Fake News and Censorship, A.K.A, Propaganda

Western corporate mainstream media is performing poorly these days. Examples are numerous. The week-long absurd effort to airbrush the coup in Bolivia as a resignation by a corrupt autocrat comes to mind. Then there is framing of Roger Stone's conviction Friday as a vindication of Russiagate, when, as Craig Murray explains, it was the exact opposite:

The headline “Roger Stone: Trump Adviser Found Guilty On All Charges in Trump Hacking Case” is deliberately designed to make you believe a court has found Stone was involved in “Wikileaks hacking”. In fact this is the precise opposite of the truth. Stone was found guilty of lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee by claiming to have links to Wikileaks when in fact he had none. And of threatening Randy Credico to make Credico say there were such links, when there were not.

Let's not forget Jonathan Steele's OPCW bombshell published Friday by CounterPunch, "The OPCW and Douma: Chemical Weapons Watchdog Accused of Evidence-Tampering by Its Own Inspectors." You won't find a hint of that story in NYT, WaPo, AP, Reuters, or the Guardian. The corporate mainstream media are actively censoring the story. OPCW leadership generated a fraudulent report in order to shield the United States, France and the United Kingdom from war crimes allegations.

What you will find are stories about Prince Andrew and his connection with the late sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Unfortunately you won't find anything about Amy Robach's revelation that ABC spiked a story three years ago about Epstein's pedophile ring unless you watch Fox News, which Katie Halper correctly identifies as feeding into the information tribalism that divides (and rules) the nation.

The Hong Kong uprising and the Buttigieg presidential campaign also need to be included as "events" animated by the corporate media. So much reporting is devoted to both that "facts on the ground" are being created in the Western mind. This is how propaganda works.

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).

The Absurdity of Russiagate

It was easy to miss, which I am sure was the newspaper's intention, tucked as it was in the interior of last Tuesday's science section, but Benedict Carey's story about the first serious academic study on fake news -- "‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests" -- pretty much demolishes "the Russians stole my election" narrative pushed in the mainstream media, the Democratic Party and by U.S. intelligence agencies:

[N]ow the first hard data on fake-news consumption has arrived. Researchers last week posted an analysis of the browsing histories of thousands of adults during the run-up to the 2016 election — a real-time picture of who viewed which fake stories, and what real news those people were seeing at the same time.

[snip] 

In the new study, a trio of political scientists — Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College (a regular contributor to The Times’s Upshot), Andrew Guess of Princeton University and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter — analyzed web traffic data gathered from a representative sample of 2,525 Americans who consented to have their online activity monitored anonymously by the survey and analytic firm YouGov.

The data included website visits made in the weeks before and after the 2016 election, and a measure of political partisanship based on overall browsing habits. (The vast majority of participants favored Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton.)

[snip]

“For all the hype about fake news, it’s important to recognize that it reached only a subset of Americans, and most of the ones it was reaching already were intense partisans,” Dr. Nyhan said.

“They were also voracious consumers of hard news,” he added. “These are people intensely engaged in politics who follow it closely.”

Given the ratio of truth to fiction, Dr. Watts said, fake news paled in influence beside mainstream news coverage, particularly stories about Mrs. Clinton and her use of a private email server as secretary of state. Coverage of that topic appeared repeatedly and prominently in venues like The New York Times and the Washington Post.

In other words, the alleged victims of fake news are cagey news junkies and political partisans who consume a lot of product overwhelmingly from corporate chains.

Can you say "There is no there there" any louder?

Many times over the last year I thought "The Russians Did It" campaign would collapse under the weight of its own absurdity -- was there any serious mainstream engagement with the assertion that the compromising information from the Democratic National Committee came from a leak (via thumb drive) and not a hack (because of online download speeds)? -- but it has chugged along all the same. It is even accepted in toto in the hipster weekly paper of my hometown.

Each week The New York Times publishes a "bombshell" front-pager purporting to document that Trump should be indicted any day now. My guess is that most people have given up reading these stories. The headlines get read, and I'm sure elite partisans continue to read everything, but for the most part Russiagate has become just noise.

And for good reason because that is what it is -- a deep state disinformation campaign targeting its domestic population. If you read Friday's "Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation" by Michael Schmidt you know that the Mueller investigation is boiling down to next to nothing. There is no evidence of collusion with Russia, and chicken shit when it comes to obstruction:

Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president reportedly dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with the special counsel’s investigation, declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said the president has fully cooperated with the investigation, and they have expressed confidence that the inquiry will soon be coming to a close. They said that they believed the president would be exonerated, and that they hoped to have that conclusion made public.

Legal experts said that of the two primary issues Mr. Mueller appears to be investigating — whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice while in office and whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — there is currently a larger body of public evidence tying the president to a possible crime of obstruction.

But the experts are divided about whether the accumulated evidence is enough for Mr. Mueller to bring an obstruction case. They said it could be difficult to prove that the president, who has broad authority over the executive branch, including the hiring and firing of officials, had corrupt intentions when he took actions like ousting the F.B.I. director. Some experts said the case would be stronger if there was evidence that the president had told witnesses to lie under oath.

Once again, can you say "There is no there there" any louder?

An interesting development is the GOP's decision to go on the offensive with a criminal referral to the DOJ on Christopher Steele, and the FBI's re-opening the Clinton Foundation corruption case. Trump delivered the tax cut and with midterms looming, Republicans are circling the wagons.

I  hope that things get interesting. The problem is that Democrats have very little game.

Demands for Massive Censorship of Internet

Internet censorship is already here, but the shape of things to come will almost certainly be much worse, much more Orwellian. The Las Vegas massacre is being used as an excuse to demand that the Internet giants hire thousands of censors (conjuring up images of Terry Gilliam's Brazil) because "fake news" following the attack identified the shooter as a MoveOn.org liberal, or, alternatively, an ISIS jihadist. According to Kevin Roose in "After Las Vegas Shooting, Fake News Regains Its Megaphone":

Facebook, Twitter and Google are some of the world’s richest and most ambitious companies, but they still have not shown that they’re willing to bear the costs — or the political risks — of fixing the way misinformation spreads on their platforms. (Some executives appear resolute in avoiding the discussion. In a recent Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg reasserted the platform’s neutrality, saying that being accused of partisan bias by both sides is “what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”)

The investigations into Russia’s exploitation of social media during the 2016 presidential election will almost certainly continue for months. But dozens of less splashy online misinformation campaigns are happening every day, and they deserve attention, too. Tech companies should act decisively to prevent hoaxes and misinformation from spreading on their platforms, even if it means hiring thousands more moderators or angering some partisan organizations. 

Facebook and Google have spent billions of dollars developing virtual reality systems. They can spare a billion or two to protect actual reality.

Fake News and the Struggle to Establish a Global System of Censorship

If not every day certainly several times a week The New York Times publishes a story having to do with the deep-state effort to police the World Wide Web. Today's offering is "In Europe’s Election Season, Tech Vies to Fight Fake News" by Mark Scott.

Most of these stories focus on Europe as the current battlefield where mainstream candidates (neoliberal candidates) are purportedly under attack by a horde of Fake News sites, some of which, like the internationally recognized Sputnik, are sponsored by the Russian state.

The stories usually are built around a promise that the aggrieved political status quo is just one super-science algorithm away from creating a sound, fact-based Internet.

What is being described is an effort to establish a global system of information censorship. The concern about Fake News is really a concern that support for the established political organs of the mainstream left and right is collapsing precipitously. "Fake News" is code for the populist rejection of the governing political center.

Scott's story today provides a perfect example:

The goal, experts say, is to expand these digital tools across Europe, so the region can counter the fake news that caused so much confusion and anger during the United States presidential election in November, when outright false reports routinely spread like wildfire on Facebook and Twitter.

“Algorithms will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting misinformation,” said Claire Wardle, head of strategy and research at First Draft News, a nonprofit organization that has teamed up with tech companies and newsrooms to debunk fake reports about elections in the United States and Europe. “It’s impossible to do all of this by hand.”

Researchers have tried to learn from the United States’ run-in with fake news, but the problem in Europe has mutated, experts say, making it impossible to merely replicate American responses to the issue.

European countries have different languages, and their media markets are smaller than those in the United States. That means groups that set up fake news sites in the United States, seeking to profit from online advertising when false claims were shared on social media, are less prevalent in Europe.

So far, outright fake news stories have been relatively rare. Instead, false reports have more often come from Europeans on social media taking real news out of context, as well as from fake claims spread by state-backed groups like Sputnik, the Russian news organization.

But with fake news already swirling around Europe’s forthcoming elections, analysts also worry that technology on its own may not be enough to combat the threat.

“There’s an increased amount of misinformation out there,” said Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, a think tank in Riga, Latvia, that will hold a hackathon with local coders in May to find potential tech solutions to this trend. “State-based actors have been trying to amplify specific views to bring them into the mainstream.”

Calls for combating fake news have focused on some of the biggest online players, including American giants like Facebook and Google.

After criticism of its role in spreading false reports during the United States elections, Facebook introduced a fact-checking tool ahead of the Dutch elections in March and the first round of the French presidential election on April 23. It also removed 30,000 accounts in France that had shared fake news, a small fraction of the approximately 33 million Facebook users in the country.

Will the Fake News purveyed by The New York Times be flagged and censored? Will the prestige press continue to act as a conveyor belt for bald government assertions, such as, "Assad gassed his own people at Khan Sheikhoun"?

Will the click-bait design of most mainstream homepages change? (Look at BBC World News and The Guardian U.S.) Fake News is the mainstream. To change the one you would have to change the other.

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.

Davos Man and Fake News

Marcy Wheeler has a good post rebutting DCI John Brennan's denial that the intelligence community was behind the leak of the "dirty dossier" on Trump. Brennan argues that the dossier was bouncing around in the press long before it was published; therefore, you cannot lay it at the IC's doorstep. But Wheeler points out that the dossier that was released included a report that postdates all the versions known to be circulating in the press. The idea that this is a domestic color revolution is the one that makes the most sense.

Wall Street lickspittle Andrew Ross Sorkin, in Davos for the World Economic Forum, has a piece worth reading. In "What to Make of the ‘Davos Class’ in the Trump Era" Sorkin outlines an emerging understanding among the elite that globalization has become very unpopular to the voting public.

Sorkin's story has a hopeful "and this too shall pass" aspect to it. Towards the end he mentions how reviled Davos was during the efflorescence of activism around the millennium:

This is not the first time that the World Economic Forum has come under fire from critics about its globalist, free-trade message. In 2000, a group of more than 1,000 demonstrators carrying signs that said “Against the New World Order” smashed the windows of a McDonald’s franchise here in Davos just down the road from the conference, protesting open trade policies espoused by then-President Bill Clinton, who was speaking at the event.

Marcy Wheeler in another post ties the sudden elite panic over Fake News to the inability to think beyond corporate globalization:

Finally, one reason there is such a panic about “fake news” is because the western ideology of neoliberalism has failed. It has led to increased authoritarianism, decreased qualify of life in developed countries (but not parts of Africa and other developing nations), and it has led to serial destabilizing wars along with the refugee crises that further destabilize Europe. It has failed in the same way that communism failed before it, but the elites backing it haven’t figured this out yet. I’ll write more on this (Ian Welsh has been doing good work here). All details of the media environment aside, this has disrupted the value-laden system in which “truth” exists, creating a great deal of panic and confusion among the elite that expects itself to lead the way out of this morass. Part of what we’re seeing in “fake news” panic stems from that, as well as a continued disinterest in accountability for the underlying policies — the Iraq War and the Wall Street crash and aftermath especially — enabled by failures in our elite media environment. But our media environment is likely to be contested until such time as a viable ideology forms to replace failed neoliberalism. Sadly, that ideology will be Trumpism unless the elite starts making the world a better place for average folks. Instead, the elite is policing discourse-making by claiming other things — the bad true and false narratives it, itself, doesn’t propagate — as illegitimate.

A Vertiginous New Year

CORRECTION: Repeatedly I have referred to Dutch and French elections both taking place in the same month in the coming year, March. Not so. My apologies. General elections for the House of Representatives in the Netherlands take place on March 15, while the first round of France's presidential election is April 23, with a run-off between the top two scheduled for May 7. So far it's Marine Le Pen of the National Front versus Francois Fillon of the Republicans. The Socialists hold their primary in January.

James Kanter, The New York Times' man in Brussels, pens a story, "As Hopes for European Unity Dim, New E.U. Headquarters Are Glowing," in today's paper comparing the new EU headquarters to a funeral urn. He waits until the last two paragraphs to mention it, along with French and Dutch earthquakes coming in March, but mention it he does:

With far-right, anti-bloc politicians in France and the Netherlands riding high in the polls ahead of elections in 2017, there is widespread speculation that Britain’s departure may be the start of a great unraveling of the European Union. 

For the first time in its history, the bloc’s survival is being openly discussed. Unsurprisingly, the gloom that has descended on Brussels has given rise to a form of black humor, much of it directed at the Europa building. Among the quips: Rather than serving as a lantern, as Mr. Samyn has called his gently curving structure, it could one day be used as a giant funeral urn, to hold the ashes of a collapsed European Union.

Naked Capitalism this morning publishes Ilargi's "2017: Where The Truth Lies," which appeared yesterday on The Automatic Earth. It is so good I need to quote a lot of it. Ilargi sees 2017 as a year of accelerating collapse. The European Union is coming apart. Brexit and Trump are just the beginning:

As for the EU, is it even possible they’re the worst of the bunch? Europe is falling apart before all of our eyes, and they’re all in full tard denial about it. They are turning Greece into a third world country, they’re alienating Britain to the point where the English will, once they wake up to what’s going on, want to set Brussels on fire. And why? There’s no point left to any of it at all.

Italy’s a goner, once enough Italians realize what the ECB wants to do to their banks. France is such a key member nobody wants to even imagine it falling, so its broke banks are ignored. Holland will come very close to voting in Wilders, which means Nexit. Germany is destabilizing rapidly. Spain has been a hornets’ nest for years. Etc.

And again: why? Well, because the Obama/Merkel model has so dramatically failed. All these places where left and right work together to produce a shapeless blob somewhere in the center that has no identity and doesn’t speak out for anyone.

You just wouldn’t know it from reading the Washington Post. Or any comparable old and respected medium in any of these European countries. It’s not just the politics that have failed, it’s its propaganda machine too.

This is something that manifests itself differently in different places, but it shouldn’t be that hard to see the ties that bind it all together. For one thing, because, not even touched on so far, the amount of fake financial news that has been forced down our throats for decades, and increasingly so: the worse things get, the bigger the lie…

There is no economic recovery. Never was. Not in the US, not in Europe anywhere. It’s a fairy tale. There are plates shifting, sure. You can cherry pick a region stateside that does well if only you select the ‘right’ stats. Like you can say employment is on a roll, if you’re willing to discard the number of ‘newly created’ jobs that are part time.

And yes, if you just completely ignore that 94 million Americans are not counted at all in unemployment numbers, Obama has been a big success. It’s just that those 94 million have a vote, too. We will see that exact same dynamic, and we have already started, play out all across Europe.

It’ll be much messier, for instance because in Holland last time I looked 81 different political parties were vying to take part in the upcoming elections, but the end result will be the same. That is, the existing order will be voted out. Not everywhere, and it won’t be replaced by radically different parties and people in all places, but do please understand that it doesn’t have to.

In Europe, it’s not and/and, it’s if/or. As in, if either Italy or France or Holland vote in a party that wants to leave the EU or the Euro, it’s game over. The endgame will be almighty messed up because of all the laws and regulations the EU has invented, but eventually the walls of Brussels will crumble. Good riddance too.

I’ve said it a hundred times before, all the institutions mentioned before, EU, IMF, UN and yes, even Congress, exist by the grace of growth. People accept them only as long as they can show reasonable proof that they bring economic benefits. As soon as that’s gone (or I should say as soon as people figure it out), so are they.

People are going to vote for someone close to their own lives, their own world, to lead them in times of contraction. That is inevitable. It’s why Trump won, and it’s also why he’s set to fail. Isn’t that a lovely paradox? We’re going to split up into smaller entities, economic contraction guarantees it.

And while everyone tries to talk you into thinking that’s terrible, there’s no reason why it should be. We can work together in many different ways. All these supranational institutions have merely become straight jackets that serve only the people who work inside them and those outside who benefit from keeping up appearances and clinging to power.

That of course gets us back to the Washington Post and its comatose brethren. The US press has been a full accomplice with Washington in reporting fake news about the recovery, and it’s not there. Never has been. The Dow Jones says one thing, the votes for Trump say another. In the end, democracy is that simple. Same goes for Britain, same goes for continental Europe.

And there’s no doubt that Trump is an iceberg-sized gamble, but a change had to come. A change from the monsoon of fake news we have all been fed, but also initially a change that won’t be able to help itself from being replete with more fake news, from all sides.

Put it this way: in 2016, the engine of change got cranked up. In the new year, it will accelerate. That is 2017. That is what the new year will bring. 

Ilargi is certainly right when he says, "And while everyone tries to talk you into thinking that’s terrible, there’s no reason why it should be. We can work together in many different ways." But he underestimates the ruthlessness of the elite when it comes to clinging to vanishing status and privilege. Look at the House of Saud. The Kingdom along with USG enablers have managed to tear up the hundred-year-old Sykes-Picot Middle East. The great postwar project, the European Union, is an associated casualty.

War, and more war, is all the rulers have in store for us. Trump's idea, one can make out the contours of it, is to ratchet down conflict in the Greater Middle East and Europe so as to focus on Obama's Asia pivot. Trump imagines the Dragon can be bum-rushed.

Trump is wrong there. And I think he is wrong to think that he can alter the bellicose direction of the Deep State in the Middle East and the New Cold War with Russia. For perpetual war to end the bottom is going to have to drop out first.

Whose Fake News?

Based on Jennifer Steinhauer's "Senate and House Leaders Call for Inquiry of Russian Hacking in Election" it looks like there will be three separate congressional investigations on purported Russian cyber-meddling in the U.S. presidential election:

[A] continuing investigation by Representative Devin Nunes of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

[T]he Senate investigation would be led by Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, will add a subcommittee to look into cyberattacks, led by Mr. Graham.

“The first thing we want to establish is, ‘Did the Russians hack into our political system?’” Mr. Graham said in an interview on Monday. “Then you work outward from there. I have a high degree of confidence Russia did this.”

Graham is a preeminent neocon. So the findings of his subcommittee, as his quote makes clear, are preordained.

At the same time, the Senate has passed a "ministry of truth" bill designed to counter the fictional tsunami of Fake News conjured by Poseidon Putin.

Simultaneously, the U.S. and its clients in the Gulf monarchies are about to lose their Stalingrad in Aleppo.

Fake News is what the organs of the mainstream press produce. Read Anne Barnard's latest, "Aleppo Close to Falling Under Complete Control of Syrian Government." Barnard reports from Beirut. A couple of years back she used to write somewhat critical pieces about the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Army.

The myth of a secular, democratic opposition has almost entirely been scrapped. Now the "moderate opposition" label is applied with a wink and nod to mean "our jihadis."

This is on display in Barnard's work of the last several months. She is in communication with the "opposition" still holed up in the eastern part of Aleppo. She emails, she texts, she calls from her bureau in Beirut. She can't travel to any of these areas controlled by the "opposition" because she would be kidnapped and held for ransom, or worse. The only time Barnard has traveled to Syria recently has been at the invitation of the government. She met with Assad.

In any event, almost all of Barnard stories in the last month or two follow a pattern. She talks to someone in Aleppo -- 95 percent of the time it is someone in eastern half of the divided city, not the government controlled western part -- and that someone says something to the effect, "I am dying. The government is killing me. Bodies are everywhere. Babies are dead all around."

Mostly she doesn't explicitly identify who she is speaking with because who she is speaking with are jihadis. Here is a sample which ends today's article:

Malek, an activist who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear that he would soon find himself in government territory, said he had moved on Monday to a safer place for the 10th time since the offensive began, along with his cats, Rocky and Loz, the Arabic word for almond.

“Why should I lie? I’m not well,” he said in a series of voice messages. “We are people, are being deleted from the human map. We have two neighborhoods and one street, and the regime will keep bombing this small area.”

Bodies were stuck under the rubble, Malek said, and even members of the White Helmets civil defense group could not rescue anyone, because the group’s equipment had been destroyed and their members scattered by the shelling.

Still attempting to find humor, he said that his cat Rocky had lost “his fiancée” along the way. “Now he’s lonely,” Malek said.

Dr. Salem, a dentist who had kept his clinic open until last week, finally moved to one of the last rebel neighborhoods as his own was taken by government forces. He said he walked through streets shrouded in smoke, and littered with the dead and wounded, to a small area where thousands were crowded in a shrinking space. “There will be a massacre if one rocket falls here,” said Dr. Salem, using only his first name.

The only way that dentist could operate was if he had the support of the jihadis who control the territory. If he were a secular, "moderate" democrat he would have been purged.

What Barnard produces is propaganda. Plain and simple. Fake News. What the Fake News crisis is all about is that the mainstream media has lost control of the narrative. What we are witnessing is a futile attempt to re-legitimize the mainstream, a mainstream, founded on war and ever-increasing inequality, that has lost all credibility.

Laying the First Bricks of the Western Great Firewall

Western neoliberal orthodoxy, though discredited, its high priests headed off to retirement or the unemployment line, appears to be in need of a quick and dirty technological patch.

As soon as Trump won the U.S. presidential election, stories started appearing in the mainstream media about the role Fake News played in securing his victory.

Fake News has a neo-McCarthyite overlay in that all this false information that is purportedly pulsating through the internet is of a Kremlin origin.

So the empire strikes back. You could see this coming in stories from Europe published in the last couple of weeks. Fake News was being mentioned in the same sentence as hate speech. Clearly the plan is to conflate the two, and have the giant tech companies -- Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter -- design a filter, a censorship program, to remove offensive content. In other words, a corporate Western version of the Chinese Great Firewall. Europe will test the beta version, and then the U.S. will follow.

The tech giants actually kicked things off on Monday when they announced an effort to censor terrorist content on the internet. Then yesterday the European Commission published its "Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online." All that needs to be done is to categorize Fake News as a variant of hate speech. And lo and behold! We have ourselves a Western Great Firewall.

Yves Smith weighs in this morning with "Witch Hunt: “Fake News” Software Touted by CBS Smears Naked Capitalism, ShadowProof, TruthDig, Others; Creator Admits He Made Up Who Went on Hit Li[s]t":

The faith in coders coming up with a magic bullet for information validation is similarly questionable. The concern about “fake news” on the Internet is almost comical given that more citizens encounter “fake news” via seeing National Enquirer and National Examiner covers in grocery stores than via websites. It is not hard to imagine that much of the tender concern expressed by the mainstream media is commercial: independent news and analysis sites threaten their legitimacy by exposing how dependent they are on stories planted by government or business source that these press outlets often fail to vet adequately.

Hallelujah! The irony of this post-election Fake News crisis is that if there is any substance to the issue it is due to the ad-driven revenue model of the tech giants. Fake Newsies aren't agents of the Kremlin but people of modest means hustling to concoct click bait to generate income from ad placement (see "Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’."

Let me quote Mark Scott's "Europe Presses American Tech Companies to Tackle Hate Speech" in full. The first bricks of the Western Great Firewall are being laid.

European officials pushed on Tuesday for American technology giants to do more to tackle online hate speech across the region, adding to the chorus of policy makers worldwide demanding greater action from the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.

The rebuke came a day after many of those companies announced that they were joining forces to fight the spread of terrorist content on the internet, agreeing to share technology and information to prevent propaganda and other dangerous materials from being disseminated on their services.

Amid growing security tensions in much of the Western world, governments, intelligence agencies and advocacy groups want Google, Microsoft and other technology companies to take further steps to curb hate speech on digital platforms, as well as to clamp down on how terrorists circulate information online.

But freedom of expression campaigners have warned that such demands may limit people’s ability to communicate across the internet, and they have cautioned that the line between hate speech and legitimate political discussion can be blurry.

In a report published on Tuesday, however, the European authorities signaled that only 40 percent of material flagged as possible hate speech online (albeit in a relatively small sample of 600 posts, videos and other online material) had been reviewed by the Silicon Valley companies within 24 hours. Of those 600 postings, just over a quarter was eventually taken down, the report said.

“While I.T. companies are moving in the right direction, the first results show that the I.T. companies will need to do more to make it a success,” Vera Jourova, the European commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, said in a statement. “It is our duty to protect people in Europe from incitement to hatred and violence online.”

Press officers for Google and Microsoft declined to comment. Representatives for Facebook and Twitter were not immediately available to comment.

In a recent interview, Richard Allen, Facebook’s head of public policy in Europe, said that the social network was committed to tackling hate speech online, but that there was a fine line between what was legitimate under freedom of speech laws and what was required to protect people online.

“Our policies provide protection from hate speech,” Mr. Allen said last month. “We shouldn’t apply media regulation to the speech of ordinary citizens.”

The report on Tuesday is part of European efforts to coax American technology companies to take more responsibility for what is published through their services. In May, companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter signed a voluntary code of conduct, agreeing to do more to tackle the rise of online hate speech across the 28-member European Union.

Some lawmakers, though, are not satisfied.

In Germany, where Facebook, in particular, has come under scrutiny, a government-backed task force is to report early next year on whether the social network, among other companies, has met national targets for responding to — and potentially eliminating — hate speech. Officials want companies to remove at least 70 percent of online hate speech within 24 hours of it being reported.

Heiko Maas, the German justice minister, has said that Facebook could even be held criminally liable for illegal hate speech posts, and he has called for legislation if the company does not meet its legal commitments.

“Facebook has a certain responsibility to uphold the laws,” Mr. Maas said.

The social network denies any wrongdoing.

Pussy Riot Reappraised

Pussy Riot, the punk-rock/guerilla-protest collective, was in the business page yesterday, interviewed by the soft-spoken Jim Rutenberg for a piece titled "A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy Riot." The member, Nadya Tolokonnikova, was in Miami for Art Basel, the annual jet set international art fair.

Based on her new video, “Make America Great Again,” Tolokonnikova has left her ski mask and her faux-punk behind and is now angling in a Madonna/Lady Gaga direction. She is trying to hit the jackpot in the United States.

It is easy to make fun of Pussy Riot, at least the solemn expressions of concern for the group's artistic freedom belched out by the USG/NGO nexus, but Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina did support Occupy Wall Street, visiting imprisoned Cecily McMillan on Rikers Island. Plus, Tolokonnikova publicly backed Bernie Sanders. So it is doubtful that Pussy Riot is a creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Rutenberg, a champion of internet censorship in the form of policing Fake News, steered the conversation towards the dangers of authoritarianism and the crisis of belief in objective truth.

But truth cannot break through if people never find it or believe it when they do. And the problem in Russia is the same one we’re seeing here, Ms. Tolokonnikova told me. “A lot of people are living really unwealthy lives so they have to work not one but two jobs, so they don’t have time to analyze and check facts, and you cannot blame them,” she said.

And, after so many years in which the “lift-all-boats” promises of globalization didn’t come to pass, she said, “they don’t trust bureaucrats, they don’t trust politicians, and they don’t really trust media.”

That’s why the top Russian propagandist Dmitry K. Kiselyov can assert that “objectivity is a myth” and, here in the United States, the paid CNN Trump-supporting contributor Scottie Nell Hughes can declare: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.”

When there is no truth, invasions are “liberations” and internment camps are “relocation centers.”

But, as Ms. Tolokonnikova said, “There is always a way if you really want to tell the truth.”

Doing so, for her, has come at a cost, even after prison. Informal Cossack security forces beat her and other Pussy Riot members as they prepared to perform in Sochi during the 2014 Olympics. That same year, a youth gang attacked her with trash and a green antiseptic chemical in Nizhny Novgorod, where she was protesting prison conditions. The men were clearly identifiable but, she said, police made no arrests.

Ms. Tolokonnikova has also co-founded a news site called Media Zona. She said it avoided opinion so that readers would accept it as a just-the-facts counter to disinformation.

“You are always in danger of being shut down,” she said. “But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.”

Her counsel for United States journalists: You better be, too.

I am not so sure about Media Zone. There appears to be a lot of stuff on Navalny's ongoing legal battles, but there is also a feature on the recent prison strike in the U.S.

What struck me was Tolokonnikova's critique of globalization to a newspaper, The New York Times, whose entire mission is to spread the gospel of globalization.

The Failure of the New McCarthyism

Yesterday was a big news day. Italy's constitutional overhaul was handily defeated at the polls, prompting premier Matteo Renzi to say that he will tender his resignation today; the Standing Rock Sioux triumphed, at least temporarily, in blocking the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from being routed beneath a dammed section of the Missouri River; and the Freedom Party underwhelmed Austrian voters, failing to unseat Alexander Van der Bellen in a do-over of last spring's presidential election.

All good news, I would say, though it is a little troubling to read (Jack Healy and Nicholas Fandos, "Army Blocks Drilling of Dakota Access Oil Pipeline") that Dave Archambault is telling all the water protectors to pack up and go home:

“It’s wonderful,” Dave Archambault II, the Standing Rock tribal chairman, told cheering supporters who stood in the melting snow on a mild North Dakota afternoon. “You all did that. Your presence has brought the attention of the world.”

The decision, he said, meant that people no longer had to stay at the camp during North Dakota’s brutal winter. The Corps of Engineers, which manages the land, had ordered it to be closed, but the thousands of protesters had built yurts, tepees and bunkhouses and vowed to hunker down.

“It’s time now that we move forward,” Mr. Archambault said. “We don’t have to stand and endure this hard winter. We can spend the winter with our families.”

Clearly the Army can reverse itself, and is likely to do so, once Trump gets into office. Many are promising to stay camped through the winter. But if the chairman of the tribe wants people to go home, that puts the water protectors at odds with their host.

This victory was won because of the robust numbers the indigenous peoples were able to marshal, the coup de grace being the arrival of the veterans. Now, the camp will shrink, and in a month or two, there will be a nighttime raid, a la NYPD of Occupy Wall Street, and that, very likely, will be that.

An interesting aspect of Renzi's flame-out is that in the run-up to Sunday's referendum he resorted to the Fake News playbook, accusing the "no" camp of spreading Russian-inspired false stories to gain advantage at the polls. Jason Horowitz's "Spread of Fake News Provokes Anxiety in Italy" is case in point (Horowitz is one of the reporters that NYT assigned to do hatchet jobs on Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary):

As early as April, Mr. Renzi complained privately to his counterparts about Russia meddling in his country’s politics by supporting anti-establishment parties.

In November, he privately discussed the spread of fake news with other European leaders and President Obama at a meeting in Berlin. Mr. Obama forcefully assailed the phenomenon while standing beside Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who has warned of Russian misinformation campaigns that “could play a role” in her own re-election bid.

Mr. Renzi’s private concerns were relayed by several current and former officials with knowledge of the conversations who were not authorized to speak publicly.

His biggest domestic opponent has been the surging and anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which would benefit most should he lose Sunday’s referendum on streamlining Italy’s bureaucracy.

Laura Boldrini, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, said she had no information about whether the Five Star Movement trafficked in fake news or promulgated Russian propaganda. But she did say it was a growing problem in Italy.

“Fake news is a critical issue and we can’t ignore it,” she said this week. “We have to act now.”

On Wednesday, Ms. Boldrini met with Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy in Europe, to discuss ways Facebook could limit hate speech and fake news on its pages.

“They can’t pretend that they are just a platform,” Ms. Boldrini said. “They are giant media companies.”

Buzzfeed and the Italian newspaper La Stampa recently reported that blogs, social media accounts and websites in Russia connected to the Five Star Movement were spreading fake news harmful to Mr. Renzi across their vast virtual networks.

Russia has long had close relations with Italy, especially under Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister and media tycoon who was a personal friend of Mr. Putin.

The story goes on to paint the Five Star Movement (M5S) as Kremlin dupes.

Fake News is a sure sign of the weakness and desperation that has taken hold of the neoliberal ruling class. Absent any proof that dire warnings about Fake News are effective in keeping voters aligned with a bankrupt neoliberal orthodoxy, the New McCarthyism has spread from Washington to Rome and Berlin.

My sense is that the New McCarthyism will soon have to be scrapped. It is not working; worse still, it is generating a significant push-back.

Mainstream Media and Lame Duck Obama Pivot to "The Enemy Within": Is "Great Firewall" Coming to U.S.?

The "Mighty Wurlitzer," playing non-stop since last week a "fake news" tune, has for the time being replaced its preferred Russophobia for the "enemy within." Obama took a turn at the electric piano while in Lima. The quote is from Gardiner Harris' "As Obama Tour Ends, He Says U.S. Influence Must Not," which appears in today's national print edition of The New York Times (but which I can't locate online):

Mr. Obama ranked the problems resulting from alleged Russian hacking far below those generated by fake news being circulated on social media.

"The concern I had has less to do with any particular misinformation or propaganda that's put out by any particular party, but a greater concern about the general misinformation from all kinds of sources, domestic, foreign, on social media, that make it difficult to figure out what's true and what's not," Mr. Obama said. [That's chutzpah!]

If elections are "full of fake news and false information and distractions, [like 'moderate rebels' or the photo of little Omran Daqneesh or the announcement by AP that Hillary had sewn up the nomination on the eve of the California primary] then the issue not going to be what is happening on the outside, " he added. "The issue is going to be what are we doing to ourselves from the inside."

The remarks followed similar comments at a news conference in Berlin on Thursday in which Mr. Obama was sharply critical of the role of Facebook and other social media companies play in spreading false news -- a remarkable change in tone for a man who has spent his presidency praising the the transformational and beneficial effects of social media.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, published a detailed post early Saturday describing ways the company was considering dealing with the problem of fake news.

One can make out the contours of what is coming our way. Zuckerberg is being hammered. At first he rejected the Deep State argument articulated by Obama, that the lunatic fringe had upended its selection of a successor, but then he buckled and spat out a censorship laundry list.

The fix the Deep State is looking for is something along the lines of the USA Freedom Act, the 2015 reboot of expiring provisions of the Patriot Act. The bulk collection of telephone metadata by the government was nominally ended only to be offloaded to the phone companies. The responsibility of policing "fake news" will be delegated to the big social media outlets -- Facebook, Google, Twitter -- with some sort of unofficial covenant or protocol being approved by the government. The USG will then have its own version of the Chinese Great Firewall.

In other words, net neutrality, if not already over, is coming to an end. It will be interesting to see how the liberal elite will then justify the majesty of America since for more than a decade -- look at Thomas Friedman's column -- it has been indistinguishable from a kind of comic-book libertarian techno-utopianism.

It all so absurd, yet it shows how truly out of touch the Democratic elite are. There is no evidence that any change will be forthcoming from the Democratic Party. Stalwart non-profits with historic links to the party have received a windfall in donations after the election. In a sign that the discredited party elite responsible for the Clinton debacle plan on ceding not one inch of ground to the Bernistas, Obama has announced that he will remain politically active once he exits the White House. (See "Obama May Jump Into Fray as Democrats Counter Trump," by Michael Shear and Thomas Kaplan. Never have I received so many Organizing for Action emails as I did after November 8.)

According to the same story above from Gardiner Harris:

In his news conference on Sunday, Mr. Obama suggested, for the first time, that he would continue to be active politically when his presidency ended.

The idea is to maintain Obama as a Fort Apache for disintegrating neoliberal orthodoxy. It is pitiful. And hopefully election results from Italy (December) and France (March) will banish the idea before Barry gets back from vacation with Michelle.