"Don't quote ME on that!" Shoddy Journalism Begs War on the Brink of Doomsday

In ‘Russian Bounty’ Story, Evidence-Free Claims From Nameless Spies Became Fact Overnight

Alan MacLeod - FAIR

July 3, 2020

Based upon a bombshell New York Times report (6/26/20), virtually the entire media landscape has been engulfed in the allegations that Russia is paying Taliban fighters bounties to kill US soldiers.

The Washington Post (6/27/20) and the Wall Street Journal (6/27/20) soon published similar stories, based on the same intelligence officials who refused to give their names, and did not appear to share any data or documents with the news organizations.

The Beat Goes On: Police Violence Against Anti-Violence Protest Continues Unabated (if unrecorded)

Anti-Racism Protesters Face Ongoing Police Violence

by TRNN

July 3, 2020

Protests against racism and police brutality are being violently attacked across the country, even as they receive less media attention.

Rummy's Map: America's Vision of a New Middle East Remains Unchanged

Reshaping the Greater Middle East: How Washington intends to triumph

by Thierry Meyssan - Voltaire Network

June 23, 2020

During the quarter of Western lockdown, the map of the Middle East was profoundly transformed. Yemen has been divided into two separate countries, Israel is paralysed by two Prime Ministers who hate each other, Iran openly supports NATO in Iraq and Libya, Turkey occupies northern Syria, Saudi Arabia is close to bankruptcy. All alliances are being called into question and new dividing lines are appearing or rather reappearing.

 

For two decades Washington has been trying to "reshape" the "Greater Middle East", an arbitrarily defined region stretching from Afghanistan to Morocco. However, over the last three years two strategies have clashed: on the one hand the Pentagon, which wants to destroy the state structures of all the countries in the region, whether friends or enemies, and on the other President Trump, who intends to dominate the region commercially without military occupation.

Toe-ing America's Line on Huawei Strains Canada's Political Elite

US anti-China campaign intensifies factional conflicts within Canada’s ruling elite

by Roger Jordan - WSWS

3 July 2020

Sharp differences have emerged within Canada’s ruling elite over Ottawa’s policy towards China. The rift is directly tied to Washington’s escalating diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against Beijing, which has already roiled Canada’s relations with China, and to intense US pressure for Canada to adopt an even more hardline anti-China stance. 

 

Brian Mulroney (Flickr.com/NATO Association of Canada) 

The latest salvo in this increasingly fractious dispute came in the form of Wednesday’s lead article in the Globe and Mail. Titled “Canada-China relations need ‘urgent rethink,’ Mulroney says,” the article promoted the call of the former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister for the establishment of a “blue-ribbon” committee to fundamentally redefine Canada’s China policy.

India's Lockdown for Lockdown's Sake

India Unlocked: World’s “Biggest Lockdown” and Workers’ Long March

by Pratyush Chandra - Dissident Voice

July 3rd, 2020

At times, states compete to showcase merchandise and relative productive capacities. Other times, many of these states sell misery to gain access to economic packages, charities and loans. Today is the time when they compete to show off their capacity to impose the most efficient lockdown on their citizenry. 

 

 Deserted Ranganathan Street, Chennai June, 2020. Hindu Times

Of course, the priority is to make this imposition consensual, because that would showcase the self-discipline of the national workforce. But if that doesn’t work, then the dosages of coercion are streamlined to measure the states’ disciplining capacity. The Narendra Modi government’s chest-thumping claim to run the “world’s biggest lockdown” was to showcase the realization of the neoliberal ideal of a “strong state” in India — the carrots-and-sticks hidden behind the quinine-and-quarantine lockdown.

Masks and Other Media Deceptions

Conspiracy Theories Malign And Benign – Face Masks And Israeli Training Of US Police

by Media Lens

July 3, 2020

Frightening numbers of people still believe that profit-maximising corporate media merely disseminate something called ‘news’. In reality, ‘mainstream’ ‘news’ is chock full of Pavlovian bells, trigger terms designed to shape and control public opinion.

When journalists use terms like ‘secretive’ and ‘hermit’ to describe North Korea, they mean ‘Evil’. When Venezuelan presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro are described as ‘leftist’, it means ‘Evil’. When Julian Assange is described as the ‘controversial’ WikiLeaks editor, it means ‘Evil’.

Feds and Seattle Cops Chop CHAZ

After multiple shootings and two deaths Seattle police forcibly end Capitol Hill Occupied Protest

by Kayla Costa  - WSWS

2 July 2020

Early on Wednesday morning, heavily militarized police officers swept the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), a tent encampment in downtown Seattle that began as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) over three weeks ago on June 8, in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. The principal demand of the demonstrators had been the defunding of the police.

Seattle police officers prepared to sweep CHOP area on Wednesday morning 

(Credit: Jake Gravbrot @walk.into.the.light for Converge Media, 2020)

At least one hundred officers from the Seattle Police Department and nearby Bellevue Police Department, as well as FBI agents, arrived at the protest with heavy riot gear and even tactical military-style vehicles to clear out dozens of protesters from their tents.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Ariel Nasr, Will Tell, Janine Bandcroft July 2nd, 2020

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

July 2, 2020

Welcome to Gorilla Radio’s continuing efforts, NOT broadcast live from CFUV Radio in the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but emanating live-to-tape via Skype from our home-based studios on this date, June 17th, 2020.

In 2001 a great tragedy befell Afghanistan; but, as bad as hosting the inauguration of America’s Global War on Terror was for Afghans, it was merely the continuation of decades of suffering conflicts of other people’s making.

Nearly twenty years after Operation Enduring Freedom’s first B-52 bombing sortie the fighting rages still; and though its name has since changed, the price those mired within The Long War pay endures. Yet, Afghanistan is more than a proxy battlefield for superpowers; made of more than just its most recent history.

Ariel Nasr is a celebrated documentary filmmaker, earning more than a dozen awards and nominations, (including an Oscar nod and Canadian Screen Award prize) for his film work; work encompassing writing, directing, and producing across platforms and crossing continents.

Listen. Hear.

Nasr’s credits include, ‘The Boxing Girls of Kabul’, Good Morning Kandahar, the interactive, ‘Kabul Portraits’ project, and his latest, the feature-length documentary release, ‘The Forbidden Reel,’ a "story of Afghanistan’s fearless and visionary moviemakers…"

Ariel Nasr in the first half.

And; as the tidal wave that has been the Covid-19 lockdown ebbs, around the World the financial and social damage wrought in its wake is beginning to be revealed. While Wall Street rockets, the biggest and strongest buffeted best by government bailouts, workers are finding promises made at the height of crisis are now quietly being broken. And like the pandemic itself, the pattern of feeding piles of public funds to corporations while pleading poor mouth to the starving knows no borders.

Will Tell is an expat living in rural southern India who says, as well as reneging on promises of financial aid to small business, the Indian government has, "NOT delivered on its promise to subsidise the ‘day labourers’. This includes taxi drivers, rickshaw drivers […and] self-employed skilled tradesmen […] either in the form of money […] or in delivery of staples [like] rice, dahl, cooking oil, [and] sugar."

Will Tell and India racing to aid the powerful, whilst the rest are left to the Covid tsunami’s rip tide in the second half.

And; long-time Gorilla Radio contributor and Green Vegan Grandma Youtuber, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour with this week’s Left Coast Events Bulletin of some of the good things to be gotten up to in and around our town in the coming week. But first, Ariel Nasr and preserving a nation’s culture, frame by frame.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

Herding the Morons: Media Lies and Cow Pies

This Russia-Afghanistan Story is Western Propaganda at Its Most Vile

by Caitlin Johnstone - Rogue Journalist

June 28, 2020

All western mass media outlets are now shrieking about the story The New York Times first reported, citing zero evidence and naming zero sources, claiming intelligence says Russia paid out bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for attacking the occupying forces of the US and its allies in Afghanistan. 

As of this writing, and probably forevermore, there have still been zero intelligence sources named and zero evidence provided for this claim.

Brave New Normal (It Ain't)

The New (Pathologized) Totalitarianism

by CJ Hopkins - Consent Factory

June 29, 2020

It was always going to come to this … mobs of hysterical, hate-drunk brownshirts hunting down people not wearing masks and trying to get them fired from their jobs, “no mask, no service” signs outside stores, security staff stopping the mask-less from entering, paranoid pod people pointing and shrieking at the sight of mask-less shoppers in their midst, goon squads viciously attacking and arresting them …

Welcome to the Brave New Normal.

Agenda for the Global South: Ten Steps to a Viable Economic Future

Ten Point Agenda For The Global South

by Vijay Prashad - Tricontinental Institute for Social Research

via Popular Resistance

June 28, 2020

In 1974, the United Nations General Assembly passed a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which was driven by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The resolution laid out a clear plan for the structural transformation of the world system, which was in the throes of a crisis at the time. But, the NIEO was set aside and the world order was shaped in a neoliberal direction; this neoliberal orientation furthered the crisis and brought us to this current cul-de-sac of human possibilities. 

Capitalism Kills but we shall rise

Judy Ann Seidman (South Africa), Capitalism, 2020

Our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research developed a ten-point agenda for a post-COVID-19 world. Last week, I presented this agenda at the High-Level Conference on the Post-Pandemic Economy, organized by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). 

Israel Ends Its Palestine Pretense: Netanyahu's "Bantustan" Proclamation

Netanyahu prepares Israel’s annexation of large slice of West Bank

by Jean Shaoul  - WSWS

29 June 2020

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to announce later this week his intention to annex the most important parts of the Palestinian West Bank, which Israel has illegally occupied since the 1967 war with its Arab neighbours.

The cabinet is to meet to approve the move, set for July 1, after it gets the green light from US President Donald Trump.

Court Capture: Dutch Courage Falters in MH17 Downing Case

MH17 TRIAL PROSECUTORS WARN JUDGES NOT TO UNRAVEL UKRAINIAN COVER-UP, REJECT CALLING RUSSIAN GENERAL KONASHENKOV TO TESTIFY

by John Helmer, Moscow

@bears_with

June 28, 2020

Dutch state prosecutors told the court in the trial of the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines MH17 that Major-General of the Russian Army Igor Konashenkov should not be allowed as a witness for the defence. To justify this in a hearing last Friday, the prosecutors revealed an illegal trick exposing the evidence in the case as a fit-up by the Ukrainian government’s military and security agencies.

Dismissing almost all the defence applications to the court for new evidence and witnesses, prosecutor Ferdinandusse* (lead image, right) said: “We do not see any reasonable grounds for accusing the prosecution of not being objective” (June 26 hearing, Min 9:17).

Justice's Last Gleaming: America Throws Another Log on Assange Fire

WikiLeaks Founder Charged in Superseding Indictment

by U.S. Department of Justice

June 24, 2020

New Allegations Assert Assange Conspired With “Anonymous” Affiliated Hackers, Among Others

A federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.

Green Idols and Other Illusions

The Big Green Lie

by Stephen Corry - CounterPunch

June 26, 2020

WWF recently released (June 5th, 2020) a short video[1] of British “national treasure” and conservation icon, Sir David Attenborough, telling us that “suddenly” saving the world is within reach. 

He says they know what to do and have a plan to build a stable, healthy world that we can benefit from forever. What’s not to like? Well, a lot! WWF’s plan regurgitates a 19th century racist assumption: That too many of the wrong kind of people threaten us all.

Living in America: Call the Police, Maybe Get Someone Killed; Call an Ambulance, Maybe Bankrupt Someone

Journalist Blinded By Cops Speaks Out

by Alan Macleod - Mintpress News 

June 26, 2020

“It will take me just under 25 years to pay off the first surgery.”

Photo: A police officer prepares to shoot tear gas Friday, 

May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis. John Minchillo | AP. 

“The only reason I’m dealing with this so well is I think poverty and low wage work is just as brutal and visceral as losing an eye to a police bullet.” – Linda Tirado

Paint It Black: America's "Colored Revolutionaries" & BLM Appropriate Black Rage

America’s Own Color Revolution

by F. William Engdahl - Global Research

June 17, 2020

Color Revolution is the term used to describe a series of remarkably effective CIA-led regime change operations using techniques developed by the RAND Corporation, “democracy” NGOs and other groups since the 1980’s.

For anyone who has studied those models closely, it is clear that the protests against police violence led by amorphous organizations with names like Black Lives Matter or Antifa are more than purely spontaneous moral outrage. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are being used as a battering ram to not only topple a US President, but in the process, the very structures of the US Constitutional order.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Arnold August, Ross Crockford, Janine Bandcroft June 25, 2020

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

June 25, 2020

Welcome again to Gorilla Radio’s continuing efforts, NOT broadcast live from CFUV Radio in the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but emanating live-to-tape via Skype from our home-based … studios on this date, June 1st, 2020.

A World on fire; as our southern neighbour’s cities roil, the citizenry outraged again by the great gulf between the professed and practiced ethos of America, can Canadians afford smug superiority?

There is too racism and injustice at the heart and in the marrow of our society. The great difference is only one of scope and news coverage.

Though Canada still enjoys a reputation as a good and fair country, the Trudeau government’s embrace of neo-liberal internationalism has both diminished the country’s independence and necessitated increasingly brutal domestic policies, especially where global capital is threatened by indigenous resistance.

Listen. Hear.

Arnold August is a Canadian journalist, lecturer and author whose titles include: ‘Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections’, ‘Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion’ and, ‘Cuba–U.S. Relations: Obama and Beyond’. His essays appear at websites in Latin America, Europe, North America and the Middle East, and at the Orinoco Tribune, where I found his recent article, ‘Trudeau in Pre-, Current and Post-Covid-19: Colonialism at Home, Imperialism Abroad – Need for Change’.

Arnold August in the first half.

And; while midwest Machiavelli, Rahm Emanuel is credited with saying, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” it’s a concept as old as politics; and a nonpartisan one too. Donald Trump’s political hero, (no, the other one) Winston Churchill also expressed the value of leveraging crises to do, as Emanuel helpfully reminds, “things that you think you could not do before.” Our Covid-19 moment is just such an opportunity, and not just for Chicago operators, or D.C. pols.

From every crevice it seems, snake-oil salesmen and politicians of all stripes are breaking cover to get things done while everyone is looking the other way. And even here in Victoria – or near here anyway. The City of Langford has decided to ditch for the lockdown duration the encumbrance of public hearings, at least where it comes to trivialities like tax and spend, and development issues. That’s right. Due to social distancing concerns, council members are good for now with phoning in their proxies in the form of voice-tallied aye ayes for Mayor Young’s boundless building ambitions.

Ross Crockford is an award-winning journalist, editor, author, civic activist and co-founder of the watchdog website, JohnsonStreetBridge.org. He’s the recipient of a Western Magazine Award for business writing, the Jack Webster Award of Distinction for investigative reporting, and is a National Magazine Awardee for sports writing. Ross’ book, ‘Victoria: The Unknown City’ is THE alt. guidebook to both the seemly and less so sides of town both past and present, and he is too a regular contributor to Victoria’s finest publication, Focus Magazine where his latest article, ‘Is public input on developments a potential casualty of COVID-19?’ appears.

Ross Crockford and local democracy as Coronavirus victim in the second half.

And; long-time Gorilla Radio contributor and ‘Green Vegan Grandma’ YouTuber, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour with the Left Coast Events Bulletin of some of the good things to be gotten up to in and around Victoria in the coming week. But first, Arnold August and observing Canada under Covid: A Flagrant Fusion of Colonialism and Imperialism.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

Terminus Approach

‘Six Months To Avert Climate Crisis’: Climate Breakdown And The Corporate Media

by Media Lens

23rd June 2020

In his classic science fiction novel, ‘Foundation’, Isaac Asimov posited a future in which ‘psychohistorians’ could predict outcomes based on past history and the large-scale behaviour of human populations by combining psychology and the mathematics of probability. 

Using ‘psychohistory’, the protagonist Hari Seldon discovers that the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire will collapse in 500 years. He warns the galactic rulers of this likely fate, while explaining that an alternative future in which human knowledge is preserved can be attained. For his trouble, he is exiled to the remote planet of Terminus.

Democracy, Fascist Regimes, Riots and Burnt Sticks

US riots and the Bolivian coup

by George Galloway - Sputnik

June 20, 2020

Not a day goes by without a new video emerging from the United States of some horrific atrocity, a murder or a lynching: a homeless man attacked, another shot as he runs away from the police, sparking more riots and demonstrations across the country. But riots can be like fireworks; they go up as exploding skyrockets but come down like a burnt stick. 

So, what exactly is going on in America? The riots go on unabated, triggered by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police on May 25 in Minneapolis. But are they a series of firework displays or is something more profound happening? Professor Gerald Horne is Chair of History at the University of Houston, so we asked him whether the riots could be a precursor to revolution.

[And...]

President Evo Morales was probably one of the most popular Latin-American political figures in recent history; however, he was, unfortunately, not popular in Washington. After a comparatively rare success, the US-backed regime change in Bolivia overthrew Morales with accusations of electoral fraud, heralded loudly on the pages of the New York Times. Seven months on, that newspaper now admits that data and analysis from the US-led Organisation of American States was flawed. This admission comes too late for President Morales as a witch hunt has ensued and his supporters are systematically hunted down. It also appears to be too late for the Bolivian people, as the new far-right government rolls back reforms and postpones scheduled elections. Ollie Vargas is a journalist based in Bolivia and has been covering events there on behalf of Mint Press; he spoke with Sputnik about what is happening on the ground.

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