Chris Hedges's Blog, page 491

Trump Bookkeeper Said to Have Immunity in Cohen Probe

NEW YORK—Media outlets are reporting that President Donald Trump’s bookkeeper for his personal and business affairs for decades has been granted immunity in the federal probe of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

The Wall Street Journal and NBC News were first to report on anonymous sources that longtime Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg got immunity to talk to federal prosecutors in the investigation of hush money Cohen paid to two women who claimed affairs with Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty to tax and campaign finance violations on Tuesday.

Though not named in the Cohen case, Weisselberg is believed to be one of two Trump executives mentioned in the suit who reimbursed Cohen and covered up the payments by saying they were legal expenses.

Weisselberg has been a Trump confidant who started working for his family in the early 1970s.

Georgia County Dumps Plan to Close 7 of Its 9 Polling Places

ATLANTA—Election officials in a majority black Georgia county voted Friday to scrap a widely condemned proposal to eliminate most of their polling places.

Concern about the proposal to close seven of nine voting locations in the rural county was “overwhelming,” and is “an encouraging reminder that protecting the right to vote remains a fundamental American principle,” the elections board in Randolph County said in a statement.

Voting and civil rights groups applauded the decision but said the episode demonstrates the need to restore Voting Rights Act protections that were tossed out by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013.

The elections board, made up of a black woman and a white man, took about 30 seconds to vote down the proposal, county attorney Tommy Coleman said.

The plan to close polling places had drawn national media attention over the past week, and county officials were inundated with angry emails from all over the country in what Coleman called “a tsunami of attention.”

Critics questioned why a county would make it harder to vote during the hotly contested governor’s race. Georgia’s top elections official, Republican Brian Kemp, is running against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is trying to become Georgia’s first black governor. Both said they oppose the plan.

An independent consultant recommended the consolidation and said the seven polling places in question don’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The county fired that consultant in a letter sent Wednesday.

The polling places in question had all been used for the primary election in May and the primary runoff election in July, and officials should have been aware of ADA compliance issues.

Randolph County and the Department of Justice entered a settlement agreement in 2012 promising to fix the ADA violations in three years. The settlement specifically included a section on polling place compliance. A grant was used to fix issues in the courthouse, but the other updates didn’t happen, Coleman said.

Coleman said the decision not to close the polling places was in the best interest of the county, but “I don’t think this will affect how they operate.”

He said he didn’t know what would be done to address the ADA compliance problems, saying the county doesn’t have the money to make the necessary fixes, certainly not before the November election.

Civil rights groups and black lawmakers said black voters would be disenfranchised if the voting locations were shuttered. Census figures show the county, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) south of Atlanta, is more than 61 percent black, double the statewide percentage.

The circumstances leave “a reasonable observer to wonder whether the real motive behind these closures is indeed to make it harder for African Americans to cast a ballot,” American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia attorney Sean Young said in a letter sent to county officials Aug. 14.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the ACLU of Georgia sent a joint letter Wednesday to election officials in all 159 Georgia counties, urging them to avoid polling place changes that could disenfranchise voters.

On Thursday, leaders of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus strongly urged the county to keep them open. In a letter to Randolph County officials, the congressional group called it “a deliberate effort to disenfranchise an emerging and engaged demographic.”

The ACLU of Georgia said in a news release after the vote that the situation “demonstrates clearly the need to reinstate the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act,” which required “historically-discriminatory states such as Georgia to obtain preapproval from a U.S. court or the U.S. Department of Justice before enacting any election changes to ensure that proposed changes would not discriminate against protected minorities.”

GOP Congressman, Wife Plead Not Guilty to Illegal Spending

SAN DIEGO—U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter was swarmed by demonstrators yelling “shame on you!” as he left a federal courthouse Thursday in San Diego after pleading not guilty to charges of illegally using his campaign account for personal expenses.

The California Republican and his wife, Margaret, entered their pleas in federal court, where prosecutors said bond could be set low because the couple is living paycheck to paycheck. The judge agreed to set bail at $15,000 for the congressman and at $10,000 for his wife.

After the arraignment, demonstrators holding signs that read “Duncan Hunter Ethics and Integrity Matter” and “Crooked Duncan Hunter” followed him as he walked to a pickup truck. He got in and removed a “Lock me up!” sign shoved onto the windshield as he was driven away. His wife was not seen leaving the courthouse after the arraignment.

A 60-count indictment unsealed Tuesday charges the couple used more than $250,000 to finance family trips to Italy and Hawaii, golf outings, school tuition, theater tickets and even fast food purchases, and then attempted to conceal the illegal spending in federal records.

Even as the five-term incumbent was under investigation by the FBI, Hunter easily won a 30-point victory in a June primary and established himself as a strong favorite to hold onto his strongly Republican 50th Congressional District seat in San Diego and Riverside counties, which his father held for many years.

Hunter’s attorney, Gregory A. Vega, has claimed there was politically motivated pressure to tarnish Hunter before the general election.

Vega told reporters after the arraignment that “the congressman has faced more difficult battles than this in Iraq and Afghanistan. He looks forward to his day in court.” Hunter’s website says he quit his job as a business analyst soon after 9/11 and joined the Marines, serving three combat tours overseas.

In a statement, House Speaker Paul Ryan called the charges “deeply serious” and said Hunter will be removed from his committee assignments, pending resolution of the case. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said Ryan should call on Hunter to resign.

The California secretary of state’s office said there is no process in the elections code for Hunter to remove his name from the ballot, and there can be no write-in candidates for the November election.

The indictment alleges the couple dipped into campaign cash for years to bankroll their lifestyle, while their household budget was awash in red ink. The spending ranged from the banal to the lavish, from movie tickets to a $6,288.74 family vacation at a resort in Hawaii.

“The Hunters spent substantially more than they earned,” the indictment said. “They overdrew their bank account more than 1,100 times in a 7-year period resulting in approximately $37,761 in ‘overdraft’ and ‘insufficient funds’ bank fees.”

Hunter’s opponent in the general election is Ammar Campa-Najjar, 29, a Democrat who has never held elective office. He received 17 percent of the votes in the primary, coming in second to Hunter. The top two vote getters in California primaries advance regardless of their party affiliation.

Campa-Najjar made a brief appearance outside the courthouse before Hunter exited. He promised to bring “national pride” to the district not “national shame.”

Trump’s Latest Dog Whistle to White Nationalists

Whether calling neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville “very fine people,” sulking through a disavowal of the Ku Klux Klan or sharing Islamophobic videos from British ultranationalists, Donald Trump has whistled to white supremacists time and again. Thursday was no exception, as the president took to Twitter—hours after a “Fox & Friends” interview with him was broadcast by Fox News—to indulge in one of his favorite pastimes: stoking racial enmities.

I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018

Trump’s tweet was in response to a segment by Fox commentator Tucker Carlson exploring a plan of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to expropriate and redistribute the country’s farmlands. In Carlson’s febrile telling, the Ramaphosa government is “stealing private property for racist reasons.”

The reality, as is so often the case with Fox News, is something else entirely. While the proposal is a subject of heated debate, replete with public hearings across several provinces, South Africa is attempting to reckon both with its history of colonialism and apartheid, as well as a present of grinding inequality. (White residents, who constitute 9 percent of the population, own as much as 35 percent of the country’s land and 73 percent of its farmland.) Ramaphosa contends the plan will grow the country’s economy and agricultural output, telling officials in January, “We can make this country the Garden of Eden.”

Trump’s claim about a “large scale killing” of white farmers, meanwhile, is patently untrue. According to The New York Times, such murders have actually plummeted to a 20-year low over the past year. But what Carlson will never admit, and the Times astutely acknowledges, is that this conspiracy theory has emerged as a favorite talking point on the alt-right. For proof, one need look no further than the responses from some of the movement’s most prominent voices:

The default Republican position has been to conveniently ignore the plight of White South Africans.

Trump–spurred by Tucker, whose report was, in turn, inspired by @Lauren_Southern–has changed the game.

— Richard

Even a Majority of Republicans Want ‘Medicare for All,’ Poll Finds

As its progressive wing and a groundswell of new and energetic candidates continues to move the Democratic Party to the left, a new Reuters poll out Thursday shows that support for a key plank of this insurgency—Medicare for All—has hit an all-time high with 70 percent of all Americans now in favor of a such program, including nearly 85 percent of Democrats and a full 52 percent of Republicans.

With such levels of popularity, as an accompanying article exploring some of the tensions within the party makes clear, Democratic leaders are being told they ignore the push for Medicare for All at their own peril.

Incredible. According to a new poll 70 percent of Americans now support Medicare for all—including 52 percent of Republicans! The momentum is with us. pic.twitter.com/6V8G8E35Nb

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 23, 2018

Members of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) policy team also applauded the findings:

uh, holy shit new @Reuters poll

“would you support a policy of medicare for all?”

democrats: 84.5%

republicans: 51.9%https://t.co/zU5UHPWqby

— mike casca (@cascamike) August 23, 2018

84.5% of Democrats support Medicare for All.

51.9% of Republicans (!!) support Medicare for All.

Don’t tell anyone but, uh, we’re gonna win. https://t.co/dqdPoesqZQ pic.twitter.com/oKqTKAn9Xq

— Josh Miller-Lewis (@jmillerlewis) August 23, 2018

While the Reuters article focused mainly on the question of whether progressive leaders like Sanders and congressional candidates like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nebraska’s Kara Eastman can convince voters to support progressive proposals, the news agency’s polling showed that centrist Democrats, who claim they are trying to appeal to so-called “moderates,” are actually alienating the vast majority of potential voters on key issues.

But the poll toward the bottom of the page conveyed that centrist Democrats still intent on appealing to moderates who they believe want to preserve the for-profit health sector—one that costs Americans $3.4 trillion per year while delivering worse outcomes than universal healthcare systems like those in the United Kingdom and France—are actually alienating the vast majority of voters.

“Democrats have been fixated for 20 years on this elusive, independent, mythical middle of the road voter that did not exist,” Crystal Rhoades, head of the Democratic Party in Nebraska’s Douglas County, told Reuters. “We’re going to try bold ideas.”

While the new poll showed higher support from Republicans for Medicare for All than other surveys, it is far from an anomaly. Progressive journalist Jordan Chariton and the Democratic Socialists of America noted that other recent polls have found that Americans from both sides of the aisle now favor government-funded universal healthcare in greater numbers than ever before.

Both also expressed deep frustration at Washington insiders’ insistence that the issue is a losing one in areas thought to be conservative-leaning, as in Tuesday’s Politico article which quoted one veteran Democratic pollster as saying, “Voters are smart enough to know that Medicare for all isn’t going to happen right now, or maybe ever.”

So #MedicareForAll is polling at 57% among Democrats and nearly 50% AMONG REPUBLICANS. So , naturally, Dem Party wizards want to run away from it (aided by stenographers in the media distorting its benefits and costs) https://t.co/rYiBcwAd00

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) August 22, 2018

63% of Americans support Medicare for All, including 81% of Democrats, 66% of Independents, and 42% of Republicans.

Anything less than a ringing endorsement of single-payer is a losing strategy. https://t.co/VpObq4mPoA

— DSA for Medicare for All (@dsam4a) August 22, 2018

The new poll numbers come less than a week after CNN‘s Jake Tapper released a “Friday Fact Check” segment claiming that a study by the Koch brothers-funded Mercatus Center concluded that Medicare for All would cost more than the current healthcare system, ignoring the report’s finding that it would actually save the U.S. $2 trillion in overall healthcare costs.

Proponents of the proposal shared Reuters’ new poll widely, expressing hope that the increasingly positive view of Medicare for All among all Americans would become impossible for pollsters and centrists to ignore.

As Koch-funded think tanks and corporate media “fact checkers” do their best to derail Medicare for All, new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds 70% of Americans want M4A, including FIFTY-TWO PERCENT OF REPUBLICANS. https://t.co/7OQwvnS4Wq pic.twitter.com/TQhAelhDIl

— Alex Kotch

Enquirer Kept Trove of Stories, Hush-Money Records on Trump

NEW YORK—The National Enquirer kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories it killed as part of its cozy relationship with Donald Trump leading up to 2016 presidential election, people familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press.

The detail came as several media outlets reported on Thursday that federal prosecutors had granted immunity to National Enquirer chief David Pecker, potentially laying bare his efforts to protect his longtime friend Trump.

Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty this week to campaign finance violations alleging he, Trump and the tabloid were involved in buying the silence of a porn actress and a Playboy model who alleged affairs with Trump.

Several people familiar with the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements, said the safe was a great source of power for Pecker, the company’s CEO.

The Trump records were stored alongside similar documents pertaining to other celebrities’ catch-and-kill deals, in which exclusive rights to people’s stories were bought with no intention of publishing to keep them out of the news. By keeping celebrities’ embarrassing secrets, the company was able to ingratiate itself with them and ask for favors in return.

But after The Wall Street Journal initially published the first details of Playboy model Karen McDougal’s catch-and-kill deal shortly before the 2016 election, those assets became a liability. Fearful that the documents might be used against American Media, Pecker and the company’s chief content officer, Dylan Howard, removed them from the safe in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, according to one person directly familiar with the events.

The AP cannot say whether the documents were destroyed or simply were moved to a location known to fewer people.

American Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pecker’s immunity deal was first reported Thursday by Vanity Fair and The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources. Vanity Fair reported that Howard also was granted immunity.

Court papers in the Cohen case say Pecker “offered to help deal with negative stories about (Trump’s) relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”

The Journal reported Pecker shared with prosecutors details about payments that Cohen says Trump directed in the weeks and months before the election to buy the silence of McDougal and another woman alleging an affair, porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels was paid $130,000, and McDougal was paid $150,000.

While Trump denies the affairs, his account of his knowledge of the payments has shifted. In April, Trump denied he knew anything about the Daniels payment. He told Fox News in an interview aired Thursday that he knew about payments “later on.”

In July, Cohen released an audio tape in which he and Trump discussed plans to buy McDougal’s story from the Enquirer. Such a purchase was necessary, they suggested, to prevent Trump from having to permanently rely on a tight relationship with the tabloid.

“You never know where that company — you never know what he’s gonna be —” Cohen says.

“David gets hit by a truck,” Trump says.

“Correct,” Cohen replies. “So, I’m all over that.”

Former Enquirer employees who spoke to the AP said that negative stories about Trump were dead on arrival dating back more than a decade when he starred on NBC’s reality show “The Apprentice.”

In 2010, at Cohen’s urging, the National Enquirer began promoting a potential Trump presidential candidacy, referring readers to a pro-Trump website Cohen helped create. With Cohen’s involvement, the publication began questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace and American citizenship in print, an effort that Trump promoted for several years, former staffers said.

The Enquirer endorsed Trump for president in 2016, the first time it had ever officially backed a candidate. In the news pages, Trump’s coverage was so favorable that the New Yorker magazine said the Enquirer embraced him “with sycophantic fervor.”

Positive headlines for Trump, a Republican, were matched by negative stories about his opponents, including Hillary Clinton, a Democrat: An Enquirer front page from 2015 said “Hillary: 6 Months to Live” and accompanied the headline with a picture of an unsmiling Clinton with bags under her eyes.

DeVos Weighs Federal Funding for Arming Teachers

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is considering a plan to use federal funding to put guns in schools, The New York Times reported Thursday, calling it an “unprecedented” move.

In March, following multiple school shootings, Congress passed a $50 million school safety bill for districts around the country that, as the Times notes, “expressly prohibited the use of the money for firearms.”

Public opinion started to turn more positive toward gun control, especially after the shootings in February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 students died. A February Politico/Morning Consult poll showed “support for stricter gun laws among registered voters [is] at 68 percent, compared with just 25 percent who oppose stricter gun laws.”

While support for gun control tends to rise after school shootings, Parkland students have made a point of keeping their names and stories in the news, touring the country and attempting to persuade youths to register to vote so that they can elect politicians who support gun control. According to a recent Elle magazine story, Parkland students are even using a high tech T-shirt to aid their registration drive.

As back-to-school season begins, however, DeVos’ Department of Education seems determined to buck the trend. According the Times, the department is examining the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grant program, which, unlike the congressional school safety funding, does not prohibit spending on weapons.

“That omission,” the Times reports, “would allow [DeVos] to use her discretion to approve any state or district plans to use grant funding for firearms and firearm training, unless Congress clarifies the law or bans such funding through legislative action.”

Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill told the Times that “[t]he department is constantly considering and evaluating policy issues, particularly issues related to school safety.” She declined to elaborate.

As the Times explains, Student Support and Academic Enrichment is a $1 billion grant program intended to help the nation’s poorest school districts accomplish three goals: “providing a well-rounded education, improving school conditions for learning and improving the use of technology for digital literacy.”

The Education Department is exploring the position that guns could fit the criteria for improving school conditions, although current guidelines for meeting that criteria include expanding access to mental health services, support for students returning to school from juvenile detention, and other social services.

The Times observes that, like calls from President Trump to arm teachers following the Parkland shootings, the Education Department proposal is almost certain to receive backlash.

In addition to being a departure from current models of education funding, it’s also in sharp contrast to funding on school safety. “Guidance for grants distributed by the Homeland Security Department that are intended for ‘school preparedness,’ for example, notes that weapons and ammunition are not permitted,” the Times reports.

According to the Education Department, school shootings were not taken into account when programs such as Student Support and Academic Enrichment were established. Previous public comments on the subject by DeVos and her staff members suggest that they will leave the question of whether to arm teachers or school staff up to individual states.

Trump, Corporate Media Are Both Enemies of the People

CNN’s liberal and anti-Trump talk show host Erin Burnett was in crisis mode last week. She was rolling her eyes, anxious for the fate of the republic. The cause of her angst? A Gallup poll showing that 57 percent of the nation’s Democrats now respond more favorably to the word “socialism” than they do to “capitalism”—this compared to 47 percent of Democrats who prefer “capitalism” over “socialism.”

Burnett interviewed Jen Psaki, a Democratic commentator and former communications director in the Obama administration, and a gloating Republican political commentator named Scott Jennings. She and her two guests agreed that this dreadful socialism business augured certain defeat for the Democrats in 2018 and 2020.

Burnett looked relieved as she put up a clip in which “progressive Democrat” and Maryland gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous responded when a reporter asked him whether he identified with the term “socialist”: “Are you f*#&ing kidding me?”

“I have to say I love Ben Jealous,” Burnett said, “for saying what he really thinks.”

Psaki expressed confidence the Democrats will be able to “capture [popular] enthusiasm and energy” linked to Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez “without going to the extreme left.”

Never mind that Sanders, who openly identifies as a socialist, was found in a Harvard-Harris poll last year to be “the most popular politician” (Newsweek) in the U.S., or that a good majority of the Democratic Party’s base prefers “socialism” to “capitalism.”

Never mind that the mildly leftish progressive Sanders would likely have defeated CNN’s bête noire Donald Trump if the Vermont senator had been the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. Never mind that what the supposed “extreme left” candidates Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other “progressive” Democrats mean by “socialism” is a series of mildly leftish social-democratic and progressive neo-New Deal policies that have long had majority support, not just among Democrats but in the whole country. The policies include: “Medicare for All” (single-payer health insurance as a human right); seriously progressive taxation of the ever-more obscenely wealthy few (in a time when the top 10th of the upper U.S. 1 percent holds as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent and three ridiculously rich men have as much wealth among them as the poorest half); free college tuition; a significantly increased federal minimum wage, and real environmental protection combined with a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Perhaps the most telling thing about Burnett and her guest’s response to the Gallup poll was their utter lack of curiosity about why the number of Democrats who prefer “socialism” to “capitalism” is now 10 points higher than the other way around. Might that have something to do with the profoundly inegalitarian, oligarchic, authoritarian and now clearly eco-exterminist performance of American and global capitalism as experienced by millions and millions of real people, especially the younger adults who embrace “socialism” to a far greater degree than their elders?

It was just another tricky day of the U.S. corporate media behaving as—to borrow a phrase from the orange-tinted quasi-fascist Donald Trump—“the enemy of the people.”

Yes, Trump is a malignant racist, sexist, plutocrat and narcissist who is, in the words of former CIA Director John Brennan (more on him below), “drunk on power.” He’s a pathological liar, an arch-authoritarian, a consummate bully, a vicious dullard and a deadly agent of ecocide.

Trump is so narcissistic he couldn’t even mention the passing of the magnificent singer Aretha Franklin without trying to make the story about him by claiming (falsely) to have known her “very well”  and that (as if the music legend had been his housekeeper) “she worked for me on numerous occasions.”

The sooner this loathsome and dangerous Bad Grandpa is yanked off the center-stage of history, the better.

But that doesn’t mean that everything the tangerine monstrosity says or tweets is wrong. “Even a broken clock,” the old saying goes, “tells the time right twice a day. “

One example of Trump’s getting something right, in a sense, is in his recurrent description of the nation’s corporate and so-called mainstream media as “the enemy of the people.”

Trump says this for nasty reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to advance democracy or social justice. He says it in astonishingly repugnant ways, calling media professionals “very bad people,” disgusting,” “disgraceful,” “stupid” and even “absolute scum.”

It’s all about his desire to govern like one of the many authoritarian world leaders he creepily admires. In El Donito’s imagined happy place of American politics, all the major media outlets would follow the lead of Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Network and right-wing talk radio to function as Trump State Media.

Still, the wannabe dictator Trump is not completely wrong about that “enemy of the people” thing. The notion the United States possesses a great “free press” and “independent” media functioning as “the lifeblood of our democracy” what “democracy” exactly?)—a central theme in the coordinated editorials that appeared in opposition to Herr Trump’s repeated attacks on the media in 300 U.S. newspapers last Thursday—is one of the great national lies of our time.

The dominant U.S. commercial and corporate media are a means of mass consent-manufacturing indoctrination, diversion and dumbing down on behalf of the nation’s intertwined corporate, financial, imperial and professional-class “elites.” Merging the dystopian visions of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Neal Postman and Phillip K. Dick, they are  a bastion of power-serving propaganda and deadening twaddle that work across hundreds of broadcast channels and through countless print and internet outlets to keep the U.S. citizenry allegiant and subordinated to big capital, the professional and managerial “elite” and the U.S. imperial state.

How could it be otherwise? Just six massive and global corporations—Comcast, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, the News Corporation and Disney—together control more than 90 percent of the nation’s television stations, radio stations, movies, newspapers and magazines. Corporate ownership combines with other deeply entrenched factors to guarantee the not-so-mainstream media’s dutiful service to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, class and empire: the controlling power of corporate advertisers (the mass media’s main market, not the public); the disproportionate purchasing power of the affluent (the main target of advertisers); the elitist socialization, indoctrination and selection of journalists, and the dependence of media on government for information, access and monopoly power.

It’s not just about the news. If you really want to see where mass propaganda on behalf of class rule, racial and gender oppression and U.S. global force projection is most effectively and compellingly manufactured, watch the entertainment media. When it comes to selling U.S-Americans on the supposed virtues of the American Empire and the purported evil of America’s “enemies,” for example, the news media have nothing on movies like “Top Gun,” “Iron Eagle,” “Independence Day,” “Rocky IV,” “Black Hawk Down,” “Argo,” “A Few Good Men,” “From Paris With Love,” “Captain Phillips,” “American Sniper,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Iron Man” and “Eye in the Sky,” and nothing on television shows like “24,” “Homeland,” “Law and Order,” “NCIS” and “FBI.” (This is just a short list from the much larger portfolio of U.S-imperialist “entertainment” media production, often generated with significant Pentagon involvement.)

Forget Kim Il-Trump and his right-wing assault on the “Fake News.” There’s a vast and impressive left, radically democratic literature on how and why the so-called mainstream U.S. media serve concentrated wealth and power, functioning as one of the most potent weapons—if not the single most potent weapon (with chilling power to shape popular perceptions of reality)—in the hands of the nation’s ruling class. See, for starters, Herbert Schiller. “The Mind Managers” (1973); Michael Parenti, “Inventing Reality: The Politics of the News Media” (1986); Parenti, “Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment” (1992); Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988); Robert W. McChesney, “Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy” (New York: Seven Stories, 1997); McChesney, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times” (2000); McChesney, “Blowing the Roof Off the 21st Century: Media” ( 2014); Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” (1983); Anthony DiMaggio, “When Media Goes to War” (2009);  Stephen Macek, “Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City” (2006); and William J. Puette, “Through Jaundiced Eyes: How the Media View Organized Labor” ( 1992). (That, again, is a short list.)

Before you run off to the library or go online to order the books I just listed (which reminds me, please purchase this as well), ask yourself why the number of U.S.-Americans who could properly describe the basics of arch-narcissist reality show personality-turned White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman’s dispute with arch-narcissist reality-television personality-turned POTUS Donald Trump is much greater (I’m guessing by 100 times) than the number of U.S. Americans who could tell you anything meaningful and truthful about the United States’ central and ongoing role in the savage crucifixion of Yemen. The latter story recently included the killing of 40 Yemeni children riding in a school bus. Their vehicle was blown up by a Saudi Arabian missile manufactured by a U.S. “defense” contractor and launched with the logistical support of the U.S. military. Forget the academic literature for now and listen to a common-sense explanation by the lefty, Chicago-born-and-raised comic Jimmy Dore, about MSNBC, the supposed left wing of the allegedly liberal corporate media:

They’re not covering the genocide in Yemen, but they’re covering Russia 24-7… they won’t cover Yemen. Why?  Because we’re complicit. The United States military-industrial complex is helping commit genocide and war crimes inside of Yemen. We’re doing that. We’re doing … ‘siege warfare.’ Siege warfare is a war crime … where you cut off supplies to people … trying to starve them … keeping them from medical supplies. You’re keeping them from clean water. … We’re doing that.

Dore was on point. The U.S. (along with its dutiful imperial pit-bull the United Kingdom) is in fact doing all that. “We” (well, “our” foreign policymakers) are equipping and otherwise participating centrally in the unconscionable infliction of an epic humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen. The Saudi-Emirati coalition has already killed many thousands of innocent Yemenis and has so devastated the nation that famine and a deadly 19th century disease, cholera (from unsanitary water) have gone epidemic there, causing mass child mortality. For weeks now, the coalition has been savagely bombing the port city of Hodeidah, the main entry point for desperately needed food and medical supplies coming into the besieged nation. And, as the intrepid antiwar witness and activist Kathy Kelly recently reported on Counterpunch last weekend:

U.S. companies such as Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin have sold billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to [the Saudi-led] coalition, which is attacking Yemen. The U.S. military refuels Saudi and Emirati warplanes through midair exercises [and] … helps the Saudi[s] choose their targets. … The United States is ‘front and center responsible’ for the Saudi coalition attacks, …‘If an airstrike was a drive-by and killed someone [journalist Samuel Oakford notes], the U.S. provided the car, the wheels, the servicing and repair, the gun, the bullets, help with maintenance of those—and the gas.’

The “mainstream” U.S. media’s silence about this epic wrongdoing has, as usual, been deafening but unsurprising. “Exceptional” America’s starvation, sickening, maiming and slaughter of innocents doesn’t fit the narrative of American benevolence—a doctrinally set staple in U.S. corporate news, war and entertainment media. So, it’s off the airwaves, for the most part—even if MSNBC’s leftmost anchor Chris Hayes was permitted to briefly and mildly break through the news blockade after the school-bus outrage. (That was a crime too heinous to avoid, especially since it took place under Trump and not under a Democratic POTUS and MSDNC darling like Barack Obama, who was deeply complicit in the war on Yemen). About which, listen again to Dore:

The biggest humanitarian catastrophe in the world, we’re gonna wait until 45 minutes into [Hayes’] news broadcast. …We haven’t covered it for over a year, not even mentioned it. So now everyone’s going ‘kudos’s he’s doing it now.’… So now, when [Syrian President Bashar] Assad was supposed to have had chemical weapons and killed 30 people with chemicals, we were supposed to bomb him. … We just killed 56 kids. Who’s supposed to bomb us now? When do we get bombed? When does someone call us butchers? ‘Wow. look at that, [Hayes] went almost two and half whole minutes [about Yemen and the U.S. role in the missile attack on a school-bus there] and people are going nuts complimenting him. …There you go: ‘We covered it.'

It’s nothing you need a Ph.D. to understand. Dore gets it, even if his numbers may be off on the bus attack. He’s from a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where people who pay attention (like the late and great journalist Mike Royko) learn early on that hypocrisy reigns and “money talks, bullshit walks” across party lines.

It’s about more than news censorship, however. The “mainstream media” work relentlessly to reduce their consumers to view issues from the point of the merely personal and private. It erases the social, historical and institutional. It inculcates the primitive level of consciousness where one can grasp something as childish as “Omarosa and Stormy Daniels were treated badly by Donald Trump” but nothing more complex beyond the individual scale than “America Good, Its ‘Enemies’ Bad”—and certainly nothing as involved and ideologically verboten as “the American Empire and military-industrial complex is invested in the murder of children in the Middle East.”

A third recent example of U.S. corporate media’s power-serving and propagandistic role deserves exposure. Last week saw the Big Pharma cable news networks CNN and MSNBC (both outlets host hundreds of drug commercials per day), The New York Times, The Washington Post and most of the corporate news establishment run to defend, acclaim and even lionize blood-soaked U.S.-imperial spy-masters, surveillance chiefs, liars and assassins like former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Why did CNN and MSNBC viewers hear again and again about how these totalitarian agents of imperial superpower death, torture, surveillance and destruction were heroic champions of human rights, liberty and freedom, fiercely dedicated to (of all things) “speaking truth to power”?  Because the Recep Tayyip Erdogan-Vladimir Putin-Xi Jinping-Kim JongUn-wannabe Trump took away Brennan’s national security clearance and threatened those of  Clapper and others as transparently political punishment for the forthright criticism of the president as a stupid, reckless, childish, and generally dysfunctional head of the American Empire. Or because of their status as potential anti-Trump witnesses in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russiagate investigation.

There’s nothing noble or remotely democratic about Trump’s motives. But there’s nothing noble or remotely democratic about imperial actors like Brennan and Clapper either. Brennan ran the drone assassination program under Obama and the extraordinary rendition program under George W. Bush. He was the “principle coordinator” of the American citizen “kill list” and crafted the “disposition matrix” that codified the targeting and secret killing of American citizens. And that was all before Obama tapped Brennan to head the CIA, where he wrote bloody new chapters in the book of imperial deceit and murder and led efforts to block a Senate investigation into CIA torture, including by spying on Senate staff members conducting the investigation.

During her much ballyhooed and deeply respectful interview with Brennan last Friday night, Russiagate-mad MSNBC rock star Rachel Maddow failed to ask him about the authoritarian implications of a recent New York Times op-ed article in which Brennan essentially suggested, in the words of the World Socialist Website’s Joseph Kishore, that “[a]ll social discontent within the United States is the work of ‘Russian puppet masters’ exploiting ‘gullible’ individuals. If ‘freedoms and liberties’ provide an opening for such operations, then these freedoms must be restricted. To ‘save democracy,’ it is necessary to abolish it.” The pretense of Brennan and his supporters to be acting in the name of “democracy” and “free speech,” Kishore notes, “echoes the claims of a long line of would-be dictators who have employed such arguments in the past.” That’s exactly right and should be completely unsurprising to anyone familiar with the arch-nefarious history of the CIA at home and abroad.

The Republican Robert Mueller is treated with solemn worship at CNN, MSNBC, the Times and the Post and the rest of the non-Fox media establishment. You’d never know from the “mainstream” coverage and commentary this new liberal icon and “war hero” (since he won medals in the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia during the 1960s) lied about Iraq’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” during his years as George W. Bush’s FBI director.

I’ll wait to write about Clapper, now a special friend and regular honored guest on the liberal CNN host Don Lemon’s nightly show, and other great Trump and Fox-demonized/CNN and MSNBC-lionized heroes of “speaking truth to power” (even Orwell would be impressed by the application of that phrase to what our “intelligence community” does in the real world) on a future occasion.   

It is appropriate to place quotation marks around the phrase “mainstream media” when writing about dominant U.S. corporate news and entertainment media. During the Cold War era, U.S. officials and media never referred to the Soviet Union’s state television and radio or its main state newspapers as “mainstream Russian media.” American authorities referred to these Russian media outlets as “Soviet state media” and treated that media as the means for the dissemination of Soviet “propaganda” and ideology.

There is no reason to consider the United States’ corporate and commercial media as any more “mainstream” than the leading Soviet media organs were back in their day. They are just as dedicated as the onetime Soviet state media to advancing the doctrinal perspectives of their host nation’s reigning elite—and far more effective.

The Soviets never came remotely close to the United States when it came to wrapping propaganda and ideology in entertainment media (see the Amazon spoof comedy series “Comrade Detective” for an often-hilarious portrayal of what a Stalinist Soviet Bloc version of an American cop show might have looked like). And Soviet news censorship was open and well known, a regular subject for underground coffeehouse comics in 1970s and ’80s Moscow. You could read the initials of the daily paper’s censors at the bottom of each issue of the onetime Soviet state papers Pravda and Izvestia. No illusions there of a totally free and independent media. Everyone knew otherwise, unlike in the U.S.

So, yes, U.S. corporate media are “enemies of the people,” even if that other great enemy of the people Donald Trump—himself a product and arguably a great “frenemy” of the corporate communications complex beneath all his anti-media bluster—says so for reasons that have nothing to with yours or mine.

So, by the way, is the CIA—an enemy of the people, that is.

Hurricane Lane Bears Down, Dumps Rain on Hawaii

HONOLULU—Hurricane Lane soaked Hawaii’s Big Island on Thursday, dumping 12 inches of rain in as many hours as residents stocked up on supplies and tried to protect their homes ahead of the state’s first hurricane since 1992.

The National Weather Service warned that some areas could see up to 30 inches (76 centimeters) before the system passes. Bands of rain extended 350 miles (566 kilometers) from the hurricane’s center.

“Even though the eye is south of the Big Island, we are seeing excessive rainfall already affecting the islands,” weather service meteorologist Gavin Shigesato said from Honolulu.

Tropical storm conditions, with winds of 73 mph (118 kph), were expected to reach the Big Island, Hawaii’s easternmost major island, later Thursday morning, with hurricane conditions possible later in the day.

As of 2 a.m., the hurricane was 335 miles (540 kilometers) south of Honolulu and moving northwest. Maximum winds had weakened slightly to 130 mph, Shigesato said.

The storm was expected to turn to the north later Thursday and into Friday, with little change expected in forward speed. The center could move close to or over portions of the main islands on Thursday or Friday. Then the storm will likely turn to the west Saturday and Sunday and pick up speed, forecasters said.

On Wednesday, the hurricane’s speed slowed from 9 mph to 7 mph (15 kph to 11 kph), Shigesato said. A slower hurricane increases the threat of flash floods and landslides because of prolonged rainfall.

The arrival of the storm’s outer bands made the threat seem more real.

“Everyone is starting to buckle down at this point,” said Christyl Nagao of Kauai. “Our families are here. We have businesses and this and that. You just have to man your fort and hold on tight.”

Shelters opened Wednesday on the Big Island and on the islands of Maui, Molokai and Lanai. Officials urged those needing the Molokai shelter to get there soon because of concerns that the main highway on the island’s south coast could become impassable.

On the island of Oahu, which was put on a hurricane warning late Wednesday, shelters were scheduled to open Thursday. Officials were also working to help Hawaii’s sizeable homeless population, many of whom live near beaches and streams that could flood.

Hawaii Emergency Management Agency Administrator Tom Travis said there’s not enough shelter space statewide and advised people who were not in flood zones to stay home.

Authorities also warned that the shelters are not designed to withstand winds greater than about 40 mph (64 kph) and that for most people they should be a “last resort.”

“Whenever possible, the public should plan to shelter in place or stay with family or friends in homes outside of these hazard areas that were designed, built or renovated to withstand anticipated conditions,” the city and county of Honolulu said in a statement.

Hurricanes are ranked 1 to 5 according to what is known as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Lane is at Category 4, with winds from 130 to 156 mph (209 to 251 kph).

Melanie Davis, who lives in a Honolulu suburb, said she was gathering canned food and baby formula.

“We’re getting some bags of rice and, of course, some Spam,” she said of the canned lunch meat that’s popular in Hawaii.

She was organizing important documents into a folder — birth and marriage certificates, Social Security cards, insurance paperwork — and making sure her three children, all under 4, have flotation devices such as swimming vests “just in case.”

Public schools were closed for the rest of the week, and local government workers were told to stay home unless they are essential employees.

Meteorologist Chevy Chevalier said Lane may weaken to a Category 3 by Thursday afternoon but that would still be a major hurricane.

The central Pacific gets fewer hurricanes than other regions, with about only four or five named storms a year. Hawaii rarely gets hit. The last major storm to hit was Iniki in 1992. Others have come close in recent years.

“We’re planning on boarding up all our windows and sliding doors,” Napua Puaoi of Wailuku, Maui, said after buying plywood from Home Depot. “As soon as my husband comes home — he has all the power tools.”

Puaoi was 12 at the time of Hurricane Iniki.

“When it did happen, I just remember pandemonium. It was all-out craziness,” she said.

Unlike Florida or Texas, where residents can get in their cars and drive hundreds of miles to safety, people in Hawaii are confined to the islands and must stay put. They have to make sure they have enough supplies to outlast prolonged power outages and other potential emergencies.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has several barges with food, water and supplies that it moved into the region ahead of Hurricane Hector, which skirted past the islands more than a week ago, according to FEMA Administrator Brock Long.

The U.S. Navy was moving ships and submarines out of Hawaii. All vessels not currently undergoing maintenance were being positioned to help respond after the storm, if needed.

President Donald J. Trump issued a disaster declaration Wednesday, authorizing the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate disaster-relief efforts with the state.

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Associated Press writers Mark Thiessen and Dan Joling in Anchorage, Alaska, and Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.

Reality Winner Gets 5 Years for Leak on Russian Hacking

AUGUSTA, Ga.—A former government contractor who pleaded guilty to mailing a classified U.S. report to a news organization was sentenced to more than five years in prison Thursday as part of a deal with prosecutors, who called it the longest sentence ever imposed for a federal crime involving leaks to the media.

Reality Winner, 26, pleaded guilty in June to a single count of transmitting national security information. The former Air Force translator worked as a contractor at a National Security Agency’s office in Augusta, Georgia, when she printed a classified report and left the building with it tucked into her pantyhose. Winner told the FBI she mailed the document to an online news outlet.

Wearing an orange jail uniform and shackles in court Thursday, Winner said she took responsibility for “an undeniable mistake that I made.”

“I would like to apologize profusely for my actions,” she told the judge. “… My actions were a cruel betrayal of my nation’s trust in me.”

Authorities never identified the news organization. But the Justice Department announced Winner’s June 2017 arrest the same day The Intercept reported on a secret NSA document. It detailed Russian government efforts to penetrate a Florida-based supplier of voting software and the accounts of election officials ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The NSA report was dated May 5, the same as the document Winner had leaked.

U.S. intelligence agencies later confirmed Russian meddling.

The sentence imposed by U.S. District Court Judge J. Randal Hall was in line with a plea agreement between Winner’s defense team and prosecutors, who recommended she serve five years and three months behind bars.

U.S. Attorney Bobby Christine told reporters Winner’s punishment is the longest sentence ever given for a federal crime involving a leak of secret information to the news media. He said Winner’s leak harmed national security by revealing “sources and methods” that impaired U.S. efforts to gather similar information.

“She was the quintessential example of an insider threat,” said Christine, the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of Georgia.

Among other leak cases cited by prosecutors in court documents, the stiffest prior sentence was three years and seven months in prison given to former FBI explosives expert Donald Sachtleben. Secret information he leaked included intelligence he gave to The Associated Press for a story about a U.S. operation in Yemen in 2012.

Winner’s defense attorneys said they were grateful the judge agreed to the sentence recommended by prosecutors. The charge she pleaded guilty to carried a maximum punishment of 10 years in prison. Winner attorney John Bell noted she will be in her early 30s when she’s released.

“It’s a serious matter and she can now get on with her life,” Bell said.

Winner spent a year in jail before reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors.

After her arrest, prosecutors used Winner’s own words against her, including a Facebook chat in which Winner once wrote to her sister: “Look, I only say I hate America like 3 times a day.”

Winner’s social media postings also included some scathing opinions on President Donald Trump. Three months before her arrest, Winner posted on Facebook that climate change was a more important issue than health care “since not poisoning an entire population seems to be more in line with ‘health’ care, and not the disease care system that people voted for a soulless ginger orangutan to ‘fix.'”

Despite prosecutors’ warnings that Winner may have stolen other U.S. secrets, she was never charged with any additional crimes.

Winner grew up in Kingsville, Texas, and enlisted in the Air Force after graduating from high school. Her parents have said she became a linguist, speaking Arabic and Farsi, and spent four years assigned to the NSA at Fort Mead, Maryland. During that time, Winner provided real-time translation to Americans conducting field missions.

After leaving the military, Winner moved to Augusta to become a civilian contractor for the NSA, which has operated a $286-million complex in the Georgia city since 2012. Court records say Winner translated documents from Farsi to English for the agency.

Winner confessed to leaking the classified report when FBI agents questioned her at her home in June 2017. Winner said she was frustrated at work and had filed complaints “about them having Fox News on.”

Prosecutors later made the 77-page transcript of Winner’s FBI interview part of the court file in her case. Any details about the document she leaked and the organization she mailed it to were redacted. But the rest of her confession to FBI agents became public.

“Yeah, I screwed up royally,” Winner told the agents before she was arrested.

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Associated Press writer Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this report.