Which Side are You On?

Glenn Greenwald's resignation from The Intercept is one of those rare "which side are you on" moments of brilliant illumination. Yves Smith has a helpful synopsis this morning with links to all the key pieces.

The story in a nutshell is that editors at The Intercept refused to publish co-founder Greenwald's story about evidence of influence peddling found on Hunter Biden's laptop. In response, Greenwald announced his resignation and set up shop on Substack.

I subscribed to Greenwald's substack, as well as Matt Taibbi's. Taibbi's take on Greenwald's resignation is definitive. I hope you read it. 

Taibbi plots the rise of Russophobia starting in 2016 as the key organizing principle of the Democratic Party. Russia went from being dismissed by Obama as barely a regional power to an omniscient many-headed hydra controlling U.S. democracy.

To me it has always seemed obvious that the the target of this new McCarthyism is the voting population of the United States. How to maintain fealty to a neoliberal order that produces more than anything else foreign wars and inequality? Gin up terror over foreign subversion by an official enemy.

As for The Intercept, its support for the war on Syria (Robert Mackey, Mehdi Hasan) and Russiagate (James Risen) shows it's squarely aligned with the U.S. national security state. On the other hand, I think Ryan Grim's reporting on progressive electoral politics is indispensable, and Ryan Devereaux has done great work on the Thin Blue Line.

In the end, does anyone doubt that Hunter Biden, a fucked up young guy, was peddling his father's name for personal advantage? I don't. At the same time, since I have never believed that Joe Biden is some kind of moral exemplar, I had no trouble voting the Democratic ticket. The battles yet to be fought are against the Democratic Party once it attains control of the federal government.

Mainstream Media: Purveyor of Fake News

Over the weekend The New York Times performed an about-face and debunked the regime change casus belli that Venezuelan troops set fire to aid trucks stuck at the Colombian border (see "Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Nicolás Maduro Burned Aid Convoy"). Max Blumenthal had already debunked the Maduro-burns-aid-trucks canard in real time.

Glenn Greenwald has a masterly write-up in "NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda" where he concludes that

What we have here is classic Fake News – spread on Twitter, by U.S. officials and U.S. media stars – with the clear and malicious intent to start a war. But no western proponents of social media censorship will call for their accounts to be cancelled nor call for their posts to be deleted. That’s because “Fake News” and the war against it is strictly a means of combating propaganda by U.S. adversaries; the U.S. and its alliesmaintain extensive programs to spread Fake News online and none of those anti-Fake News crusaders call for those to be shut down.

And the next time claims are made about Venezuela designed to fuel regime change and wars, the independent journalists and analysts who were absolutely right in this instance – who recognized and documented the lies of the U.S. Government weeks before the New York Times did – will again be ignored or, at best, mocked. Meanwhile, those in the media and Foreign Policy Community who uncritically amplified and spread this dangerous lie will be treated as the Serious People whose pronouncements are the only ones worth hearing. With rare exception, dissent on Venezuela will continue to be barred.

That’s because the U.S. media, by design, does not permit dissent on U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to false claims about U.S. adversaries. That’s why skeptics of U.S. regime change in Venezuela, or dissenters on the prevailing orthodoxies about Russia, have largely been disappeared from mainstream media outlets, just as they were in 2002 and 2003.

"Classic Fake News" methods of mainstream reporting are spreading to cover larger sections of the daily newspaper. Brexit, the trade war with China, the occupation of Afghanistan repeat the same talking points endlessly, so much so it is hard not to ignore them (which is likely the intention).

A Truly Horrendous and Shocking Revelation that Bodes Ill for 2020

There is a helpful roundup today in RT (see "Huge Psy-op in UK? Not interested. British media silent on Integrity Initiative months on") regarding the lack of coverage in the British media on the Integrity Initiative.

The Integrity Initiative (II) is a project of the Institute for Statecraft, a Scottish charity, funded by, among others, the British Ministry of Defense, the British Foreign Office, the U.S. State Department, NATO and Facebook. The Institute for Statecraft's stated mission is to educate about governance and advance human rights; it's real mission is to shore up support for a fracturing neoliberal consensus by fabricating a hostile Russian bogeyman.

That's where the Integrity Initiative project comes in: It's supposed to combat Russian disinformation, but in fact the Integrity Initiative produces fake news about Russian disinformation. It disseminates this Russiaphobia through clusters of journalists, politicians and academics.

Since the Institute for Statecraft was hacked in November what has become clear to me -- and what explains the silence in the mainstream Western media (RT focused solely on the mainstream British media, but the same goes for the U.S.) -- is that the II is how the mainstream media operates in general: clusters of journalists, politicians, academics and think-tankers are managed by the government (even if the form happens to be a charity) to produce official enemies.

A peek behind the Great Oz's curtain can be found in Glenn Greenwald's story Sunday, "NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party." In a nutshell, NBC News Russiabaited antiwar presidential aspirant Tulsi Gabbard by citing analysis from New Knowledge identifying "‘chatter’ related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns.”

As Greenwald points out:

What NBC — amazingly — concealed is a fact that reveals its article to be a journalistic fraud: That same firm, New Knowledge, was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.'”

It's not as if New Knowledge's information warfare went under the radar. The New York Times alone has published six stories since it was revealed in December that New Knowledge's Jonathon Morgan created a ersatz Russian botnet to support the GOP's Roy Moore in the special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama:

• "Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics," Dec 19
• "Doug Jones ‘Outraged’ by Russian-Style Tactics Used in His Senate Race," Dec 20
• "Facebook Closes 5 Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race," Dec 22
• "LinkedIn Co-Founder Apologizes for Deception in Alabama Senate Race," Dec 26
• "Democrats Faked Online Push to Outlaw Alcohol in Alabama Race," Jan 7
• "Fake News as ‘Moral Imperative’? Democrats’ Alabama Move Hints at Ugly 2020," Jan 13

All of this is an enormous body blow to the McCarthyite anti-Russian hysteria that undergirds much of the official Democratic Party. As Jim Rutenberg points out in the last article in the above list of six:

New Knowledge helped build the website for the Alliance’s [Alliance for Securing Democracy] disinformation-tracking database, Hamilton68, which had monitored suspected Russian-linked accounts, tracking the falsehoods they spread and the discord they tried to sow. (New Knowledge also helped write a report on Russian troll activity released last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee.) The Alabama project, Mr. Schafer told me, “undercuts our collective ability to take other countries to task for their deceptive, online behavior.”

A more appropriate question to ask, the one implied, is how much of the putative deceptive online activity attributed to hostile foreign actors is actually homegrown?

What are we supposed to do with "Russians Meddling in the Midterms? Here’s the Data" and "After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced," both sourced to Jonathon Morgan? Have these storylines been debunked and publicly repudiated? When are the congressional hearings scheduled?

NBC News citing Morgan and New Knowledge to tar the antiwar Gabbard is evidence that the fakeness of mainstream media is exposure proof. A truly horrendous and shocking revelation that bodes ill for 2020.

Does Populism Change Everything?

I'm reading Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything. It is fantastic but dispiriting. It provides a historical account of how collective recognition of climate change corresponded with a corporate-dominated globalized free trade system -- the latter effectively negating a plan for addressing the former. In fact, the primacy of trade was memorialized at the outset at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.

One theme that Klein stresses throughout is localism. In order to deal with the planet's changing climate we are going to have to craft local solutions. The problem is that the neoliberal global trade architecture that has been erected the last 25 years makes localism illegal. Local goods and services cannot be privileged over those from foreign countries.

And this is why there is such hostility from the neoliberal center towards the populism that is rising throughout the West. At root this fast-growing populism is a rejection of corporate-managed international trade and banking. Being anti-immigrant is just the flower of the populist plant that has taken root.

This morning online, which means it will be printed in tomorrow's national edition, The New York Times has a good, long article by Alissa Rubin, "Geert Wilders, Reclusive Provocateur, Rises Before Dutch Vote," devoted to the "Dutch Trump":

Geert Wilders, far-right icon, is one of Europe’s strangest politicians, not least because he comes from the Netherlands, one of Europe’s most socially liberal countries, with a centuries-long tradition of promoting religious tolerance and welcoming immigrants. 

How he and his party fare in the March 15 elections could well signal how the far right will do in pivotal elections in France, Germany and possibly Italy later this year, and ultimately determine the future of the European Union. Mr. Wilders (pronounced VIL-ders) has promised to demand a “Nexit” referendum on whether the Netherlands should follow Britain’s example and leave the union.

“The Netherlands is kind of a bellwether, a lot of trends manifest themselves here first,” said Hans Anker, a Dutch political strategist who has worked both in the Netherlands and the United States. 

“I wouldn’t rule out that Wilders could be prime minister,” he added. “This one is fundamentally unpredictable.”

The problem for Wilders, even if he wins, will be forming a government:

Right now Mr. Wilders’s party looks set to win more seats than any other or to come in second. However, he has historically polled better before elections than he has performed in them. [Same problem that Le Pen and the National Front have.] Still, after pollsters underestimated the likelihood of both Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump last year, no one is relying on predictions.

The bigger question is whether even if Mr. Wilders comes in first or second, he would be willing to form or join a governing coalition. For more than 20 years, no one party has had a majority. Other parties say they will not work with him and he has shown little interest in compromise and working with others.

What I find curious is how balanced Rubin's story is compared to, say, The Times' reporting on Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, which is always dismissive. It is as if the neoliberal center sees a possibility of collaborating or co-opting the rising populism. This is the dance underway with Trump. And at this point I think it should be apparent to all of us that Trump is willing to play along with the neoliberal center.

There are of course contradictions. The future of the EU is problematic. A Wilders wins means a Nexit vote, as a Le Pen win means a Frexit. The Trump talking point is that capitalism, for all intents and purposes, is contained in one country, and that is the United States. Multilateral trade agreements will be scrapped in favor of bilateral negotiations. Easier said than done. Globalized free trade is the key to the neoliberal unipolar world; that, and full spectrum U.S. military dominance. A kaleidoscope of bilateral trade agreements leads to a multipolar world.

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For a good assessment of the Thomas Perez's election over Keith Ellison this weekend to lead the DNC, read Glenn Greenwald's "Key Question About DNC Race: Why Did Obama White House Recruit Perez to Run Against Ellison?"

The answer? Money, of course. It doesn't bode well for Democrat hopes of picking up seats at the midterm.