FAKE NEWS, RUSSIAN HACKING, AND THAT AWFUL PUTIN (USED TO BE TRUMP)

Since the Trump election, a major news media allegation has been that ‘fake news’ interfered with the electoral process, and further that ‘Russian hacking’ helped defeat Hillary Clinton. Today’s declassified ‘intel’ report cites the ‘clear preference’ of Putin for Trump, but keeps the ‘damning evidence’ secret, presumably for national security reasons. Leading the drumroll for aggressive punishment of Russia for ‘undermining democracy’, is Senator John McCain, who says this was an ‘act of war’. He is of course, an ‘honorable man’, like the others in the US government who dismiss Russia as a ‘gas-station economy’ the ‘size of Italy’s’. McCain once made jokes about bombing Iranians. In 2008 in one of his presidential debates with Obama, he repeated the claim of the holiest of recent US Presidents (Reagan), that publicly funded health-care would be ‘like communism - with the state telling you which doctor you can use’. 35 million Canadians and hundreds of millions of Europeans know how exceptionally true these claims are. Such honorable men (and women – Clinton, Rice, Albright) also led the drum-roll for the invasion of Iraq, not very long ago, on charges of ‘weapons of mass-destruction’ (WMD), which then morphed into ‘installing democracy’ when none were found. Some may even recall the ‘evidence’ presented by Colin Powell in the UN in support. Despite references to 'weapons of mass deception' at the time, Oxford did not invent the phrase ‘Post-Truth’ then; only after Trump was elected, against odds and polls; and the wishes of the 'elites', aka the 'Deep State'. Perhaps ‘social media’ was not as strong in 2003. But it seems the real complaint by the major corporate news media is that they no longer have what they have long had – a monopoly. Now there is a serious competitor. Dozens of tomes written by the likes of Dr. Chomsky on what he politely calls the ‘propaganda system’, about the misrepresentation of the role of the US and its allies in the world, at the behest of a few super-rich families and huge corporations, are rarely mentioned in major news outlets – so they must be ‘fake’. (Oxford and its ilk, of course, understand their role in the Empire which replaced the British one.) Trump responds that charges of Russian hacking are a ‘witch-hunt’ by sore losers. While that may be true, the real motives appear to be much deeper-rooted. What Eisenhower called the ‘military-industrial complex’, and early 20th century General Smedley Butler called ‘racketeering for capitalism’ remains a huge and powerful force in US politics. Inventing external enemies is key to justifying half the planet’s expenditure on WMD by the US. After the USSR fell, the war on terror replaced it. Now there is a secret war over the future of the US dollar, the enormous debt accumulated by the US government, financed by Petrodollars (and post-2008 the creation of trillions of $ from thin air, called 'quantitative easing'), which has generated pushback from those who resent this grotesquely ‘exorbitant privilege’ But there is not much news coverage about this secret war, except in ‘fake news’. So let’s review some of the fake news that has successfully been censored by the responsible and ethical major news media of the West (allegedly corporate-owned). 1. That the US and its allies have killed not just hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, but cumulatively (including through ‘genocidal’ sanctions) – millions. That Obama’s drone assassination victims number over 80,000 including 8 wedding parties. Both those claims were made by Physicians for Social Responsibility in the US, Canada and Germany, but were blanked out. Imagine for instance the hysteria in major news outlets if ISIS had taken out 1 Western wedding party. 2. That the US and its allies have secret wars in 138 countries, including several in Africa, and this is the source of the 60 million refugees today. That’s from Tomdispatch.com, who also report that every Western bomb blows off heads, arms, legs of women, children, men…. Again no reference in Western news sources to these matters, except to civilian casualties by Russian bombings in Syria. Presumably Russia does not have the ‘smart-bombs’ of the US, which refuse to explode when they hit civilians. 3. The most outlandish of fake news claims on the internet must be that the Federal Reserve, IMF and most central banks are not state-owned, but privately owned banks, and that these invisible bankers have orchestrated wars for centuries, including the world wars and most recently the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria because their leaders did not want to sell their countries’ resource (oil) in US dollars. Now we all know for sure that these are simply conspiracy theories, don’t we? 4. Equally outlandish must be the reports including by John Pilger, that NATO's buildup of armed forces on the Russian border is the greatest since Adolf Hitler; or that Obama's 'pivot to Asia' likewise is an unprecedented buildup of naval forces, bases and weaponry designed to provoke, intimidate and potentially strangulate China, including massive arms budgets in Australia and Japan for the same reason. It goes without saying that claims that Brexit and the Trump victory represent 2 revolts by peoples angry at the ‘neo-liberal’ assault against those populations and their democracy are nonsense. True, ‘populism’ raises its ugly head now and then (will the 'stupid and ignorant herd' never learn?). But the real enemy is external, and the world’s greatest defender of freedom and democracy is of course the USA. The revelation of embarrassing information through wikileaks is the assault on democracy; concealment would have defended it. Blaming Putin helps deflect attention from the reasons for Trump’s victory, and other pesky things like Citizens United, which could be called the US Supreme Court’s support for plutocracy, and attack on democracy.