Friday, March 7, 2014

In the Fog of The Presstitutes - 3

Got Truthiness?
There can be no coup or coup d'état without the "assistance" of the media, the press.

That press assistance is measured by various groups around the world each year.

That measurement of the freedom of the press and that measurement of the press doing what it has been designed to do, shows a disturbing trend.

The media or press in the U.S. is at number 46 on the list, barely making the top 50, in terms of quality of reporting (A Tale of Coup Cities - 9).

Of course the drop to that very low position has taken a long time and a lot of work (Mocking America).

The press has helped the military to cover up its vast command systems that form a vast worldwide network of military bases that are even used by the military NSA to spy on everyone (The Virgin MOMCOM - 8, Blind Willie McTell News).

The presstitutes have recently been trying to inject the old cold war fears to perpetuate the plundering of the middle class (Ukraine: Tea Potters In A Tempest, cf. Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money through Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money - 10).

The increasing poverty and joblessness is a result of distributing the welfare of the middle class and poor, by, among other things, sending jobs overseas where Pentagon military presence in 191 countries protects 1% operations in those areas (MOMCOM - A Mean Welfare Queen, American Feudalism - 6).

This has been the history of the past century, the past one hundred years (Viva Egypt - 2), and it continues unabated now:
Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last week when he announced that the Army would shrink to levels not seen since before World War II. Headlines about this crisis followed in papers like the New York Times and members of Congress issued statements swearing that they would never allow our security to be held hostage to the budget-cutting process.

Yet a careful look at budget figures for the U.S. military -- a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57% of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40% of all military spending on this planet -- shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon.

This piece of potentially explosive news has, however, gone missing in action -- and the “news” that replaced it could prove to be one of the great bait-and-switch stories of our time.
(The Pentagon’s Phony Budget War, Tom Dispatch). This money, your tax dollars, is used to interfere with internal politics of many nations:
Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War.  (*indicates successful ouster of a government)
  • China 1949 to early 1960s
  • Albania 1949-53
  • East Germany 1950s
  • Iran 1953 *
  • Guatemala 1954 *
  • Costa Rica mid-1950s
  • Syria 1956-7
  • Egypt 1957
  • Indonesia 1957-8
  • British Guiana 1953-64 *
  • Iraq 1963 *
  • North Vietnam 1945-73
  • Cambodia 1955-70 *
  • Laos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
  • Ecuador 1960-63 *
  • Congo 1960 *
  • France 1965
  • Brazil 1962-64 *
  • Dominican Republic 1963 *
  • Cuba 1959 to present
  • Bolivia 1964 *
  • Indonesia 1965 *
  • Ghana 1966 *
  • Chile 1964-73 *
  • Greece 1967 *
  • Costa Rica 1970-71
  • Bolivia 1971 *
  • Australia 1973-75 *
  • Angola 1975, 1980s
  • Zaire 1975
  • Portugal 1974-76 *
  • Jamaica 1976-80 *
  • Seychelles 1979-81
  • Chad 1981-82 *
  • Grenada 1983 *
  • South Yemen 1982-84
  • Suriname 1982-84
  • Fiji 1987 *
  • Libya 1980s
  • Nicaragua 1981-90 *
  • Panama 1989 *
  • Bulgaria 1990 *
  • Albania 1991 *
  • Iraq 1991
  • Afghanistan 1980s *
  • Somalia 1993
  • Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
  • Ecuador 2000 *
  • Afghanistan 2001 *
  • Venezuela 2002 *
  • Iraq 2003 *
  • Haiti 2004 *
  • Somalia 2007 to present
  • Libya 2011*
  • Syria 2012
  • [Ukraine 2014]
(RINF, "Overthrowing other people’s governments"). Each of those nations is located in one of the Pentagon's six commands which cover the entire round globe, the world (see "The Virgin MOMCOM - 8" link up-thread), and according to some reports, we can add the Ukraine to the list:
The Estonian foreign ministry confirmed the leaked conversation was accurate. It said: "Foreign minister Paet was giving an overview of what he had heard in Kiev and expressed concern over the situation on the ground. We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition's involvement in the violence." Ashton's office said it did not comment on leaks.

During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga – who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor – blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.

"What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides," Paet said.

"So she also showed me some photos, she said that as medical doctor, she can say it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it's really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened."

"So there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition," Paet says.
(Guardian). So, snipers paid to be doing the bidding of the hard-right were shooting both police and demonstrators which benefited any country but Russia.

The social critics (e.g. Ukraine Through the Fog of the Presstitutes) like Dredd Blog are supposed to be doing something to counter the massive propaganda of the mainstream media:
In our own era, continuous commentary on the political maneuverings around DOMA, health care and immigration has sometimes obscured a massive failure [by the presstitutes] to engage with the issues of poverty, mass incarceration, growing wealth disparity, corporatization, endless war, ecological catastrophe and the striking abandonment of the concept of the common good.
(The Point, "... the Role of the Social Critic", emphasis added). Here at Dredd Blog you can read entire series of posts covering each of those subjects year in and year out (see the index at Series Posts).

The previous post in this series is here.

This is dedicated to Rupert Morlock:



1 comment:

  1. Paul Craig Roberts points out that Russia has a right to have 25,000 troops in Crimea, but has only about 15,000. Russian troops have been there since 1990s: Link

    ReplyDelete