Chris Hedges offers a fine overview of the ways the corporate state
is reasserting its role as information gatekeeper to suppress media
platforms that threaten its interests by
telling the truth. We are being herded back into the information dark
ages, just as neoliberal capitalism plunges into terminal crisis.
The whole article is important, but here are a few nuggets from Hedges:
A de facto blacklist, especially in universities and the press, was
used to discredit intellectuals, radicals and activists who decried the
idea of the nation prostrating itself before the dictates of the
marketplace and condemned the crimes of imperialism, some of the best
known being Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Ward Churchill,
Nader, Angela Davis and Edward Said. These critics were permitted to
exist only on the margins of society, often outside of institutions, and
many had trouble making a living.
The financial meltdown of 2008
not only devastated the global economy, it exposed the lies propagated
by those advocating globalization. Among these lies: that salaries of
workers would rise, democracy would spread across the globe, the tech
industry would replace manufacturing as a source of worker income, the
middle class would flourish, and global communities would prosper. After
2008 it became clear that the “free market” is a scam, a zombie
ideology by which workers and communities are ravaged by predatory
capitalists and assets are funneled upward into the hands of the global 1
percent. ...
The corporate state was in crisis at the end of the
Obama presidency. It was widely hated. It became vulnerable to attacks
by the critics it had pushed to the fringes. Most vulnerable was the
Democratic Party establishment, which claims to defend the rights of
working men and women and protect civil liberties. This is why the
Democratic Party is so zealous in its efforts to discredit its critics
as stooges for Moscow and to charge that Russian interference caused its
election defeat. ...
In the name of combating Russia-inspired
“fake news,” Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN in April
imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by “evaluators,” that hunt for
key words such as “U.S. military,” “inequality” and “socialism,” along
with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura Poitras, the
filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search engineering,
says Google has amassed some 10,000 “evaluators” to determine the
“quality” and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on
Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites
such as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New
York Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing
this censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are
cheerleaders for American imperial projects and global capitalism.
Because they are struggling in the new media environment for
profitability, they have an economic incentive to be part of the witch
hunt. ...
The latest salvo came last week. It is the most
ominous. The Department of Justice called on RT America and its
“associates”—which may mean people like me—to register under the Foreign
Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the corporate state knows that most
of us will not register as foreign agents, meaning we will be banished
from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the intent. The government will
not stop with RT. The FBI has been handed the authority to determine who
is a “legitimate” journalist and who is not. It will use this authority
to decimate the left.
This is a war of ideas. The corporate
state cannot compete honestly in this contest. It will do what all
despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale surveillance, lies,
blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and,
eventually, violence.
