Precious Metal Futures" Trendline Frenzy: Are Gold, Silver, Platinum, and Copper About to Die?

Gold Futures (GC)

 

Gold futures found itself in dangerous waters during the 12/05 session as GC price action temporarily broke below 1,267 – a key support level from gold’s last two swing lows on 10/6 and 10/27.  After closing at 1,268.40, GC became the chart of the day, with price sitting just above support trendlines on both the short and long-term.  Having tread water in place by chopping around in a sideways price channel for the past two months, GC futures need to bounce immediately or may begin a lengthy plunge with a clear-cut downside drowning target of 1,215.

 

 

 

 

Silver Futures (SI)

 

Silver futures continued to sell-off for the 6th consecutive losing session; swiftly breaking down below two previous major swing lows at 16.444 (10/09) and 16.282 (08/07).  SI’s short-term technical profile has become very bearish, with silver futures floating around in ‘no man’s land’ without any meaningful support levels in sight.  While a small bounce may cool-off the current sell-off - and attempt to push ‘poor man’s gold’ prices back up into 16.50-17.00 - what’s more likely is that silver futures will gravitate towards their next major support levels.  If so, SI will be magnetically drawn down to 15.55 like Magneto lazily beckoning for a spoon. 

 

 

 

Platinum Futures (PL)

 

Platinum futures dropped for the third straight session, before finding support at the key trendline connecting the last two major swings at 895.40 (07/11) and of 906.50 (10/06).  The next few sessions will likely determine whether platinum bounces back up towards 960 and remains in a sideways price channel, or if it confirms the Super DMI™ bearish crossover and heads even lower to test long-term support at 895-905.  Price action will see a strong bounce at those levels, but a break below 895 means that 830-870 is where PL futures will be heading in early 2018.

 

 

 

 

Copper Futures (HG)

 

Dr. Copper’s technicals are the only thing we would dare think to possibly know better than Gundlach; well, maybe how to handle frustartion with a pathetically hollow fourth estate of mainstream media and maybe haircuts, but we digress and absolutely adore the art-loving Buffalo Bill suffering true Bond King.

Copper futures were simply obliterated, suffering their largest loss in a single session since 12/14/11.  If price continue to head lower over the course of this week, extremely strong support at 2.906 should provide a well-bid bounce back up towards 3.05.  If not, Copper may only delay an inevitable move down towards long-term support at 2.55 now that price has confirmed the Super DMI™ bearish crossover.

 

 

 

Check out Fibozachi.com to learn about modern technical analysis and trading indicators that actually work.

NBC's Brian Williams: "Our Job Is To Scare People To Death" Over North Korea

On Tuesday night MSNBC"s Brian Williams bluntly told his panel on the channel"s flagship prime time program, The 11th Hour, that "our job tonight actually is scare people to death" over North Korea. The remarks came in the midst of a vigorous discussion which included Andrea Mitchell giving a detailed description of what the potential death toll on the Korean peninsula might be should a ballistic missile exchange occur. The panel also included MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance, to which Williams" remarks were specifically directed.

Williams begins his revealing comment at the 2:00 mark.

In response to Williams" unexpected and very revealing comment, Mitchell appeared to shake her head, though it"s unclear if she was approving or disapproving of what he actually said - there was no push back by the panelists or attempt to seek clarification on Williams" words.

Though the world is currently witnessing a dangerous and escalating war of words between President Trump and the so-called hermit kingdom, mainstream media reporting has long been driven by simplistic fear mongering concerning the geopolitical dynamics driving tensions in the region. The American public is generally woefully uneducated regarding to history of US-North Korean tensions and war.

Brian Williams: "our job tonight actually is scare people to death on this subject".

According to the 20th century theologian and political commentator Reinhold Niebuhr, fear is a prime means which leading public institutions and elites utilize to keep the masses loyal. Fear and sensationalized coverage is also good for ratings and advertising revenue. Niebuhr says society"s "myth-makers" - an apt description of today"s major corporate media - constantly give us mere illusions divorced from truth:

Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep the ordinary person on course.

While the media"s job ought to be the at all costs investigative uncovering of truth and accurate analysis in its role as the Fourth Estate, Brian Williams apparently thinks it"s his and NBC"s job to induce constant fear in the public. He openly stated just that.

Last April, Williams was widely mocked on social media for his comments in response to Trump"s bombing Syria. Responding to a Pentagon video which showed US cruise missiles being launched on an airfield in Syria, he said live on MSNBC that he found himself “tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.”

Sergey Lavrov Says US Media Reminds Him of Soviet Union's "Pravda"

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a few choice words for the U.S. media during a press conference in Cyprus a few days after the NYT and WaPo unleashed a pair of dubiously sourced accusations about what was said between President Trump and the minister during a meeting in the Oval Office.

As Russia Insider reports:

“I sometimes get the impression that many U.S. media outlets work according to a principle which was common in the Soviet Union. Back then, people used to joke that the newspaper Pravda Truth] had no truth in it, and the Izvestia [News] paper has no news in it. I get the impression that many U.S. media operate in the same way.”

U.S. media were barred from Lavrov"s meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, but that didn’t stop WaPo from reporting that Trump allegedly shared classified information with Lavrov about the source of intelligence that inspired the U.S. to ban travelers from 10 airports in the Middle East and North Africa from storing laptops in carry-on luggage. The report added that the decision to share that information jeopardized the source in the process. Meanwhile, the NYT reported that Trump said he fired Comey because the FBI director was a “nut job" and that the decision had eased pressures from the FBI"s investigation into collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Lavrov has denied that any classified information was shared during the meeting. Though it"s important to remember that, even if Trump did share classified intelligence, doing so wouldn"t be a violation of U.S. law.

But of course, WaPo has refused to provide evidence to corroborate its story, relying instead on anonymous sourcing and the public’s “trust” in the fourth estate, which unsurprisingly remains at historic lows.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Advisor H.R. MacMaster, both of whom were in the Oval Office during the meeting, have both issued statements denying that any classified information was shared. Russian President Vladimir Putin has even offered to provide a transcript of the conversation, should the White House request it. To our knowledge, no request has been made.

Lavrov also pointed out that the WaPo report contradacts an earlier U.S. media report about the source of the intelligence that led to the laptop ban. WaPo reported that the sensitive information allegedly relayed by Trump had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government.

But months ago, the Daily Beast reported that intelligence leading to the ban was based on information about an ISIS plot gathered during the Yemeni raid that left one Navy SEAL dead just days after Trump’s inauguration.

Here"s the Daily Beast:

Three intelligence sources told The Daily Beast that the ban on carry-on electronics aboard U.S.-bound flights from 10 airports in North Africa and the Middle East was the result of information seized during a U.S. raid on Al Qaeda in Yemen in January.

So which is it?

Largest French Newspaper Explains Why It Won't Cover The Macron Leaks

 Following the French election commission"s demands that media not cover the "Macron leaks", and French TV channels choosing not to mention the hack, France"s largest newspaper, Le Monde, has issued a statement explaining why it will not be reporting on any of the leaked documents (or the actual leak itself)... until after the election has confirmed "their man".

As Le Monde attempts to explain...

A few hours before the end of the official campaign, Friday May 5, thousands of internal documents attributed to the Emmanuel Macron"s campaign were published on the Internet. Le Monde was able to review part of these documents, the result of a massive hack of the personal and professional email accounts associated with the [Macron) movement.

Whatever the origins of the hack, the publication of these documents two days before the second round, during the blackout period that forbids candidates and their supporters from expressing themselves, is clearly aimed at disrupting the electoral process.

Le Monde will not publish the contents of any of these documents before the second round.

• First because the volume of stolen documents - 15GB of files - make their analysis, cross-check, and confirmation that journalistic work requires, impossible to conduct during this time.


• Also, and especially, because these files were published 48 hours before the vote, with the clear goal of harming the validity of the ballot, at a time when the main interested parties are legally forbidden from responding to any accusations.

If the documents contain revelations, Le Monde, of course, will publish them, after having investigated, in accordance with our journalistic and ethical rules, without being made a tool of anonymous actors" publishing schedule.

So to translate into non-narrative-spin - the largest French newspaper refuses to mention leaked documents that are now open source, and appear genuine - and have not been denied by the Macron team, because there are lots of them (so pick a few) and it will upset the election (well isn"t that the point?)... BUT they will report on whatever they find after investigating it... which obviously will occur after Macron is confirmed as France"s next President.

As we detailed earlier, the parallels to the Clinton hacking are manifold, but now the establishment has better control of the fourth estate with few in the press actually touching upon the actual contents of the documents, which some say confirm prior allegations of illicit financial dealings and offshore accounts, and instead merely attacking the messenger. Indeed, as journalist Kim Zetter noted overnight, "Telling journos to not report on hacked emails misses point that nearly all important leaks occur because someone broke law or a contract" and then followed up with the following rhetorical question, flipping the situation by 180 degrees: "If GRU, intending to assault dem., hacks Trump & publishes emails showing his direct connection to Russia, should journos report on those."

One wonders if this embarrassingly pro-establishment behavior by an apparently "free press" will smash France"s rankings in the World Press Freedom Index even further (already below Lithuiania and Slovenia and just above Belize...)

Populism In Our Time - "The Status Quo Is The Fundamental Problem"

Authored by Paul Brodsky via Macro-Allocation.com,

“Be even more suspicious…of all those who employ the term we or us without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that we are all agreed on our interests and identity.”
- Christopher Hitchens

Merriam-Webster defines populist as “a believer in the rights, wisdom and virtues of the common people”, and when the word is capitalized: “a member of a U.S. political party formed in 1891 primarily to represent agrarian interests and to advocate the free coinage of silver and government control of monopolies”. The first definition seems to be the very point of representative government; the latter what happens when representative government is no longer representative.

The use of the word “populist” among professional politicos implies an off-the-run candidate or leader with ill-intent - an irreverent voice deigning to challenge established institutions by speaking directly to the deplorable rabble, bypassing the narrative perpetuated by vast political and media infrastructures. Those inclined towards transitive logic might infer that governments and the Fourth Estate propose, but are not structured and do not work, to serve the rights, wisdom and virtues of commoners.

We won’t get idealistic about democracy or the gaping separation between political rhetoric and execution. In non-revolutionary times (about 99.9% on a timeline) governments serve the privileged. It is what they do. Political leaders throw bones to commoners, providing bread, circuses and welfare - distractions eminently better than brioches chucked at them by Marie Antoinette, but decidedly worse than most people’s conception that their government abides by the principle of equal access for all.

Liberal democracies are like major medical insurance policies. They will, in the end, protect freedom and most liberties, but they do not provide preventative health care. (Indeed, as their promotion of systemic debt shows, they are not above distributing the fiscal equivalent of cigarettes to their citizens.)

We would argue that the manner in which resources are distributed (i.e., where an economy falls on a spectrum ranging from heavy government subsidies to entirely free commercial markets), is the most critical determinant of economic sustainability and social tranquility; an influence even greater than religious and cultural identities. Fitting government into popular needs and expectations is an ongoing balancing act, requiring authorities to continually synchronize public needs, capabilities and expectations.

Brexit, Trump (Le Pen, Frexit?), etc. are manifest samples of popular will seeking more equitable resource distribution. What is the difference between Les Misérables in 1832 and Ms. Clinton’ Deplorables today? About 4,000 miles and a hundred or so years.

The best “the people” (and investors) can hope for from governments today is that regime changes will be swift, orderly, and will keep the principles that sustain patriotism intact, even if those principles do not comport with reality. Reality ultimately resides in popular will, not in the narrative wealth-funded institutions foster. Diverse societies with a plurality of political ideals, social mores and economic goals are great. We should all watch out when they coalesce around a general sense of helplessness.

Fake News

Fake news is the deliberate spread of misinformation through traditional news or social media with the intent to mislead for financial or political gain. We are shocked (shocked!) it has become a thing today:

• In the first century, Octavia launched a campaign of misinformation against Mark Anthony.


• Benjamin Franklin wrote fake news about murderous "scalping" Indians working with King George III in an effort to influence public opinion towards revolt.


• In 1835, the New York Sun reported that astronomers confirmed bizarre life on the moon. The Sun’s subscription based increased despite admitting soon after that it was all a hoax.


• The Nazi Party rose to power in Germany in 1933 and established the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. All published fact and fiction were dubious, to say the least.


• Also in 1933, The New York Times published false reports written by its Moscow bureau chief (who won a Pulitzer Prize them), denying Russia was purposely starving millions of its citizens.


• For some unknown reason (facetious), modern examples of fake news episodes promoted by established media are difficult to come by…in established media.


• Social media is where all the fake news is today (facetious again).

The old saw about not believing everything you read in the papers never threatened established media until there was an alternative news source. While old media’s journalistic standards for sourcing and editing are no doubt generally superior to new media’s, the advent of internet-based news is shining a harsh light on a fundamental problem that has always existed with the press, but no longer does: the tight, clubby control of the Fourth Estate over a narrow information channel.

The de-centralization component of the internet has thrown a grenade into that channel and the result has been information disintermediation, which we think is, on balance, a great thing. The market for information is now free, even freer than the market for stocks and bonds. The difference is regulation. The process through which the public can consume securities is highly scrutinized while the process through which the public can consume information is not (in the US, thanks to the first amendment).

There are two directions popular opinion can go today regarding fake news: 1) demand that public information be regulated, or 2) embrace the idea that all information may be false. We believe the public has already decided overwhelmingly that it wants access to all news – real or fake, no matter.

If global communications authorities really want to set standards for news distributors then they would have to prohibit news organizations from being for-profit companies with incentives to sensationalize. This would apply to the New York Times as well as everyone posting cats that look like Hitler on Face Book. Practically, there would be very little compliance and such so a scenario is a non-starter.

The difference between news and information, whether fact or fiction, is in the eye of the beholder, not the editorial judgment of the publisher. This is where it belongs. Consumers of information beware. If we are to be honest, fake news is information meant to manipulate us and it will be with us always, as it always has been.

Regulatory Populism

Securities regulators should follow the non-action of public communication regulators - drop all standards related to the distribution of market information so that market participants become aware that they do not (indeed, cannot) have equal information and that information is not distributed simultaneously to all.

As for timing, an investor who witnesses first-hand a terrorist event or natural disaster is at an advantage, should she choose to act on it. More common, unscheduled information typically arrives on our screens two to ten minutes before financial television stations broadcast it. As for information itself, investors that do not make the effort to know all public information, or do not hire people that make the effort, will always be at a disadvantage. This is as it should be if we want to investing to be fair and merit-based.

Regulators cannot enforce how people communicate amongst themselves, but they can try to enforce how those with non-public information act on it. Identifying an illegality can be challenging. What if an investor who was about to take a position comes to understand something will soon happen that would make him suffer losses were he to do so? How can regulators get in the minds of investors?

Our sense is that regulatory oversight mostly exists to provide a means of weeding out the most heinous abuses of the public trust. The public trust is an interesting concept on its own. Question: Why are investors supposed to always trust the markets? Answer: So they stay invested. Question: Why are investors always supposed to stay invested? Formal Answer: We have no idea. (Informal Answer: To benefit rentiers with money and those closest to the credit channel, and to attract global wealth.)

Thus, market regulation is more a tool to sustain the perception of fair markets so the public stays invested than a means of actually ensuring fair markets. In a normally functioning economy, which at this point has been fictionalized, the factors of production would actively decide whether to save or invest.

Financial Populism

Our series of reports last month on passive vs. active investing highlighted a trend towards financial populism that has taken hold recently in the form of exchange traded products. (Vanguard, for example, took in $2 billion each day to their ETFs in the first quarter – monster inflows at the expense of active managers with educations, experience, and sometimes dissenting market views and opinions.)

The greater trend towards financial populism has been in place for a long time. The establishment of defined benefit pensions and mutual funds created consensus opinion, which brought together how economic and market information is framed and consumed. Certain information – popular economic data series, asset valuation metrics and political narratives – would reliably migrate in and out of vogue like herds of sheep, but with the speed and dexterity of cattle.

The herding behavior of helpless animals is analogous to the survival instincts of contemporary investors who think they have learned that they cannot get richer than their neighbors by speculating in alpha-seeking strategies. They are enthusiastically embracing beta strategies that promise market returns - nothing more, nothing less.

The demographically-driven, credit-driven popularity of financial asset markets over the last generation, combined with loss protection provided by exogenous market forces (i.e., central bank “puts”), have given financial asset markets the patina of risk-free sanctuaries. They are anything but. The truly unintended consequence passive investors will discover (soon, we think) – is that beta investing is not saving. Investing in financial asset markets remains speculative…now more than ever.

In our view, equity and real estate markets will soon destroy vast amounts of perceived wealth, either in nominal (price) terms or in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, most likely the latter. The destructive cause will not be a sudden change in popular sentiment, because even that would not change how and where perceived wealth is warehoused. The cause will be the necessary dilution of currencies in which financial assets are denominated. (We would be happy to provide more on this.)

We agree with elites that see populism as dangerous, but for an entirely different reason. The status quo is the fundamental problem, not an institutional framework to which we can revert for protection. The very way contemporary societies think of resources and wealth is at issue. The way we will be richer than our neighbors will be by satisfying our liabilities with our assets in real terms; not a very popular notion.

As for our particular relationship with populism, we agree with Cyril Connelly of the New Statesman: “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

George Soros: The Man Behind the Mayhem

I have struggled to understand George Soros because he is a character riddled with contradiction. His push to break down borders by increasing immigration all over the world is undermining his desire to establish a unified Europe and a unified world. By pushing too hard, too fast, he’s creating obvious pushback. So, I decided to work on an article that would help me get a little better sense of what drives him.

On the one hand, he openly acknowledged at the end of 2016 that an “immigration crisis” is busting Europe apart at the seams. On the other, he states that the EU has always been his cherished project. So, why is he pushing immigration to the EU’s breaking point?

I see the same contradiction in German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Europe is clearly her favorite project, too, and yet she seems hell-bent on stuffing immigrants from outside of Europe down every European nation’s throat, including her own, to a degree that is clearly over stressing indigenous cultures and creating fractures everywhere.

Clearly Europe already has financial fractures that risk busting apart Europe’s always-precarious union of iron bonded together with clay. Do these two leaders thrive on stress so much that they feel compelled to force more discontented and impoverished people into an already fractured vessel? Are they just pathologically inclined toward self-destruction? Are they immigration bulimics who can’t stop stuffing themselves –addicts who have to keep shoving another needle in their arm, no matter the harm?

Another full-on euro crisis in 2017 seems like an obvious prediction to me. Why is it not obvious to those who so want the eurozone to succeed?

Poor Sore Soros

George Soros lost a billion dollars because his bets against a Trump victory crashed on his head. Soros recently fell into a public tirade and wrote that Trump is a Nazi — a would-be dictator who threatens the glorious hope of the new world order. (The very fact that Soros feels compelled to admit that Trump now “threatens the new world order” makes me feel good to know that even the new world order’s strongest backers feel his hot breath on their necks. We can only hope Soros is right.)

Soros is concerned that rejection of Hillary means the dawning of democracy in the world is being extinguished. Those words tell me Soros will do all he can to rile people against the new US leader who extinguished Hillary’s flame, democratically elected as he was. Here again, Soros is a contradiction, for he is always talking about how important democracy is; but I hope to sort that out in this article, too.

Soros is afraid that America will now be ““unable to protect and promote democracy in the rest of the world.” If he thinks Hillary would have done that, he must mean that, under Trump, we will now no longer carry out as many wars and coups as the US staged under Hillary’s state department in order to assure democracy. (Again, I would find that refreshing; but it is apparently alarming to Soros who, himself, was an advocate of the coup in Ukraine and of Hillary’s war in Syria. See my earlier published State Department documents.)

Soros laments that his new world order is disordering itself, “first from Brexit, then from the election of Trump in the US, and on December 4 from Italian voters’ rejection, by a wide margin, of constitutional reforms;” but everyone knows these movements are primarily being fueled by the EU’s insane immigration policies. Even in the US, immigration was a main issue. Maybe liberals love these immigration policies, but clearly there are too many people who don’t, and when you try to force feed people on each other, they’re going to throw up on you.

With equal blindness, Soros laments all the fake news that has “disoriented electorates” and “destabilized democracies.” I say it is blindness because Soros does everything he can to destabilize any democracy that is nationalistic by bankrolling riots against any government that is not going along with his globalist dogma. He is both pushing unwanted immigration in mass and financing protests and coups, which makes it seem peculiar that he’s surprised by growing disorder in the new world order.

The baldfaced hypocrisy is astounding.

What makes Soros tick, and what makes him talk?

George Soros states that his overriding cause in everything he supports philanthropically is what he calls the creation of “open societies,” and he states that the one principle he believes can save humanity is pluralism. Without that, he believes we will destroy each other. He witnessed such destruction as a boy in Hungary under Hitler’s occupation where clearly pluralistic cultures were not embraced, and he states those years were formative to his character, as I imagine they would be.

Maybe that is what drives Soros to put enormous amounts of money into squeezing people together through immigration, even though he sees that it is creating stress fractures in his beloved European Union. Given the horrors that he witnessed as a child, his need to force pluralistic societies into being could be pathologically driven.

But there, I think, is the key failure in his belief system. Soros truly believes he can create pluralistic societies by pushing people together so that people of different beliefs and culture learn to get along. If I were asked what is the greatest common trait humanity has that can save us from each other, I wouldn’t answer “pluralism.” I’d answer that it would have to be love of humanity. In the absence of love for all humanity, pushing people together will only create conflict, but I don’t think Soros understands love. Soros is working like a machine to force something to happen because, like a machine, he doesn’t understand the underlying love that is necessary in order for that to actually work.

Given his childhood, as retold in the video below, I believe he truly believes in the value of open societies. I can certainly see where that kind of childhood would make that a belief of fierce importance. By the same token, then, Soros only believes in it so long as those societies are moving democratically toward his unifying principle of pluralism were Jews and Germans, Blacks and Whites, Christians and Muslims can live side by side. If, however, democracies elect autocratic leaders, he prefers to rip them into shreds. Maybe that is how he acts out his pent-up rage against Hitler, and maybe that’s why he has wanted to see so much immigration into Germany.

Even Steve Kroft on Sixty Minutes struggled almost twenty years ago to understand the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of George Soros who openly describes his financial endeavors as being done without any regard to morality or social consequences but who, outside of his business life, “tries to be moral” and is very socially involved. Here is the actual interview, not the popular fake-news one plastered on conservative sites all over the internet (which attempts to make Soros look even worse than he naturally does by editing together statements that didn’t happen in the same context and by removing his qualifying statements):

Even in this unmanipulated version of the interview, Soros makes the peculiar statement that it was “not at all” difficult for him to travel with his Nazi protector and watch the man confiscate the property of his fellow Jews. It didn’t trouble him in the least because he wasn’t the one doing it.

While Soros was not the one actually seizing the property of his fellow people, as the fake news versions make it sound, I have to think most people with a conscience would experience duress just watching what was happening to their own people. That Soros says it wasn’t the least bit difficult indicates some pathology had already set in … as though he was numb to what was happening or was able to completely dissociate himself from what his Nazi protector was doing.

The particularly telling part is when he immediately goes on with a smile to equate that experience of watching the confiscation of Jewish property to being just like his work in financial markets where, if he wasn’t the one causing currencies to break down with his own speculation, someone else would be causing the chaos anyway, so what difference does it make?

That is how he has learned to compartmentalize life. Since someone is going to do it, it might as well be him. He admits that he never gives a thought to the morality of his investing or the pain he creates. After causing financial pain to entire nations, he then gives money to build what he sees as better, more pluralistic nations. Like an android who is compelled to do the right thing for humanity by his programming, he doesn’t understand that you cannot force love, so you cannot force people together. You can nurture love, but you cannot force it.

The sociopathically broken boy is trying to make society work the way he believes it should. He’s trying to push the pieces together in belief that they should meld.

What does George Soros have in store for 2017?

In a publication addressed to his many socio-political charities, Soros wrote at the close of 2016,

Well before Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I sent a holiday greeting to my friends that read: “These times are not business as usual. Wishing you the best in a troubled world.” Now I feel the need to share this message with the rest of the world….. I find the current moment in history very painful. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of closed societies – from fascist dictatorships to mafia states – are on the rise. How could this happen? The only explanation I can find is that elected leaders failed to meet voters’ legitimate expectations and aspirations and that this failure led electorates to become disenchanted with the prevailing versions of democracy and capitalism. Quite simply, many people felt that the elites had stolen their democracy…. The lack of redistributive policies is the main source of the dissatisfaction that democracy’s opponents have exploited…. I was an avid supporter of the European Union from its inception. I regarded it as the embodiment of the idea of an open society: an association of democratic states willing to sacrifice part of their sovereignty for the common good…. But then something went woefully wrong. After the Crash of 2008, a voluntary association of equals was transformed into a relationship between creditors and debtors, where the debtors had difficulties in meeting their obligations and the creditors set the conditions the debtors had to obey. That relationship has been neither voluntary nor equal. Germany emerged as the hegemonic power in Europe, but it failed to live up to the obligations that successful hegemons must fulfill, namely looking beyond their narrow self-interest to the interests of the people who depend on them…. Democracy is now in crisis. Even the US, the world’s leading democracy, elected a con artist and would-be dictator as its president…. What lies ahead? I am confident that democracy will prove resilient in the US. Its Constitution and institutions, including the fourth estate, are strong enough to resist the excesses of the executive branch, thus preventing a would-be dictator from becoming an actual one. But the US will be preoccupied with internal struggles in the near future, and targeted minorities will suffer. The US will be unable to protect and promote democracy in the rest of the world. (Zero Hedge)

These words resonate with the boyhood experience Soros had with Germany’s hegemonic power in Europe back in his childhood. I’m sure he can’t help but feel Germany is at it again. And Trump with all of his impassioned speeches sounds a bit like Hitler to him, as do the racial overtones in Trump’s immigration concerns. Soros is confident that the US has institutional structures that will prevent things from going that far, but he’s convinced Trump would go that far if not for those constraints. So, Soros is going to put all of his power into battling Trump in the years ahead as that, for him, is his battle against Hitler.

In other words, I think Soros isn’t just name calling. I think that is how he sees it, and it plays on very deep childhood trauma in his life.

Soros, crying over the disruption of his new world disorder and having lost a billion because of Trump, is going to fight back with more force than ever, and in the letter above he hints at his planned attack: “The US will be preoccupied with internal struggles in the near future, and targeted minorities will suffer.” The irony here is that Soros will be the one targeting those minorities in order to get them as inflamed as he can, empowering protestors who convince minorities that Trump actually hates them. (Just as mainstream media constantly retold the fake-news story that Trump said Mexicans are rapists.)

Soros is making this prediction in the same manner as when he has predicted crashing currencies. He predicted their fall because his own investments were betting against those currencies. He new he had enough money involved to tip the balance in currencies that already wanted to fall and that his words had enough clout to create further push in that direction.

Soros is going to stir the pot for all he’s worth this year and make sure the rage explodes into flames, and he’s got enough money to do a lot of stirring, and the rage already wants to happen anyway. So, that should tell you what you need to know about where the year is going.

Soros sees the European Union falling apart, and he sees Putin pushing it in that direction as more elections come along where anti-establishment candidates like Trump are rising in prominence in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy and France. He knows that Trump will encourage those movements, too. So, Trump and Putin are a combined threat to the European union, which Soros avidly supported from inception.

Soros put his money behind the Ukrainian coup because he saw Putin as an autocrat with whom the democratically elected government of Ukraine was aligning itself. If Trump is Hitler to him, Putin is Stalin, who overran eastern European nations like Hungary after Hitler left. Soros likes democracies that decide things his way, but Ukraine chose a leader that was reaching for closer ties with Stalinist Putin. Democracy is great so long as it leads to the kind of government Soros believes is best, but must be fought if it leads to nationalism or leans toward autocratic leaders (at least, those that Soros sees as autocratic).

Soros says he is concerned that Russia will interfere in this year’s upcoming European elections with with more “fake news.” Ironically, Soros writes, “The trouble is that the method Putin has used to destabilize democracy cannot be used to restore respect for facts and a balanced view of reality.” Yet, Soros seeks to destabilize democracies, himself, with protests and riots that certainly don’t restore any respect for facts or any balanced view of reality either because who is listening for facts or trying to be balanced in the middle of a riot?

Soros spends billions of dollars through “charitable” organizations to sow discord all over the world, particularly over issues like immigration, then writes,

With economic growth lagging and the refugee crisis out of control, the EU is on the verge of breakdown and is set to undergo an experience similar to that of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Those who believe that the EU needs to be saved in order to be reinvented must do whatever they can to bring about a better outcome.

He can see the refugee crisis is out of control, and yet he fuels it. He can see it is breaking up his beloved EU, but he keeps pushing in that direction, just as Merkel does. I can only understand this Jekyll-and-Hyde nature as a pathological belief in the virtue of pluralism that developed during the Nazi occupation years that he says formed his character. Others might see it as though he just pretends to care about a refugee crisis, but that he is pushing that crisis because of some other hidden agenda.

He seems completely earnest to me when he says these things, and my lie detector is usually razor sharp; so I am inclined to believe he’s not conspiring for world control but really believes in what he’s doing. It is, however, a pathological belief that has raised pluralism as the supreme virtue, which comes from his Jewish experience under the Nazis. When you put the wrong virtue on top of all your values, it usually ceases to be a virtue and becomes a tyrant. If, for example, loyalty is your highest virtue, you will be loyal to the evil leader you serve, no matter what wrongs he does; and that’s how Hitler reigned.

I haven’t seen much to indicate that Soros knows love from personal experience. If his character were built on love, he would not have been so indifferent toward seeing property confiscated from his fellow Jews as something that was going to happen whether he was there observing it or not. He also would care about how many people get hurt in the violent protests he finances. Because he doesn’t really get what it takes to make people function together, he keeps trying to push them together to make it work, and he tries to create conflict where he perceives the threat of dictatorship in order to destabilize those dictatorships.

So, his is a two-pronged approach: shove people together to create pluralism; bust up dictatorships that don’t tolerate pluralism. He is deeply pained at this point that his new world order is falling apart everywhere, so he’ll push it harder, apply more money, to try to make it work.

In my next article, I’ll summarize the movements that are already forming to make that happen.

Confessions Of A Fake News Reporter

Submitted by Douglas Herman via Strike-The-Root.com,

“A lie can travel half way around the world while truth is still putting on its shoes.”  ~ Mark Twain

I write for those so-called “fake news” websites. You know the ones: the 200 odd deplorable websites, the ones Hillary, the Pope and Michael Moore have attacked as threatening to destroy World Peace, Democracy, Facebook and the Mainstream Media (MSM).

I only write for a handful of them, sad to say, although I’ve been linked to scores more. One of my recent columns went viral and it probably swayed the entire election – for better or worse: Before Trump, Sen Bulworth Spoke Truth To Power .  Seriously, the blatant corruption of the losing team, from Super Delegates to Podesta and PizzaGate to hidden Hillary health issues and secret sums of money funneling through the Clinton Foundation in “Pay to Play” accusations cost them the election, despite the best efforts and endorsements of the entire American media.

I’ve written for Rense, Counterpunch, Antiwar and Zerohedge. Most of my best stuff appears here on Strike The Root first, or STR as we call it, a website where Henry David Thoreau rather than Mark Zuckerberg is our moderator.  Tragically, STR did not appear on ProporNot and we are devastated, absolutely devastated.  Not.

Sometimes I ask my friends: If knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, which is preferable? I always hope someone will respond, as Socrates or Obi Wan would have: Knowledge of our ignorance is power; bliss in this age is unattainable. 

So then, as an average American citizen, is it better to be misinformed or uninformed? Because Disinformation is almost a holy sacrament within the mainstream Operation Mockingbird media. Thus we fake news reporters believe we’re channeling our inner Tom Paine, Mark Twain or Henry D. Thoreau when we blog or post or link. When HDT wrote: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who is striking at the root,” he was a spreader of fake news, by today’s tender standards. We like to think of ourselves as worldwide root strikers, following in his footsteps.

Cui Bono: Who Benefits?

Cops and crime scene investigators (CSI) always ask that question: Who benefits? Who had most to gain by the murder? We fake news reporters pride ourselves on getting the facts. Like legendary Joe Friday from that old TV show, Dragnet, we interview eyewitnesses, contact insiders and whistleblowers, sift through the circumstantial evidence (Like John Podesta’s creepy artwork) and attempt to deduce the truth. Unlike the TV talking heads and Op/Ed writers for the elite media news, we want to know exactly Who Benefits?  Even if it pisses off some elites. Or the elite media.

“There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.”

Sounds like some fake news screed, right, or some wacky conspiracy theory, right? Nope, this was written almost a hundred years ago by the Father of Public Relations and author of a book on propaganda that greatly influenced Adolf Hitler. Edward Bernays was Jewish and teaching in New York in 1923. Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, read his book Crystallizing Public Opinion and learned a lot from him a few years later, adopting Bernays’ masterful propaganda techniques.

“There is no means of human communication which may not also be a means of deliberate propaganda,” Bernays wrote and the Nazis adopted. “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.”

Maybe the mainstream media should nominate Ed Bernays as the Founding Father of Fake News, for spreading these ludicrous ideas far ahead of his time. But fakery and fudging the facts is best left to those rich and powerful Mockingbirds and their presstitutes of the so-called legacy media. Most of the best and brightest of that media have long since been blacklisted or silenced. Seymour Hersh, Steve Lendman and Paul Craig Roberts rarely appear in the NY/LA Times anymore.  Why? Because their stuff, like most of the stuff written by unknown root strikers like me, is exactly like Senator Bulworth’s. Too tough, too true.

“It must be the money; it turns everything to crap,” said Bulworth to some Hollywood elites in that movie, just before the Oscar-winning actor and director, Warren Beatty, was blacklisted from Hollywood for almost 20 years. But money is rarely a factor for fake news reporters like myself. We do it for patriotism and professional pride. In more than a dozen years of devising “fake news,” I’ve been paid about $2,000 or about TEN BUCKS A COLUMN.

“I guess I really do believe that the good is worth doing because it is good,” said peace activist and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), Ray McGovern. “It shouldn’t matter that there is little or no guarantee of success, or even a truthful recounting of what happened.”

A couple years ago, McGovern was manhandled out of a Hillary Clinton speech she gave at George Washington University.  The topic of her speech? The need for respect of dissent. Naturally NONE of the so-called legacy media present there covered his dissent, except in a dismissive way. “America’s Fawning Corporate Media is the embodiment of a Fourth Estate that is dead in the water,” McGovern added.

By contrast to my TEN BUCKS a column, Hillary Clinton received a reported $500,000 for an appearance and speech she gave at ASU. The transcript never appeared in public, as far as I know, so it must have been absolutely priceless.

“Hillary Clinton, the woman who voted for a war that was sold on a diet of fake news, a war that killed hundreds of thousands, is now lecturing Americans about fake news putting ‘lives at risk’,” wrote Paul Joseph Watson, on the alleged fake news website Infowars. Watson is like Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick on steroids. “Being lectured by Hillary Clinton about fake news is like being lectured by Ted Bundy about not raping and killing women. It’s a joke, but a particularly sick joke given that Hillary’s role in pushing fake news had actually led to the deaths of countless innocent lives.”

We fake news reporters feed on the efforts and insights of others. We wish them well, Godspeed, Kudos, Bravos, Hurrahs, Links and Likes. Because we know that Pulitzer Prizes for reporting are now reserved for the con artists connected to the crony crime media. True Crime reporters rarely win Pulitzers anymore.

Consider Matthew Allen. He penned a column called: NYT Mocks PizzaGate as Impossible, But Its CEO Covered up Jimmy Savile Scandal. Now if this news reporter Allen is wrong, a malicious spreader of so-called fake news, then why doesn’t the NYT sue him for slander or libel?  Most of us would simply Google this fellow Jimmy Savile and then we would try to weigh the facts in PizzaGate objectively.

Allen writes, “It’s important to remember that the CEO of the fabled newspaper is none other than Mark Thompson, the former BBC director who ‘lied’ during the Jimmy Savile investigation, and is at least partly to blame for allowing a monster like Savile (So evil?) to operate within the BBC for so long ‘undetected’.”

As I said, if so many of us fake news reporters are slandering people, why aren’t they suing us? Shouldn’t The New York Times, instead of trying to sublet office space in their diminishing empire, sue writers like Matthew Allen? Why doesn’t the New York Times sue him for malicious slander or libel? “Mark Thompson’s newspaper is a crime against the written word,” Allen added, as a parting shot.  

To those of us who seek the truth, guys like Allen and Assange and Anonymous are allies in the fight against the toxic lies of the wealthy, well-connected and woefully corrupt power elites.

Props or Snopes?

Over the holidays, when a huge scandal shocked the cringing mainstream media world, WE CELEBRATED. We celebrated the deliciously karmic news that Facebook "fact checker" Snopes.com was accused of embezzling company funds. The so-called debunker of “fake news,” deified by the mainstream media without any fact-checking at all, suddenly was a steaming pile of backstabbers, porn stars and alleged con artists and embezzlers.  Not that there’s anything wrong with porn stars.  Most mainstream media personalities are highly paid porn performers. They just earn MILLIONS more than porn star Jenna Jameson ever dreamed of earning.

Many brilliant fake news reporters remain anonymous while posting as fictional characters in the alt media. Cognitive Dissonance, Miffed Microbiologist and Hedgeless Horseman are funny and always provocative at Zerohedge.  Jack Burton, at the same website, offers some astute, thought-provoking insight on an especially timely subject, terrorism.

“ISIS never touches an Israeli head,” Jack opined recently. “They are sworn allies of the Israeli Government. Seeing great benefits to be had from the Middle East Super Power, backed by the USA. The main ISIS allies are: Turkey, Israel, the USA and NATO. All this Obama crying on TV about ISIS threats is bullshit fucking lies. Obama is behind backing ISIS on to final victory in Syria. When Russia began to kill ISIS in earnest, the following governments demanded they cease bombing ISIS at once:  Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, USA, UK, Germany and others.”

Now that Aleppo has fallen, the mainstream media is in mourning. Not for all the wars they encouraged these past 15 years, or for the millions of refugees those wars caused, or the tremendous pressure now on European countries to house and feed those refugees.  No, not at all.  To them, that evil dictator Putin has almost prevailed, and only freedom of the press will keep democracy safe. And you know what? They are right. Only freedom of the press and the Constitution will keep citizens safe. That’s why I guess I’ll log onto George Washington’s Blog, Zerohedge, Infowars, Brietbart, STR, Rense and Natural News to stay informed.  Because we fake news reporters must keep informed.  Without us, America will certainly fall.

Addendum: While we fake news reporters love to be proven right, quite often we’re proven prescient. When I penned JFK and Obama--Profiles in Courage and Cowardice, I hoped to have been proven wrong. Sadly, ALL of the fake news reporters I quoted in that column EXACTLY eight years ago were proven correct.

Addendum 2.0   No fake news reporter can claim Trump will succeed overwhelmingly. More likely he will sell out his huge core of hopeful believers to the money/power elites, just as almost all presidents have done in the past. If not, Trump will die in some tragic accident or from some lone gunman. We would love to be proven wrong.

George Soros Conjures Hitler In Attack On 'Ascendant Populists', Warns "Democracy Is Now In Crisis"

Authored by George Soros, originally posted at Project Syndicate,

Well before Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I sent a holiday greeting to my friends that read: “These times are not business as usual. Wishing you the best in a troubled world.” Now I feel the need to share this message with the rest of the world. But before I do, I must tell you who I am and what I stand for.

I am an 86-year-old Hungarian Jew who became a US citizen after the end of World War II. I learned at an early age how important it is what kind of political regime prevails. The formative experience of my life was the occupation of Hungary by Hitler’s Germany in 1944. I probably would have perished had my father not understood the gravity of the situation. He arranged false identities for his family and for many other Jews; with his help, most survived.

In 1947, I escaped from Hungary, by then under Communist rule, to England. As a student at the London School of Economics, I came under the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper, and I developed my own philosophy, built on the twin pillars of fallibility and reflexivity. I distinguished between two kinds of political regimes: those in which people elected their leaders, who were then supposed to look after the interests of the electorate, and others where the rulers sought to manipulate their subjects to serve the rulers’ interests. Under Popper’s influence, I called the first kind of society open, the second, closed.

The classification is too simplistic. There are many degrees and variations throughout history, from well-functioning models to failed states, and many different levels of government in any particular situation. Even so, I find the distinction between the two regime types useful. I became an active promoter of the former and opponent of the latter.

I find the current moment in history very painful. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of closed societies – from fascist dictatorships to mafia states – are on the rise. How could this happen? The only explanation I can find is that elected leaders failed to meet voters’ legitimate expectations and aspirations and that this failure led electorates to become disenchanted with the prevailing versions of democracy and capitalism. Quite simply, many people felt that the elites had stolen their democracy.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US emerged as the sole remaining superpower, equally committed to the principles of democracy and free markets. The major development since then has been the globalization of financial markets, spearheaded by advocates who argued that globalization increases total wealth. After all, if the winners compensated the losers, they would still have something left over.

The argument was misleading, because it ignored the fact that the winners seldom, if ever, compensate the losers. But the potential winners spent enough money promoting the argument that it prevailed. It was a victory for believers in untrammeled free enterprise, or “market fundamentalists,” as I call them. Because financial capital is an indispensable ingredient of economic development, and few countries in the developing world could generate enough capital on their own, globalization spread like wildfire. Financial capital could move around freely and avoid taxation and regulation.

Globalization has had far-reaching economic and political consequences. It has brought about some economic convergence between poor and rich countries; but it increased inequality within both poor and rich countries. In the developed world, the benefits accrued mainly to large owners of financial capital, who constitute less than 1% of the population. The lack of redistributive policies is the main source of the dissatisfaction that democracy’s opponents have exploited. But there were other contributing factors as well, particularly in Europe.

I was an avid supporter of the European Union from its inception. I regarded it as the embodiment of the idea of an open society: an association of democratic states willing to sacrifice part of their sovereignty for the common good. It started out at as a bold experiment in what Popper called “piecemeal social engineering.” The leaders set an attainable objective and a fixed timeline and mobilized the political will needed to meet it, knowing full well that each step would necessitate a further step forward. That is how the European Coal and Steel Community developed into the EU.

But then something went woefully wrong. After the Crash of 2008, a voluntary association of equals was transformed into a relationship between creditors and debtors, where the debtors had difficulties in meeting their obligations and the creditors set the conditions the debtors had to obey. That relationship has been neither voluntary nor equal.

Germany emerged as the hegemonic power in Europe, but it failed to live up to the obligations that successful hegemons must fulfill, namely looking beyond their narrow self-interest to the interests of the people who depend on them. Compare the behavior of the US after WWII with Germany’s behavior after the Crash of 2008: the US launched the Marshall Plan, which led to the development of the EU; Germany imposed an austerity program that served its narrow self-interest.

Before its reunification, Germany was the main force driving European integration: it was always willing to contribute a little bit extra to accommodate those putting up resistance. Remember Germany’s contribution to meeting Margaret Thatcher’s demands regarding the EU budget?

But reuniting Germany on a 1:1 basis turned out to be very expensive. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, Germany did not feel rich enough to take on any additional obligations. When European finance ministers declared that no other systemically important financial institution would be allowed to fail, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, correctly reading the wishes of her electorate, declared that each member state should look after its own institutions. That was the start of a process of disintegration.

After the Crash of 2008, the EU and the eurozone became increasingly dysfunctional. Prevailing conditions became far removed from those prescribed by the Maastricht Treaty, but treaty change became progressively more difficult, and eventually impossible, because it couldn’t be ratified. The eurozone became the victim of antiquated laws; much-needed reforms could be enacted only by finding loopholes in them. That is how institutions became increasingly complicated, and electorates became alienated.

The rise of anti-EU movements further impeded the functioning of institutions. And these forces of disintegration received a powerful boost in 2016, first from Brexit, then from the election of Trump in the US, and on December 4 from Italian voters’ rejection, by a wide margin, of constitutional reforms.

Democracy is now in crisis. Even the US, the world’s leading democracy, elected a con artist and would-be dictator as its president. Although Trump has toned down his rhetoric since he was elected, he has changed neither his behavior nor his advisers. His cabinet comprises incompetent extremists and retired generals.

What lies ahead?

I am confident that democracy will prove resilient in the US. Its Constitution and institutions, including the fourth estate, are strong enough to resist the excesses of the executive branch, thus preventing a would-be dictator from becoming an actual one.

But the US will be preoccupied with internal struggles in the near future, and targeted minorities will suffer. The US will be unable to protect and promote democracy in the rest of the world. On the contrary, Trump will have greater affinity with dictators. That will allow some of them to reach an accommodation with the US, and others to carry on without interference. Trump will prefer making deals to defending principles. Unfortunately, that will be popular with his core constituency.

I am particularly worried about the fate of the EU, which is in danger of coming under the influence of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose concept of government is irreconcilable with that of open society. Putin is not a passive beneficiary of recent developments; he worked hard to bring them about. He recognized his regime’s weakness: it can exploit natural resources but cannot generate economic growth. He felt threatened by “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. At first, he tried to control social media. Then, in a brilliant move, he exploited social media companies’ business model to spread misinformation and fake news, disorienting electorates and destabilizing democracies. That is how he helped Trump get elected.

The same is likely to happen in the European election season in 2017 in the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. In France, the two leading contenders are close to Putin and eager to appease him. If either wins, Putin’s dominance of Europe will become a fait accompli.

I hope that Europe’s leaders and citizens alike will realize that this endangers their way of life and the values on which the EU was founded. The trouble is that the method Putin has used to destabilize democracy cannot be used to restore respect for facts and a balanced view of reality.

With economic growth lagging and the refugee crisis out of control, the EU is on the verge of breakdown and is set to undergo an experience similar to that of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Those who believe that the EU needs to be saved in order to be reinvented must do whatever they can to bring about a better outcome.

When It Comes To Fake News, The U.S. Government Is The Biggest Culprit

Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”—Former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg

Let’s talk about fake news stories, shall we?

There’s the garden variety fake news that is not really “news” so much as it is titillating, tabloid-worthy material peddled by anyone with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an active imagination. These stories run the gamut from the ridiculous and the obviously click-baity to the satirical and politically manipulative.

Anyone with an ounce of sense and access to the Internet should be able to ferret out the truth and lies in these stories with some basic research. That these stories flourish is largely owing to the general gullibility, laziness and media illiteracy of the general public, which through its learned compliance rarely questions, challenges or confronts.

Then there’s the more devious kind of news stories circulated by one of the biggest propagators of fake news: the U.S. government.

In the midst of the media’s sudden headline-blaring apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works.

Why?

Because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media. They don’t want us to be more discerning when it comes to what information we digest online. They just want us to be leery of independent or alternative news sources while trusting them—and their corporate colleagues—to vet the news for us.

Indeed, the New York Times has suggested that Facebook and Google appoint themselves the arbiters of truth on the internet in order to screen out what is blatantly false, spam or click-baity.

Not only would this establish a dangerous precedent for all-out censorship by corporate entities known for colluding with the government but it’s also a slick sleight-of-hand maneuver that diverts attention from what we should really be talking about: the fact that the government has grown dangerously out-of-control, all the while the so-called mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation—the U.S. government.

As veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward blew the lid off the Watergate scandal, reported in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece, “The CIA and the Media”:

“More than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty?five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency... There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services... Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters... In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Bernstein is referring to Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein shows, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA.

Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news. Bernstein writes: “Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps?Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald?Tribune.”

For example, in August 1964, the nation’s leading newspapers—including the Washington Post and New York Times—echoed Lyndon Johnson’s claim that North Vietnam had launched a second round of attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. No such attacks had taken place, and yet the damage was done. As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon report for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, “By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.”

Fast forward to the early post-9/11 years when, despite a lack of any credible data supporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction, the mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon to sound the war drums against Iraq. As Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian put it, “our government … used its immense bully pulpit to steamroll the watchdogs… Many were gulled by access to administration insiders, or susceptible to the drumbeat of the government’s coordinated rhetoric.”

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder, one of the only news agencies to challenge the government’s rationale for invading Iraq, suggests that the reason for the media’s easy acceptance is that “too many journalists, including some very famous ones, have surrendered their independence in order to become part of the ruling class. Journalism is, as the motto goes, speaking truth to power, not wielding it.”

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only it’s been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

Thus, whether you’re talking about the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the government’s invasion of Iraq based upon absolute fabrications, or the government’s so-called war on terror, privacy and whistleblowers, it’s being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies. “The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.”

But wait.

If the mass media—aka the mainstream media or the corporate or establishment media—is merely repeating what is being fed to it, who are the masterminds within the government responsible for this propaganda?

Davies explains:

The Pentagon has now designated “information operations” as its fifth “core competency” alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department"s campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites.

This use of propaganda disguised as journalism is what journalist John Pilger refers to as “invisible government… the true ruling power of our country.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we no longer have a Fourth Estate.

Not when the “news” we receive is routinely manufactured, manipulated and made-to-order by government agents. Not when six corporations control 90% of the media in America. And not when, as Davies laments, “news organizations which might otherwise have exposed the truth were themselves part of the abuse, and so they kept silent, indulging in a comic parody of misreporting, hiding the emerging scandal from their readers like a Victorian nanny covering the children’s eyes from an accident in the street.”

So let’s have no more of this handwringing, heart-wrenching, morally offended talk about fake news by media outlets that have become propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.

After all, as Glenn Greenwald points out, “The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function.”

So where does that leave us?

What should—or can—we do?

I’ll close with John Pilger’s words of warning and advice:

Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all — and I believe that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn’t true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn’t true of the United States. In all the years I’ve been a journalist, I’ve never known public consciousness to have risen as fast as it’s rising today…yet this growing critical public awareness is all the more remarkable when you consider the sheer scale of indoctrination, the mythology of a superior way of life, and the current manufactured state of fear.

[The public] need[s] truth, and journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers of power. I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people’s movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken… In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web... The best reporting … appears on the web … and citizen reporters.

The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people. We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now.