Who is to Blame?

More Bad News on the Way

It looks like more bad news is on the way. "China, Germany, and South Korea have all reported substantial new outbreaks of COVID-19 after they eased lockdowns." Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is predicting that U.S. unemployment will grow even worse in the coming months. And the U.S. and its Five Eyes partners are using the pandemic to step up attacks on China, locking in the New Cold War 2.0, as the Dragon is shunted into the corral with the Russian Bear.

For all intents and purposes the shambolic Trump administration should be on its way out the door. The problem is that the Democrats are equally shambolic. Biden is a joke, and if he chooses the uniquely unappealing Kamala Harris as his running mate, don't be surprised if Trump can stumble into a second term.

Facebook's New Censorship "War Room"

Today The New York Times features another "The Russians Stole My Election!" wrap-up. The "newspaper of record" does these about every other month, if not monthly. The ruling elite are absolutely committed to this neo-McCarthyite narrative. The message is clear: We're back to the Cold War, and, absent a political revolution in the United States, it'll be with us for the rest of our lives.

Accompanying "The Russians Stole My Election!" piece is a laughable story ("Inside Facebook’s Election ‘War Room’" by Sheera Frenkel and Mike Ives) about the new election war room being constructed at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters.

The key passage -- the one most highlighted in the comments section appended to the story -- is as follows:

Already, foreign operatives have evolved their online influence campaigns to skirt the measures Facebook has put in place ahead of the midterms, said Priscilla Moriuchi, director of strategic threat development at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

“If you look at the way that foreign influence operations have changed these last two years, their focus isn’t really on propagating fake news anymore,” Ms. Moriuchi said. “It’s on augmenting stories already out there which speak to hyperpartisan audiences.”

In other words, "fake news" is not the concern, communication itself is. Filtering of communication is the goal, which is going to be a problem because the tech giants have monetized communication. The more clicks the better. The more divisive the more clicks.

The whole neo-McCarthyite narrative is like slapping a 1950s Red Menace comic book horror story over our postmodern neoliberal reality. It's a perversion, a monstrosity. A horrible price will no doubt be paid.

There Won't be a Trial

There's a decent interview of Michael Isikoff by Real News Network's Aaron Mate. A friend of mine has been trying to get me to read Russian Roulette.  He is convinced that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump.

Joe Lauria points out in "Clinging to Collusion: Why Evidence Will Probably Never Be Produced in the Indictments of ‘Russian Agents’" that the indictment announced Friday is not meant to end in a trial. It is primarily theatrical, of the cold war variety.

Evidence Likely Never to be Seen

Other apparent sources for information in the indictment are intelligence agencies, which normally create hurdles in a criminal prosecution.

“In this indictment there is detail after detail whose only source could be intelligence, yet you don’t use intelligence in documents like this because if these defendants decide to challenge this in court, it opens the U.S. to having to expose sources and methods,” Johnson said. [Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson.]

If the U.S. invoked the states secret privilege so that classified evidence could not be revealed in court a conviction before a civilian jury would be jeopardized.

Such a trial is extremely unlikely however. That makes the indictment essentially a political and not a legal document because it is almost inconceivable that the U.S. government will have to present any evidence in court to back up its charges. This is simply because of the extreme unlikelihood that arrests of Russians living in Russia will ever be made.

In this way it is similar to the indictment earlier this year of the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg, Russia, a private click bait company that was alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by buying social media ads and staging political rallies for both Clinton and Trump. It seemed that no evidence would ever have to back up the indictment because there would never be arrests in the case.

But Special Counsel Robert Mueller was stunned when lawyers for the internet company showed up in Washington demanding discovery in the case. That caused Mueller to scramble and demand a delay in the first hearing, which was rejected by a federal judge. Mueller is now battling to keep so-called sensitive material out of court.

In both the IRA case and Friday’s indictments, the extremely remote possibility of convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception of Russia’s guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations, presented as though it is established fact. Once that impression is settled into the public consciousness, Mueller’s mission would appear to be accomplished.

For instance, the Times routinely dispenses with the adjective “alleged” and reports the matter as though it is already established fact. It called Friday’s indictments, which are only unproven charges, “the most detailed accusation by the American government to date of the [not alleged] Russian government’s interference in the 2016 election, and it includes a litany of [not alleged] brazen Russian subterfuge operations meant to foment chaos in the months before Election Day.”

Upheaval in Europe Points to War with Russia

War with Russian is still the strong bet. War appears to be a last ditch frantic effort to slow the rapid collapse of the neoliberal center in Europe.

It doesn't look like the Five Star Movement (M5S) is going to govern Italy, as Outis Philalithopoulos explains below. M5S representatives are defecting to other parties. Philalithopoulos predicts a center-right government.

"US, Britain and France prepare onslaught against Syria," Statement of the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board:

No less significant than the geopolitical motivations for the war are pressing domestic considerations. All of the major imperialist powers preparing for war are riven by deep internal crises and a growing movement of the working class.

French President Macron has signaled his support for the US war drive as his government is embroiled in a head-on confrontation with transportation workers over his hated neoliberal policies. Germany’s right-wing grand coalition government, cobbled together after months of back-room deals, enjoys minuscule public support.

The British state, thrown into crisis by the Brexit-mandated withdrawal from the European Union, is led by a prime minister who is held in universal contempt, with no authority or legitimacy. Theresa May is so afraid of public opposition to British involvement in Syria and a repeat of Prime Minister David Cameron’s debacle in 2013 that she has announced plans to proceed with an attack without a vote in Parliament.

And the United States is embroiled in the greatest political crisis since Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon, exacerbated by a growing strike wave of teachers and mounting opposition throughout the working  by class.

The rush by NATO to embrace a conflict with Russia leaves the distinct impression that the US and the European powers would welcome a de facto state of war, which they could use as a pretext to intensify their drive to censor the Internet and outlaw domestic political opposition. The NATO powers are in the grip of a war fever as reckless as it is criminal. As their internal crises intensify, their military provocations become all the more naked.

"Italian Politics One Month Later" by Outis Philalithopoulos:

First [Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio] declared that the Five Stars would stick with the EU, with the Euro, and with the Atlantic alliance.

Next he declared that he was willing to form a coalition government with any political party as long as it would respect the Five Stars’ rules.

After that, he declared that he would be happy to form a government with the PD provided they would save face for him by leaving Renzi out of it. Or he could form a government with Lega provided that they would save face for him by leaving Berlusconi out of it.

For the time being, the center-right parties have been fairly decent about maintaining their pacts, and it soon became clear that Salvini/Lega would stick to the coalition they had committed to. Di Maio then returned to the idea of forming a government with the PD. When the PD said it wasn’t interested, the Five Stars responded that for the good of the country it ought to be, considering that it could thereby atone for its mistakes.

The current state of play is that Di Maio is continuing on his desperate quest to find a person, party, angel, demon, or extraterrestrial life form that might be capable of giving him enough support to allow him to form a government. In this he draws strength from the 11 million Italians who believed in him and his promise to provide a sort of universal basic income at least to the unemployed – an attractive vision especially in the South given the high unemployment rate there. On the other hand, if it starts to look like the promises of the Five Stars are empty, then there is a significant risk that many of its voters will lose faith and bolt in the next election.

Di Maio doesn’t merely have to worry about the voters deserting – there are also real reasons to doubt the loyalty of some of the newly-elected Five Stars senators and deputies. After the previous election, there were about 40 defectors (deputies and senators) from the Five Stars: the so-called “mixed group,” which subsequently became a prize that other parties worked to attract into their own orbits in order to bulk up their coalitions.

Di Maio’s worry is that as he continues to fail to form a government, there will be fresh defections – there have already been eight. Many of the Five Stars’ representatives come from modest backgrounds. Although defecting would mean having to pay the fines mentioned above, that might seem like a small price to pay compared to having the opportunity to safeguard their (potentially lucrative) seats at the table.

All of this raises the stakes for Di Maio in his frantic efforts to try to accomplish something, somehow.

Skripal Poisoning Canard Comes Unraveled

Following the initial UK-U.S. organized bum rush of Russia over the Skripal poisoning, the narrative has come under increasing suspicion.

The Skripal daughter, Yulia, is now conscious and appears to be on her way to recovery. The police officer who assisted the Skripals has also recovered and returned home. How is this possible if what we're dealing with here is a super-lethal fourth generation chemical weapon, code name Novichok?

More questionable is the idea that an assassin --  and not just any assassin, but one who is trained in the use of a fourth generation nerve agent -- would smear her Novichok on the front-door handle and skedaddle. What if the Amazon deliveryman were to arrive?

This morning Ellen Barry and David Sanger come to the rescue in "Poisoned Door Handle Hints at High-Level Plot to Kill Spy, U.K. Officials Say."

British and American officials say they are struck by the symbolism of the attack on Mr. Skripal, as well as its effectiveness. There were many ways the former spy could have been killed: He could have been shot, or killed in a staged accident.

But the assassins knew the nerve agent would be identified, and knew it would be linked to Russia, the officials said. That was meant to send a chilling message to others who would think of defecting to, or informing, the West.

And by conducting the operation in an historical British town, some distance from London, the attack was meant to indicate that no place was out of reach of Russian assassins, the officials said.

The boldness of the attack on Mr. Skripal, which took British authorities by surprise, has caused them to reassess Mr. Putin’s use of what has come to be called “hybrid warfare.”

The officials are now viewing those actions as part of a pattern — one rarely seen in the Cold War — in which Mr. Putin exerts Russian power in ways that are hard to attribute directly to Russian actors, but leave little doubt in the minds of adversaries about the country’s willingness to use a range of new tactics.

This explanation is similar to the one used when the question is asked, Why would Assad use a weapon that provides no tactical advantage yet invites retribution from a superpower? Because he loves to terrorize his people.

That's basically what Barry and Sanger are hanging out there for the NYT readers to consume. Putin did this, used a chemical weapon nonsensically in an assassination attempt, to terrorize his opponents.

It's the Boris and Natasha explanation. In other words, a cartoon meant for children.

The Theater of the Big Lie

Read newspapers long enough and you learn to decipher the truth by noting patterns in propaganda. It's like mirror writing, crude, but most big-lie propaganda is crude.

The strong tell that the coordinated expulsion of Russian diplomats throughout Europe and in the United States was an ostentatious display meant to cloak Western perfidy is the repeated morning-after invocation of a previous big lie.

Andrew Higgins in "A New Cold War With Russia? No, It’s Worse Than That" reminds readers that

While denying any part in the March 4 poisoning of Sergei V. Skripal, a former spy, and his daughter, Yulia, both still critically ill in the hospital, Russia in recent years has built up a long record of flouting international norms, notably with its 2014 annexation of Crimea, the first time since 1945 that European borders have been redrawn by force.

Steven Erlanger in "How an Outraged Europe Agreed to a Hard Line on Putin" uses almost the exact wording:

“This is an intelligence operation carried out with intelligence capacity with weaponized, weapons-grade chemical agents,” one senior European official said. “It has taken matters to an entirely different level.”

Alluding to Russia’s earlier aggressions in Ukraine, the senior official added, “Russia keeps violating international law in Crimea and Ukraine and unwritten rules on nonintervention, and now there is the use of nerve agents in Britain.”

To claim that Crimea's vote to join the Russian Federation in 2014 is proof of Russian aggression is absurd. It was purely a defensive move coming close on the heels of the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev.

Russian leaders would have been criminal in their neglect if they hadn't engineered a plebiscite to protect the Russian-speaking population of the Crimea, not to mention its major port of Sevastopol.

To defend yesterday's diplomatic expulsions by citing Russia aggression in Crimea immediately casts doubt on assertions of Russian guilt. Furthermore, Higgins says that Russia's annexation of Crimea is "the first time since 1945 that European borders have been redrawn by force." What about Kosovo?

So, as Erlanger makes plain in his story, yesterday's expulsions were merely big-lie theater planned last week over a dinner in Brussels attended by Merkel, May and Macron.

Corbyn on the Skripal Affair

In The Guardian yesterday Jeremy Corbyn penned a defense of his stance regarding the Skripal affair, "The Salisbury attack was appalling. But we must avoid a drift to conflict." His position is more hawkish than is being presented in the mainstream media. For instance, he applauds prime minister Theresa May's expulsion of Russian diplomats, and he calls for cracking down on the many Russian oligarchs who shelter on Britain's shores:

We agree with the government’s action in relation to Russian diplomats, but measures to tackle the oligarchs and their loot would have a far greater impact on Russia’s elite than limited tit-for-tat expulsions. We are willing to back further sanctions as and when the investigation into the Salisbury attack produces results.

The Tory government seems willing to take up Corbyn's idea of seizing Russian tycoon assets, but limiting the seizure to Putin's allies.

What set off the attacks on Corbyn was his statement of the obvious: We don't know who poisoned Skripal and his daughter, and trusting the government in these matters has gone very badly of late:

[T]hat does not mean we resign ourselves to a “new cold war” of escalating arms spending, proxy conflicts across the globe and a McCarthyite intolerance of dissent. Instead, Britain needs to uphold its laws and its values without reservation. And those should be allied to a foreign policy that uses every opportunity to reduce tensions and conflict wherever possible.

This government’s diplomacy is failing the country. Unqualified support for Donald Trump and rolling out the red carpet for a Saudi despot not only betrays our values, it makes us less safe.

And our capacity to deal with outrages from Russia is compromised by the tidal wave of ill-gotten cash that Russian oligarchs – both allied with and opposed to the Russian government – have laundered through London over the past two decades. We must stop servicing Russian crony capitalism in Britain, and the corrupt billionaires who use London to protect their wealth.

[snip]

But if we are to unite our allies behind action that needs taking, we must make full use of existing international treaties and procedures for dealing with chemical weapons. That means working through the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to reduce the threat from these horrific weapons, including if necessary an investigation by chemical weapons inspectors into the distribution of Soviet-era weapons.

There can and should be the basis for a common political response to this crime. But in my years in parliament I have seen clear thinking in an international crisis overwhelmed by emotion and hasty judgments too many times. Flawed intelligence and dodgy dossiers led to the calamity of the Iraq invasion. There was overwhelming bipartisan support for attacking Libya, but it proved to be wrong. A universal repugnance at the 9/11 attacks led to a war on Afghanistan that continues to this day, while terrorism has spread across the globe.

Can't really dispute that. And I think that's what's behind the howls of derision in the tabloids. When you are actively engaged in a "big lie" you can't have someone of prominence stand and state the obvious.

The New York Times, always on the lookout to skewer Corbyn, hopped on the bandwagon with Stephen Castle's "U.K. Labour Leader’s Stance on Russian Ex-Spy’s Poisoning Splits Party." Fortunately Castle lets the sunshine in at the end of his article. The Blairites within Labour can't touch Corbyn:

But one commentator, John Rentoul, suspects that there is more support for Mr. Corbyn’s position outside Parliament where, he wrote, the Labour leader’s “idealistic opposition to warlike words goes down well with much of the general public.” And it remains true that despite the strong circumstantial evidence of Russian involvement, the British police have neither identified any direct link to the Kremlin nor named any suspects.

Whether Mr. Corbyn pays a political price for his stance may depend on how the Anglo-Russian rift develops. His supporters are likely to give him the benefit of the doubt, and most of his internal critics are already well-known opponents. While his comments gave plenty of ammunition to the right-wing press, many analysts, pointing to last year’s elections when the tabloids vilified the Labour leader, concluded that he might wear their criticism as a badge of honor.

The Italian elections, May's shuckin' and jivin' on Brexit, Trump's apparent longevity all point to the neoliberal center Washington Consensus in serious trouble. For those in power the solution is to lock in a New Cold War. Stifle dissent. Cement in narrow boundaries for political discourse.

It's a long shot. It will buy the discredited neoliberal center some more time. How much more is the question. But inevitably there will be a correction.

It's Back to the Future with the New Cold War

An interesting post by Caitlin Johnstone yesterday, "MSM Keeps Running Stories About Space Aliens All Of A Sudden, And It’s Weird," which I read on Niqnaq, hypothesizes about the efflorescence of UFO stories recently in the corporate media:

So we’ve got UFO footage suddenly being released with the approval of the Pentagon, and a bit of an odd uptick in reports about space aliens in general being promoted in surprising places like NBC News. I don’t know why this is happening. But I do know that the last Cold War with the Soviet Union was accompanied by a UFO panic, and that the US and its allies are well into a new cold war with Russia.

A 2002 study by British researchers combed through thousands of previously secret government documents about UFO phenomena, and concluded that the UFO craze was most likely attributable to Cold War paranoia and not visitors from the stars. It also found that defense and intelligence agencies had taken a great interest in manipulating the UFO panic to gain an advantage over the Soviets. A Guardian article about the study reports the following:

“But Clarke and Roberts, whose research is to be published this week in a book called Out of the Shadows , did uncover evidence that the American Secret Service, with the possible connivance of the British, looked at ways of using the public panic over UFOs as a psychological weapon against the Russians.

"In CIA memos marked ‘secret’ and seen by The Observer, top officials consider exploiting the UFO craze. ‘I suggest that we discuss the possible offensive or defensive utilisation of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes,’ wrote CIA director Walter Smith in 1952.

‘Shortly after that meeting the CIA sent a delegation to Britain to discuss UFOs. It is hard to imagine that they did not discuss the psychological warfare aspects of it with their British counterparts,’ Clarke said.”

So we’ve been here before, and we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that all these exciting new UFO revelations suddenly being covered in mainstream outlets are nothing more than new cold war manipulations of some sort by the CIA and the Pentagon. I don’t really know what’s going on with all this, but I do know it’s not normal, and I know that truth is the first casualty of war. This most certainly includes cold war, where psyops play a much larger role than in conventional hot warfare.

We know of the strong connection between the SciFi craze of the early 1960s and the Cold War from our exploration of Where Monsters Dwell, the most recent post of which was last month.

Liberals Beginning to Question Cold War 2.0?

A good article this morning picked up from Niqnaq is BuzzFeed's "Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything," by Miriam Elder and Charlie Wartzel. Elder and Wartzel are Russophobic. For instance, they believe the DNC hack was perpetrated by Russia. Nonetheless they can't abide recent excesses in the prestige press that link every bit of dissent within the U.S. to a Kremlin-engineered bot. In other words, there is an element within the shrinking liberal consensus that sees that the New Cold War as a pit trap:

By now you know the drill: massive news event happens, journalists scramble to figure out what’s going on, and within a couple hours the culprit is found — Russian bots.

Russian bots were blamed for driving attention to the Nunes memo, a Republican-authored document on the Trump-Russia probe. They were blamed for pushing for Roy Moore to win in Alabama’s special election. And here they are wading into the gun debate following the Parkland shooting. “[T]he messages from these automated accounts, or bots, were designed to widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult,” wrote the New York Times in a story following the shooting, citing little more than “Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia.”

This is, not to mince words, total bullshit.

The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund.

But even some of the people who popularized that metric now acknowledge it’s become totally overblown.

“I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” said Watts, the cofounder of a project that is widely cited as the main, if not only, source of information on Russian bots. He also called the narrative “overdone.”

The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online,” according to its own description, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. “They are not all in Russia,” Watts said during a phone interview last week. “We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.” So, not bots.

We’ll likely never know the contents of the list for sure — because the researchers decline to divulge the identity of who they are monitoring. (The reasons they give for secrecy include worries that the accounts would then change their behavior and concerns over identifying accounts that are not, in fact, linked to Russian influence efforts, aka making a mistake.)

It is All Russian Trolls, All the Time

The Parkland massacre had already been bumped to below the fold by the Mueller indictment, but this morning we learn that national outrage at yet another school shooting is actually a subset of an all-encompassing Russian disinformation campaign.

The pattern by now is obvious. Whenever it looks as if the confused, apathetic American electorate is about to rouse itself and take action the media reminds us that it is actually a malicious Russian plot implemented by bots on social media. 

The reality is that the purported Russian disinformation campaign is actually a U.S. disinformation campaign. Support for the political-economic status quo has disappeared -- Trump's election is all the proof you need on that score -- and therefore a scheme is required to secure the allegiance of the electorate. How about this? "You are under attack, and Russia is attacking you." It worked before. Why not try it again?

No evidence has yet been produced to document the extent of this Russian troll army. Neil MacFarquhar's story yesterday "Inside the Russian Troll Factory: Zombies and a Breakneck Pace" was built around interviews with two former employees of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg. The problem is that they didn't work as trolls targeting the U.S. They worked as trolls generating content for the Russian market.

This has been the fundamental weakness of almost all the reporting of Mueller indictment. No effort has been made to actually quantify the size and budget of the Russian troll army as it relates to the United States. The numbers we see bandied about in terms of the Internet Research Agency are for its overall activities, and based on what Moon of Alabama has written, "Mueller Indictment - The "Russian Influence" Is A Commercial Marketing Scheme," it is a standard clickbait factory.

Where Monsters Dwell #12

As the media peddles furiously to convince us that Russia has plans to make us a nation of Manchurian Candidates, it is helpful to consider a simpler time, the first Cold War.

By happenstance -- to see how old newsprint paper that the interior pages of comic books were printed on scanned, I reached into my closet and arbitrarily grabbed a handful of comics -- I started working my way through old issues of Where Monsters Dwell.

Where Monsters Dwell was a Marvel title from the dawn of the Bronze Age of Comic Books (1970 to the mid-1980s) that reprinted Silver Age (1955 to 1970) science fiction and horror. While not having a quote from Stan Lee or Roy Thomas at hand to explain why Marvel did this, my guess is that the company was expanding and it had a lot of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko material from the period directly preceding its blastoff as a superhero factory of the 1960s. So why not introduce it to a new generation of readers (like me) who missed it the first go-round a decade earlier?

What my intermittent study of Where Monsters Dwell has revealed is that Marvel's Silver Age monster stories were about the Cold War. The space aliens and evil robots from another world like Orogo! were stand-ins for the specter of nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union. The usual story has the alien appear, promise global domination, crush some buildings before it is defeated by the pluck and ingenuity of a boy; in Orogo's case, a blind old man.

"Orogo! The Nightmare from Outer Space!," reprinted in Where Monsters Dwell #12 (November 1971), was originally published in Journey into Mystery #57 with a cover date of March 1960, a little more than a year before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Stan Lee penned the story and Don Heck supplied the art. If you want to get the flavor of the guileless rootedness and materially secure America of the 1960s, look at Don Heck's work.

 

If you're unconvinced that these stories of aliens and robots are metaphors for the Cold War, "The Pretender!" should change your mind. Originally appearing in Tales to Astonish #31 (May 1962), "The Pretender!," a filler story penciled by Paul Reinman, posits that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is in fact an alien space invader. (The story, whose author is not credited, was probably written after the alleged "shoe-banging incident" at the United Nations in the fall of 1960.)

Marvel became the top comic-book publisher in the 1960s by taking these Silver Age monsters and through a neat Kirby-Lee alchemy making them heroes. What are the Fantastic Four if not a exemplary bourgeois family of space monsters returned to Earth? What is Spider-Man if not a teenage laboratory abomination? We're not talking about Barry Allen here. We're talking about characters who seemed much more real than Batman and Superman. How Lee, Kirby and Ditko did this, I'm saying, is by taking all that ambient fear of the Cold War and putting it inside their heroes. 

The monsters became the heroes, but the monsters were merely stand-ins for the Cold War Soviet enemy. In other words, the whole Marvel superhero revolution of the 1960s was based on the conversion of the fear of an existential foe into a new more human heroism.

It's no wonder now that Marvel is experiencing trouble it has tried to go back to the Monsters Unleashed formula. The political parties in the United States are attempting the same sort of reboot with Cold War 2.0. 

But that era of Silver Age social conformity can't be Jiffy-Popped from on high. That cohesion is an organic thing. And the Marvel heroes of the 1960s played a big part in its undoing.

Now in the "Modern Age" Hollywood is dependent on Postmodern comic-book heroes. The lines are crossed. The cookies have crumbled. The New Cold War won't boot. It might work for partisan New Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans, but a cultural revolution it is not.

Russophobia, Domestic Dissent and Internet Censorship

The story "Russia Sees Midterm Elections as Chance to Sow Fresh Discord, Intelligence Chiefs Warn.," by Mathew Rosenberg, Charlie Savage and Michael Wines, has been topping the news for close to 24 hours.

There are two takeaways from the story, neither of which bolster the headline. The first is that there is no evidence that Russia is targeting U.S. election infrastructure:

Russia does not, however, appear to be trying to penetrate voting machines or Americans’ ballots, United States officials said.

“While scanning and probing of networks happens across the internet every day, we have not seen specific or credible evidence of Russian attempts to infiltrate state election infrastructure like we saw in 2016,” Jeanette Manfra, the chief cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview last week.

Right now, Mr. Pompeo said, Russia is trying to focus on what are known as influence operations — using social media and other platforms to spread favorable messages — not hacking.

“The things we have seen Russia doing to date are mostly focused on information types of warfare,” he said.

Which is takeaway two. What we're talking about here in terms of Russia is people like me, citizens of the United States who read the news and who express dissent when it comes to the destructive course of American global hegemony, whose views are being amplified by Russian clickbots:

“We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at its annual hearing on worldwide threats.

[snip]

Russia appears eager to spread information — real and fake — that deepens political divisions. Bot armies promoted partisan causes on social media, including the recent push to release a Republican congressional memo critical of law enforcement officials.

The bots have also sought to portray the F.B.I. and Justice Department as infected by partisan bias, said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee.

“Other threats to our institutions come from right here at home,” he said. “There have been some, aided and abetted by Russian internet bots and trolls, who have attacked the basic integrity of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. This is a dangerous trend.”

So at root Russiagate, the New Cold War, Cold War 2.0, the trenchant Russophobia of the Democratic Party are about domestic dissent. Support for the governing political establishment is collapsing. (It is more visible in Europe because European nations have a parliamentary system and party formation and coalition creation are much more fluid.)

But make no mistake. The same thing is happening in the United States. The Democratic Party is facing an existential crisis, one which likely will become even more acute after the November midterms. Ever since the Democrats blocked Bernie in the primaries and then Hillary lost the general, they have been confronting this crisis. Their solution was to concoct Russiagate.

Are clickbots real? Absolutely. They are an inseparable part of the functioning Internet. Giants like Google and Facebook couldn't survive without them. Does Russia employ bots to juice "sympathetic spokespeople"? Absolutely. I can bear witness. This is a humble, low-traffic page. But when I do harvest a lot of clicks on a particular day -- what I consider a lot of clicks, a couple hundred -- the country of origin is Russia; and it is presumably machine driven because the traffic is to entries made several years ago, and they are counted off in chronological sequence.

Is this illegal? Of course not. You don't think U.S. bots juice Russian opposition blogs? How about all those hits for Alexei Navalny's YouTube talks?

So what is to be done? How to keep clickbots for commerce but bar them from enhancing "sympathetic spokespeople"?

I guess we should look to China for an answer. In other words, massive censorship. The corporate world appears to be turning in that direction.

The Neoliberal Center Burns

You have to tip your hat to the The New York Times. Though it is one of the principal outlets for the New Cold War with Russia, in its Saturday edition it published a shattering rebuttal from one of its Moscow-based reporters.

"Why Putin’s Foes Deplore U.S. Fixation on Election Meddling" by Andrew Higgins is an assessment of the U.S. media's Russophobia from the perspective of pro-Western Russian intellectuals:

Ultimately, they say, Americans are using Russia as a scapegoat to explain the deep political discord in the United States. That has left many westward-leaning Russians, who have long looked to America for their ideals, in bitter disappointment that the United States seems to be mimicking some of their own country’s least appealing traits.

The hunt for a hidden Russian hand behind President Trump’s election victory has caused particular disquiet among liberal-minded Russian journalists.

“The image of Putin’s Russia constructed by Western and, above all, American media outlets over the past 18 months shocks even the most anti-Putin reader in Russia,” Oleg V. Kashin, a journalist critical of the Kremlin, wrote last week in Republic, a Russian news site. He complained that the American media has consistently misconstrued the way Russia works, presenting marginal opportunists and self-interested businessmen with no real link to the Kremlin as state-controlled agents working on orders from Mr. Putin.

For Ivan I. Kurilla, a professor of history and an America specialist at the European University at St. Petersburg, a bastion of liberal thinking, Russia’s prominent and almost entirely negative role on America’s political stage since the November election reprises a phenomenon first seen in the late 1800s.

“Americans use Russia each time they feel their own identity in crisis,” said Mr. Kurilla, the author of a new book on the history of Russian-American relations, “Frenemies.”

But don't expect from "the newspaper of record" a reduction in the number of stories devoted to Russian troll farms and Russian hackers disseminating fake news "weaponized" to destroy Western democracy. On the same day Higgins' story ran, The Times published Jason Horowitz's "Italy, Bracing for Electoral Season of Fake News, Demands Facebook’s Help":

In a global atmosphere already thick with suspicion of Russian meddling in elections in the United States, France and Germany, as well as in the British referendum to leave the European Union and the Catalan independence movement in Spain, many analysts consider Italy to be the weak link in an increasingly vulnerable European Union.

No one in Italy is more worried than the governing Democratic Party. In recent days, its members have made an orchestrated attempt to focus the attention of the country — and of powerful social media platforms like Facebook — on a misinformation campaign that they believe is devised to damage one of the last major center-left governments standing in Europe.

Mr. Renzi, a wily political operator who partly blames online misinformation campaigns and fake news for the failure of a referendum that forced his resignation in December, is not only seeking to protect himself, but also to go on the offensive.

(Before being dispatched to Rome, Horowitz held the "Get Bernie!" portfolio during the 2016 presidential election campaign.)

The template is a simple one. Any organized electoral challenge to the neoliberal center is tarred as a Russian psyops crafted personally by the evil Putin. The template is provided by U.S. intelligence agencies and dutifully applied by the corporate media. Brexit, Trump, Geert Wilders, Le Pen, AfD, Catalan independence, Italy's Five Star Movement -- every bogeyman tracks back to Moscow.

It's infantile and superficial. But it is also a strong indication how dead-ended the "Washington Consensus" has become. When you're desperate and trying to make it day to day, week to week, month to month, the tendency apparently is to revert to old patterns.

That's why I was surprised that in the run up to Germany's September elections there was no effort to inflate the online Russian bogeyman. This was obviously a failure of Western intelligence. No one predicted the precipitous drop off in support for the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. There were predictions that Alternative for Germany might reach the Bundestag, but not that Merkel would have to rely on a minority government. We'll see if Martin Schultz eats his words and ends up resuscitating the grand coalition. In any event, rest assured that if new elections are called, this time around, there will be plenty of Russophobia.

An interesting development in the disintegration of the neoliberal center is the recent hysteria over sexual harassment. Male animality is exposed. Celebrity scalps are piling up. Where and when it will end is hard to gauge. It could go on for a long time. I welcome it. Because it promises to burn, baby, burn.

Click Bots are Not a Russian Creation

The latest salvo in the New Cold War with Russia is a story published last week by veteran investigative reporter Scott Shane. In "The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election" Shane argues that

The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.

What Shane uncovers is a minute number of fake accounts allegedly linked to a Kremlin-connected company:

An investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had leaked. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign.

[snip]

“We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform,” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, wrote on Wednesday in a post about the Russia-linked fake accounts and ads. “We believe in protecting the integrity of civic discourse.”

Critics say that because shareholders judge the companies partly based on a crucial data point — “monthly active users” — they are reluctant to police their sites too aggressively for fear of reducing that number. The companies use technical tools and teams of analysts to detect bogus accounts, but the scale of the sites — 328 million users on Twitter, nearly two billion on Facebook — means they often remove impostors only in response to complaints.

Though both companies have been slow to grapple with the problem of manipulation, they have stepped up efforts to purge fake accounts. Facebook says it takes down a million accounts a day — including some that were related to the recent French election and upcoming German voting — but struggles to keep up with the illicit activity. Still, the company says the abuse affects only a small fraction of the social network; Facebook officials estimated that of all the “civic content” posted on the site in connection with the United States election, less than one-tenth of one percent resulted from “information operations” like the Russian campaign.

Twitter, unlike Facebook, does not require the use of a real name and does not prohibit automated accounts, arguing that it seeks to be a forum for open debate. But it constantly updates a “trends” list of most-discussed topics or hashtags, and it says it tries to foil attempts to use bots to create fake trends. However, FireEye found that the suspected Russian bots sometimes managed to do just that, in one case causing the hashtag #HillaryDown to be listed as a trend.

 As Moon of Alabama posted last week, "How $100,000 of unspecific advertisement would influence an election in which more than $1 billion was spend on political ads is unexplained." MoA points out that the "Russians did it!" is a diversion from the larger story of the fraudulent advertising sales that form the foundation of Facebook's business. John Lanchester discussed this in a lengthy article, "You Are the Product," devoted to Facebook which appeared this summer in the London Review of Books:

Facebook seems vulnerable to these disenchantment effects. One place they are likely to begin is in the core area of its business model – ad-selling. The advertising it sells is ‘programmatic’, i.e. determined by computer algorithms that match the customer to the advertiser and deliver ads accordingly, via targeting and/or online auctions. The problem with this from the customer’s point of view – remember, the customer here is the advertiser, not the Facebook user – is that a lot of the clicks on these ads are fake. There is a mismatch of interests here. Facebook wants clicks, because that’s how it gets paid: when ads are clicked on. But what if the clicks aren’t real but are instead automated clicks from fake accounts run by computer bots? This is a well-known problem, which particularly affects Google, because it’s easy to set up a site, allow it to host programmatic ads, then set up a bot to click on those ads, and collect the money that comes rolling in. On Facebook the fraudulent clicks are more likely to be from competitors trying to drive each others’ costs up.

The industry publication Ad Week estimates the annual cost of click fraud at $7 billion, about a sixth of the entire market. One single fraud site, Methbot, whose existence was exposed at the end of last year, uses a network of hacked computers to generate between three and five million dollars’ worth of fraudulent clicks every day. Estimates of fraudulent traffic’s market share are variable, with some guesses coming in at around 50 per cent; some website owners say their own data indicates a fraudulent-click rate of 90 per cent. This is by no means entirely Facebook’s problem, but it isn’t hard to imagine how it could lead to a big revolt against ‘ad tech’, as this technology is generally known, on the part of the companies who are paying for it. I’ve heard academics in the field say that there is a form of corporate groupthink in the world of the big buyers of advertising, who are currently responsible for directing large parts of their budgets towards Facebook. That mindset could change. Also, many of Facebook’s metrics are tilted to catch the light at the angle which makes them look shiniest. A video is counted as ‘viewed’ on Facebook if it runs for three seconds, even if the user is scrolling past it in her news feed and even if the sound is off. Many Facebook videos with hundreds of thousands of ‘views’, if counted by the techniques that are used to count television audiences, would have no viewers at all.

To single out Russia in all of this is absurd. Click bots are everywhere. The problem is not a Russian one. Shane's story received prominent placement on the front page of The New York Times; the Equifax hack, a much bigger story, got bottom of the fold.

At least Shane acknowledges that who gets labeled a "Russian troll" is often a regular Russophile citizen:

“Yes, the Russians were involved. Yes, there’s a lot of organic support for Trump,” said Andrew Weisburd, an Illinois online researcher who has written frequently about Russian influence on social media. “Trying to disaggregate the two was difficult, to put it mildly.”

Mr. Weisburd said he had labeled some Twitter accounts “Kremlin trolls” based simply on their pro-Russia tweets and with no proof of Russian government ties. The Times contacted several such users, who insisted that they had come by their anti-American, pro-Russian views honestly, without payment or instructions from Moscow.

“Hillary’s a warmonger,” said Marilyn Justice, 66, who lives in Nova Scotia and tweets as @mkj1951. Of Mr. Putin, she said in an interview, “I think he’s very patient in the face of provocations.”

Ms. Justice said she had first taken an interest in Russia during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, while looking for hockey coverage and finding what she considered a snide anti-Russia bias in the Western media. She said she did get a lot of news from Sputnik and RT but laughed at the notion that she could have Kremlin connections.

Another of the so-called Kremlin trolls, Marcel Sardo, 48, a web producer in Zurich, describes himself bluntly on his Twitter bio as a “Pro-Russia Media-Sniper.” He said he shared notes daily via Skype and Twitter with online acquaintances, including Ms. Justice, on disputes between Russia and the West over who shot down the Malaysian airliner hit by a missile over Ukraine and who used sarin gas in Syria.

“It’s a battle of information, and I and my peers have decided to take sides,” said Mr. Sardo, who constantly cites Russian sources and bashed Mrs. Clinton daily during the campaign. But he denied he had any links to the Russian government.

 The important thing to remember is that the New Cold War is an effort to occlude the collapse of support for neoliberalism, the governing dogma of mainstream political parties. It is a ham-handed attempt meant to freeze the free fall of the political order.

The Deep State's Russian Hacking Narrative Collapsing

After Charlottesville and the reintroduction of the throbbing heart of American politics, white supremacy, the deep-state spun yarn of Russian subversion of Western democracy looks exactly like what it was all along -- a dubious spy-vs.-spy potboiler complete with bears both fancy and cozy cooked up in Langley and spoon fed to a servile media.

Yesterday, as if to say, "Please, don't forget about the New Cold War when you are tearing down all those monuments to the Lost Cause," The New York Times published the frontpager, "In Ukraine, a Malware Expert Who Could Blow the Whistle on Russian Hacking," by its two journeymen Russophobes, Andrew Kramer and Andrew Higgins.

The story is laughable. A malware architect in Ukrainian custody is cooperating with FBI. We are asked to believe that portions of code the Ukrainian, known as Profexer, authored ended up on DNC servers. We are also asked to believe that somehow it was Russian agents who put the code there.

There is no evidence that Profexer worked, at least knowingly, for Russia’s intelligence services, but his malware apparently did.

That a hacking operation that Washington is convinced was orchestrated by Moscow would obtain malware from a source in Ukraine — perhaps the Kremlin’s most bitter enemy — sheds considerable light on the Russian security services’ modus operandi in what Western intelligence agencies say is their clandestine cyberwar against the United States and Europe.

It does not suggest a compact team of government employees who write all their own code and carry out attacks during office hours in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but rather a far looser enterprise that draws on talent and hacking tools wherever they can be found.

Also emerging from Ukraine is a sharper picture of what the United States believes is a Russian government hacking group known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28 or Fancy Bear. It is this group, which American intelligence agencies believe is operated by Russian military intelligence, that has been blamed, along with a second Russian outfit known as Cozy Bear, for the D.N.C. intrusion.

Rather than training, arming and deploying hackers to carry out a specific mission like just another military unit, Fancy Bear and its twin Cozy Bear have operated more as centers for organization and financing; much of the hard work like coding is outsourced to private and often crime-tainted vendors.

[snip]

“There is not now and never has been a single piece of technical evidence produced that connects the malware used in the D.N.C. attack to the G.R.U., F.S.B. or any agency of the Russian government,” said Jeffrey Carr, the author of a book on cyberwarfare. The G.R.U. is Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the F.S.B. its federal security service.

United States intelligence agencies, however, have been unequivocal in pointing a finger at Russia.

The whole thing screams false flag. One interesting takeaway though is that the press, at least The New York Times, is starting to hedge with several statements ascribing the Russian hack theory solely to U.S. intelligence agencies. This is a recent change. For many months there was merely the bald assertion that "the Russians did it." Clearly when the "Russia hack" narrative collapses, as it already is, the media doesn't want to be forced to issue a series of retractions a la the Iraq War.

Assange says he has proof that DNC documents WikiLeaks published last year did not come from Russia. Combined with the studiously ignored story that the DNC documents were leaked not hacked, the casus belli of the deep state's New Cold War is disintegrating.

Maidan Blowback: North Korea's ICBMs

UPDATE: In a post today, "Hyping North Korea To Relaunch Reagan's Star Wars?," Moon of Alabama denies the veracity of the entire NYT story:

One missile defense marketing pundit claimed today that the North Korean missile engines used in the recent tests were bought from factories in Ukraine or Russia. The usual propagandist at the New York Times picked up on that to further their anti-Russian theme:

"Mr. Elleman was unable to rule out the possibility that a large Russian missile enterprise, Energomash, which has strong ties to the Ukrainian complex, had a role in the transfer of the RD-250 engine technology to North Korea. He said leftover RD-250 engines might also be stored in Russian warehouses."

But the engines in question are of different size and thrust than the alleged R-250 engines and the claimed time-frame does not fit at all. The Ukrainian government denied any transfer of missiles or designs. The story was debunked with in hours by two prominent experts. But implicating Russia, however farfetched, is always good if one wants to sell more weapons.

****

The New York Times is one of the chief purveyors of Russophobia. Usually the newspaper's anti-Russia propaganda, at first glance at least, appears plausible. But that's not the case with this morning's offering by William Broad and David Sanger, "North Korea’s Missile Success Is Linked to Ukrainian Plant, Investigators Say."

The story, based on a new study by an International Institute for Strategic Studies missile expert, is that North Korea's recent ICBM success is due to the acquisition of Russian-designed engines, RD-250s, from a plant, Yuzhmash, in Dnipro, Ukraine. As Broad and Sanger explain:

Analysts who studied photographs of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, inspecting the new rocket motors concluded that they derive from designs that once powered the Soviet Union’s missile fleet. The engines were so powerful that a single missile could hurl 10 thermonuclear warheads between continents.

Those engines were linked to only a few former Soviet sites. Government investigators and experts have focused their inquiries on a missile factory in Dnipro, Ukraine, on the edge of the territory where Russia is fighting a low-level war to break off part of Ukraine. During the Cold War, the factory made the deadliest missiles in the Soviet arsenal, including the giant SS-18. It remained one of Russia’s primary producers of missiles even after Ukraine gained independence.

But since Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was removed from power in 2014, the state-owned factory, known as Yuzhmash, has fallen on hard times. The Russians canceled upgrades of their nuclear fleet. The factory is underused, awash in unpaid bills and low morale. Experts believe it is the most likely source of the engines that in July powered the two ICBM tests, which were the first to suggest that North Korea has the range, if not necessarily the accuracy or warhead technology, to threaten American cities.

“It’s likely that these engines came from Ukraine — probably illicitly,” Mr. Elleman said in an interview. “The big question is how many they have and whether the Ukrainians are helping them now. I’m very worried.”

Throughout the story, Broad and Sanger repeatedly try to link the engine transfer, at least rhetorically, to Russia. There is no stronger tell than the highlighted passage above where Dnipro is painted a city on the front lines of the civil war. It is unclear from the sentence which side of the Novorossiya border Dnipro is located.

This is nothing more than crass propaganda. Dnipro has always remained loyal to the coup government in Kiev. It removed its Lenin statues and even changed the name of the city, Dnipropetrovsk, to comply with the 2015 decommunization law. (The city had been named after the Communist leader of Ukraine Grigory Petrovsky.)

If anything this story is your standard tale of CIA blowback. The United States instigated a coup in 2014 and, subsequently, one of its designated rogue nations has a powerful ICBM arsenal to go with its small stockpile of nuclear bombs.

Perpetual War Comes Out of the Closet

What's interesting about the otherwise unremarkable "U.S. War Footprint Grows in Middle East, With No Endgame in Sight," by Ben Hubbard and Michael Gordon, is the public acknowledgement by one of the main organs of the prestige press, The New York Times, that current policy of the United States is to fight numerous wars in the Middle East indefinitely.

The story makes the point that the Middle East theater of perpetual war is not a Trump innovation but merely a continuation of an Obama administration policy. The U.S. military is actively participating in the wars in Iraq and Syria, with promises -- some tacit, others explicit -- that once ISIS is defeated troops will stay on in these countries. Trump's departure from Obama is that he appears to have placed the U.S. in a leading, rather than supporting role, in Yemen. The story is good at adding some detail here:

The complexity of these wars and the American role in them is clear in Yemen, where the United States has two distinct roles, both of which have increased under Mr. Trump.

The country, the Arab world’s poorest, has been split in half since militants known as the Houthis allied with parts of the military and seized the capital, pushing the internationally recognized government into exile.

Two years ago, a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia began bombing the rebels, hoping to weaken them militarily and restore the government. They have made little progress, while more than 10,000 people have been killed and large parts of the country are on the verge of famine, according to the United Nations.

Under Mr. Obama, the United States provided military support to the Saudi-led coalition, but halted the sale of precision-guided munitions over concerns that airstrikes by Saudi Arabia and its allies were killing too many civilians.

But since Mr. Trump took office, his administration has advanced some arms deals for coalition countries, while approving the resumption of sales of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, according to an American official familiar with Yemen policy.

Mr. Trump’s more muscular approach has been hailed by Gulf leaders, who felt betrayed by Mr. Obama’s outreach to Iran and who hope that they now have an ally in the White House to help them push back against their regional foe.

“It understands that it is uniquely positioned to play a unique role in bringing some stability to the region, and I think there is a meeting of the minds between the Saudi leadership and the Trump administration,” said Fahad Nazer, a political consultant to the Saudi Embassy in Washington who said he was speaking on his own behalf.

At the same time, since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the United States has stepped up its long-running drone campaign against the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, believed to be the organization’s most dangerous.

Mr. Trump granted a Pentagon request to declare parts of three provinces in Yemen as an “area of active hostilities,” giving commanders greater flexibility to strike. Later, a Special Operations raid in late January led to the death of many civilians and an American commando.

So far this month, the United States has also launched more than 49 strikes across Yemen, most of them during one five-day period, according to data gathered by the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. That is more strikes than the United States had carried out during any other full year on record.

Some analysts note that this military surge has not brought with it a clear strategy to end Yemen’s war or uproot Al Qaeda.

That's because there isn't one. Sometime in the last 15 years planners realized that state building is no longer feasible, only state destruction. So that is the new normal. A steady state of destruction. Hubbard and Gordon don't include nearby Libya and Somalia in their analysis, but there is every indication that stepped-up U.S. military action with "no endgame in sight" is the case there as well. And then there is the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa.

To go with the souped up Global War on Terror there is simultaneously a New Cold War, definitely with Russia and in the beginning stages with China.

And where is the anti-war movement in the United States? Nowhere.

New Cold War Here to Stay

There really should be no more expressions of hope that a Trump administration will scrap the New Cold War. The White House has appointed Fiona Hill, a spook-friendly, deep state intellectual as the person in charge of Europe and Russia. According to this morning's Situation Report:

Trump taps critic for post. In a surprising move, “the Trump administration has offered a well-respected scholar and sober critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin the position of White House senior director for Europe and Russia, a White House official told FP’s John Hudson in an exclusive get.

“The decision to hire Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for one of the government’s top jobs dealing with U.S.-Russia relations is likely to earn bipartisan praise in Congress where Republicans and Democrats have expressed mounting unease with the Trump administration’s apparent contacts with Russian officials during the presidential campaign.”

Look at the blurbs for her Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013), co-written with Clifford Gaddy:

If you want to begin to understand Russia today, read this book.
—Sir John Scarlett, former chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)

For anyone wishing to understand Russia’s evolution since the breakup of the Soviet Union and its trajectory since then, the book you hold in your hand is an essential guide.
—John McLaughlin, former deputy director of U.S. Central Intelligence

Of the many biographies of Vladimir Putin that have appeared in recent years, this one is the most useful.
—Foreign Affairs

This is not just another Putin biography. It is a psychological portrait.
—The Financial Times

Considering how busy you are, do you have time to read books? If so, which ones would you recommend? “. . . My goodness, let’s see. There’s Mr. Putin, by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy. Insightful.”
—Vice President Joseph Biden in Joe Biden: The Rolling Stone Interview

Can't get more deep state than that. My sense, now that Jeff Sessions is in the neo-McCarthyite cross hairs, is that the New Cold War and the deep state's antipathy for all things Russian is a way to protect an ailing neoliberalism from Trump's economic nationalism.

Neo-McCarthyism is being used to bring Trump to heel. Trump is now in line with the deep state's foreign policy objectives, except for trade. His administration will continue to be battered until he relents on offshoring and multilateral trade.

Specter of Fake News Creates Justification for Surveillance and Censorship

"Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News," by Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy, provides an encapsulation of efforts underway in Europe and the United States to police the Fake News phenomenon.

Part and parcel of the New McCarythism sweeping Western capitals, Fake News, as conjured up by embattled government officials and their partners in the mainstream media, is a plot by Russia and its army of trolls to spread bogus -- often times titillatingly so -- stories in social media and the blogosphere that undermine support of and trust in the prestige press, centrist political parties and government. 

That's the official version of Fake News. What's really going on is a desperate, fumbling attempt by the elite to herd citizens who no longer believe in the dominant neoliberal paradigm. (When real examples of Fake News are provided it is usually something with a commercial motive, like the Fake News campaign 20th Century Fox launched to promote its feature film, A Cure For Wellness.) 

Erosion of support for the neoliberal center is branded fake and sourced to Russian hackers and trolls. That way the elites buy themselves a little time to see if they can figure things out. Maybe there's another avatar of the mainstream, like Barack Obama, waiting in the wings. Maybe there is a high-tech fix to filter and censor all that social media traffic.

Scott and Eddy describe rapid response team East Stratfor, established by the European Union, and its work to combat Fake News. It is clear, given the volume of online traffic, that it is a futile effort:

The East Stratcom team is the first to admit that it is outgunned: The task is overwhelming, the volume of reports immense, the support to combat them scant.

The team tries to debunk bogus items in real time on Facebook and Twitter and publishes daily reports and a weekly newsletter on fake stories to its more than 12,000 followers on social media.

But its list of 2,500 fake reports is small compared with the daily churn across social media. Catching every fake news story would be nearly impossible, and the fake reports the team does combat routinely get a lot more viewers than its myth-busting efforts.

East Stratcom is purely a communications exercise. Still, team members, most of whom speak Russian, have received death threats, and a Czech member of the team has twice been accused on Russian television of espionage.

The team in Brussels is not the only force in Europe fighting the problem. Similar groups are being created from Finland to the Czech Republic to disprove online hoaxes, state agencies are improving online security to counter potential hacking attacks and European news media outlets are expanding fact-checking teams to counter false reports.

Though the effort is futile, it does allow for the mainstream media to print and broadcast about the Fake News phenomenon. In the Scott-Eddy story Emmanuel Macron is singled out as a Fake News target, as is Angela Merkel:

In Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing tough competition ahead of elections in September, the country’s domestic intelligence service already has reported a sharp rise in so-called phishing attacks in recent months aimed at political parties and members of the country’s Parliament. 

They attribute these efforts to the hacking group known as Fancy Bear, or APT 28, which American intelligence agencies linked to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee before the presidential election. Both American and German intelligence officials believe the group is operated by the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service.

It is always a good day for The New York Times when it can remind its readers that the DNC was hacked by Fancy Bear.

Besides performing an indispensable "public diplomacy" role by inflating an Oz-like Fake News specter, groups like East Strator are the camel's nose in the tent of the tech giants:

The German government is weighing potential hefty fines for tech giants like Google and Facebook, whose platforms allow false stories to be quickly circulated. The companies insist that they cannot be held responsible because they do not generate the stories.

Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, said that although there was no “smoking gun,” Russia was likely to be involved in the increase in online misinformation aimed at destabilizing German politics.

“What makes cyberattacks so sexy for foreign powers is that it is nearly impossible to find a smoking gun,” Mr. Maassen said in an interview with Phoenix TV Feb. 12. “It is always possible to cover your tracks and operate undercover.”

American tech giants also have stepped in after they were accused of not doing enough to counter false reports on their platforms, accusations that Facebook, Google and other companies deny. They are now funding initiatives in the United States, France and elsewhere to flag fake news online and remove posts if they are found to violate companies’ terms of use or local laws.

“This isn’t just about debunking falsehoods,” said Jenni Sargent, the managing director of First Draft News, a nonprofit that is partly funded by Google and expanding rapidly in France ahead of the country’s elections, as well as across Europe and beyond. “What we’re trying to do is to deal with the content as opposed to the source.”

Such efforts across Europe have gained momentum since the United States’ presidential election.

This of course is surveillance and censorship. It is an enormous task for the tech giants. Their censorship bots are going to have to get much more refined. But by that time it will too late. The neoliberal center is splintering faster than can be managed. What the elites need is something like the Chinese have, a Great Firewall. Can the deep state pull it off. Not under present circumstances.