Trump-Kim summit to show real progress
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | January 23, 2019
The White House disclosed in Washington on January 19 that President Trump’s second summit with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “will take place near the end of February”. One month is a very long time in politics but the White House disclosure came at the conclusion of three-day working level talks between senior officials of the US, North Korea and South Korea at a secret location near Stockholm, Sweden.
In particular, the visit to Washington last week by North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator Kim Yong-chul’s and his meeting with Trump, has raised expectations. (Kim’s visit to the US opened the door for the working level negotiations in Sweden.)
The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later said in Davos that progress has been made at these talks and he anticipated that they provided a “good marker” for the upcoming summit. As Pompeo put it, “There’s an awful lot of things to be done but some good things have happened already.” He added that there are “many steps along the way to achieve” the goal of North Korea’s denuclearization, while expressing optimism that the next summit will be productive.
The US-North Korea negotiations after the Singapore summit last June had stalled since Pyongyang remained reluctant to “denuclearize” and on its part the US was averse to a step-by-step approach to dismantle the sanctions regime. North Korea has warned that denuclearization could be at risk unless the US eases sanctions, while the US has demanded so far that Pyongyang must first demonstrate its commitment to abandoning the nuclear weapons.
The big question is how this deadlock could be ending. Pompeo’s remarks articulating denuclearization concerns in the same breath as “security and stability and peace on the Peninsula” suggest that the US is gradually shifting its position and is open to embracing the approach of step-by-step concessions. Trump’s upbeat remarks after meeting the North Korean envoy last week lends credence to such a reading.
In the period since the June summit in Singapore between Trump and Kim Jong-un, the latter has consolidated his position. Most importantly, Kim has mended his equations with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he visited earlier in January (Kim’s fourth visit to China in the past year), and the relations between the two countries have remarkably improved.
According to Chinese media reports, Kim assured Xi that he is committed to “achieving results” at the second summit with Trump and will “continue sticking to the stance of denuclearization” and “make efforts… to achieve results.” Equally, Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying that Pyongyang and Washington would “meet each other half way.”
Equally, the relations between the two Koreas are also proceeding smoothly. It was a measure of Kim’s confidence that in his annual New Year’s speech, the emphasis was heavily placed on his economic programme rather than on threat perceptions.
But the problem lies on the American side. A big campaign is already unfolding with a view to deny Trump the legacy of a successful summit with Kim and a foreign-policy achievement in defusing the North Korea tensions (here and here.) Simply put, North Korea problem has got intertwined with the US domestic politics – like Russia, Syria or Afghanistan. In an editorial comment, Washington Post wrote,
“The North Koreans no doubt hope they can manipulate Mr. Trump into new giveaways at a second summit, such as a relaxation of sanctions, a declaration ending the Korean War, or even the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea… We’d like to hope that Mr. Trump’s advisers, such as Mr. Pompeo, would dissuade him from reckless action; but then, as the president’s recent decision to order U.S. troops out of Syria showed, he’s not inclined to listen. All of which means that a resumption of U.S.-North Korean negotiations should be welcomed — but warily.”
The fact of the matter is that Kim, who has consolidated his position thanks to the backing of Beijing and the prospect of a beneficial economic partnership with South Korea, may well be in a mood to compromise by offering a road map for denuclearization. And if that happens, Trump being highly unpredictable, especially if he is called upon to reciprocate, all bets are off. Indeed, what if Trump reciprocates with the mother of all concessions like withdrawing US troops from South Korea?
Coincidence or not, with just about several weeks left for the Trump-Kim summit, the talks between the US and South Korea regarding the cost-sharing of American military presence in South Korea have reached a deadlock after 10 rounds of intense negotiations since last November. Trump has complained more than once that the US was “subsidizing” the militaries of South Korea. According to Trump, US paid for “about 60 percent” of South Korea’s military costs.
At any rate, through a diplomatic channel, the US demanded in late December that South Korea pay $1.2 billion for costs related to the presence of the 28,500 US soldiers, under a contract valid for one year. The proposal has been framed as an ultimatum from Trump, who stipulated that no offer less than $1 billion would be entertained. Whereas, the South Korean negotiators insist that the amount should not exceed 1 trillion won ($887 million), calling that number “psychologically significant” for the Korean public, and that there should be a five-year contract.
All in all, even if the negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear programme have been exasperatingly slow during the period since the Trump-Kim summit last June in Singapore, it is still better than a hostile standoff or a military confrontation. Without doubt, the Trump-Kim summit created an ambience in which inter-Korean rapprochement could commence, which has since gained traction.
As 2018 ended, the world witnessed the astounding sight of a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of a new inter-Korean railroad. At the recent talks in Sweden, South Korea actually played a mediatory role between the US and North Korea. If the summit in Singapore was a historic one, real progress can be expected in the upcoming round 2. The South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said last week that the corresponding measures the US may offer in response to North Korean progress toward denuclearization could include “an end-of-war declaration, humanitarian aid, and a permanent channel for dialogue between the US and North Korea.”
Integrity Initiative wipes website pending probe into ‘theft’ of disturbing leaked data
RT | January 22, 2019
The British state-funded Integrity Initiative, exposed last year for conducting Europe-wide political influence campaigns in leaked files, has removed all of its website content “pending an investigation” into the data “theft.”
A group claiming association with the loose hacktivist collective Anonymous has been dumping private Integrity Initiative documents online in various batches since November. The leaks revealed that the Scotland-based, government-funded organization, which bills itself as a non-partisan disinformation-busting charity, was actually using “clusters” of journalists, politicians, and academics to carry out secret anti-Russia campaigns, interfere in domestic politics across Europe and smear anyone who questioned its narratives.
In a surprise move on Monday, the Integrity Initiative abruptly announced on Twitter that it had “temporarily removed” all content from its site “pending an investigation into the theft of data” from the Institute of Statecraft, the II’s London-based parent operation.
In a statement posted on its now mostly bare website, the II claimed the leaks were “part of a campaign to undermine the work” of the Initiative which it said involved “researching, publicising and countering the threat” Europe faces in the in the form of “disinformation” and “hybrid warfare” – ironically, exactly what the shady organization itself was accused of engaging in with its hefty government paycheck.
It remains an open question if, in an effort to save face, the group would accuse Russia of being behind the leaks and even of doctoring the documents. While the statement admitted that some of the leaks were “genuine,” it claimed others were “falsified” – but did not provide any evidence to back up that claim. It is, however, apparent that Russia has been the Initiative’s main target during the course of its questionable work.
The website will be “relaunched shortly” and “analysis” of the hack and its “significance” will be published soon, the statement said. It doesn’t look as though many will be awaiting that analysis with bated breath, however.
Perhaps discouraging for the Integrity Initiative, few seemed upset to see their content disappear. Most responses to the announcement tweet are of the trolling variety, accusing the organization of simply being caught in the act and trying to clean house.
After the II leaks, Scottish newspaper the Daily Record wrote that the revelations – including that the government-funded organization had also conducted a domestic smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn – was “one of the biggest political scandals of the year.”
The scandal received scant coverage by mainstream British media, however. Labour MP Chris Williamson told RT earlier this month that the lack of interest could have something to do with the fact that high profile journalists themselves were seemingly involved in the shady operation.
BuzzFeed’s Cohen Lies Just Latest Example of Embarrassing ‘RussiaGate’ Hysteria
By Kit Klarenberg | Sputnik | January 21, 2019
In a bombshell report, on 17 January BuzzFeed claimed Donald Trump had told his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the specifics of the ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ project — a felony, and indeed an impeachable one.
Other news outlets the world over eagerly regurgitated the story, and Democratic lawmakers on social media and indeed on the floor of the US legislature advocated kickstarting impeachment proceedings.
However, in an unprecedented move, the very next day special counsel Robert Mueller broke with his 20-month-long convention of not commenting on news reports relating to his investigation by announcing the story wasn’t true. Moreover, he was critical of BuzzFeed’s failure to contact his representatives and ask for verification on the story before publication.
History of Fabulism
Not long after Mueller’s denial, more critical voices began scrutinizing the report. Many noted Jason Leopold — one of the reporters on the story — had previously been involved in another epic ‘fake news’ fiasco at BuzzFeed relating to Russia. In November 2017, he authored a story which claimed the FBI was investigating records indicating in August 2016 the Russian Foreign Ministry sent US$30,000 to its embassy in Washington for “election financing”.
A shock story evidently written for maximum ‘clickbait’ value, Leopold — almost certainly consciously — opted to bury the fact the payments related to Russia’s own elections in September 2016, in which expatriate Russians were permitted to vote in their adopted home countries. As of January 2019, the article hasn’t been removed from web, although a qualifier has been added to its introductory paragraph.
Jason Leopold
Others expressed shock Leopold was still employed by any media outlet at all, for as Colombia Journalism Review documented back in 2006, his lengthy career has been typified by controversy, ignominy and dishonesty.
For instance, in August 2002 Leopold wrote an article for Salon claiming then-Secretary of the Army and former Enron vice chair Thomas White knew more about the company’s infamously questionable accounting practices than he’d admitted up to that time. The key piece of evidence for the allegation was an internal Enron email that was apparently leaked to Leopold by an anonymous source — but after he was unable to produce a copy when asked by his editor, and it was revealed he’d plagiarised portions of the piece from the Financial Times, it was pulled from the website.
In a perversely ironic twist, in 2005 Leopold’s memoir (Off the Record), in which he pledged to come clean about all the “lying, cheating and backstabbing” he’d engaged in over the course of his journalistic career and set the ‘record’ straight on his various ignominious departures from media organisations (including the Los Angeles Times and Dow Jones ), was dumped by planned publisher Rowman & Littlefield just before it went to press after one of the book’s sources threatened to sue.
Leopold had claimed the source in question, Steven Maviglio — spokesperson for then-California Governor Gray Davis — had told him he “might have broken the law by investing in energy companies using inside information”, which was apparently totally untrue.
The next year, Leopold again landed in hot water when he published a story for Truthout claiming Karl Rove “told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials,” he was due to be indicted in the Valerie Plame scandal. In the piece, he said multiple anonymous sources had confirmed Rove’s indictment “was imminent” — mere days later prosecutors confirmed Rove would not face charges. Despite this, Truthout chief Marc Ash stood by the story despite a lack of corroboration elsewhere and furious denials from all named in the story for some time.
Standing By
Intriguingly, there were shades of Ash’s response in BuzzFeed’s reaction to Mueller’s denials — namely, the outlet stood by the story, not only refusing to retract it, but “reconfirming” it — and editor-in-chief Ben Smith vehemently defended his decision to publish in a much-ridiculed interview on CNN, claiming the reporting would be “borne out” by future disclosures.
Other outlets have chosen to retract and/or correct their reporting on the story — although, journalist Doug Henwood has noted while New York Times covered the report on the front page of its print edition, its correction was buried on page 11 the next day.
Despite BuzzFeed’s defence of the story, it’s likely to go down as yet another utterly embarrassing mainstream media ‘RussiaGate’ failure in a very long line — stories which have briefly generated borderline-hysteria on social media and cable news, but been proven to be utterly without foundation in short order. Here are some of the most notorious.
Manafort Meeting Never Was
On 27 November 2018, The Guardian published a seismic exclusive report authored by Luke Harding that claimed Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chair and now-convicted felon, met with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on three separate occasions.
The story stretched believability to breaking point — Manafort somehow managed to enter and exit the Embassy without being photographed, filmed or even noticed, and left no record of his presence in the building’s visitor log — and was based entirely on anonymous sources.
WikiLeaks immediately issued a vehement denial, declaring the story to be completely “fabricated” and noting the paper had given them virtually no time to respond prior to publication. Within hours, the organisation had set up a legal fund seeking donations in order to sue The Guardian for libel, and were calling for the resignation of Editor Katherine Viner. The paper responded by softening the report’s wording significantly, making clear it was based entirely on unverifiable allegations from anonymous sources, rather than anything even approaching actual evidence.
In less than a day, what Harding and Viner had evidently hoped would be the journalistic scoop of the year was shaping up to be the biggest disaster in news reporting since Germany’s Stern magazine published ‘The Hitler Diaries’ in 1983, a disaster that could severely — and enduringly — damage the reputation of The Guardian and land the paper in significant legal hot water. Despite this, the story was uncritically regurgitated by news outlets the world over. As of January 21, neither Harding nor Viner has retracted or apologized for the piece.
Dates Mixed Up
On 9 December 2017, CNN claimed Donald Trump Jr. was offered advanced access to the notorious DNC and Podesta email troves by WikiLeaks — a smoking gun proving the Trump campaign had colluded with WikiLeaks to undermine Hillary Clinton. The story was then backed up by MSNBC, with intelligence and national security reporter Ken Dilanian breathlessly claiming to have “independent confirmation” of the story.
It would be mere hours before the incendiary story would be completely shredded by reality. In truth, Trump Jr. had been apprised of the email dumps’ existence by a member of the public 10 days after their release. The assorted anonymous sources who’d confirmed the story to both networks had evidently all got their dates mixed up, or indeed were lying — or didn’t even exist perhaps, as both networks’ refusal to name their sources may imply.
The pair’s determination to cover up their colossal journalistic failure doesn’t end there — both have deleted every trace of the story from their official websites and YouTube channels, and attempts by individual users to upload their own copies invariably result in copyright claims and deletion.
Just Ain’t Crickets
In another major disaster for MSNBC — and its star reporter Dilanian — in September 2018, the network repeatedly claimed Russia was the primary suspect in “mysterious” attacks giving US diplomatic staff in Cuba “brain injuries”.
“Sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon were likely used on the government workers… [they are] so sophisticated the Americans don’t even fully understand it,” Dilanian said.
Subsequent reports claimed CIA intercepts of Russian communications backed up the conclusion the Kremlin was directing the dastardly brain damaging blasts. Such was the ferocity of the reporting — and the seriousness of the allegations — Republican Senator Cory Gardner appeared on the network to say Russia should now be classified a “terror state”.
MSNBC carried on with their microwave weapon crusade despite academics casting significant doubt on their analysis — it would not be until January 2019 the story would be totally debunked, when two scientists — Alexander Stubbs of Berkeley and Fernando Montealegre-Z of the UK’s University of Lincoln — published a study based on recordings of the sounds embassy personnel complained of hearing, and blamed for their “brain damage”, revealing the ‘microwave weapons’ to in fact be…Caribbean crickets during mating season.
READ MORE:
‘Not Accurate’: Mueller Refutes BuzzFeed Cohen Scoop
Cuban Horror Stories: How US Scares Investors Off From the Island — Pundits
US Questioning Ecuadorian Embassy Staff Over Debunked Assange-Manafort Story
As Guardian’s Manafort-Assange Story Exposed as Fake, Ex-CIA Agent Blames Russia
US Administrations Have Been Intervening in Venezuela Since at Least the Early 2000s
FAIR | January 16, 2019
Janine Jackson interviewed Alexander Main about the Nicolás Maduro re-election for the January 11, 2019, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript :
Janine Jackson: When it comes to Venezuela, elite US media don’t hide their feelings. And their feelings are all the same. Headlines on last year’s reelection of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro differed only in tone, including the disdainful: “As Venezuelans Go Hungry, Their Government Holds a Farcical Election,” from the Economist; the decisive: USA Today‘s “Maduro Is Turning Venezuela Into a Dictatorship,” or Foreign Affairs’ more somber version, “Venezuela’s Suicide; Lessons From a Failed State.” There’s Forbes’ vaguely threatening “Why Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela May Wish He Lost the Presidential Election,” and Foreign Policy’s unashamed “It’s Time for a Coup in Venezuela.”
But they’re all pretty much variations on a theme that’s hard to unhear, given that media bang it out so loudly and repeatedly. Here to help us sort fact from froth is Alexander Main. He’s director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Alex Main.
Alex Main: Thank you, Janine.
JJ: Writing for FAIR on Venezuelan elections last year, Alan MacLeod pinpointed US media’s preferred trope, which was to say that Maduro was reelected “amid”—amid outcry, amid widespread disillusionment, amid charges of irregularities, amid low turnout. The message, I think, to readers was that Maduro’s re-election was not legitimate. What should we know about last May’s elections in Venezuela?
AM: So what isn’t generally mentioned by the media is that a critical factor in the outcome of the election was the approach taken by Venezuela’s opposition. Much of the opposition, many of its parties, decided to boycott these elections, for a variety of reasons.
At any rate, the media did not examine that fact. And we’re still not seeing it very much. I think one of the few exceptions is the Washington Post, in the article that appeared today, that did mention the divisions within the opposition, and their decision not to participate that had, obviously, a huge effect on the election result.
JJ: The media coverage would give you the impression that Venezuela’s election almost happened in a vacuum, but there was in fact involvement from, for example, the Organization of American States.
AM: Well, the Organization of American States, or rather the secretary general of the organization, whose name is Luis Almagro. He represents himself. He was elected, but once secretary general, he has sort of executive power there; but he doesn’t represent the countries within the organization. He has been on a campaign against the Maduro government from very early on. It stems from their initial decision not to allow him to send electoral observers to the elections.
And this is based on a decision taken by Venezuela’s electoral authorities many years ago, when they decided that they had enough transparency, enough safety measures around the elections, that they no longer required any sort of outside tutelage.
A number of countries in Latin America have taken the same decision. It’s a decision that has to do with the respect of their sovereignty. Certainly you don’t see in the US any massive presence of international observers, even though I think a lot of people would like to see that at some point.
But anyway, this was a sovereign decision that was taken by Venezuela’s electoral authority. And following that, Almagro really went on a rampage, and has been very much involved in efforts to try to delegitimize the Maduro government and to support the very hard-line opposition.
In doing this, he went sort of out of bounds in terms of his rhetoric, even for a lot of right-wing governments in Latin America, when late last year he voiced support for a military coup, much as some US officials have done, and US members of Congress have done. And as a response, you had all of the governments of Latin America that signed on to a statement that categorically rejected the possibility of any form of military intervention, whether by coup or an outside military intervention in Venezuela.
But certainly his rhetoric, and the campaign that he has led—along with other figures, such as Sen. Marco Rubio—have certainly given the impression that there is a desire for US intervention in what’s going on in Venezuela, and that’s, I think, resulted in sort of a defensive reaction from the Venezuelan government.
JJ: Well, it sounds very disturbing, but also confusing. You know, when I was looking through headlines, I saw one from something called the Pacific Council on International Policy that said, “Maduro Re-Elected. Can Democracy Ever Prevail in Venezuela?” I mean, just at the level of the sentence, it’s confusing. And then when you start talking about a coup to save democracy—which is the upshot of current coverage, and I guess policy—it just doesn’t even seem to make sense. The call is for the US to intervene, but the US is already intervening, isn’t it?
AM: Well, yeah, absolutely, and they’ve really been intervening in Venezuela, various US administrations, since at least the early 2000s, when we know that the US government—through institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy—has been providing funding and training to opposition groups in Venezuela, and often very hard-line groups that have taken a radical line, not recognizing the government and trying to seek its removal through extra-constitutional means, including a short-lived coup that took place in April of 2002.
The US has been very involved in trying to isolate them, Venezuela, diplomatically throughout the region, putting a lot of pressure on Latin American governments to support US measures condemning the situation in Venezuela.
More recently, the US has been applying sanctions against the government of Venezuela. And this is a very underreported thing in the US media and the international media generally.
When you see the coverage, for instance, of the Maduro inauguration, what you don’t see at all are references to the impact of the economic sanctions that have been applied. In fact, there are few media outlets at this point that even acknowledge that there are economic sanctions, even though they’ve been in place since August of 2017, when Trump announced them through an executive decree, having determined Venezuela to be an “extraordinary threat to US national security.” Those were the actual terms that were used in order to justify these sanctions.
And they’ve had a dire effect in Venezuela, which has been experiencing an economic crisis for quite a while now, since 2014 at least. And the government, of course, has failed to resolve this. It has to do with some of the government’s own economic policies. But at this point, the US also bears responsibility through these sanctions, where they have cut off Venezuela’s access to international financial markets, by which they can borrow money and purchase the necessary imports that the country needs. And we know that there aren’t enough imports of food or of medicine that are taking place at the moment.
And it’s also had a dire effect on the country’s oil production. And, of course, oil is the source of most of Venezuela’s national revenue. Along with falling oil prices, there’s been a tremendous fall in oil production in Venezuela, and it accelerated, actually, after these sanctions were put into place, because the Venezuelan government isn’t able to make the necessary investments to maintain the oil fields.
So that’s not mentioned, really, whatsoever in the major media, even though you have economists, including opposition-aligned economists from Venezuela, like Francisco Rodriguez, who have pointed out the very negative impact that these sanctions are having on the country.
JJ: Alan MacLeod also found a piece in Bloomberg that came close to acknowledging it, but in such a strange way. It was an article in which Bloomberg said that victory in the “widely derided election” gives Maduro “sole ownership of the nation’s crushing economic crisis.” And then in the very next sentence, it gloats that US and regional leaders will punish Venezuela by imposing “further isolation and sanctions on the crisis-stricken nation’s all-important oil industry.”
AM: Exactly. There’s this absurd idea that the sanctions somehow only hurt the Venezuelan government and Venezuelan government officials. It’s always the Venezuelan government’s responsibility, when they discuss the economic situation.
From time to time, you do see some media saying, “Oh, but the Venezuelan government says that the US sanctions are contributing to this dire economic situation.” They fail to ask any independent expert. You know, any economists that are taking a good look at what’s going on in Venezuela today will tell you, “Well, yes, these sanctions quite obviously are having a very negative impact.”
JJ: Finally, one of the things that coverage does is present the Venezuelan people as benighted. A piece from Time from last year includes one of my favorite creations. It first of all says that the crisis, the current crisis, “can be traced to the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez to the presidency,” so Chávez is the reason that things are difficult now. But I love this presentation: “Chávez concocted a political system that used often high oil prices to essentially bribe the masses into supporting him.”
The picture of the Venezuelan people that one gets from US media coverage is really as sort of benighted, not knowing what’s good for themselves and, once again, requiring some sort of intervention to tell them how to do democracy.
AM: Yes. This is quite absurd. Really, what we’re seeing in Venezuela is, one, an extraordinarily well-organized population, and particularly in poor communities that are certainly confronting a very dramatic economic situation, but I think doing so in effective ways that make the situation somewhat sustainable for these communities. So we’re seeing a very, very high level of community organization.
I’d say the vast majority of Venezuelans at this point are probably quite disgruntled with Maduro and his government. However, the Venezuelan opposition really offers no viable alternative to the Maduro government. They have never presented any sort of coherent economic proposal, with the possible exception of the opposition candidate in last year’s election. But, of course, most of the opposition parties boycotted those elections.
And in general, I think a lot of Venezuelans, certainly those that come from lower-income communities, are well aware of the fact that the opposition is linked to the country’s traditional economic elite, and they have a terrible reputation from their involvement in governments before Chávez was in power.
Things may be bad under Maduro, but I think there’s a sense among many Venezuelans that things could actually be quite a bit worse under opposition governments, particularly if they impose the sort of neoliberal policies that hurt the poor people of Venezuela enormously during the decades prior to Hugo Chávez’s election in the late ’90s.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Alexander Main; he’s director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find their work, including Alex’s piece, “The United States’ Hand in Undermining Democracy in Venezuela,” online at CEPR.net. Alexander Main, thank you very much for joining us today on CounterSpin.
AM: Thank you, it was a pleasure.
‘Fake news’ is okay if it’s about #RussiaGate: Top 7 fake ‘collusion’ stories the media pushed
RT | January 21, 2019
BuzzFeed’s ‘bombshell’ claim last week that Donald Trump told ex-lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to congress is just the latest in a long line of ‘Russiagate’ stories that have later turned out to be false.
But BuzzFeed’s rubbished article is part of a phenomenon of what could be termed ‘acceptable fake news’ — fake news that gets a pass from the media because it serves a certain narrative. In this case, it furthers the ‘Russiagate’ narrative, which the mainstream media has been pushing breathlessly for two years. Lacking hard proof that Trump ‘colluded’ with Russia to win the 2016 election, they have clung to any shred of fake evidence they can find.
Last week, one astute Twitter user compiled a list of a whopping 42 Russiagate stories which were billed as bombshells but which ended up needing to be retracted or corrected. Here are seven of the most scandalous instances.
1. MSNBC pushed line that WikiLeaks released ‘fake’ Clinton emails
When WikiLeaks published the emails belonging to Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta in 2016, MSNBC sought to actively encourage its viewers to believe the emails were doctored by Russia.
They based that spurious claim on the fact that a fake transcript of a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs was drifting around Twitter. The fake transcript had not been published by WikiLeaks, however. Rather, it was the creation of a pro-Clinton troll who had intended to trick Trump supporters into believing it was real so he could later embarrass them for their gullibility. MSNBC reporters who used the fake Twitter transcript to tarnish WikiLeaks’ authentic documents never corrected their false claims.
2. WaPo claims Russia ‘hacked’ the Vermont power grid
In one of the most infamous cases of a botched Russia-related story, the Washington Post claimed that Russia had hacked the Vermont power grid. In its zeal to deliver bombshell proof that Russia was attempting to attack the US, the Post reporters didn’t even bother to contact the utility company which could have told them that there had been no hacking or penetration of the power grid at all. The Post admitted later in an editor’s note that the story was fake.
3. CNN fires three journalists over botched story
It’s not often journalists who publish fake Russia-related ‘bombshells’ face real consequences, but last June, three CNN journalists, including the executive editor of a shiny new ‘investigative’ branch had to resign following the retraction of a false story which claimed Congress was investigating a Russian investment fund “with ties” to Trump’s team. The story quoted a single anonymous source and CNN later admitted that its reporters failed to follow “some standard editorial procedures” before publishing it.
4. Oops? CNN gets date on email wrong, causes mass panic
In a rush to prove that the Trump campaign had advance knowledge of and access to hacked DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, CNN (again) got the date of an email wrong. CNN claimed “multiple” sources had told them the email about the documents had been sent to the Trump campaign on September 4, but in reality, it had been sent on September 14 — a day after the WikiLeaks documents were made public — not, as CNN had claimed, nine days before.
5. ABC’s dud on Michael Flynn and ‘contact’ with Russians
Veteran ABC journalist Brian Ross was suspended after reporting last December that Trump had ordered former adviser Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials during the presidential campaign. It turned out, Trump had made this request of Flynn after he had won the election — not an unusual request for someone about to become the president of the US. Ross left ABC for good a while later after a career littered with embarrassing reporting blunders.
6. Russian supersonic tech or…crickets?
MSNBC reported last year that Russia was likely responsible for a supersonic attack on US diplomats stationed in the Cuba embassy. One ‘expert’ appeared on the channel stating that possible Russian “sophisticated microwaves” targeted the diplomats, while a reporter claimed Russian guilt had been “backed up” by interceptions of Russian communications. Meanwhile, intelligence sources told the New Yorker that no such evidence existed. When the Associated Press later released an audio recording, two US scientists deciphered that the sounds the diplomats had heard were more than likely the sounds of a species of Caribbean crickets during mating season.
7. Guardian claims Manafort had ‘secret meetings’ with Assange
WikiLeaks raised more than $55,000 in donations to sue the Guardian after the British newspaper published a story alleging (without corroborated evidence) that Julian Assange had held secret meetings with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Assange has been living since 2012. The story which WikiLeaks claims is completely false — and which has also been questioned by other journalists — was written by Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter who has been accused before of fabricating stories and who went AWOL after the report was received with serious skepticism.
Unfortunately, the regularity with which these Russiagate stories have turned out to fake still hasn’t raised any red flags with establishment journalists, who seem more eager to bolster a narrative than to uncover actual facts.
Climate Hysterics Skyrocket Even As Weather Disasters Haven’t
By Paul Driessen | Climate Change Dispatch | January 21, 2019
Call it climate one-upmanship. It seems everyone has to outdo previous climate chaos rhetoric.
The “climate crisis” is the “existential threat of our time,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her House colleagues. We must “end the inaction and denial of science that threatens the planet and the future.”
Former California Governor Jerry Brown solemnly intoned that America has “an enemy, though different, but perhaps very much devastating in a similar way” as the Nazis in World War II.
Not to be outdone, two PhDs writing in Psychology Today declared that “the human race faces extinction” if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.
And yet “even people who experience extreme weather events often still refuse to report the experiences as a manifestation of climate change.” Psychologists, they lament, “have never had to face denial on this scale before.”
Then there’s Oxford University doctoral candidate Samuel Miller-McDonald. He’s convinced the only thing that could save people and planet from cataclysmic climate change is cataclysmic nuclear war that “shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction.”
All this headline-grabbing gloom and doom, however, is backed up by little more than computer models, obstinate assertions that the science is settled, and a steady litany of claims that temperatures, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts et cetera are unprecedented, worse than ever before, and due to fossil fuels.
And on the basis of these hysterics, we are supposed to give up the carbon-based fuels that provide over 80% of the U.S.’ and global energy, gladly reduce our living standards – and put our jobs and economy at the mercy of expensive, unreliable, weather dependent, pseudo-renewable wind, solar and biofuel energy.
As in any civil or criminal trial, the burden of proof is on the accusers and prosecutors who want to sentence fossil fuels to oblivion. They need to provide more than blood-curdling charges, opening statements and summations. They need to provide convincing real-world evidence to prove their case.
They have refused to do so. They ignore the way rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide is spurring plant growth and greening the planet. They blame every extreme weather event on fossil fuel emissions, but cannot explain the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age or extreme weather events decades or centuries ago – or why we have had fewer extreme weather events in recent decades.
They simply resort to trial in media and other forums where they can exclude exculpatory evidence, bar any case for the fossil fuel defense, and prevent any cross-examination of their witnesses, assertions and make-believe evidence.
Climate models are not evidence. At best, they offer scenarios of what might happen if the assumptions on which they are based turn out to be correct.
However, the average prediction by 102 models is now a full degree F (0.55 C) above what satellites are actually measuring.
Models that cannot be confirmed by actual observations are of little value and certainly should not be a basis for vital energy policymaking.
The alarmist mantra seems to be: If models and reality don’t agree, reality must be wrong.
In fact, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed to 405 parts per million (0.0405% of Earth’s atmosphere), except for short-term temperature spikes during El Niño ocean warming events, there has been very little planetary warming since 1998; nothing to suggest chaos or runaway temperatures.
Claims that tornadoes have gotten more frequent and intense are obliterated by actual evidence. NOAA records show that from 1954 to 1985 an average of 56 F3 to F5 tornadoes struck the USA each year – but from 1985 to 2017 there was only 34 per year on average.
And in 2018, for the first time in modern history, not a single “violent” twister touched down in the United States.
Harvey was the first major (category 3-5) hurricane to make US landfall in a record twelve years. The previous record was nine years, set in the 1860s. (If rising CO2 levels are to blame for Harvey, Irma and other extreme weather events, shouldn’t they also be credited for this hurricane drought?)
Droughts differ little from historical trends and cycles – and the Dust Bowl, Anasazi, and Mayan droughts, and other ancient dry spells were long and destructive. Moreover, modern agricultural and drip irrigation technologies enable farmers to deal with droughts far better than they ever could in the past.
Forest fires are fewer than in the recent past – and largely due to failure to remove hundreds of millions of dead and diseased trees that provide ready tinder for massive conflagrations.
Arctic and Antarctic ice are largely within “normal” or “cyclical” levels for the past several centuries – and snow surface temperatures in the East Antarctic Plateau regularly reach -90 °C (-130 F) or lower.
Average Antarctic temperatures would have to rise some 20-85 degrees F year-round for all its land ice to melt and cause oceans to rise at faster than their current 7-12 inches per century pace.
In fact, the world’s oceans have risen over 400 feet since the last Pleistocene glaciers melted. (That’s how much water those mile-high Ice Age glaciers took out of the oceans!)
Sea level rise paused during the Little Ice Age but kicked in again the past century or so. Meanwhile, retreating glaciers reveal long-lost forests, coins, corpses, and other artifacts– proving those glaciers have come and gone many times.
Pacific islands will not be covered by rising seas anytime soon, at 7-12 inches per century, and because corals and atolls grow as seas rise. Land subsidence also plays a big role in perceived sea level rise – and US naval bases are safe from sea level rise, though maybe not from local land subsidence.
The Washington Post did report that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places, the seals are finding the water too hot.” But that was in 1922.
Moreover, explorers wrote about the cyclical absence of Arctic ice long before that. “We were astonished by the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait,” Sir Francis McClintock wrote in 1860. “I was here at this time in [mid] 1854 – still frozen up – and doubts were entertained as to the possibility of escape.”
Coral bleaching? That too has many causes – few having anything to do with manmade global warming – and the reefs generally return quickly to their former glory as corals adopt new zooxanthellae.
On and on it goes – with more scare stories daily, more attempts to blame humans and fossil fuels for nearly every interesting or as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon, weather event or climate fluctuation.
And yet countering the man-made climate apocalypse narrative is increasingly difficult – in large part because the $2-trillion-per-year climate “science” and “renewable” energy industry works vigorously to suppress such evidence and discussion … and is aided and abetted by its media and political allies.
Thus we have Chuck Todd, who brought an entire panel of alarmist climate “experts” to a recent episode of Meet the Press. He helped them expound ad nauseam on the alleged “existential threat of our time” – but made it clear that he was not going to give even one minute to experts on the other side.
“We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it,” Todd proclaimed. “The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”
The only thing left to discuss, from their perspective was “solutions” – most of which would hugely benefit them and their cohorts, politically and financially.
Regular folks in developed and developing countries alike see this politicized, money-driven kangaroo court process for what it is.
They also know that unproven, exaggerated and fabricated climate scares must be balanced against their having to give up (or never having) reliable, affordable fossil fuel energy. That is why we have “dangerous man-made climate change” denial on this scale.
That is why we must get the facts out by other means. It is why we must confront Congress, media people and the Trump Administration, and demand that they address these realities, hold debates, revisit the CO2 Endangerment Finding – and stop calling for an end to fossil fuels and modern living standards before we actually have an honest, robust assessment of supposedly “settled” climate science.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of articles and books on energy, environmental and human rights issues.
Lancet EAT Report Promotes Activism Over Science
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | January 21, 2019
Last week, The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, officially drove off a cliff. With much fanfare, it released a 47-page report titled Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT – Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems.
That title is the first screaming clue we’re being fed propaganda. As I’ve discussed previously, the Anthropocene doesn’t exist.
A scientific body known as the International Commission on Stratigraphy is tasked with defining and naming geological periods. It decides these matters according to an official, established process.
That body’s website contains a chart updated six months ago. It clearly indicates Earth remains in the Holocene. The term Anthropocene is nowhere to be found.
The notion that we’ve entered a new and distinct geological epoch is 100% activist hogwash. It’s an argument. Made by environmentalists. An argument that has been rejected by the scientific authorities who are experts in such matters.
Food in the Anthropocene, indeed. By naming its new report after this figment of activist imagination, The Lancet has been deliberately deceptive.
Medical journals are supposed to be the opposite of fake news. Now they spread misinformation on purpose.
Marie Colvin, Homs and Media Falsehoods about Syria
By Rick Sterling | Dissident Voice | January 20, 2019
Introduction
In April 2014 I was part of an international delegation which visited Syria for five days. The delegates came from many different countries. Among the notables were the Irish Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire, a Syrian-British heart surgeon and Julian Assange’s father. We spent time in Damascus, then traveled by bus to Latakia and then Homs. In each city we had meetings with political, religious and social leaders but also had time to wander about and talk with people on the streets.
In Latakia, I met Lilly Martin, an American woman who married a Syrian and has lived there, raising a family for the past twenty-five years. She told me how wrong the western media coverage was. Contrary to media claims, she said protests in Latakia were violent from the start. After the first outbreak of violence, Syrian police and military were ordered to not carry weapons. Protesters continued to burn and destroy government offices with incidents of knifing and shooting unarmed police.
Peaceful Homs Street (Photo: Rick Sterling)
When we visited Homs I was struck by how normal it looked. The streets were full of people and the city looked fine. It was dramatically different than the images portrayed in western media. It was only when we were driving out of Homs that we passed an area where there was widespread destruction and battle damage. There was a sharp contrast between most of the city and the few neighborhoods where battle had raged.
Homs (Photo: Rick Sterling)
The American journalist Marie Colvin died in February 2012 in one of those neighborhoods. It was called Baba Amr. Ten days after her death, the militants and remaining civilians had all departed Baba Amr. It’s unfortunate that Marie Colvin did not talk with Lilly Martin or visit the majority of Homs where the war was not raging. It could have provided much needed balance to her perspective.
Marie Colvin and Homs
According to many of her colleagues, Marie Colvin was charming and courageous, ambitious and fun to be with. She had a knack for including personal details, descriptions and emotions that engaged the reader. Unfortunately, Colvin’s reports and interviews from Syria were inaccurate and a huge distortion of the situation.
It is useful to examine Colvin’s reporting now, seven years later, because there is a wave of new articles, books and movies about her and how she died in Syria.
Colvin and photographer Paul Conroy were smuggled into Syria from Lebanon in February 2012. They spent some days in the town of Al Buwaydah and then were taken into the city of Homs using a drainage culvert to avoid Syrian Army checkpoints. Their guides and minders for the trip were from the Farouq Battalion associated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
Beginning in the Fall 2011, militants from the Farouq Battalion set up checkpoints, killed security and soldiers and gradually took control of the Homs neighborhood called Baba Amr. They called it a “liberated zone”. By the time Marie Colvin and other journalists arrived, most of the civilians had fled the fighting to stay with friends and family in other parts of the city.
Colvin and Conroy spent a few days in Baba Amr but then left through the tunnel when it was rumored that Syrian forces were going to attack. After learning that the attack did not take place, the journalists made the difficult journey back into Baba Amr. The second morning after returning, Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Olchik died as the Syrian forces launched mortar and missile attacks.
Biased and Inaccurate Reporting from Syria
Marie Colvin’s reports and interviews from Syria were broadcast widely in the UK and USA. She wrote an article titled “A vet is only hope for Syrian wounded“. The article begins “Wounded civilians arriving at a makeshift clinic in the Syrian city of Homs are relying on a vet to save their lives because there is no doctor to treat them.” As documented in Conroy’s book, they were not in Homs; they were in the town Buwaydah when they observed a vet working as a medic. Actually, there were hundreds of doctors performing medical duties and treating civilians and soldiers injured in the conflict in Homs.
Colvin’s major story for the Sunday Times was titled “Final dispatch from Homs, the battered city“. It begins by describing a “widows basement” with 300 “frightened women and children trapped in the horror of Homs”. The report of 300 women and children is an exaggeration. Another journalist estimated half that number which is likely an exaggeration itself, since the photos and video show fewer than 50 women and children.
Colvin continued her report saying, “The widows’ basement reflects the ordeal of 28,000 men, women and children clinging to existence in Baba Amr.” This is a huge falsehood; there was a tiny fraction of that number of civilians remaining in the neighborhood. Paul Conroy wrote as follows: “It became increasingly unbelievable that there were an estimated 28,000 people still living in Baba Amr. I hadn’t seen a single one.” (page 188, “Under the Wire”)
The night before her death, Marie Colvin did live interviews on BBC, Channel 4 and CNN. The CNN interview began by showing video of a baby dying from a shrapnel wound. CNN believed Marie Colvin was an eye-witness to the baby’s death. Anderson Cooper asked Colvin what it was like to be in the room. Marie Colvin replied that the room was chaotic and the baby’s death heartbreaking. She dramatized the situation by speaking about the baby’s grandmother being a volunteer in the room when the baby arrived. However, Colvin was not in the room at all. Marie Colvin and the media activists were shown the video on a laptop computer by their FSA guide. (page 155, “Under the Wire”).
In her CNN interview Colvin described Baba Amr as “28,000 civilians, men, women and children, hiding, being shelled, defenseless…. There are no military targets here…. So it’s a complete and utter lie that they (Syrian military) are only going after terrorists…. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.” In reality, Baba Amr was the primary base for militants of the Farouq Battalion. If there was an “utter lie”, it was pretending that this was primarily a civilian neighborhood.
The Syrian Reality Which Colvin Did Not Report
Like most western coverage of Syria, Colvin’s reporting did not provide important context such as the following:
* How the conflict began in Homs. An eyewitness reported “From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”
* How Baba Amr was taken over. In October 2011 militants from the Farouq Battalion set up checkpoints within Baba Amr, attacked and killed Syrian Army soldiers and other security forces, and killed or expelled government supporters. The process was similar to what was documented by a civilian in Aleppo: “Nine days from my window in Aleppo“.
* Attacks on infrastructure. In December 2011, militants blew up the pipeline to Homs’ oil refinery, a major source of oil for the country.
In mid January, an Arab League report documented the results of their investigation. They said:
The Observer Mission witnessed acts of violence being committed against Government forces and civilians that resulted in several deaths and injuries. Examples of these acts include the bombing of a civilian bus, killing eight persons and injuring others, including women and children, and the bombing of a train carrying diesel oil. In another incident in Homs, a police bus was blown up, killing two police officers. A fuel pipeline and some small bridges were also bombed.
Militants in Baba Amr destroyed government tanks and used their own tank to attack government forces.
Abu Sa’eed, Free Syrian Army Unit Commander
On 2 February 2012, FSA militants attacked a government checkpoint, killing ten soldiers and taking another 19 as prisoners. That was evidently the last straw for the government. The next day, February 3, the intense bombardment of Baba Amr began.
Promoting External Intervention
Marie Colvin’s reports from Baba Amr had a political goal of spurring Western intervention. This is made clear in emails to her Sunday Times editor. “It is sickening that the Syrian regime is allowed to keep doing this …. I think again to focus on Baba Amr, 28,000 defenceless under shelling….” (pp 196-197, “Under the Wire”).
Her reports were missing crucial facts, sensationalized the suffering on one side, ignored the suffering on the other side and demonized the government which was the target for overthrow.
Amateur Video Homs
In her interview with CNN, Colvin used the video of the dying little baby to urge western intervention. “That baby probably will move more people to think, ‘What is going on, and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?”
In her final article for the Sunday Times Colvin says, “In Baba Amr, the Free Syrian Army (FSA)…. have virtually unanimous support from civilians who see them as their defenders.” This claim is highly dubious. The vast majority of civilians had left Baba Amr. All that were left were family members of FSA militants and others who had nowhere to go.
The bias in Marie Colvin’s reports and interviews was not unique. On the contrary, nearly all NATO and Gulf state reporting on Syria has been biased. Stephen Kinzer would later write “The media are misleading the public on Syria.” Patrick Cockburn would later write that “Nearly everything you have read about Syria and Iraq could be wrong“.
How Marie Colvin Died
It is claimed that Marie Colvin was intentionally targeted by the Syrian government. This is unlikely. Her death brought opprobrium on Damascus and helped the militant opposition. A few months after Marie Colvin’s death, a prominent British journalist reported that the same Syrian rebels tried to get him and his team killed. “I’m quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian Army. Dead journos are bad for Damascus.”
It is also claimed that Syrian intelligence determined the location of Marie Colvin by identifying a satellite phone signal used in her interviews. This is false. Colvin told her editor at the Sunday Times that the Thuraya satellite phones did not work. For her Skype interviews she used the same antenna uplink used night and day by media activists in Baba Amr.
Marie and Remi were working in a battle zone, guided and effectively embedded with armed insurgents. Their deaths were another tragic consequence of the war.
Ten days after Colvin’s death, the militants and remaining civilians withdrew from Baba Amr. There was no massacre, just a street parade and celebration in other parts of Homs.
Syrian Journalists Killed (Photo: Rick Sterling)
The deaths of Marie Colvin and Remi Olchik sparked many tributes and widespread publicity. Largely unknown in the West, hundreds of Syrian journalists have also died in the conflict. In a sense, they are all victims of the proxy war on Syria. In another sense, the equivalence is not fair. The war has been encouraged by some and imposed on others.
Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who grew up in Canada but currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. He can be reached at rsterling1@gmail.com.
The Tale of “Count” Soros and the Young Latvian State he Destroyed
By Martin Berger – New Eastern Outlook – 20.01.2019
All across the globe alternative media sites would typically describe George Soros as the mastermind of a “globalist” movement, who would undermine any society it can profit from through subversion, manipulation and trickery.
As it’s been revealed by the Telegraph, George Soros, the billionaire known as the man who “broke the Bank of England”, is backing a campaign to overturn Brexit, while remaining one of the three senior figures linked to the Remain-supporting campaign group Best for Britain. Reportedly, he handed over some 500 thousand dollars to this movement in a bid to lead a second referendum to keep Britain in the EU.
In turn, Donald Trump would describe this so-called philanthropist in his Twitter posts as a donor to anti-Trump protesters, while the president’s family and closest advisers are said to go much further. To illustrate this claim it’s enough to mention that his son – Donald Trump Jr. would re-tweet a claim by the comedian Roseanne Barr that George Soros is a Nazi.
It’s been noted that on Fox News, in Republican fund-raising appeals and in research by conservative advocacy groups, the name of George Soros is invoked as an all-purpose symbol of liberalism run amok.
It’s curious that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused George Soros of supporting anti-government protests in central Istanbul of 2013 and other countries around the world. The protests swelled from a demonstration to the biggest political challenge that then-Prime Minister Erdogan had faced against his rule.
Further still, the New York times would state that:
The closing advertisement for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign featured Mr. Soros — as well as Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve at the time, and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, both of whom are Jewish — as examples of “global special interests” who enriched themselves on the backs of working Americans.
One can often hear geopolitical analysts describing Soros as «one of the top disclosed donors to American political campaigns in the modern campaign finance era», but the sad truth is that he donated many millions more to political nonprofit groups operating all across the globe that are not liable to disclose their true donors in most states.
Igors Meija, the chairman of the board of directors of Latvia’s construction company Constructus LV, in one of his recent speeches has quite colorfully described the true nature of the “selfless donations” that George Soros is know of making, ruining Latvia and its economy through those. In particular, the CEO revealed that Soros would often brag that he spent 90 million dollars on “supporting democracy” in Latvia. Yet if one is to take a closer look at the profits Soros and the powerful members of his closed club like the Rothschilds reaped from these investments, one can safely state that they’ve made a lot of money by donating them. Among the most noticeable assets that Soros and other oligarchs own is the Lativian external debt that has recently reached 11 billion dollars due to machinations that Soros pulled off in cooperation with the bribed Latvian officials. This amounts to 6,515 thousands dollars that each Latvian resident has to pay, or 12,509 dollars taken from each economically active person. Even to service this debt Latvian tax payers have to give away 1,1 million dollars a day of their hard-earned cash! Just three months of debt servicing amounts to the 90 million dollars Soros spent on “promoting democracy“ in Latvia! One can admit that Soros and the likes of him know how to get more than impressive ROI rates.
If nothing changes in the foreseeable future and the dire demographic situation in Latvia won’t improve, each economically active resident of Latvia will have to pay 23,882 dollars to the kind philanthropists that ruined their country. Igors Meija complains that on top of this all, Soros managed to “liberalize” local financial sector by eliminating all Latvian competitors from it, handing over the money of the ruined Latvian banks, such as Latvijas Krājbanka, Trasta komercbanka, ABLV, to overseas debt holders. .
Igors Meija is convinced that this “philanthropist” his “club” will stop carnivorous practices, especially once they’ve realized that the obedient Latvian bureaucracy will do anything they demand it to do in a bid to stay in power and profit from the local population. The CEO is convinced that Latvia is reminiscent of America in post-Columbian era. Once the “pale-faced do-gooders” landed on the Latvian shores and offered glass mirrors and beads to the local population in exchange for diamonds and gold, Latvians have had a hard time to make their both ends meet.
Similar cases of debt enslavement by Soros and the likes of him can be found in various countries all across the world, where Soros carries on its “philanthropic activities”.
However, Western financial and political elites have been receiving significant dividends from defending George Soros in a multitude of MSM platforms that they own, deliberately hiding the true nature of this soulless plutocrat. Of course, among such media outlets one can find the Guardian, the New York Times and the Financial Times on top on a number of other publications, that have already lost all credibility with the Western public due to the extensive amount of shill work they do for the Western financial elites.
Soros, Fake News & Italian Media: Journalist Reveals Plot to Put Rome Under Austerity
Sputnik – January 20, 2019
Sputnik Italia contributor Alessio Trovato investigates the purpose of George Soros’ recent closed-door meeting with European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans, and broader campaign to convince Brussels to put Italy under the supervision of the ‘troika’ (the European Central Bank, the EC and the International Monetary Fund).
George Soros, a sworn enemy of the present right-populist coalition government in Rome, has been on something of a mission to put Italy under austerity, with Italian media reporting on such efforts going back to at least 2011. Last October, in an explosive interview for Italian TV, former Prime Minister Mario Monti revealed that Soros had called him at the height of the European sovereign debt crisis eight years ago, urging Italy to accept ‘assistance’ from the IMF to dig out from under its debt problem. Monti refused at the time, saying following Soros’ advice would have turned Italy into another Greece.
On November 26, 2018, in a meeting in Brussels with Timmermans, along with a representative of EC President Jean-Claude Juncker, Soros was again assumed to have brought up the debt issue, with Italian media speculating heavily regarding the vague comments of an EC spokesperson, who said only that they “cannot confirm or deny whether Italy’s budget was discussed.”
Meanwhile, Sputnik Italia contributor Alessio Trovato writes, Soros’ Open Society Foundations has been cutting paychecks “to a considerable number of journalists and influencers whom (surprise) constantly refer to him as a ‘benefactor’ and ‘spontaneously’ support all of his campaigns, including his support for migration, mondialism, Russophobia and colour revolutions.”
A big part of the problem, according to Trovato, is that the mainstream media continues to completely ignore Soros’ activities, or to report on them only with reluctance, even as the billionaire seeks to interfere in democratic processes and the internal affairs of sovereign nations.
Soros’ Agents in Mainstream Media vs. Italy’s National Interest
“Even journalists who do not receive ‘favours’ from the magnate are either incapable of saying anything on this subject or prefer not to do so,” Trovato wrote. “Hence we come to the case of Ivo Caizzi, Luciano Fontana and Federico Fubini, who are likely to become a classic in the annals of Italian journalism, and show the battle for journalistic independence being waged inside the mainstream media.”
Late last year, Caizzi, the Brussels correspondent of Italy’s highly influential Corriere della Sera newspaper, leaked internal email communications accusing Fubini, the paper’s chief economics commentator, and Fontana, its executive director, of publishing ‘Fake News’ in November about ‘inevitable sanctions’ against Italy for its violation of EU budget legislation. In reality, Rome managed to avoid sanctions, reaching a compromise deal with Brussels in December. However, reports of imminent sanctions from a respectable mainstream newspaper are thought to have threatened the country’s economic stability.Last week, Caizzi wrote an open letter to his employers, asking them to respond to several serious questions in the interests of the newspaper, his fellow journalists, and readers. In the editorial, the journalist asked whether editor-in-chief Fontana’s behaviour has been corrected, and whether it would be appropriate for Fontana to limit himself to expressing his personal opinions to editorials, op-eds and comments. Caizzi asked whether reports of ‘imminent sanctions’ could have adversely affected the financial markets and played in the hands of speculators (who, incidentally, include Soros) betting on the Italy’s destabilization, the collapse of the country’s stock market, and the growth of yields on Italian government obligations.
“Can we hope that in 2019, Corriere will return to its motto of ‘providing independent and high-quality information and ensuring maximum reliability of the news from the first to the last page?” Caizzi asked.
Commenting on the editorial, Trovato suggested that “even the rebellious Caizzi” did not comment on two issues which “he is certainly aware of.”
Specifically, Trovato noted, “Soros met Frans Timmermans behind closed doors in Brussels [in November]. The 88-year-old Soros is not one to head off to Brussels for no reason. If he is talking to someone, it means he has something to ask, or offer. Mr. Timmermans is not just anybody, but the so-called ‘spitzenkandidad’, the lead candidate for the presidency of the European Commission in the event of victory for the socialists and the democrats in the upcoming elections to the European Parliament. What did they talk about? A trifle –Soros seems to have asked Timmermans to take measures so that the European Commission rejects the Italian tax maneuver to allow the troika to be brought to Italy. In effect, Soros essentially asked Juncker’s deputy… to turn Italy into the same kind of hostage to the EU as Greece. In this sense, [Corriere’s reporting] turned Italian media into a sort of fifth column, preparing the markets for the upcoming speculative moves from the inside.”
Secondly, the journalist noted, Federico Fubini is a member of the European Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundations, and, ironically, on the European Commission’s ‘expert group on Fake News’.
“The point is, how can one believe that Europe is struggling against Fake News when it also produces it? Can we believe in the impartially of information published thanks to the ‘donations of generous and disinterested benefactors’?” Trovato asked.
Ultimately, the Sputnik Italia contributor noted, “our only chance for survival lies in being aware of what’s going on and in our own analytical skills. Discuss, doubt and check everything – otherwise you will never understand who you’re up against. Maybe it’s a troll – an agent of the Kremlin, or perhaps someone funded by the Open Society, the Aspen Institute, the Bilderbergs, the Atlantic Council, the CIA, Mossad, the FSB, a proponent of the troika trojan horse, or just about anyone else. Never trust! Even those who tell you not to believe anyone!”
MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle
By Caitlin Johnstone | January 20, 2019
Following what the Washington Post has described as “the highest-profile misstep yet for a news organization during a period of heightened and intense scrutiny of the press,” mass media representatives are now flailing desperately for an argument as to why people should continue to place their trust in mainstream news outlets.
On Thursday Buzzfeed News delivered the latest “bombshell” Russiagate report to fizzle within 24 hours of its publication, a pattern that is now so consistent that I’ve personally made a practice of declining to comment on such stories until a day or two after their release. “BOOM!” tweets were issued by #Resistance pundits on Twitter, “If true this means X, Y and Z” bloviations were made on mass media punditry panels, and for about 20 hours Russiagaters everywhere were riding the high of their lives, giddy with the news that President Trump had committed an impeachable felony by ordering Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a proposed Trump office tower in Moscow, a proposal which died within weeks and the Kremlin never touched.
There was reason enough already for any reasonable person to refrain from frenzied celebration, including the fact that the story’s two authors, Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, were giving the press two very different accounts of the information they’d based it on, with Cormier telling CNN that he had not personally seen the evidence underlying his report and Leopold telling MSNBC that he had. Both Leopold and Cormier, for the record, have already previously suffered a Russiagate faceplant with the clickbait viral story that Russia had financed the 2016 election, burying the fact that it was a Russian election.
UPDATE: A spokesperson for the special counsel is disputing BuzzFeed News’ report. https://t.co/BEoMKiDypn pic.twitter.com/GWWfGtyhaE
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 19, 2019
Then the entire story came crashing down when Mueller’s office took the extremely rare step of issuing an unequivocal statement that the Buzzfeed story was wrong, writing simply, “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”
According to journalist and economic analyst Doug Henwood, the print New York Times covered the Buzzfeed report on its front page when the story broke, but the report on Mueller’s correction the next day was shoved back to page 11. This appalling journalistic malpractice makes it very funny that NYT’s Wajahat Ali had the gall to tweet, “Unlike the Trump administration, journalists are fact checking and willing to correct the record if the Buzzfeed story is found inaccurate. Not really the actions of a deep state and enemy of the people, right?”
This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must continue to trust them.
“Those trying to tar all media today aren’t interested in improving journalism but protecting themselves,” tweeted NBC’s Chuck Todd. “There’s a lot more accountability in media these days than in our politics. We know we live in a glass house, we hope the folks we cover are as self aware.”
More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass media.
“Mueller didn’t do the media any favors tonight, and he did do the president one,” griped the odious Chris Cuomo on CNN. “Because as you saw with Rudy Giuliani and as I’m sure you’ll see with the president himself, this allows them to say ‘You can’t believe it! You can’t believe what you read, you can’t believe what you hear! You can only believe us. Even the Special Counsel says that the media doesn’t get it right.’”
“The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they’re willing to lie to do it, and I don’t think that’s true” said Jeffrey Toobin on a CNN panel, adding “I just think this is a bad day for us.”
“It does reinforce bad stereotypes about the news media,” said Brian Stelter on the same CNN panel. “I am desperate as a media reporter to always say to the audience, judge folks individually and judge brands individually. Don’t fall for what these politicians out there want you to do. They want you to think we’re all crooked. We’re not. But Buzzfeed now, now the onus is on Buzzfeed.”
CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed‘s when they wrongly reported that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks’ DNC email archives prior to their 2016 publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by multiple people.
CNN is leading the way in bashing BuzzFeed but it’s worth remembering CNN had a humiliation at least as big & bad: when they yelled that Trump Jr. had advanced access to the WL archive (!): all based on a wrong date. They removed all the segments from YouTube, but this remains: pic.twitter.com/0jiA50aIku
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 19, 2019
The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage.
The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it doesn’t mean it’s not true. The only reason people don’t rise up and use the power of their numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media’s endless cultural engineering project. They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better.
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US Middle East Policy: The Growing Propensity for Genocide
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From the Archives
The New Baghdad Pact
By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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