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All the right progressives are running for 2020 ... but they need a really smart strategy to have a chance against the neoliberal beast

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New documents reveal a covert British military-intelligence smear machine meddling in American politics

The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive “political smear unit” is infiltrating the US.
by Max Blumenthal and Mark Ames
Part 5 - A foreign agent in the State Department?
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, boasting of “20 years of countering disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends.” In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team member:



Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with “counter-propaganda,” the State Department’s Global Engagement Center has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. “My old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist,…
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The memo that helped kill a half million people in Syria

The memo shows the advice Hillary Clinton was getting to plunge the U.S. deeper into the Syrian war. As Trump seeks to extricate the U.S. the memo has again become relevant, writes Daniel Lazare.
by Daniel Lazare
Part 3 - How it Turned Out
Needless to say, that’s not how things turned out. At that moment, Libya seemed under control. But three or four months later, it would explode as Western-backed Islamist militias blasted away at one another, imposing strict Sharia law, re-instituting slavery and rolling back decades of social progress. Once President Barack Obama approved a modified version of the Clinton-Petraeus plan, Syria would plunge into the same abyss as jihadis funded by Saudi Arabia and the other oil monarchies, many of whom came from Libya, spread sectarian violence and fear.
The memo’s assumption that the U.S. could neatly and cleanly decapitate the Syrian government without having to worry about broader consequences was little short of deluded.
The notion that ordinary Syria…
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The Twitter smearing of Corbyn and Assange

Historian and U.K. analyst Mark Curtis checks out the Twitter accounts of journalists whose names have been associated with the Integrity Initiative, a British “counter disinformation” program.
By Mark Curtis
Part 3 - Linking Assange to the Kremlin
Many of the same individuals have also been tweeting false statements about Julian Assange and Russia.
The Integrity Initiative twitter site itself retweeted a Guardian smear article about a lawyer, Adam Waldman, visiting the Wikileaks founder.

US lobbyist for Russian oligarch visited Julian Assange nine times last year https://t.co/pcvsATION0 — Integrity Initiative (@InitIntegrity) June 20, 2018
It also tweeted: “If you still believe Assange is some kind of hero, you deserve pity at best.”
Anders Aslund has tweeted that Assange “represents certain Russian agencies” that “Wikileaks, Assange & Snowden are nothing but highly successful Russian special operations” and “Kremlin agents” and that “Assange is collaborating w[ith] Russia Today as pr…
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Panicked neoliberal tools attempt to trigger a war of generations against AOC's progressive counterattack

globinfo freexchange
We were slightly surprised to see such an article title in one of the primary info tools of the global neoliberal regime and financial capital. But the subtitle immediately clarified everything.
When we read the title “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Revenge of the Millennials” of the article in Bloomberg, we thought that we might be in front of a small miracle. We thought that the time has come for some people inside the core of the establishment apparatus to admit that the younger generations have lost dramatically from this brutal system. And so, the time has come to overthrow it, take their 'revenge'.
But no, it was too good to be true.
The subtitle immediately revealed the trick: “The Democrats’ major economic initiatives tend to favor the young at the expense of the old.”
Then, inside the article we read: “Almost every major new economic initiative proposed by Democrats — the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, debt-free college — has a common feature: Un…
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JPMorgan raises boss Dimon’s pay to a sweet $31 million, topping pre-crisis record

Wall Street banking giant JPMorgan has awarded its chief executive Jamie Dimon $31 million in total compensation for his work in 2018. The pay exceeds his record compensation of $30 million in 2007 before the financial crisis.
It’s a 5.1 percent increase from 2017 as the bank raked in a record profit last year. Dimon’s pay package included $24.5 million of restricted stock tied to performance, an annual base salary of $1.5 million and a $5 million cash bonus, the New York-based bank said in a regulatory filing. It explained that board members have approved Dimon’s compensation based on the bank’s “strong performance in 2018.”
This week, JPMorgan reported a $32.5 billion annual profit for 2018, the biggest yet in US banking history. The bank’s performance was buoyed by corporate tax cuts, rising interest rates and growth in the firm’s credit-card business.
Dimon, the 62-year-old billionaire banker, has been at the helm since the end of 2005. He has previously said that he plans to stay in…
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Kusturica: Yellow Vests ‘the consequence of the corporate world taking over’

Acclaimed Serbian actor, director, and musician Emir Kusturica told RT that France’s Yellow Vest movement is a “consequence of the corporate world taking over,” and a natural “reaction from the people.”
France’s Yellow Vest protests, which began as a reaction to a fuel tax hike and evolved into a broad national rejection of the centrist, pro-corporate policies of President Emmanuel Macron, have rocked the country for nine weeks, as over a thousand protesters have been detained and Macron’s popularity plummets.
Kusturica, whose work has tackled themes of political corruption and conflict, told RT: “Yellow Vests is the consequence of the corporate world taking over and leaving France with the capital.”
“French people are the most comfortable people in the world and they are starting to lose their privileges,” he added, and the loss of that privilege has driven them to cynicism and riots.
“It’s a consequence of the 90s,” Kusturica continued, “when the corporate world exporting factories to t…
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Labour and anti-Semitism in 2018: The truth behind the relentless smear campaign against Corbyn

Bombarded by disinformation campaigns, many British Jews are being misled into seeing Corbyn as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating Britain against the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism menace
by Jonathan Cook
End-of-year polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and political trends over the past year and predict where things are heading in the next. But a recent poll of European Jews – the largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a new, left-wing form of anti-semitism.
Part 7 - Only ‘partial’ Jews
In fact, Netanyahu’s views are widely shared in Israel. A few years ago the celebrated liberal Israeli author A B Yehoshua outraged American Jews by saying they could only ever be what he called “partial Jews” outside Israel. Speaking of the divide between them and Israeli Jews, he said: “In no way are we the same thing - we are total and they are partial.” He ca…
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Amnesty International’s troubling collaboration with UK & US intelligence

Some troubling connections contradict Amnesty’s image as a benevolent defender of human rights and reveal key figures at the organization during its early years to be less concerned with human dignity and more concerned with the dignity of the US and UK’s image in the world.
by Alexander Rubinstein
Part 1
Amnesty International, the eminent human-rights non-governmental organization, is widely known for its advocacy in that realm. It produces reports critical of the Israeli occupation in Palestine and the Saudi-led war on Yemen.
But it also publishes a steady flow of indictments against countries that don’t play ball with Washington — countries like Iran, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea and more. Those reports amplify the drumbeat for a “humanitarian” intervention in those nations.
Amnesty’s stellar image as a global defender of human rights runs counter to its early days when the British Foreign Office was believed to be censoring reports critical of the British empire.
Peter Be…
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Re-Colonisation

For Thierry Meyssan, one of the consequences of the successive ends of the bipolar and unipolar world is the re-establishment of colonial projects. One after the other, the French, Turkish and English have publicly declared the return of their colonial ambitions. We still need to know what form they will adopt in the 21st century.
by Thierry Meyssan
Part 1 - The French Empire
For a decade we have been revealing the incongruity of the French desire to re-establish its authority over its old colonies. This was the logic behind the nomination by President Nicolas Sarkozy of Bernard Kouchner as Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Kouchner replaced the French Revolutionary idea of «The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen» with the Anglo-Saxon notion of «Human Rights». Later, his friend President François Hollande declared, during a Press conference on the fringes of the UN General Assembly, that it was time to re-establish a mandate over Syria.
The great grand-nephew of ambassador F…
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How a neocon-backed “fact checker” plans to wage war on independent media

As Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States.
by Whitney Webb
Part 4 - The oligarch team’s deep bench
While Brill and Crovitz’s connections alone should be enough cause for alarm, a cursory examination of Newsguard’s advisory board makes it clear that Newsguard was created to serve the interests of American oligarchy. Chief among Newsguard’s advisors are Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and Ret. General Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, a former NSA director and principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy seeking to “advise corporate clients and governments, including foreign governments” on security matters that was co-founded by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who also currently serves as the board chairman of major weapons manufacturer BAE systems.
Another Newsguard adviso…
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