there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia peacekeeping operation supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson refused Clark, retorting, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.” Now Clark apparently decided to come out of retirement for the chance to go at Russia directly.

Naked asset grab

In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s “first priority must be to regain control of financial markets,” which he assures Poroshenko that Soros would be ready to assist in: “I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about the swap agreement.”

He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via a special EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU’s “AAA” top credit rating to provide a risk insurance for investment into Ukraine.

Whose risk would the EU insure?

Soros details, “I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian businesses. This is likely to attract the interest of the investment community. As stated above, Ukraine must become an attractive investment destination.” Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, “The investments will be for-profit but I will pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations. This should allay suspicions that I am advocating policies in search of personal gain. “

For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980’s, will know that his supposedly philanthropic “democracy-building” projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990’s allowed Soros the businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University’s “shock therapy” messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the post-Soviet governments to privatize and open to a “free market” at once, rather than gradually.

The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the seemingly seamless interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros the philanthropist. In West Africa George Soros backed a former Open Society employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, giving her international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her presidency she had been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market game, studying economics at Harvard and working for the US-controlled World Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi. Before becoming Liberia’s President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).

Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first acts as President was to also invite the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to “protect George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human rights.”

Naftogaz the target

The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and energy monopoly, Naftogaz. He writes, “The centerpiece of economic reforms will be the reorganization of Naftogaz and the introduction of market pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden subsidies…”

In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock Therapy: “I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your government and give your wholehearted support to a radical, ‘big bang’ type of approach. That is to say, administrative controls would be removed and the economy would move to market prices rapidly rather than gradually…Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the hidden subsidies…”

Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization “big bang.”

The Puppet-Master?

The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power.

Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions, who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:

Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.

Soros shapes ‘New Ukraine’

Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros’ IRF money is behind creation of a National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree from Poroshenko which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature. Soros writes, “The framework for bringing the various branches of government together has also emerged. The National Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The International Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the Soros Foundations was the sole financial supporter of the NRC until now…”

Soros’ NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override parliamentary debate to push through “reforms,” with the declared first priority being privatization of Naftogaz and raising gas prices drastically to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt country can hardly afford.

In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key role in selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers—Natalia Jaresko, an American ex- State Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics Minister, and a health minister from Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to his proposal for a “big bank” privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states, “You are fortunate to have appointed three ‘new Ukrainian’ ministers and several natives (sic) who are committed to this approach.”

Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU that the current government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the notorious corruption that has dominated every Kiev regime since 1991. Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will convince the EU to cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March 2015 paper says that, “It is essential for the government to produce a visible demonstration (sic) during the next three months in order to change the widely prevailing image of Ukraine as an utterly corrupt country.” That he states will open the EU to make the €11 billion insurance guarantee investment fund.

While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not corrupt, Soros reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper procedures block his agenda. Talking about his proposals to reform Ukraine’s constitution to enable privatizations and other Soros-friendly moves, he complains, “The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly elected Rada on proper procedures and total transparency.”

Soros suggests that he intends to create this “visible demonstration” through his initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature.

George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank to lobby his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no doubt laying a subtle role.

George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros once boasted in a TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile with forged papers, assisting the Horthy government to seize property of other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Soros told the TV moderator, “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”

This is the same morality apparently behind Soros’ activities in Ukraine today. It seems again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he helped bring to power in February 2014 US coup d’etat is riddled with explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of “public-private-partnership.” Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich private investors like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his Ukraine strategy memo, “George Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new Ukraine, March 12, 2015.”

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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DC’s Atlantic Council raked in funding from Hunter Biden’s corruption-stained employer while courting his VP father | The Grayzone

Posted by M. C. on October 17, 2019

Addressing the parliament in Kiev, Biden declared that “corruption can have no place in the new Ukraine,” stating that the “United States has also been a driving force behind the IMF, working to provide a multi-billion package to help Ukraine..”  

That same month, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/13/dcs-atlantic-council-raked-in-funding-from-hunter-bidens-corruption-stained-employer-while-courting-his-vp-father/

By Max Blumenthal

With its relentless focus on corruption in Russia and Ukraine, the Atlantic Council has distinguished itself from other top-flight think tanks in Washington. Over the past several years, it has held innumerable conferences and panel discussions, issued a string of reports, and published literally hundreds of essays on Russia’s “kleptocracy” and the scourge of Kremlin disinformation.

At the same time, this institution has posed as a faithful partner to Ukraine’s imperiled democracy, organizing countless programs on the urgency of economic reforms to tamp down on corruption in the country.

But behind the curtain, the Atlantic Council has initiated a lucrative relationship with a corruption-tainted Ukrainian gas company, the Burisma Group, that is worth as much as $250,000 a year. The partnership has paid for lavish conferences in Monaco and helped bring Burisma’s oligarchic founder out of the cold.

This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.

As Biden parries Trump’s accusations, some of the former vice president’s most ardent defenders are emerging from the halls of the Atlantic Council, which featured Biden as a star speaker at its awards ceremonies over the years. These advocates include Michael Carpenter, Biden’s longtime foreign policy advisor and specialist on Ukraine, who has taken to the national media to support his embattled boss.

Even as Burisma’s trail of influence-buying finds its way into front page headlines, the Atlantic Council’s partnership with the company is scarcely mentioned…

NATO’s think tank in Washington

The Atlantic Council functions as the semi-official think tank of NATO in Washington. As such, it cultivates relationships with well-established policymakers who take a hard line against Russia and support the treaty organization’s perpetual expansion.

Biden has been among the think tank’s most enthusiastic and well-placed allies.

In 2011, then-Vice President Biden delivered the keynote address at the Atlantic Council’s distinguished leadership awards. He returned to the think tank again in 2014 for another keynote at its “Toward A Europe Whole and Free” conference, which was dedicated to expanding NATO’s influence and countering “Russian aggression.” Throughout the event, speakers like Zbigniew Brzezinski sniped at Obama for his insufficiently bellicose posture toward Russia, while former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright fretted over polls showing low public support for US interventionism overseas.

In his own comments, Biden emphasized the need to power Europe with non-Russian sources of natural gas. This provided a prime opportunity to Ukrainian suppliers like Burisma and US energy titans. Many of these energy companies, from Chevron to Noble Energy, also happen to be top donors to the Atlantic Council.

“This would be a game-changer for Europe, in my view, and we’re ready to do everything in our power to help it happen,” Biden promised his audience.

At the time, the Atlantic Council was pushing to ramp up the proxy war against pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. In 2015, for instance, the think tank helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles.

Given that the Atlantic Council has been funded by the two manufacturers of the Javelin system, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, this created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. In fact, the think tank presented its Distinguished Business Leadership Award to Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson that same year.

Dubious arrangements like these are not limited to arms manufacturers. Anders Aslund, a neoliberal economist who helps oversee the Atlantic Council’s programming on Russia and Eastern Europe, was quietly paid by a consortium of Latvian banks to write an October 2017 paper highlighting the supposed progress they had made in battling corruption…

Biden made his first visit to the post-Maidan government of Ukraine in April 2014, just as Kiev was launching its so-called “anti-terrorist operation” against separatists who broke off from the new, NATO-oriented Ukraine and its nationalist government and formed so-called people’s republics in the Russophone Donbass region. The fragmentation of the country and its grinding proxy war flowed directly from the regime-change operation that Biden helped oversee.

Addressing the parliament in Kiev, Biden declared that “corruption can have no place in the new Ukraine,” stating that the “United States has also been a driving force behind the IMF, working to provide a multi-billion package to help Ukraine..”

That same month, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma.

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