Month: January 2019

by William Skink

There is a great long-read about media and unionizing that includes what Lee Enterprises and scumbag Matt Gibson did to the Missoula Indy staff, which you can read here. Here is a portion of the Missoula-relevant part:

On a Tuesday morning in September, Indy staff learned the paper had shut down before the workday even began. The move was abrupt, moreso considering everything had been in place for the next issue. Lee deleted the paper’s social media accounts and essentially salted the earth by replacing its website archive with a redirect to the Missoulian’s homepage.

The impact of a community newspaper can’t be quantified, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Last month, an episode of National Public Radio’s podcast Hidden Brain examined the relationship between newspaper closures and interest rates. The show cited research that found interest rates for loans go up after newspapers shut down, due to an increased risk of local government corruption when there aren’t journalists around to play watchdog.

Dan Brooks, a freelance reporter and former columnist for the Indy, said that’s his biggest concern, that the loss of the Indy equates a loss in accountability.

“I think that city and county government are going to be able to get away with a lot in the absence of the Indy because, you know, local television news is not performing that function, and The Missoulian, their staff is overworked,” he said. “They’re putting out the same paper with a smaller staff, and I don’t think they’re in a position to devote resources to longform, long-term investigative journalism.

“It’s a bonanza for low-level, small town corruption.”

Brooks is absolutely correct in his assessment. Losing the Indy means much less scrutiny on local government and government-related agencies that receive Federal funding, like Mountain Line. I know the Indy would have been all over the selective removal of benches near the homeless shelter on Broadway.

I still get angry every Thursday. I get even angrier when I’m looking for information, and I think I find something, but it’s an old Indy article, so I get a redirect to the Missoulian website. In the excerpt above the term “salted the earth” definitely applies.

Now, more than ever, Missoula needs critical voices to counter the drumbeat of development. In a cheerleading piece from the Missoulian about “radical updates proposed for downtown Missoula” the rapacious appetite of development is salivating over getting its hooks on public spaces, like Caras Park. A few weeks ago the city brought in Jason King to present these radical ideas. The Missoulian article makes no effort to explain King’s role or even mention the agency he works for.

Quality reporting. From the link:

Imagine a parking structure instead of the one-level lot near Caras Park, with roof-top restaurants and decks overlooking the Clark Fork River and a main floor public market, where families can relax after playing on the carousel. Imagine a small, nearby winter ice rink that turns into a splash pond in the summer.
…
He expected the potential changes to the Caras Park area would be the most controversial, and was surprised when 70 percent of audience members taking part in an immediate key pad poll at The Wilma either voted “yes” or “probably yes.” Another 20 percent said they had more questions about it, and 10 percent were opposed.

King was quick to point out that the possible changes to the Caras Park area could top $20 million. He said they understand the public feels tapped out, and instead of floating a bond or using property taxes, the city may need to partner with a developer — something he called a “deal with the devil” as a city planner.

“Usually, we say you don’t give up public space because you will never get it back, but we can’t find any other way to pay for the improvements that people are looking at now,” he said. “This is one that our team had very mixed feelings about.”

Metropolis Missoula is coming. I think about this impending vision for the valley while I’m stuck in standstill traffic on Mullan going to work in the morning. Missoula’s infrastructure is showing serious strains from our growing population, and essential services are struggling. Or maybe I’m interpreting the inability to address criminal behavior in bus shelters during the day along Broadway wrong.

Who is going to fill the void left by the shuttering of the Indy? Not the Missoula Current, that’s for sure. And not some blogger putting up posts in his spare time.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see if local efforts can resurrect something to take the place of the empty space corporate greed (and fucking Matt Gibson) made when they shut the doors and salted the earth.

by William Skink

It must be hard for someone who has spent over a decade promoting Democrats and denouncing Republicans to acknowledge how little difference exists between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to disastrous American foreign policy.

All it took was a link to this pathetic attempt at unifying Democrats to get political scold Don Pogreba to make an appearance, using his highly advanced debating skills to mock my post with this comment:

I know this blog post will stop American militarism in its tracks. Well done!

Obviously my posts will never stop American militarism, that is the point of Pogreba’s mockery. Serious political partisans understand that American militarism is here to stay because they worship at the alter of American exceptionalism. Any critic who deviates from the consensus of American militarism, whether it’s a “humanitarian intervention” in Libya or a coup in Venezuela, deserves to be mocked.

The only presidential hopeful who has explicitly opposed the bipartisan support of the coup in Venezuela, Tulsi Gabbard, was also the target of Pogreba’s mockery. In response to a commenter who said this:

EZ choice. Tulsi Gabbard is the only real one out of that horrible corporatist warmongering bunch.

Don Pogreba had this reply:

Cool take, comrade.

For someone trying to get Democrats unified ahead of the 2020 election, insinuating Tulsi Gabbard and her supporters are communists is an odd way to go about it.

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, will avoid the disdain of pathetic partisans for now after his tweets on Venezuela show Sanders to be more aligned with Trump and Neocons/Neoliberals than non-interventionists:

Here’s Shamus Cooke describing how Bernie and the Dems flunked Trump’s test on Venezuela:

After an excruciating day of silence Bernie finally found his voice— by sending three tweets. But the content was revealing, reinforcing the weakness that kept him silent during the first critical day.

Tweet #1 was essentially a point-by-point plagiarism of Trump’s lies used to justify the coup. Bernie Tweeted:

“The Maduro government has waged a violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society, violated the constitution by dissolving the National Assembly and was re-elected last year in an election many observers said was fraudulent. The economy is a disaster and millions are migrating.”

Instead of targeting Trump’s coup actions Bernie targets the victim. Bernie’s allegation of a fraudulent election is simply slander, since Venezuela’s elections are widely regarded as among the best in the world.

Read the rest of the article for more analysis on Bernie’s disappointing take on the Venezuela coup.

I am not deluded enough to think my barely-read political posts will have any impact on American militarism. But I’m old and stuck in my ways. What Don Pogreba should do if he really wants to protect America’s capacity to kill and destroy is to make sure those high school students he “teaches” understand the futility of opposing war.

With Don’s help Democrats in Montana can identify any potential non-interventionist/communist high school students before they become adults, then Don can instill in them the hopelessness of opposing America’s war machine. If they do unfortunate things, like start reading Counterpunch articles, then Don’s weaponized mockery would be well-placed to ensure they are marginalized enough to understand their opinions don’t matter.

by William Skink

How can politicians and media figures who have spent the past two years hyperventilating over Russia’s supposed influence over American elections shift so seamlessly to recognizing the unelected opposition in Venezuela?

I truly don’t understand how the cognitive dissonance doesn’t produce some physiological effect, like the exploding of a head or two.

There has been no objective, third party assessment of the validity or corruption of the Venezuelan elections that reelected Maduro. And there will be no significant political cross-winds in America to stop Trump’s deep-state handlers from doing something militarily stupid to assert the selfish interests of their oligarch/corporate funders.

Will Trump’s base absorb another glaring example of how their boy allows himself to be led by the interventionists he campaigned against during the 2016 election? Doubtful. Trump playing 4-D chess as “reported” by Q-anon is an easy, albeit deranged, rationalization over clear evidence Trump won’t oppose the bottomless appetites of empire.

And how about those Progressives? Will they even blink over another coming interventionist disaster, or are they too busy already worrying over party unity for 2020 to care about how Democrats and Trumplicans merrily walk hand-in-hand when it comes to bombing other countries that don’t bend to our imperial will?

I heard NPR casually report over the weekend how America is trying to play “king-maker” in Venezuela. Were the passengers of Suburus going out to recreate in our snowy wonderland (if you can afford it) alarmed at what could transpire?

Will it take a hot war and expensive gas prices to get Americans to pay attention to how America continues to steamroll non-aligned countries with lethal sanctions before trying to overtly capitalize on the chaos our policies help create?

by William Skink

Michelle Alexander will be a hard woman to take down. She is the first woman of color to join the op-ed club at the New York Times, so as far as identity is concerned, she’s got a lot going for her. But will identity be enough to protect her from racists?

I’m not talking about white racists. Six days ago, before Martin Luther King’s day of remembrance, Alexander bravely wrote a piece titled Time to Break the Silence on Palestine.

Read it. You won’t read a braver op-ed in an establishment rag like the NYT anywhere else. Maybe this op-ed can help change that. Here’s an excerpt:

We must not tolerate Israel’s refusal even to discuss the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as prescribed by United Nations resolutions, and we ought to question the U.S. government funds that have supported multiple hostilities and thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the $38 billion the U.S. government has pledged in military support to Israel.

And finally, we must, with as much courage and conviction as we can muster, speak out against the system of legal discrimination that exists inside Israel, a system complete with, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, more than 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinians — such as the new nation-state law that says explicitly that only Jewish Israelis have the right of self-determination in Israel, ignoring the rights of the Arab minority that makes up 21 percent of the population.

With the tides turning, maybe there will be less Progressives on everything but Palestine cowering behind the silence to protect their own political careers.

by William Skink

Jeremy Scahill’s latest podcast, titled Donald Trump and the Media Temple of BOOM!, takes a look at the fallout of the latest bombshell to fizzle in the Russiagate saga.

The transcript isn’t up yet, so I can’t quote exactly what he said, but the gist is these media fuck-ups help Trump, they validate the narrative of fake news (tarnishing good reporting that’s happening) and it’s all leading up to what Scahill is afraid will be a tremendous let down when Mueller’s investigation finally wraps up. If it ever does wrap up. And if the findings are ever shared transparently with the public.

More on why that is doubtful later in the post.

Scahill understands the damage the media is doing to itself. The damage needs to be acknowledged, not ignored. Greenwald has done a good job of holding mainstream media accountable for their embarrassing failures with Russiagate and has provided this handy list of the 10 most embarrassing ones.

A problem I have with Scahill and Greenwald’s framing of these media missteps is I don’t think they are missteps at all. If you understand that this is an information war and that mainstream/corporate media represents the consolidated interests of their parent companies (all 6 of them) then you will better understand what you are seeing and reading.

I think there is an operation being run against Trump and corporate media is playing a significant role. This might sound impossible, but I can both believe that to be the case, while also believing Trump is a dangerous demagogue adding accelerant to a dumpster fire.

Before Trump was inaugurated, Obama signed Executive Order 12333. This move empowered agencies like the FBI to sift through raw data. That means when the FBI interviewed Michael Flynn, sans lawyer, there’s a good chance they had a transcript of what Flynn said to the Russian Ambassador to the US at the time, Sergey Kislyak.

This interview came up last month in transcripts of a Congressional grilling of Comey. From trusty CNN:

In the interview, Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, pressed Comey on the purpose of the interview.

“It is not the FBI’s job, unless I’m mistaken, to correct false statements that political figures say to one another. So why did you send two bureau agents to interview Michael Flynn?” Gowdy asked.

“Because one of the FBI’s jobs is to understand the efforts of foreign adversaries to influence, coerce, corrupt the government of the United States,” Comey responded. “So they were sent there as part of that counterintelligence mission to try and understand why it appeared to be the case that the national security adviser was making false statements about his conversations with the Russians to the vice president of the United States.”

Gowdy also pushed Comey on comments he had made in a New York forum earlier this month, in which he told a moderator his decision to send two FBI agents to the White House without notifying the White House counsel’s office was something he “probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized administration.”

“I’m just kind of hung up on the phrase ‘gotten away with,’ ” Gowdy told Comey on Monday in the private Capitol Hill interview, according to the transcript.
“In an administration where the rhythm of the context between the FBI and the White House was more established, there would’ve been a strong expectation that we coordinate it through White House counsel instead of calling the national security adviser directly. That’s what I meant by it,” Comey replied.

The timing of the interview thrust Comey back into the spotlight over the Russia investigation, as he was quizzed on the Flynn interview the same week that Flynn was supposed to be sentenced by a federal judge, although that sentencing was delayed Tuesday. But memos detailing how the FBI had arranged the interview and the assessment afterward were released ahead of the sentencing date, raising new questions for Comey from Republicans.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Tuesday criticized Comey and the FBI for the interview following Flynn’s hearing.

“The FBI broke standard protocol in the way that they came in and ambushed Gen. Flynn and in the way that they questioned him and in the way that they encouraged not to have White House counsel’s office present,” she said at the White House press briefing.

Without partisan blinders on, it’s not hard to see how the swamp immediately mired Trump in a counter-insurgency effort launched by elements of the permanent deep state. You don’t have to some Breitbart wing-nut to see what’s happening.

Last month, two reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee were made public. Here is how the Grayzone Project describes the report and some initial Democrat reactions:

On December 17, two reports detailing ongoing Russian interference operations commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee were made public. They generated a week’s worth of headlines and sent members of Congress and cable news pundits into a Cold War frenzy. According to the report, everything from the Green Party’s Jill Stein to Instagram to Pokemon Go to the African American population had been used and confused by the deceptive Facebook pages of a private Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency.

Nevermind that 56% of the troll farm’s pages appeared after the election, that 25% of them were seen by no one, or that their miniscule online presence paled in comparison to the millions of dollars spent on social media by the two major presidential campaigns and their supporters to sway voters. This was an act of war that demanded immediate government action.

According to Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the reports were “a wake up call” and a “bombshell” that was certain to bring “long-overdue guardrails when it comes to social media”. His Republican counterpart on the committee, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, hailed the research papers as “proof positive that one of the most important things we can do is increase information sharing between the social media companies who can identify disinformation campaigns and the third-party experts who can analyze them.”

So, why didn’t these bombshell revelations detonate?

But the authors of one of the reports soon suffered a major blow to their credibility when it was revealed that they had engaged in what they called a “Russian style” online disinformation operation aimed to swing a hotly contested special senate election. The embarrassing revelation has already resulted in one of the authors having his Facebook page suspended.

The well-funded deception was carried out by New Knowledge, a private cyber intelligence firm founded by two self-styled disinformation experts who are veterans of the Obama administration: Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox.

It just gets worse from there.

Now, back to Mueller’s investigation. The presumed function of Mueller is that he is investigating Trump’s Russia connections, but I think Mueller has another function, and that is to keep the focus of attention from drifting too far toward the deep state’s “insurance policy” counter-insurgency efforts against Trump.

I recently ran across a very interesting piece on Mueller’s family history, which includes connections to two of the three CIA officials Kennedy fired after the Bay of Pigs failure:

Let me introduce you to the man of the hour in Washington, Robert Swann Mueller III. Robert was born into the upper crust in our American class system. At one point in his education in private schools John Kerry was a classmate. (Kerry was also a fellow Bonesman with the Bushes.) Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966, three years after John Kennedy’s assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann’s grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy’s murder there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world. You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife’s family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a “lone nut”, as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK’s murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding.

You would have to be quite the coincidence theorist to think there’s nothing to these family connections.