Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts

10 December 2023

The Lesser of Two Evils Is Still Evil



At the extreme the methods of both the left and the right become increasingly similar, even though their nominal objectives may differ greatly. 

In the end they invoke perception and power to maintain a veneer of hypocrisy, while promoting a dogmatic set of beliefs through varying degrees of force and fraud.  Invoking necessity and the lesser of two evils, dissent is repressed, and discussion is silenced.  Because their beliefs no longer serve the public, or principles, or higher ideals.  

They are enthralled to power and money, and themselves, above all else. 

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers, with approving smiles."

Simone Weil

09 August 2018

Silencing Dissident Voices: Consortium News Interviews State Department Whistleblower Peter Van Buren


"In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship."

Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist


"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Constitution of the United States, Amendment I


"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."

Martin Luther King

"On the premiere edition of Consortium News Radio we speak with Peter Van Buren, a former State Department official, whistleblower and victim of Twitter censorship.

Van Buren speaks about his experiences in Iraq, the critical book he wrote about those experiences and how the Obama State Department eventually attempted to have him tried under the Espionage Act.

This week Van Buren had his Twitter account permanently shut down and seven years of his Tweets wiped from the record. Why? Because he challenged mainstream journalists who contested a Tweet from journalist Glenn Greenwald that mainstream reporters support America’s wars and help bring them about.

One corporate journalist decided to silence Van Buren by complaining to Twitter, which, within two days, and with no due process, obliged.

Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, interviewed Van Buren on Wednesday, August 8 for 40 minutes."

You can view the Consortium News website here.

I am sure most of us have forgotten Van Buren, and the other 'whistleblowers, activists, and dissenters' that were prosecuted, and sometimes vindictively persecuted, by Obama/Clinton.

Julian Assange comes to mind as well, among others.  How he has been treated is disgraceful and an abusive use of state power and 'the letter of the law.'   But going forward it will set the tone for freedom of the press for everyone who chooses to say things that are at odds with, or even unflattering to, the prevailing narrative.

Pervastive platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth should be treated like common carriers.   That would relieve them from having to bear the burden of defining what is to be censored and what is not.  This places that burden on the government, subject to all the checks and balances and recourse therein.

It is all too easy for government to pressure private companies to excess, and then point the finger at them, holding them as scapegoats.

And those on both right and left should be able to see the excesses that may be justified by this current climate of hysteria, which truth be told, emanates from the corporate Democrats as much as any of the many excesses of the GOP.





10 January 2018

And Now Comes the Internet Censorship


"A credibility trap is when the regulatory, political and/or informational functions of a society have been so compromised by a long term, generalcorruption that they cannot address any meaningful reform without implicating, at least incidentally, themselves.  The status quo has at least tolerated the corruption and fraud, if not profited directly from it, and most likely continues to do so.  The power brokers have become susceptible to various forms of blackmail.  And so a failed policy is sustained long after it is seen to have failed, because admitting failure is not an option for those who hold positions of advantage and power."

Jesse


"One of the primary characteristics of narcissists is their exaggerated sense of entitlement.  It's hardly surprising then that so many politicians somehow think they deserve to game the system.  After all, from their self-interested perspective, isn't that what the system is for?  In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be their's.  So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with. And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything."

Leon F. Seltzer


"Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism


"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform."

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup


"On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?— three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that—  Masters of the Universe."

Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities

The pain of remaining human—  when the increase in wickedness unleashes the age old enemy, and makes the love of most grow cold.

How does the status quo deal with an erosion of confidence in their actions in the late stage of a cycle of looting and abuse, caught as they may be in a credibility trap?

This is the point where we seem to be, when the facade of benevolent justice starts slipping away, and the looting and self-dealing becomes all too visible, on brazen display in scandal after scandal,  special privileges and bailouts, and historic inequality.

And if there is an erosion of confidence, it surely cannot be due to anything that the best among us have done.  They are wise and benevolent, heavily burdened by the task of guiding the public.

So there must be some foreign enemy or internal dissidents, actively trying to  cause people to lose confidence in their rule.

When you run out of credible answers, one solution is to stop people from asking the questions.   An offer of the bullet or the bribe is often effective for those with significant profiles and platforms.  It is being used now more than you may know.   The pressure on the well-informed to be silent is presently palpable.  The quiet sacrifice of many people of conscience is under-appreciated.

A broader and more general use of censorship is sufficient for the rest.   Concentration of mainstream media ownership in a few powerful hands is soon followed by increased and unilateral censorship powers over the wider variety of remaining independent sources.

There is a case to be made for restricting certain types of public speech, especially that which incites the public to violent prejudice. But that case must be narrow, highly transparent, and exceptional and infrequent. Unfortunately in times of general corruption measured restraint becomes abusive, widely and secretly used to silence any form of truth-telling and dissent from the established narratives and powers.

And it should be noted that in the cases of the most extreme examples of hate speech in history, their power was not in their eloquence, or the powerful logic of their arguments, of which they had neither.  If we look at them now their language is crude and their ideas vulgar, false, and repugnant..

No, their power was that no one was able to speak out freely against them, to dissent from their obvious misstatements and errors, that were repeated endlessly without anyone who could effectively stand against them.  And the people followed those lies into the abyss.

The Intercept
First France, Now Brazil Plan to Empower the Government to Censor the Internet
By Glenn Greenwald

Yesterday afternoon, the official Twitter account of Brazil’s Federal Police (its FBI equivalent) posted an extraordinary announcement. The bureaucratically nonchalant tone it used belied its significance. The tweet, at its core, purports to vest in the federal police and the federal government that oversees it the power to regulate, control and outright censor political content on the internet that is assessed to be “false,” and to “punish” those who disseminate it. The new power would cover both social media posts and entire websites devoted to politics...

Tellingly, these police officials vow that they will proceed to implement the censorship program even if no new law is enacted. They insist that no new laws are necessary by pointing to a pre-internet censorship law enacted in 1983 – during the time Brazil was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that severely limited free expression and routinely imprisoned dissidents...

The move to obtain new censorship authority over the internet by Brazilian police officials would be disturbing enough standing alone given Brazil’s status as the world’s fifth most populous country and second-largest in the hemisphere. But that Brazil’s announcement closely follows very similar efforts unveiled last week by French President Emmanuel Macron strongly suggests a trend in which government are now exploiting concerns over “Fake News” to justify state control over the internet...

Beyond having one’s political content forcibly suppressed by the state, disseminators of “Fake News” could face fines of many millions of dollars. Given Macron’s legislature majority, “there is little doubt about its ability to pass,” the Atlantic reports.

Both Brazil and France cited the same purported justification for obtaining censorship powers over the internet: namely, the dangers posed by alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. But no matter how significant one views Russian involvement in the U.S. election, it is extremely difficult to see how – beyond rank fear-mongering – that could justify these types of draconian censorship powers by Brasília and Paris...

So for those who are comfortable with the current French leader overseeing a censorship program in conjunction with courts to censor “Fake News” from the internet, do you trust the Trump administration to make those determinations? Do you trust Marine Le Pen?...

Read the entire essay at The Intercept here.

Given the growth of intolerance, a surprisingly large segment of the public will not only tolerate, but may welcome censorship.  They wish to escape the pain of thinking, of being human.  They wish to smash all the mirrors that reflect their growing inhumanity.

"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, have given up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer


“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death— the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and murders that we are not going to be judged.”

Czesław Miłosz

01 May 2014

Follow the Money: The Failure of Corporately Owned Journalism in a Crony Capitalist System


"I have been told by multiple members of the media that JP Morgan Chase has called them and stated that if their media outlet has me on television again, that JP Morgan Chase will pull their advertising from the offending network."

James Koutoulas, Founder of Commodity Customer Coalition and advocate for victims of MF Global

"The crisis blew into public view last November when The New York Times, followed by the Financial Times and others, reported that a big, new enterprise project from Bloomberg, said to have documented an extensive web of corrupt ties between one of China’s wealthiest businessmen and elite politicians, had been spiked at an unusually late stage in the editing process.

The reported spike came after an extensively footnoted version of the story had been fact-checked and pored over by company lawyers, and after members of the reporting team had been praised internally for yet more stellar work. The Times reported that Winkler, in a conference call with reporters, defended the decision not to publish the story by likening the situation to the need for self-censorship by foreign bureaus in Nazi Germany to preserve their ability to continue reporting there.

That reasoning was controversial enough, but a Bloomberg executive would later let slip a motive that was even more problematic...The defining moment, however, the one that has dealt the deepest shock to Bloomberg and may affect it for years, was a widely reported speech by the company’s chairman, Peter T. Grauer, who in March said, in effect, that Bloomberg had gotten carried away with its investigative journalism in China to the detriment of its true vocation: selling computerized terminals that provide financial information.

“We have about 50 journalists in the market, primarily writing stories about the local business and economic environment,” Grauer said in answer to a questioner after a speech at the Asia Society in Hong Kong. “You’re all aware that every once in a while we wander a little bit away from that and write stories that we probably may have kind of rethought—should have rethought.”

Howard W. French, Bloomberg's Folly, Columbia Journalism Review, May 1, 2014

Read the entire story here.


31 March 2014

Iron Grip of the Credibility Trap: The Ongoing War On Whistleblowers and Transparency


Sam Seder interviews documentary film maker Robert Greenwald on his 2013 film, War On Whistleblowers.

A reader informs me that this documentary is currently available on Netflix streaming.




“Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance.”

Office of the President-elect Barack Obama, 2008 Transition Project