Ben Norton - News you won't hear in corporate media

I wrote about how on Wikipedia is a deeply undemocratic platform, dominated by Western state-backed actors and corporate public relations flacks, easily manipulated by powerful forces.

A staggering 80 percent of edits on Wikipedia are made by just 1 percent of users.

Governments, intelligence agencies, and large corporations maintain significant influence over Wikipedia, editing the encyclopedia to push their agendas, while carefully monitoring articles and policing new edits.

Large corporations hire PR firms of Wikipedia editors to sanitize entries about themselves.

And a small group of regime-change advocates and right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporters have blacklisted independent media outlets like @TheGrayzoneNews on explicitly political grounds, violating the encyclopedia’s own guidelines – which it has no mechanisms to enforce even if it wanted to.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censors-the-grayzone-as-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/

Under FBI orders, Facebook and Google removed an independent media website that published writers critical of US foreign policy.

The FBI's justification for the removal was extremely dubious, and it sets a troubling precedent for censorship of other critical outlets.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/05/the-fbi-launches-open-attack-on-foreign-alternative-media-outlets-challenging-u-s-foreign-policy/

Another big @TheGrayzoneNews exclusive: We published photos that were surreptitiously taken inside a British courtroom, which show political prisoner Julian Assange, visibly disoriented, confined to a glass cage and unable to communicate with his lawyers.

Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann was guaranteed more rights in court than journalist Julian Assange.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/29/british-court-assanges-physical-deterioration/

The founder and editor of Jacobin, the pro-imperialist “socialist” magazine that humbly dubbed itself “a leading voice of the American left,” just published an op-ed in the New York Times endorsing right-wing demented predatorial war criminal Joe Biden.

Many people criticized me for supposedly being “too harsh” on Jacobin.

You now have no excuse to deny the obvious: Jacobin’s role is to construct a Respectable Left that is pro-imperialist, anti-communist, and just a social-democratic arm of the Democratic Party.

https://t.co/4Kvz3BEHhz

A lot of my work as a journalist has been dedicated to exposing the role of so-called “human rights” groups and “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) as tools of US imperialism. But rarely is their status as an arm of Washington’s imperial power openly acknowledged.

Back in October 2001, war criminal Colin Powell, a former top US military commander and then secretary of state under George W. Bush, gathered leaders of prominent NGOs in Washington to butter them up and emphasize the crucial supplementary role that they would be playing in the US government’s post-9/11 war efforts.

Powell heaped praise on NGOs that “shed light on human rights.” He noted that they were a key part of US military efforts, a “force multiplier” in Washington’s wars, and “such an important part of our combat team.”

Powell dispelled any pretense that American NGOs do work around the world in the interest of vague notions like “human rights.” Rather, he gloated, these NGOs serve the United States’ imperial interests, and it is in fact the illusion of their ostensible “independence” from the US government that is precisely what “makes [them] so valuable.”

https://bennorton.com/colin-powell-ngos-force-multipliers-us-military-combat-team/

via @TheGrayzoneNews:

There is a shocking update in this massive corruption scandal: A US judge just approved moving forward with the liquidation of Venezuela's most valuable foreign asset, Citgo, which is worth billions of dollars.

Venezuela's real, elected government used this publicly owned company to fund social programs for the Venezuelan people. But the Trump administration illegally stole Citgo in order to fund the coup gang of Juan Guaidó.

Now a US judge is going to sell Citgo off to oil corporations, and then use that money to pay a Canadian mining company. Other US oil corporations will take some of the money as well.

This is textbook vulture capitalism. These corporate vultures are going to work together to pick apart their prey -- and the Venezuelan people are the ones who suffer greatly because of it.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/09/03/the-citgo-conspiracy-opposition-figures-accuse-guaido-officials-of-scam-to-liquidate-venezuelas-most-prized-international-asset/

The Intercept has burnt at least three sources now. And its Russiagate story that landed leaker Reality Winner in prison was co-authored by an embedded police reporter who is now the NYPD's top spokesperson.

I investigated this shocking scandal for @TheGrayzoneNews: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-winner-richard-esposito-nypd/

Biden is going to run a right-wing campaign that is slightly less overtly racist than Trump's, but still racist. His campaign is going to ignore Latinos; he will attack Trump from the right on key issues; and he will push an anti-immigrant, pro-war, neoliberal platform.

Then Biden will lose anyway.

Trump already won re-election when Biden was selected (anointed) as the Democratic candidate. This is all a distraction and a farce.

The actual left should not waste a single second on the Biden campaign dead end. The US left should be focused on building a new party that can destroy and replace the Democrats. That is the most important mission today.

https://news.yahoo.com/biden-campaign-doesnt-consider-latinos-143056489.html

The leaked contract between US coup puppet Juan Guaidó and the Silvercorp USA mercenary firm closely resembles the bounty the DEA placed on the head of actual President Nicolás Maduro and members of his inner circle this March.

The deal also tacitly authorizes the elimination of working-class Venezuelans in proposed death squad activities.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/10/guaido-mercenary-contract-venezuelas-maduro-us-bounty-death-squad/

Current and former staff members of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have denounced the group's IIT report alleging Syrian government sarin use at Ltamenah, criticizing its reliance on rumor, hearsay, “scientifically flawed” claims, and the influence of unqualified, secret “experts” aligned with the Western-backed opposition.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-chemical-weapons-report/

So much for "democracy": The renowned British peace activist and former diplomat Craig Murray has been charged with contempt of court for writing blog posts.

The suspicious indictment represents a heavily politicized, Kafkaesque case in which Murray has virtually none of his rights guaranteed. It also appears to be a part of the British government’s aggressive crackdown on the Scottish independence movement.

In comments to @TheGrayzoneNews, Murray described the case against him as a thoroughly undemocratic attack on free speech, and warned it may be punishment for his dissident journalism and activism exposing the UK’s crimes and lies.

Murray said he faces the possibility of “no jury, no ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ test, no public interest defence allowed, no freedom of speech defence allowed, and up to two years in jail and an ‘unlimited’ fine.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/27/craig-murray-indicted-blog-posts/

This is wild: The director of far-right Bolivian coup leader Camacho’s presidential campaign threw a slander-laced tantrum against @TheGrayzoneNews in a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, blaming our factual journalism for a report on repression.

This right-wing Bolivian politician, former World Bank official, and longtime Harvard Kennedy School professor falsely and maliciously asserted that our independent news website is supposedly funded by the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. And he defamed us claiming we have “no respect for the truth.”

This is the latest in a series of attacks on The Grayzone’s journalism by right-wing US-backed forces in Latin America — which have included the arrest of editor Max Blumenthal on outlandish charges fabricated by members of Venezuela’s opposition.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/16/bolivia-coup-the-grayzone-cidh-camacho-maclean/

Here is part 2 of our discussion of the end of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and how the professional media left, largely based in Brooklyn, opportunistically capitalized on his movement to push a soft-imperialist branding of "democratic socialism" — and to advance their careers in the press.

We also address media celebrity AOC, Jacobin Magazine, the DSA, and the scheme to divert angry politicized youth back into the thoroughly discredited, neoliberal Democratic Party.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3I5MgbOvFo

*Bernie Sanders goes out with a whimper - An obituary on an aborted 'revolution'*

There are some difficult truths in this podcast episode, but Max Blumenthal and I discuss the failure of the Bernie campaign and some of the questionable figures surrounding it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrnQm9Y9_zU

Nicaragua's US-backed right-wing opposition and the corporate media are waging an information warfare campaign to undermine the elected leftist Sandinista government, spreading fake news about coronavirus.

In this report on the ground in Managua, I dispelled some of the false claims and I explained how Nicaragua's approach carefully balances the needs of workers and the poor with public health.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/13/regime-change-coronavirus-nicaragua/