Nicaragua’s ‘Foreign Agents’ Law Explained
NSCAG News | February 22, 2021
In October 2020, Nicaragua passed a ‘Foreign Agents’ law. The law requires all organisations, agencies or individuals, who work with, receive funds from or respond to organizations that are owned or controlled directly or indirectly by foreign governments or entities, to register as foreign agents with the Ministry of the Interior. The fundamental objective of the law is to establish a legal framework that will regulate natural or legal persons that respond to foreign interests and funding, and use this funding to carry out activities that lead to interference by foreign governments or organisations in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, putting at risk the sovereign security of the country.
Predictably, the law has caused an outcry from the United States, who accuse Nicaragua of sliding towards dictatorship (when in fact the new law mirrors a similar and even more stringent law in the United States) and organisations like Amnesty International who claim that President Ortega plans to ‘silence those who criticise government policies, inform the population and defend human rights.’
The truth of the matter is that the intention behind the law is very simple – to create a tool that allows Nicaragua to ensure or prevent foreign powers, countries, governments, agencies or organisations from developing acts of interference in Nicaragua’s domestic affairs or national domestic policy, something that not only Nicaragua seeks to do and condemn, but very much something that international organisations of all kinds also condemn. There are Resolutions of the United Nations; there are Resolutions of the Organization of American States; there are Rulings of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where they condemn, in a clear and categorical way, all these acts of interference, by any foreign Government in the domestic matters of another country.
For years now, the US has poured millions of dollars into opposition NGOs and media in Nicaragua in an attempt to destabilise the country, undermine the democratically elected government and bring about ‘regime change’. Since 2017, a handful of Nicaraguan NGOs and media have received well over US$100 million from USAID alone. There are clear signs that the US intends to intensify these actions in the run up to Nicaragua’ national elections in November. In passing the Foreign Agents law, the Nicaraguan government has acted only to stem the tide of US funding which has been used until now to create chaos and instability and attack the country’s sovereignty.
There are around 5,000 NGOs in Nicaragua – the vast majority are engaged in perfectly legitimate activities around health and social issues for example and none of them will be affected by this law which is targeted solely at a minority of organisations who have been heavily funded by the US merely to act as proxies for US and right wing opposition ambitions in the country.
‘Nicaragua has the right to know about and protect itself from foreign funding of its domestic opposition – a country is not required to cooperate in its own overthrow by a foreign power.’ – Chuck Kaufman, Alliance for Global Justice
Sources:-
Council on Hemispheric Affairs, article by John Perry
The Grayzone article by Ben Norton
Interview with Deputy Walmaro Gutierrez, President of the Economic Commission of Nicaragua’s National Assembly, Tortilla con Sal
Briefs
By Nan McCurdy
UNICEF Says Not Closing Schools Was Best Decision
Jean Gough, UNICEF regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, acknowledged the decision of the Nicaraguan government not to close schools in the face of the pandemic. The regional director of the United Nations Children’s Fund congratulated the efforts made by Nicaragua to give continuity to education, among them the “best decision was not to close the schools in time of pandemic.” During a meeting at the headquarters of the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Denis Moncada, Gough expressed UNICEF’s decision to continue supporting the actions of the Nicaraguan government. The meeting allowed both parties to discuss the current Cooperation Program between UNICEF and Nicaragua for the period 2019-2023. Moncada thanked the representative of the United Nations agency for the support they provide to programs on education and protection of children and adolescents. (Radio La Primerisima, 7 March 2021)
Bernays and Propaganda – Propaganda Continues Unabated – Part 5
By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog | March 11, 2021
In most nations, when a particular criminal conduct reaches epidemic proportion, the government finally acts decisively to eradicate it. Not in America; they solve the problem by legalising it. They did this with influence-peddling (lobbying) and drugs, the same now occurring with domestic propaganda which has been against the law for a very long time to protect citizens from psychological manipulation and control by their own government. The law has always been ignored, but Congress is now dispensing with the pretense in repealing two major laws, the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act (1) (2) (3) (4) and the 1987 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, so as to permit the authorities to disperse false and misleading propaganda and campaigns of misinformation against its own people. Of course, the government has always done this surreptitiously, sometimes to an overwhelming extent as in the case of war marketing, but it has always been illegal. After this, it won’t be. One Pentagon official claimed this new provision will have “No checks and balances. No one will know if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false”. In an article in USA Today, it was quoted that the US military (Pentagon) already spends about $4 billion per year on propaganda to sway public opinion, much of that directed domestically. (5) (6) (7)
We now have the sock puppets, (8) (9) the fake social media personas on the Internet, used by the US military and intelligence agencies to affect and lead public opinion in many countries, usually with the intent of inciting civil unrest and revolution. It has been obvious for some time that these tactics have been used domestically as well, the new legislation simply legalising the process. Many US government agencies have obtained this software that permits them to flood the social media with fake people making fake posts in support of government positions and discrediting those who hold contrary views or are critical of the government. The software is extremely detailed, providing extensive backgrounds for these fictitious people, permitting a single human to assume the identities of as many as 1,000 fake people, and make them appear to actually be in a certain physical place or even attending an actual event. They control the IP address, making it impossible to detect that a single person in one location is orchestrating all that activity. The program manual states, “There is a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas”. The contract requires “virtual private servers” located in and outside the US, to give false locational information, and also requires what it calls “traffic mixing”, blending the persona controllers’ internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that offers “excellent cover and powerful deniability”.
This “Persona management software” is now being used to manipulate public opinion on key issues, with unlimited numbers of virtual people regularly flooding US social media with pro-government propaganda in attempts to manage public perception and kill political activism. This is called “counter-messaging” and the Pentagon has made no secret of its activities in promulgating “black propaganda” – which means knowingly spreading lies to mislead and misinform the public for the purpose of stifling political dissent. In its increasing fear of political activism, the US government has labeled the Internet as a “breeding ground for domestic terrorists”, and appears to include in this category anyone who questions the government’s version of events. This is all part of a massive program to intimidate, manipulate, and crush all public dissent, and to control not only domestic discussion but also to actively manipulate worldwide opinion. Their activity is becoming common in China where, on the occurrence of an event containing useful propaganda fuel, we often see a flood of commentary on Weibo supporting the American position, these ostensibly being posted by native Chinese but almost inevitably originating in Fort Langley, Virginia.
The government has used these in smear campaigns (10) (11) (12) against reporters and other high-profile individuals who criticise US government policy, to the extent of creating fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in their names, containing fake posts meant to be personally damaging, and have even created fake websites and Wikipedia pages purporting to belong to an individual, all for the purpose of discrediting “dissidents”. When a Taiwanese scientist aired his research identifying the 5 haplotypes of COVID-19 and proving America had to be the original source since these types existed only in the USA, the VOA harassed the man so badly online that he closed all his social media accounts and went dark.
The US government performs surveillance and infiltration in attempts to control the public dialogue in many nations, creating Twitter-like social media platforms in other countries, ostensibly local but all monitored and controlled by US agencies. Most are the work of USAID. The Americans innocently proclaim the purpose as “encouraging open political discussion” (in every nation but the US), but it’s a ‘discussion’ they mean to control entirely and skew to satisfy their agenda of inciting unrest and revolution. One such platform in Cuba was widely ridiculed when knowledge of it became public in early 2014, and was killed. (13) (14) (15) Even the Associated Press reported that it “was set up to encourage political dissent”, but White House officials claimed they wanted only “to provide Cubans with a platform to share ideas and exchange information”, claiming it was used to “share cricket scores” and by farmers to “share market prices”. Maybe, but it was used primarily for political destabilisation. The State Department and USAID actively pushed for these platforms after their successes in causing the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. The State Department also provided several million dollars to a team of American hackers to develop a system known as a mesh network to enable US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba to communicate more freely and securely, with USAID committing yet another several million to the same cause. This is precisely what the US has been doing in Hong Kong for many years now.
The real owners and controllers of Google are reading from the same script. Google is not actively propagandising, but functions as an information gateway with all searches heavily censored and prioritised so that we see only what the secret government wants us to see and receive only the information they want or permit us to have. (16) Facebook and Twitter are not better. (17) Wikipedia is different, being one of the most criminally-dishonest active propagandists in the world. (18) There is surprisingly little in Wikipedia that is not either censored or outright false. If you want to know the number of protons in a Cesium atom, you will find the correct answer, but in any area related to history, politics, wars, government, the Jews, Israel, Arabs, ‘Axis of evil’ members, crimes of governments and corporations, the truths of the European bankers and their ravaging of the world, Wikipedia is 95% sanitised misinformation. And this propaganda is intense; Wiki has tens of thousands of ‘volunteers’ constantly scouring all the page entries to find items requiring editing or deleting. Many people have reported correcting an obviously false entry only to discover moments later that their corrections had been deleted and the page locked. Perhaps the biggest laugh is Wiki’s claim that “Content Requires Verifiable Data”. Maybe, but only from you.
The final pillar of this social engineering is the Jewish-owned and/or controlled media and entertainment industries which have long since abandoned the dissemination of truth and information and wholeheartedly adopted the primary task of propagandising the public mind. Today, the topics are different than the war marketing of Bernays, but – and this is very important to understand – the intensity remains the same. Just as Bernays once flooded every possible media channel with war-mongering hatred, today those same channels are directed to nations other than Germany (China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Libya Cuba, Syria, Venezuela), to the instillation of fear (the war on terrorism) which is easily manipulated to achieve astonishing measures of social control, and to detail-less information to maintain public ignorance and confusion on all important issues. Paul Craig Roberts wrote that “The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government. The function of the “mainstream media” is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups.” (19) That is precisely correct.
The book publishers are also onside in this vast propaganda campaign. The content of educational texts especially is heavily controlled by the disparate elements of the propaganda machine, with countless topics and theories proscribed. Howard Zinn was a notable exception in having some of his “radical” (i.e. accurate) history books published, but today, only shortly after his death, all his books are being removed from school libraries and destroyed. During the past two or three generations it has become increasingly difficult, and now almost impossible, to publish books on topics that would pose a threat to the activities of the secret government, and more than a few individuals have been killed for trying. The concentration of media and publishing power is not an accident, but part of a plan to eliminate information contradictory to the best interests of Bernays’ invisible people. Today, many publishers and authors will testify that Amazon actively suppresses many books while pretending to sell them.
Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood, (20) (21) wrote “What is amazing is the extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the world. By making a ‘shadow’ America, one which idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made.”
The US movie industry is the worst of all media for fictionalising history and reality and replacing them with fabricated mythology. A recent example is Steven Spielberg’s unforgivably distorted portrayal of Lincoln and slavery and the American civil war. It was the Rothschild’s Barings Bank that financed the slave trade, and a great many if not most of the slave traders were Jewish. Furthermore, we have adequate documentation that it was European Jewish bankers who stimulated the slavery-related rift in American society to instigate the civil war. In this context, Spielberg’s movie is an especially offensive false and mythical portrayal of the true facts. As one columnist noted, Spielberg’s movie “had too many negroes and too few Jews”. The upshot is that tens of millions of gullible Americans will take with them to their graves a totally and absolutely false understanding of a critical period in their nation’s history.
That is the real issue, and that brings us back to Bernays who wrote: “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world to-day. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation.” It also begins very early to indoctrinate little minds.
“The American Jews have always used their films as an active propaganda channel to transmit not only their own political agenda but the fiction of US culture, values and way of thinking to people in other nations, these films containing an outpouring of individualism or struggles in pursuit of freedom or the realisation of the American Dream. They have always portrayed an idealised society intended to evoke in others a kind of yearning for America and the things it appears to be. All is cleverly arranged, with meticulous attention paid to the smallest details of setting, with the American flag so often prominent and Americans always portrayed as leaders of the world. All of this is a large and persistent attempt at a kind of cultural colonisation of the world, the Jews excelling at the presentation of a superficial layer of intense audio and visual effects that are “so image rich and content poor that they manipulate our emotions and short-circuit our reason”.”
The great objection to all this is that the presentation is totally false, the US being nothing like the mythical movie presentations, and the values promulgated and unconsciously accepted are not actually held by Americans, and certainly not by the nation’s leaders. Like everything similar emanating from the US, American movies are stimulating, high-quality lies, which is why many nations restrict American content.
All of the above, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the advertising industry, Hollywood movies and TV programs, book publishing and book selling, Wikipedia, and the social media, are controlled by Jews. Their control over information is almost complete, giving them the power to directly influence people’s thoughts and behavior and to alter the course of events. All of these follow the same inescapable propaganda script. (22) (23) (24) They are not apologetic about this control; Philip Weiss wrote an article in Mondoweiss titled, “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?”. (25) I can think of several objections.
Control over the mass media and of the movie industry have always been central to the dissemination of propaganda in the US, with the media presenting the narrative to be adopted and the movies glorifying the propaganda myths disguised as entertainment. The US is the one nation most thoroughly saturated by the media, Americans being bombarded daily with thousands of images on what is essentially political ideology, guiding popular opinion in a predefined direction. The media themselves and many branches of the government spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the art of public propaganda directed at the bewildered herd, this mass media bombardment daily shaping the American view of reality. American author Gore Vidal wrote:
“You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque. The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent.” (26)
All of the so-called values that Americans hold so dear and appear so determined to inflict on all other nations, have their origin in the propaganda disseminated by Bernays’ invisible government through this tightly-held media cartel. Dr. Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of political science, wrote “Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don’t know is that American propaganda is hidden, and its characteristics, integrated into communications and entertainment, convince people that they are not being manipulated. Propaganda is not supposed to be part of an ‘open society’. Much of our media now are so image rich and content poor that they just serve to capture the eye, manipulate our emotions, and short-circuit our reason. The propaganda and advertising industries therefore function increasingly like adult obedience industries. They instruct their audiences in how to feel and what to think, and increasing numbers of people follow and accept the cues without question.”
Snow described one of her previous jobs as being a “propagandist” for the US Information Agency. She said, “In the US, we don’t think of ourselves as a country that propagandises, even though to the rest of the world we are seen as really the most propagandistic nation”. According to her, the US has more PR professionals than news reporters, and the global reach of what Bernays called Public Relations is just a euphemism for propaganda that involves the entire US media. One example of this was the appointment of an advertising professional as Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs. In an article in the LA Times, Naomi Klein wrote that “[Charlotte Beers] had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she’s built brands for everything from dog food to power drills, and that her task now was to work her magic on the greatest branding challenge of all – to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to an increasingly hostile world”. (27) (28) (29) Secretary of State Colin Powell actively defended this: “There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand diplomacy.” (30)
I wrote elsewhere of the fake stories the US military produced for its invasions of Iraq and Libya, with fabricated video of locals apparently cheering the American invaders as liberating heroes. You may have wondered why ‘protestors for freedom’ in many foreign nations (Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ukraine) inexplicably seem to create all their protest signs in English; they are all fake, meant for an American audience. Here is some background for you, from a speech given at the US Air Force Academy by John Rendon, a PR consultant employed by the US military. Rendon said, “I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician, an information warrior and a perception manager”, at which point he reminded his audience that when US troops entered Kuwait City during the first Persian Gulf war, they received a wildly enthusiastic greeting from hundreds of Kuwaitis waving US flags. He then asked, “Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City were able to get American flags? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then”. (31) (32) It is interesting that Americans boast so openly about their perverted manipulation of the world’s peoples. This was Pompeo boasting, “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” And the American people cheered.
American propaganda foolishness knows no bounds. Some years ago, prior to President Bush’s helicopter landing in a public downtown park on his visit to Italy, I watched dozens of Secret Service agents with cans of paint, spray-painting all the grass a lovely shade of green so Bush would look prettier on TV. When a US President or State Secretary speaks to an empty hall at the United Nations, the media obligingly cut and paste an audience from another speaker’s talk to make Americans proud that their leader was enthusiastically applauded by a full house.
Today, every part of America is all about marketing the brand, selling the sizzle instead of the steak. The operating philosophy is termed “perception management”, the attempt to substitute a utopian fictionalised version of events for reality. Great efforts are made to determine which actions or attitudes or sentiments to portray to the American public and the world, which items of information should be denied to the public, and which “indicators” are necessary to convey to audiences to influence their emotions and dull their objective reasoning. This perception management combines some facts, some unrelated truths, a great deal of deception, all wrapped in layers of what is termed “psychological operations”, and used to sell patriotism, wars, capitalism, fear and fascism. This is the legacy of Lippman and Bernays: an entire nation has degraded to the point where product substance is irrelevant and brand perception is everything.
The picture in Americans minds of their own country consists of a vast array of misinformation, falsehoods and myths, covering every facet of the human experience and which they fervently, and even belligerently, believe to be true. The reason I have dwelt on the topic of propaganda to the extent I have done, is to demonstrate the equal truth that the picture foreigners hold in their minds of the US also consists of the same vast array of lies, misinformation, falsehoods and myths, their understanding of the US equally as flawed as that of the Americans themselves. Almost everything we read, see and learn about the US is mythical propaganda far removed from reality. We are buying the sizzle without the steak, paying for the brand without understanding or even receiving the product.
Bernays’ secret government has been taking control of the ideological foundations of all of America, the propaganda onslaught including the political, corporate, banking, foreign policy, military, media, and academic sectors of the nation, attempting to force all into a single cohesive mental state. It isn’t simply information or misinformation. By controlling the sources and so deciding what you can and cannot see or learn, they plan to decide how you feel and what you think, and ultimately who has or does not have a voice. This is what led CIA Director William Casey to state, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” (33)
The world finally appears to be awakening to the fictional foolishness that is America today. The Pew Research Center has done several recent studies which document a growing distrust of everything American in most countries (34), including China and Western Europe. At the same time, it notes that American citizens are receiving an increasingly narrow view of important world issues, exacerbating their already fabled ignorance. Pew also note that while the American people receive limited information reduced to child-like sound bytes lacking breadth, depth and context, this deliberately fabricated ignorance also increases the ease of propagandists to make false claims that appear real and are difficult to question.
One recent example was the political coup in the Ukraine, the second time the US has overthrown an elected government in that nation. The Americans first instigated a mini-revolution and installed Julia Tymoshenko as their puppet president, this queen’s reign terminated prematurely when she was imprisoned for massive fraud, embezzlement and murder. The Americans then invested – by their own admission – more than $5 billion to destabilise the country with an impressive amount of violence in a second attempt to take control. This disintegrated when most of Eastern Ukraine, especially the Crimea, objected to the US effort and voted to separate from the Ukraine and rejoin Russia. For background, the Crimea had always been part of Russia but was only recently ‘given’ to the Ukraine as a peace measure; its citizens are virtually all ethnic Russians and wanted to return home.
However, the US media carried only the news and video of riots, omitting the fact that they were all US-inspired and financed and that the CIA had a huge contingent resident in Kiev that was masterminding the events from the US Embassy. They specifically omitted video of the “democratic protestors” returning to the US Embassy compound afterward to collect their pay. The riots were attributed to Russia’s “meddling” and presented as cries for freedom by the Ukrainian people, and the secession vote by the Crimean residents which was entirely self-initiated, was described in the US media as a “Russian invasion” of the Crimea. It is in this context that the US climbs on its hypocritical moral white horse and pretends to “warn” Russia about “interfering in Ukraine’s elections”, filling American hearts with pride in their nation’s fight for truth and freedom. With this heavily-propagandised false picture flooding the US media, most Americans believe they clearly understand the situation in the Ukraine and that Russia is indeed “the evil empire”. In fact, they understand nothing clearly and what little they know is wrong, but when a nation’s government so thoroughly controls the media and the narrative, and is a pathological liar, what hope is there for the people?
This ‘perception management’ marketing of the US brand is not limited to US soil; even more time and money are spent on managing perceptions in other nations, one of these being China. The US spends more than $300 million in China each year on marketing their productless brand. It isn’t only obvious outlets like the Voice of America; the Americans make Herculean efforts to plant pro-American messages in newspapers, magazines, social media Weibo and WeChat, in the topic outline of speeches, placing visiting professors in schools and universities in China, and in thousands of other sources that reach the public. This is entirely a psychological warfare operation and is described by the Americans in these terms. The aim of this huge effort is simply to employ all manner of lies and misinformation to make China’s government look bad in the eyes of its people (and the world).
As one example, the U.S. Consul-General in Guangzhou, Jim Levy, filled the internet with outright false or badly-twisted information about sudden racial discrimination against blacks in China. For background, all visas expired during the COVID-19 epidemic, requiring foreign nationals to return home and wait for approval of new visas. Many Africans, in China to purchase low-cost goods to ship home, and reluctant to lose their income source, failed to comply, essentially hiding underground. As health officers were making the rounds to test foreigners and obtain health codes, there were many stories of Africans jumping out of windows (hopefully first-floor windows) to escape the medical authorities and avoid the necessary quarantines. Finally, the police had to instruct apartments and hotels to not provide accommodation to anyone lacking a valid visa, but the US Consulate filled Chinese social media and foreign airwaves with stories titled, “African nations, US decry racism against blacks in China”. (35) (36) My opinion of Levy is not high, especially since he was using his American diplomatic post to further the political aims of his Jewish masters. In a similar manner, Alan Dershowitz, another American Jew, this one from Harvard, not long ago gave a speech to AIPAC, the Godzilla of Jewish influence in the US, where he asked all Jews to create as much pressure as possible on China’s imaginary human rights violations in Tibet, to take the world’s attention off the Jewish atrocities in Palestine. International politics supported by propaganda, i.e. “perception management”, is a dirty business.
Hong Kong today is saturated with CIA and other US-based media control, their long-term propaganda campaign being the entire source of the Western-oriented political agitation and the persistently negative views of China that originate there. George Soros, another American Jew, finances the seditious “China Media Project” at Hong Kong University, creating a massive anti-China campaign and responsible for much of the violence there. The violence and chaos in Tibet and Xinjiang all have the same source. Philip Agee, a former CIA agent (37), wrote that the US has been conducting this illegal interference in Tibet since prior to the 1950s and 1960s, claiming that his duties in the CIA involved attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power, infiltrating and manipulating political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups, women’s groups and especially the media. He details how he paid journalists to publish American propaganda as if it were the journalists’ own information, and how the CIA spent huge sums of money intervening in foreign elections to promote and elect an American puppet candidate. The NYT had very little nice to say about Agee in their obituary. (38)
Jonathan Power told us of one highly-placed British diplomat who stated, “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism”. (39) (40) Power wrote further that “America Is Sadly In The Grip Of ‘Exhausted Ideas’”. (41) And as Naomi Klein noted, nations don’t generally object to America’s so-called ‘values’, but to the fact that the US never adheres to them. Critics see only US unilateralism, defiance of all international laws, great wealth disparity, and increasing unjustified crackdowns and violations of civil rights. She wrote that America’s problem “was not with the brand but with the product”, and that the great and increasing international anger – and it is anger – arises “not only from the facts but also from a clear perception of false advertising”. In other words, American hypocrisy, the Utopia Syndrome I wrote of earlier. However, Americans seem oblivious to these realities and are redoubling their efforts to propagandise not only all Americans but the world.
Introduction – If America Dissolves… https://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 1 of 5 — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 2 of 5 — The Marketing of War — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-marketing-of-war/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 3 of 5 –– Democracy Control – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-democracy-control/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 4 of 5 –The Transition to Education and Commerce – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-transition-to-education-and-commerce-part-4/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 — Propaganda Continues Unabated — You are now here.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.
His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
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Notes
(1) https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736
(2) https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736/text
(3) https://newswithviews.com/smith-mundt-act-of-1948-and-the-coup/
(4) https://www.rt.com/usa/smith-mundt-domestic-propaganda-121/
(7) https://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2013/07/08/pentagon-propaganda-post-somali/2498339/
(8) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
(9) https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2014/04/18/military-sock-puppets-nsa-trolls-cia-shills/
(11) https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/03/03/how-and-how-not-to-beat-a-smear-campaign/
(12) https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/18/us-government-funded-coda-story/
(13) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-created-cuba-twitter-sow-unrest-reports-ap
(14) https://apnews.com/article/904a9a6a1bcd46cebfc14bea2ee30fdf
(15) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-zunzuneo-stir-unrest
(17) https://nypost.com/2021/01/04/ted-cruz-twitter-most-brazen-and-google-most-dangerous/
(18) https://www.serendipity.li/cda/censorship_at_wikipedia.htm
(19) https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/01/24/the-media-destroyed-america/
(20) https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573
(21) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118657.An_Empire_of_Their_Own
(22) https://researchlist.blogspot.com/2011/06/jewish-ownership-of-big-media.html
(23) http://tapnewswire.com/2015/10/six-jewish-companies-control-96-of-the-worlds-media/
(24) https://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/jews-in-the-media-hollywood/
(25) https://mondoweiss.net/2008/02/do-jews-dominat/
(26) https://www.latimes.com/la-bk-gore-vidal-1989-08-04-story.html
(27) Naomi Klein | The Spectacular Failure of Brand USA; https://naomiklein.org/spectacular-failure-brand-usa/
(28) http://www.pbs.org/pov/borders/2006/de_sellingamerica.html
(29) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-04-fg-beers03-story.html
(30) https://www.alternet.org/2002/03/brand_usa/
(31) https://nexus23.com/warfare2/the-rendon-group-reloaded/
(32) http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_Pentagon%27s_Information_Warrior
(33) https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/03/the-dangers-of-privatized-intelligence/
(34) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/how-americans-see-problems-of-trust/
(37) http://www.philipagee.com/
(38) https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/obituaries/10agee.html
(39) https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7021898632.pdf
(40) https://www.globalissues.org/article/163/media-in-the-united-states
(41) https://www.eurasiareview.com/22042020-america-is-sadly-in-the-grip-of-exhausted-ideas-oped/
Biden Regime won’t incentivize Iran to join JCPOA talks
Press TV – March 12, 2021
The US once again asserts that it will not offer any “incentives” to prompt Iran to rejoin talks with Washington on “mutual compliance” with a 2015 nuclear agreement it unilaterally left later, insisting that it is Tehran that has to take the first step.
“We will not offer any unilateral gestures or incentives to induce the Iranians to come to the table,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Thursday, Reuters said.
“If the Iranians are under the impression that, absent any movement on their part to resume full compliance with the [nuclear deal], … we will offer favors or unilateral gestures, well that’s a misimpression,” he added.
Under his signature “maximum pressure” policy against Iran, former American president Donald Trump withdrew Washington from a landmark nuclear accord between Iran and the P5+1 group of states – the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China plus Germany.
He then restored the economic sanctions that the deal had lifted. The US also began threatening third countries with “secondary sanctions” if they did business with Iran in defiance of the bans.
This is while the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has been ratified as a United Nations Security Council resolution, making both the US’s departure from the accord and its snapping the sanctions back into place unilateral and illegal.
Iran, in turn, began confronting the sanctions under Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khamenei’s Resistive Economy directive.
It also started a number of nuclear countermeasures on the first anniversary of the US’s withdrawal in line with its rights under the deal to retaliate for the other side’s non-commitment. The Islamic Republic gradually increased its counteractions as Washington and its allies in the deal would continue to violate their JCPOA obligations.
Price suggested that Washington could consider step-by-step resumption of each party’s nuclear commitments only after Tehran returned to the negotiation table.
“If and only if Tehran comes to the negotiating table, would we be in a position, would we be prepared to discuss proposals that would help push both sides back on that path of mutual compliance to the deal,” he said. “Ultimately, that is where we seek to go: compliance for compliance,” the spokesman added.
Iran has, on the one hand, underscored that, unlike the US, it was never the party to leave the talks in the first place. On the other, it notes that the JCPOA is a done deal and does not need any renegotiation.
As its definitive stance on the issue, the Islamic Republic also emphasizes that it will only resume its full compliance with the deal once the US lifted all the sanctions, noting that the sanction relief process is Washington’s contractual duty and should take place without any preconditions.
Biden’s brand of democracy isolates the Palestinians
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | March 11, 2021
Israel is reportedly concerned that US President Joe Biden will prioritise human rights over traditional allegiances in the Middle East. With a policy shift that departs from the Trump administration’s belligerence, Biden is attempting to bring Washington in line with the human rights rhetoric favoured within the international arena, albeit rarely, if ever, acted upon.
The recent declassification of documents pertaining to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has been used by Israel to claim that the Biden administration risks alienating the settler-colonial state’s allies in the Middle East, particularly at a time when the Netanyahu government is still basking in the diplomatic success of the Abraham Accords.
Israel need not worry, though. While other Middle Eastern governments may indeed come under intense scrutiny and be forced to make cosmetic changes to their atrocious human rights record – releasing prominent activists from prison, for example – Israel will not be required to make any such concessions. The international community has already accomplished a great deal in marketing Israel’s security narrative as indistinguishable from human rights. If Israel says it needs to defend itself, how dare the international community suggest otherwise? On the contrary, governments are eager to support Israel’s killing machine and turn a blind eye to its victims. Collateral damage in the name of human rights is perfectly acceptable, it seems.
The White House has recently released the “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance“. Democracy is Biden’s selling point. Holding the new US administration to account on its democracy, however, is a different story. After all, anything is better than Trump. Such reasoning played into the psyche of the US electorate and political responsibility may well become a relic of the past if the Biden administration continues to be juxtaposed against Trump’s, or viewed as a better option for no other reason than the president is now not Trump. Indeed, there is a risk of Biden being spared the usual scrutiny that comes with being US president, and while Israel may miss the Trump era, the current administration is certainly not averse to upholding the apartheid state’s impunity.
It is more a selective process of which governments the US is going to support militarily in the name of democracy, rather than a repudiation of militarism as Biden is attempting, and failing, to convey to the world.
“In the Middle East, we will maintain our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security, while seeking to further its integration with its neighbours and resuming our role as promoter of a viable two-state solution,” the guidance document proclaims. There’s no conflict for Israel in that, since “two states” is a defunct option that existed only to enhance its own security narrative. An “ironclad commitment” to Israel’s security is undemocratic, though, no matter how much the two-state solution is given a democratic gloss through international consensus.
What Biden’s brand of democracy looks like to Israel will be untenable for the Palestinian people. There is no mention of the Palestinians in the document, indicating to us all for whose benefit the two-state paradigm will be pursued. It is not about the result, but the allegiances forged through such diplomacy, which the Palestinian Authority is still deceiving itself into thinking gives it a say over which governments are supportive of the Palestinians’ struggle for their land and rights. The truth is that Biden’s brand of democracy isolates Palestinians, and all in the name of human rights.
Coronavirus Crackdown Madness at the Alaska State Senate
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | March 11, 2021
Over the last few weeks, coronavirus crackdown mandates, including mask wearing requirements, have been rolled back in several states. But, in Alaska, the state Senate is proceeding with a looney and pernicious crackdown on one of its own members because she has not fully complied with a list of coronavirus-related rules for the capitol. The rules, including required mask wearing, are supposedly purposed to counter coronavirus.
Andrew Kitchenman reported Wednesday at Alaska Public Media that the state Senate has voted to allow Senate leaders to enforce coronavirus-related rules against Sen. Lora Reinbold. The result is Reinbold, who has chosen neither to wear a mask nor to undergo — and report the results of — mandated repeated coronavirus-related medical testing, being prohibited from entering the capitol other than the Senate gallery from which she will be able to vote while the Senate is in session.
No more in person attendance at committee meetings, including of the Judiciary Committee of which she is chair, for Reinbold. No more joining in the debate on the Senate floor either. Reinbold is even being booted from her office in the capitol, relegated to using office space elsewhere.
Here’s to Reinbold standing up to the bullies. It sounds like that is just what Reinbold intends to do. Kitchenman shares in the article this quote from Reinbold’s Facebook page: “My actions are to protect my constitutional rights, including civil liberties and those who I represent, even under immense pressure and public scrutiny.”
Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute
Domestic Terrorism Goes Transnational: The war on Dissidents Picks Up Momentum
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 11, 2021
The claim is often made that President George W. Bush’s war on terror, which produced legislation that was employed to attack Iraq in 2003, eventually morphed into the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history when that conflict destabilized the entire region and led to an American multifront military engagement that now appears permanent. Few of those in the policymaking business appreciated that by turning “terrorism” into an especially invidious form of evil allowing governments to arrest or even assassinate without due process and bomb civilians if they fit a profile, Pandora’s box was being opened to expand that authority to commit other heinous abuses of authority.
Jim Bovard has described how post 9/11 there were hundreds of arrests for no good reason, in some cases only because someone had a name or countenance that appeared to be “Arabic.” Congressman Ron Paul and a handful of others observed at the time that the legislation would inevitably be used against domestic enemies of the state as well as against foreign or foreign-linked groups, meaning that the real damage done by the Patriot Act, the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) and the Military Commissions Act would be felt somewhere down the road, possibly at a point where the original objective of the legislation would be more or less forgotten.
Now that we have an identified “domestic terror” problem one should expect at a minimum a massive increase in surveillance of innocent citizens coupled with arbitrary arrests and incarcerations. Indeed, the process is already well underway with FBI Director Christopher Wray announcing that there are several thousand terror “cases” under development. There will also be increasing calls to take away guns and to control what is allowed to appear on the internet. Soon Americans will have nothing to measure their remaining liberties by and will be less free to exercise rights including free speech, possibly dramatically so.
So now we have reached a point where we have a government that is committed to further reducing one’s rights in order to “keep us safe” from a domestic threat and congress critters are openly speaking of bringing in “war on terror” type expedients to make sure that they have the tools available to do just that. The Joe Biden White House has made clear that it has embraced fighting domestic terrorists as a top priority. Last week, the Administration sought authorization from the Pentagon to keep thousands of national guard troops in the District of Columbia for 60 days more, presumably to protect the government buildings and staff. The pretext for the continued presence was a vaguely described plot constituting a “potential threat” to overrun the Capitol building on March 4th, a day when it was apparently anticipated that Donald Trump would miraculously be returned to office. The House of Representatives even canceled a session over concerns that they were about to be invaded by a hostile “militia.” Just how “real” the threat was has not been made clear beyond suggestions of “chatter” over the internet, nor has there been any explanation of why the 2,200 strong Capitol Police force is unable to deal with the problem.
Be that as it may, the Biden Administration thinks it knows exactly who the enemy is. The government already has a working definition of a domestic terrorist, i.e. “If you advocate violence as a tool to further political ends, and take concrete steps to do that, you’re a terrorist.” But if you thought that included groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) you would be wrong. For the Biden Administration it is the stereotyped right-wing extremist, who, among other attributes, is represented by the media and government as coming from the class that Hillary Clinton once described as “deplorables.”
The accepted definition of the enemy defies logic as the rioting, arson, and killing that has taken place over the past year has generally been inspired by Antifa and BLM, resulting in major damage and destruction in various cities and states. But the mobs who wrecked and looted have been mostly set free by the courts in the Democratic Party dominated cities. In Portland Oregon 90% of the [arrested] rioters were not prosecuted, presumably because the local judicial system believed that their “cause was just.” Against that is the trauma of the January 6th incident at the Capitol, much smaller in scope and damages but obviously terrifying to the media and Congress. Also what did occur bore a more comfortable theme for the Democrats which they have been beating to death ever since – “insurrection caused by right wing extremists who were overwhelmingly white and support Donald Trump.” That’s apparently all one needs to initiate a campaign to get rid of such dissidents.
For some suggestions about the direction the Biden Administration will be going in to eliminate domestic terrorism, one only has to review the comments of Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland at his Senate confirmation hearing on February 22nd, where he declared that going after domestic terrorists would be a top administration priority. When asked if he regards the numerous attempts by Antifa and BLM rioters to destroy federal courthouses in Portland and Seattle as acts of domestic extremism or terrorism, he hedged on the issue and replied:
“So an attack on a courthouse while in operation, trying to prevent judges from actually deciding cases, that plainly is, uhm, domestic extremism, uhm, domestic terrorism. An attack simply on a government property at night… or any other kind of circumstances, is a clear crime and a serious one and should be punished. I don’t mean… I don’t know enough about the facts of the example you’re talking about, but that’s where I draw the line. One is… both are criminal, but one is a core attack on our democratic institutions.”
According to the man who almost became a Supreme Court Justice and now appears to be on his way to becoming Attorney General if you attack and seek to destroy a government building when there is no one in it is a different level of criminality than seeking to disrupt what is going on inside during business hours. It clearly is a fine line, or at least Garland sees it that way, but in either case you are making the building non-functional in terms of its intended use. Indeed, groups like BLM have regularly condemned the criminal justice system and if you burn the building down it will be unusable for a long, long time. So clearly what makes something “terrorism” as opposed to only “criminality” is the expectation based on the events of 1/6 that it will be right-wing whites who will be doing the disruption. They are the terrorists.
So, it seems pretty clear that the Biden Administration is now preparing to go after the people that it objects to and will create new laws as necessary to do so. Garland will certainly have a hand in that development. And if anyone is thinking of leaving all of this behind by fleeing to another country where there is an actual rule of law, it would be best to consider the matter again. On February 22nd, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that white supremacy right-wing nationalist movements have become a “transnational threat” that has exploited the fear of the coronavirus pandemic to gain support. He said that “White supremacy and neo-Nazi movements are more than domestic terror threats. They are becoming a transnational threat. Today, these extremist movements represent the number one internal security threat in several countries. Far too often, these hate groups are cheered on by people in positions of responsibility in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago. We need global coordinated action to defeat this grave and growing danger.”
It means you can run but you can’t hide. It looks like there will be a worldwide coalition to extirpate the evils that come automatically with whiteness and, as BLM is now de facto a major constituency of the U.S. Democratic Party, you know that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi will be leading the charge.
Censorship-happy Twitter suddenly concerned about ‘public conversation’ as Russia cracks down on illegal content
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | March 11, 2021
Twitter’s complaints about Russian regulators slowing down its traffic would be a lot more credible if the platform hadn’t been so eager to turn into a partisan echo chamber and place itself above the law in its own homeland.
On Wednesday, Russia began throttling Twitter as a way of pressuring the San Francisco-based company to remove over 3,100 posts found to be in violation of Russian law. Specifically, this includes 450 instances of child pornography and more than 2,500 incitements to underage suicide.
Twitter responded by saying it was “deeply concerned by increased attempts to block and throttle online public conversation.”
It’s more than a bit disturbing that Twitter considers child porn and calls to suicide “public conversation.” The former is illegal in the US as well, and both are against their own terms of service.
Twitter might argue that it’s based in the US and that the First Amendment of the American Constitution protects the free speech of everyone on their platform – except we all know that for them to do so would be the height of hypocrisy.
Back in May 2018, a US federal judge defined Twitter as a “designated public forum,” ruling that then-President Donald Trump has no right to block hostile users, not even from the official presidential account but from his personal one. That would violate the law, and “no government official is above the law,” argued Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald.
Judge Buchwald was curiously silent when Twitter decided it was above the law, banning Trump’s account while he was still the sitting president in January 2021, on the basis of how his tweets might be “received and interpreted.”
Trump’s tweets “must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence,” Twitter argued, citing his “pattern of behavior” to argue that they amount to “glorification of violence.”
Before removing the account and all its content altogether, Twitter – as well as Facebook and YouTube – outright deleted Trump’s video messages in which he called for his supporters to stay peaceful and respect law and order. Now that those are gone, the only narrative out there is the one pushed by mainstream media and Democrats, who claim Trump “incited insurrection” at the Capitol on January 6.
In the run-up to the 2020 US election, Twitter locked out the New York Post over a legitimate story about Hunter Biden and Ukraine; slapped a label insisting that massive changes to voting procedures were “safe and secure” – by sheer coincidence, in line with the effort to “fortify” the vote and ensure the “proper” outcome – and labeled any questions about the result as “disputed” before eventually banning those who asked them.
Twitter has since degenerated into a partisan echo chamber, where political trends are without exception the Democrat talking points of the day, often astroturfed by paid activists. Ostensibly a platform and not a publisher, their “What’s happening” sidebar editorializes constantly.
For example, earlier this week President Joe Biden seemed unable to remember the name or title of his defense secretary, who was standing right behind him. Through the lens of Twitter, that became the story of that one time Trump called the Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple,” as that’s what “people” were ostensibly talking about instead. Public square? More like loudspeakers blaring official propaganda from every lamppost.
They’re not the only Silicon Valley company to think itself above the law, or more powerful than entire countries. Witness the recent showdown between Facebook and Australia, in which Mark Zuckerberg sought to bully Canberra into abandoning plans to force online platforms to pay for news content. Perhaps Jack Dorsey is thinking he can do the same with Moscow.
Whatever the outcome of this showdown, don’t let anyone gaslight you into thinking it has anything to do with freedom of “online public conversation.” Free speech was a fundamental value of the American Republic, but that is manifestly no longer the case in the entity that has now replaced it, better known as Our Democracy. Silicon Valley supported this revolutionary change. It is now merely reaping what it has sown.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator
Feds Indict Own Informant As Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Case Unravels
By Eric Striker | National Justice | March 11, 2021
Federal prosecutors are charging a key informant in the case against a group of Michigan militia members who the FBI claims were plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer last fall.
Stephen J. Robeson, a 58-year-old man from Wisconsin, was indicted on March 3rd by a grand jury for being a felon in possession of a .50 caliber sniper rifle. Robeson is known in political circles for his over the top violent rhetoric. He was recently exposed in court as a paid FBI asset that shows up to First and Second Amendment themed protests in the trademark “Boogaloo” Hawaiian shirt.
According to a report by Detroit News, Robeson was one of the main instigators behind the entrapment of members of the Wolverine Watchmen militia in a whimsical scheme to abduct Whitmer. The timing of the arrest was perceived in some circles to be a dirty political trick by federal agents wanting to create bad publicity for Donald Trump right before the 2020 election.
Court documents show that Robeson infiltrated the militia on orders of the FBI during a meeting of Second Amendment enthusiasts in Dublin, Ohio. It was at the Ohio meetup that, with heavy input from Robeson, more than a dozen men allegedly led by a mentally ill homeless man named Adam Fox began concocting their plan. Robeson then attended a subsequent tactical training camp in Northern Michigan that prosecutors say was in preparation for snatching Whitmer from her nearby vacation home.
Multiple informants and undercover agents were involved in pushing the defendants in the case to take part in the conspiracy as well as furthering it along. Robeson was singled out by Josh Blanchard, the defense attorney of Barry Croft, for using his material resources and heavy peer pressure to try and get the men to talk about storming Whitmer’s home and abducting her.
Generally speaking, FBI informants are given carte blanche to engage in crimes and dangerous activities. Most FBI informants are career criminals introduced into law-abiding political organizations in order to cause strife and gin up phony terror plots. Federal prosecutors are burning Robeson likely out of fear that he will burden their case at trial. While it may be a bit trickier, defense attorney’s can still call Robeson to the stand to undermine the Feds’ case even if they do not plan to use his testimony.
Last January, prosecutors were able to compel 25-year-old Ty Garbin to become a cooperating witness in exchange for a plea. This may be their best hope for salvaging the case.
Washington’s thirst for white terrorists has compelled the FBI and DoJ to lower their professional standards to an almost untenable degree. Representative Jamie Raskin, who is a Jewish activist, is ordering FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide a briefing on “white supremacists” in the police and military by this Tuesday, suggesting that government persecution of patriotic militia groups is about to intensify even further.
The case is scheduled to go to trial on October 12th.
Michigan health department hit with lawsuit over refusal to share nursing home data comparable to Cuomo’s cover-up
RT | March 11, 2021
A local reporter is suing Michigan’s health department after it denied repeat requests for its nursing home data amid the Covid-19 outbreak, piling pressure on the government as lawmakers demand a probe into its pandemic response.
Journalist Charlie LeDuff launched a Freedom of Information suit against the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday, accusing the agency of withholding data linked to coronavirus deaths in nursing homes without legal basis.
“Not only does the public have the right to know this information, we have the need to know,” said LeDuff, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting for the New York Times in 2001 and later returned to local coverage in Detroit. “If we’re going to fix end-of-life care moving forward, it’s going to require a hard look at how the state’s policies treated our most vulnerable population.”
Represented by the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, LeDuff says numerous FOIA requests to the state government have been denied without justification. The first inquiry, submitted in late January, was rejected only an hour after it was submitted on grounds that it would divulge sensitive health records – an argument the journalist rejects.
While LeDuff said the state had previously published “certain statistical information” related to Covid-19 deaths, he argued it is lacking in transparency. He drew parallels to the New York state government, which has also come under fire for unwillingness to share its nursing home statistics.
“The need for transparency in this particular area has already been established, in another state, thanks to recent revelations that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration had intentionally withheld data from disclosure due to concerns about the resulting political fallout,” LeDuff’s complaint said, noting that he saw “significant similarities” between Cuomo’s policies and those of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Whitmer has also faced fierce criticism over her pandemic response, namely a directive early on in the outbreak that incentivized nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients, despite the risk they posed to the facilities’ aging residents. Cuomo and several other Democratic governors imposed similar policies, which critics say contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths in elderly populations most vulnerable to the virus.
Among the most vocal of Whitmer’s detractors is county prosecutor and former GOP state Senator Peter Lucido, who suggested on Monday that the governor could be slapped with criminal charges over her handling of nursing homes and “willful neglect of office.”
Whitmer later responded, castigating the prosecutor for “shameful political attacks based in neither fact nor reality” while insisting her administration “carefully tracked CDC guidance on nursing homes, and we prioritized testing of nursing home residents and staff to save lives.”
GOP lawmakers also called on Michigan AG Dana Nessel last week to investigate Whitmer’s nursing home policies in a formal letter to the state Department of Justice. Nessel, however, has signaled unwillingness to launch a probe, saying “bad policy” does not equate to “violations of the law.”
“I think oftentimes it is appropriate for the office to investigate. But not just when you say, ‘We don’t like what this policy is,’” she said of the request.
Whitmer’s administration was previously taken to court by Republicans alleging her “temporary” emergency pandemic powers had been extended indefinitely without approval from the legislature. While the state Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the governor, she simply sidestepped the decision by having her health director extend the orders instead, citing a legal loophole stemming from the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak.
Biden’s awkward threat of retaliatory cyber attacks belies US uncertainty and insecurity on all things Russia
By Scott Ritter | RT | March 9, 2021
By leaking plans for “covert” cyber-retaliation against Russia, the Biden administration allows domestic political considerations to trump legitimate national security concerns by painting Russia as the all-purpose bogeyman.
In a front-page story, the New York Times disclosed that the Biden administration was planning a range of “clandestine” cyber-attacks targeting Russia, ostensibly in retaliation for Russia’s alleged role in masterminding the SolarWinds hack that continues to resonate across the United States. According to the Times, these attacks are expected to unfold over the course of the next three weeks and are “intended to be evident to President Vladimir V. Putin and his intelligence services and military but not to the wider world.” These attacks, the Times notes, will most likely be combined with other actions by the Biden administration, including additional economic sanctions against Russia, and actions to “harden” US government networks against future attacks.
Even as the Biden administration struggles to piece together a response to the SolarWinds breach, it must wrestle with a new cyber-attack targeting a vulnerability in Microsoft’s email systems that exposes the communications and cyber architecture of a whole host of US government and private clients. Unlike SolarWinds, the current attack is believed to have been carried out by “state actors” operating on behalf of China.
Seen together, the SolarWinds and Microsoft email intrusions represent a daunting challenge for Anne Neuberger, a former Director of Cybersecurity for the National Security Agency who was appointed to serve in the newly created position of deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies. Neuberger has been tasked with overseeing what Washington, DC calls a “whole of government response” to these events. It is a thankless task, one made even more so by the fact that any response she develops must assuage domestic political pressures as well as address any genuine cyber threat that may exist.
The plan of action described in the New York Times is remarkable on several levels. First and foremost, it assumes as fact a linkage between the Russian government and the SolarWinds cyber-attack. While the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) have released a joint statement which attributes the SolarWinds attack to “an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in origin,” no evidence has been provided to sustain this allegation. For its part, the Russian government has denied any involvement in the SolarWinds attack.
While the Russian denial must be taken with a grain of salt–no one would expect the Russians to openly admit to carrying out such an attack–the Russian silence serves to illustrate the most disconcerting aspect of the New York Times’ story–that the Biden administration is openly telegraphing what it has said will be “clandestine” attacks targeting Russia.
Neuberger, a career veteran of the secretive world of cyber-sleuthing, is familiar enough with the lexicon of intelligence terminology to know that telegraphing your punch is–literally and figuratively–the antithesis of a “clandestine” activity. It should be clear to all who read the Times story that the intended target of the leak was not Vladimir Putin, his generals and/or his intelligence services. Rather, it was the domestic American consumer of news-based information. By injecting this tidbit of information into the news cycle, the Biden administration is prioritizing public posturing over any vestige of national security.
This does not mean that the US is incapable of sending Russia a clandestine slap on the wrist in retaliation for cyber-attacks it may or may not have conducted. According to some media reports, the NSA and Cyber Command possess the capability to deliver crippling cyber-based blows against the totality of the Russian state and economy, shutting down energy production, energy supply, financial, telecommunication, transport, military, and government networks at will. If ordered to do so, the NSA and Cyber Command could activate these tools in a selective fashion, targeting some or all of Russia. The announced clandestine strike would most likely not consist of a destructive attack on Russian networks, but rather a probe intended to let the Russian leadership know that the US was buried inside its networks, and as such able to shut things down at will.
If such a message were in fact to be sent, in the form of a clandestine (i.e., unannounced) cyber probe, then it might have the kind of consequences intended–Russian officials, having detected such an intrusion, would scale back their actions against US targets for fear of triggering a greater retaliation. The key to this kind of activity is that it is being done in the shadows, away from public scrutiny, never to be acknowledged by either party. By announcing its intention to conduct “clandestine” cyber retaliation, the Biden administration has nullified any potential gain it may have achieved if it had kept the actions truly covert in nature. Russia will continue to deny any role in the SolarWinds cyber event, and will either make public the US actions, thereby painting the US as the cyber aggressor, or just ignore the US actions altogether, leaving the US to either admit it did something, or to look as if what it did had no impact.
In its rush to attribute the SolarWinds cyber-attack to Russia without providing any evidence to back this assertion up, the Biden administration only feeds into the existing high level of Russophobia that permeates American society today. By telegraphing its intent to retaliate against Russia, the Biden administration has shown that it has allowed itself to be taken hostage by its own history of anti-Russian rhetoric.
Far from being a sign of strength, the actions of the Biden administration only underscore the extent to which it is prisoner to the fickle ignorance of an American public all too willing to accept at face value any narrative that paints Russia as the bogeyman. The subordination of legitimate national security interests to domestic politics is the most visible symptom of the impotence that has taken hold of the Biden administration when it comes to putting substance behind Joe Biden’s empty contention that “America is back.” As Tywin Lannister reminded the youthful Joffrey Lannister in G. R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords, “Any man who must say ‘I am king’ is no true king at all.”
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
COVID: To Governors who are re-opening your States—how to defeat the attacks against you
By Jon Rappoport | NoMoreFakeNews | March 10, 2021
Governors:
Talk to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He understands the game.
In December, his office issued an order to all state labs processing COVID PCR tests. They must now report “the number of cycles” they deploy in every test they perform. [1] [1a]
Roughly speaking, a cycle is a quantum leap which increases the sensitivity of the test. As readily asserted by Anthony Fauci, any test using more than 35 cycles is meaningless. [2] [2a]
—Not only meaningless, but laden with false-positive results. The patient is falsely claimed to be “infected.”
However, the FDA and the CDC, since the launch of the COVID PCR test, have been recommending using 40 cycles; and therefore labs have been following this advice. [3] [3a] [3b]
The outcome, in terms of falsely inflated case numbers, has been a disaster.
Furthermore, as reported by the New York Times, testing labs never tell the patient or the doctor how many cycles they use in running the PCR. [4]
Governor DeSantis understood the massive testing problem. That’s why his office, and his state department of health, ordered the labs to report “numbers of cycles.”
Armed with this background, you governors can meet and overcome challenges as you re-open your states. Why do I say this? Because the attacks coming your way will be based on three statistics:
The number of COVID cases in your state; the number of COVID deaths; and the number of COVID hospitalizations.
“Well, these numbers are rising. The governors must lock down again. Otherwise, they are contributing to disease and death.”
But you see, all three statistical categories depend on a positive PCR test. And since the test, improperly run, has resulted in huge numbers of false-positives, you can restore sanity and more accurate data by following Governor DeSantis’ lead.
Once your state labs report how many cycles they are using for each PCR test they run, you can reject any test that deploys over 35 cycles. You can eliminate vast numbers of false-positives, and when you DO…
The number of COVID cases, COVID deaths, and COVID hospitalizations in your state will decline, as they should.
And those who would attack you, based on those numbers, will have no ability to make their case.
In a nutshell, a vast fraud has been perpetrated on The People, and you can stop it.
You can restore sanity, re-open your states, and make the stranglehold of COVID restrictions a thing of the past.
Readers of this article: you can perform a valuable service by forwarding the article to the governor’s office in your state.
SOURCES:
[1] https://www.flhealthsource.gov/files/Laboratory-Reporting-CT-Values-12032020.pdf
[1a] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/12/08/florida-forces-labs-to-report-number-of-pcr-test-cycles/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE (starting at 3m50s)
[3] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download (page 37 (pdf page 38))
[3a] CDC-006-00019, Revision: 06, CDC/DDID/NCIRD/ Division of Viral Diseases, Effective: 12/01/2020; see: https://web.archive.org/web/20210102171026/https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download
[3b] CDC-006-00019, Revision: 05, CDC/DDID/NCIRD/ Division of Viral Diseases, Effective: 07/13/2020; see: https://web.archive.org/web/20200715004004/https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download
[4] nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
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From the Archives
British weapons and personnel doing much of the killing in Yemen
Press TV – June 18, 2019
A detailed report published by the Guardian newspaper has shown how Britain is massively contributing to Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen as it suggests that London is not only supplying the bombs that fall on Yemenis, but it provides the personnel and expertise that keep the war going.
The comprehensive report by Arron Merat published on Tuesday showed that Britain was doing much of the killing in Yemen as the country continues to provide Saudi Arabia with everything it needs to turn its southern impoverished neighbor into a graveyard.
“Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” said Merat in the report. … continue
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