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So much news. So little time.
If you thought Rupert Murdoch's use of his News of the World site had been exposed enough and thus they wouldn't dare to reassert that kind of control (lying and spying) again . . .
I guess it doesn't have to be Murdoch running things this time, does it?
Imagine how many people have been in on the ground floor of this particular scam for a loooong time. Just waiting to spring it on us.
One unelected ring to rule them all. A council of business elites, a “Meritocracy” if you like, ruling from the green-zone over all of us commoners out here struggling to make a living in the new normal which he helped create and he profited from.
That’s Arianna’s new sugar daddy and the root of the “alternative” World Post.
The fake news comes at us so quickly these days that it's pretty easy to lose track of the real news* and what's really happened to our democracy (gone) and freedom of thought, action, association, etc. (obviated by the Supreme Court long ago), that we formerly proudly proclaimed for more than 200 years.
Edward Snowden has popularly been compared to major whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Wigand. However, there is an important difference in the Snowden files that has so far gone largely unnoticed. Whistleblowing has traditionally served the public interest. In this case, it is about to serve the interests of a billionaire starting a for-profit media business venture. This is truly unprecedented. Never before has such a vast trove of public secrets been sold wholesale to a single billionaire as the foundation of a for-profit company.
. . . Chelsea Manning, responsible for the largest mass leaks of government secrets ever, leaked everything to WikiLeaks, a nonprofit venture that has largely struggled to make ends meet in its seven years of existence. Julian Assange, for all of his flaws, cannot be accused of crudely enriching himself from his privileged access to Manning’s leaks; instead, he shared his entire trove with a number of established media outlets including the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde and El Pais.
Today, Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year sentence in a military prison, while the Private Manning Support Network constantly struggles to raise funds from donations; Assange has spent the last year and a half inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, also struggling to raise funds to run the WikiLeaks operation.
A similar story emerges in the biggest private sector analogy — the tobacco industry leaks by whistleblowers Merrell Williams and Jeffrey Wigand. After suffering lawsuits, harassment and attempts to destroy their livelihoods, both eventually won awards as part of the massive multibillion dollar settlements — but the millions of confidential tobacco documents now belong to the public, maintained by a nonprofit, the American Legacy Project, whose purpose is to help scholars and reporters and scientists fight tobacco propaganda and power. Every year, over 400,000 Americans die from tobacco-related illnesses.
The point is this: In the most successful whistleblower cases, the public has sided with the selfless whistleblower against the power- or profit-driven entity whose secrets were leaked. The Snowden case represents a new twist to the heroic whistleblower story arc: After successfully convincing a large part of the public and the American Establishment that Snowden’s leaks serve a higher public interest, Greenwald promptly sold those secrets to a billionaire.
He justified this purely on grounds of self-interest, calling Omidyar’s offer “a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity.” Speaking to the Washington Post, Greenwald used crude careerist terminology to justify his decision to privatize the Snowden secrets . . .
News about Greenwald-Poitras’ decision to privatize the NSA cache came just days after the New York Times reported on Greenwald’s negotiations with major movie studios to sell a Snowden film. This past summer, Greenwald sold a book to Metropolitan Books for a reportedly hefty sum, promising that some of the most sensational revelations from Snowden’s leaks would be saved for the book.
Indeed what makes the NSA secrets so valuable to Greenwald and Poitras is that the two of them have exclusive access to the entire cache. Essentially they have a monopoly over secrets that belong to the public.
. . . Clearly, in a story as sensational and global and alluring as Snowden’s Secrets™, exclusive access equals value. And for the first time in whistleblower history, that value has been extracted in full through privatization.
It is one thing for Greenwald to maintain that exclusivity — or monopoly — while working with the Guardian, a nonprofit with institutional experience in investigative journalism. It is quite another for him to sell them to a guy with a history of putting profits before public interest.
As Yasha Levine and I wrote at NSFWCORP, Omidyar invested in a third-world micro-loans company whose savage bullying of debtors resulted in mass suicides. Rather than acknowledge this tragedy, Omidyar Network simply deleted reference to the company from his website when the shit hit the fan.
This — this? — is the guy we’re supposed to trust with the as-yet unpublished NSA files? He’s the one we’re relying on to reveal any dark secrets about the tech industry’s collusion with the NSA? Let’s hope there’s nothing in there about eBay. Whoops! Deleted!
But it's not like Greenwald would let someone (a very rich someone) who's profited from the misery of the miserable profit off public information too, is it? What principles are at work here?
Fortunately, as the single investor, founder and CEO of “NewCo”, Omidyar’s self-professed helplessness at eBay doesn’t extend to his new journalistic venture. With that level of autonomy, no one — not even Glenn Greenwald, who has admitted that Omidyar’s money is irresistibly persuasive — can tell him which secrets to publish on his new site, and which should remain hidden forever.
We can all rest easy in our beds, then, knowing that Omidyar is in charge of our secrets. Information of national importance, such as which major tech companies colluded with the US government to spy on private citizens, will be published at the discretion of the founder and largest shareholder of one of those companies.
We still live on the fumes of what was once the grand ideal of the USA defending freedom throughout the land and abroad. Too bad it's mainly been self-serving propaganda for the wealthy "elites" since the Reagan Times. And also very depressing to have to reconsider every news item we've been fed for the last 30-some years. (Not to mention why Obama's championing of the healthcare mandate was always his first priority - way ahead of obtaining any justice for the citizens hoodwinked by the bankerscams, et al.)
Enter the “pure savagery” of the new Meritocracy of billionaire neo-feudal barons, working class peasants and the house negros like Greenwald . . . .
And you thought Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden (let's give him a light sentence or pardon him!), Ariánna Stasinopoúlou Huffington, et al., were out there on the edge "taking chances" on behalf of our public interest?
Not on your Omidyar!
Read all the linked articles for the lowdown on our new life. Your eyes will widen as hope arises that it can't be true.
Ah, the great transition.
Democracy is a dated and childish notion, . . . Rule of the elites, by the elites and for the elites is the new natural order. An order that was cast aside, at least in principle, not all that long ago (1215-ish?).
. . . Once all the major legitimate alternative news sources are gone thanks to CISPA and the “Snowden” psyop, these “entrepreneurs” will have their products ready and waiting for those of you out there ready to BELIEVE whatever it is they tell you to. Their product will be the ILLUSION of dissent and what they are banking on is that in time, with nothing else to compare it to, their products will become trusted by default.
Reading the truth about things like the Malala story, the Cheonan, 9/11, Alvin Greene, vote rigging, Honduras, Syria, Libya, colonialism, GLOBALIZATION, the unconstitutional healthcare mandate, the American Gladio campaign … all of that will become a thing of the past.
Dissenting opinions and investigative journalism within the context of allowed parameters of discourse will be branded like Coke (World Post) and Pepsi (First Look Media) but they will essentially be the same thing as they will serve the same interests.
These billionaires see the writing on the wall and are positioning themselves to own the only opposition voices left standing in the very near future after CISPA 2014 is rolled out in the wake of the Snowden affair.
Read about the billionaire under Arianna's wings below.
Nicolas Berggruen, Billionaire Globalist and Meritocracy Advocate, Behind Huffington’s World Post
Posted on January 9, 2014
In other news:
‘No Free Lunch’ Republican Bills Taxpayers for his Food But Tells Poor Kids To Work for Theirs
A Georgia Republican who suggested school children do cafeteria work because there’s “no such thing as free lunch” billed thousands of dollars for his own meals to taxpayers.
WSAV-TV found that Rep. Jack Kingston, who’s running for the U.S. Senate, had filed expense reports for as much as $4,182 worth of lunches for his office staff over the past three years.
That could have purchased nearly 2,000 school lunches, reported Talking Points Memo.
In addition to his own taxpayer-funded meals, the station reported, the congressman also received $4,289 in free meals billed to third-party groups such as the Georgia Bankers Association and the Congressional Institute.
WSAV reported that Kingston traveled abroad on congressional business at a taxpayer cost of $24,313, which includes more than just meals, and filed expense reports for $145,391 in meals for campaign events.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _BofA Recommends Junior Employees Stop Doing That Thing It Never Condoned In The First Place
Following moves by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to give junior bankers 36 hours off each weekend and one whole weekend off a month, respectively, Bank of America has announced that its young worker bees should go ahead and think about taking a couple Saturdays or Sundays off every now and again.
*Connections Between Michael Hastings, Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown — The War With the Security State
At the time of his death in a mysterious one-car crash and explosion, journalist Michael Hastings was researching a story that threatened to expose powerful entities and government-connected figures. That story intersected with the work of two controversial government critics—the hacktivist Barrett Brown and the on-the-run surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Any probe into Hastings’s untimely death needs to take into account this complex but essential background.
Comments:
He had all the goods on the ENDGAME CO.and he was gonna publish all of it.That's why he had an accident. The ruling class have murdered presidents.
2 comments:
Trickledown. Voodoo economics. The slug trail of Reaganism is long.
And slimy!
Thanks for all your comments.
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