Don't Shoot Burr (Again) He's Only the Messenger (MSM to be Trusted? Why?) Reuters Especially Not (When Did NC Decide To Be Governed by Corporation-Owned Creeps?)

Please watch "Pay 2 Play" on Free Speech TV (FSTV). It will be the best (most meaningful) TV you've seen in a looong time.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _


Think your government surveils you enough already?

Senator Richard Burr (Republican - North Carolina) doesn't.

And he's upping the ante.

(When did North Carolina voters get this stoopid (and he was easily re-elected)?) (See also Governor McCrory (Duke Power's boy toy). Who Pays Governor Pat McCrory? Right. He has always refused to reveal his personal tax returns* (and he has revealed less than Romney did!) and doesn't list all his income on other forms because NC law allows "consultants" to obfuscate pay sources.) (And don't even get me started on (Tiny Brain) Tom Tillis.) (Oh, for the days of Jim Hunt!)

Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr says not to worry about his Cyber Information Sharing Act, which Sen. Ron Wyden has called ”a surveillance bill by another name.”

Burr, on the other hand, likens his bill to a neighborhood watch program, where “citizens and private entities” share information voluntarily so that they’re all more prepared to respond to threats.

But Burr’s analogy only works if he’s imagining something like the Homeowners Association From Hell, one empowered to enter the houses of residents in the neighborhood in the guise of looking for burglars, which can also then snoop around and report on whether you’re doinking the baby sitter or watching pirated videos.

That’s because the bill envisions companies monitoring not just their own networks — but also the private accounts of their customers — for threats. While the bill requires written consent before a service provider can monitor customers’ accounts, that will be — and probably already is — written into those Terms of Service Agreements you never read before you click to agree to them. And the bill permits data collected in the guise of keeping out cyberintruders — the equivalent of burglars, in Burr’s analogy — to be used to prosecute other crimes, including child exploitation or Intellectual property theft.

How Reliable Is Reuters?

April 17, 2015

Eric Zuesse

People see their own nation, and foreign nations, through the filter of the press that’s available to them; so, if that filter is systematically distorting (distorting in ways that most of the others similarly do), then democracy cannot function, public opinion can be manipulated and warped; and wars might even start that shouldn’t — something Americans have tragically been experiencing lots of, during recent decades, such as when we invaded Iraq in 2003 (just to cite the most famous of many examples).

A typical "Reuters" ‘news’ report will be examined here, in order to determine how high the journalistic standards of the Reuters ‘news’ organization actually are. Reuters is an internationally respected ‘news’ organization, as reliable as any major ‘news’ organization in the U.S. and Europe — thus, it’s a good source to provide a case-example.

The particular report, dated Thursday, April 16th, is titled “Russia Blames U.S. for Security Crises and Turmoil in Ukraine.”

Its first sentence is a simple and true statement of fact: 

“Top Russian officials accused the United States on Thursday of seeking political and military dominance and sought to put blame on the West for international security crises, including the conflict in east Ukraine.”

The second sentence is anything but factual:   it is instead contemptuous of the Russian speakers and of what they said, yet offering no evidence that what they said was false, nor is it offering evidence in support of the report’s own contemptuous attitude toward them:

“Evoking Cold War-style rhetoric, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said a drive by the United States and its allies to bring Kiev closer to the West was a threat to Moscow and had forced it to react.”

This sentence implicitly accuses Russia of “Evoking Cold War-style rhetoric,” with supposedly no reason for Russia to do so. The secondary implication here is that Russia and not the U.S. instigated the current restoration of Cold War between the U.S. and Russia. It also implicitly asserts that there was and is no real “drive by the United States and its allies to bring Kiev closer to the West,” and no real “threat to Moscow” that really “had forced it to react” against America’s takeover of Ukraine as a client-state hostile towards Russia next door.

This second sentence is, unfortunately, a string of lies, as will now be documented:

Here is proof that Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department told the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on 4 February 2014 whom to get to be appointed to rule Ukraine once the then-sitting democratically elected Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, will be overthrown, which occurred 18 days later, on 22 February 2014. In other words:  18 days before the overthrow, she actually chose Yanukovych’s replacement.

Furthermore, the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor has called this overthrow of Yanukovych “the most blatant coup in history.”

All knowledgeable and honest people acknowledge that this overthrow was a U.S. coup that installed the current pro-U.S. and rabidly anti-Russian client-state-government in Ukraine.

No one denies that Ukraine borders Russia, and that to Russia it would be an extremely dangerous place for the U.S./NATO to place nuclear missiles aimed at Moscow ten minutes away.

No one denies that when the Soviet Union’s dictator Nikita Khrushchev tried to do something similar to this in the opposite direction (i.e., against the United States), in 1962, by placing missiles in Cuba, that was then validly taken by U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy to be an existential threat to the United States, and cause for nuclear war unless reversed by the Soviet leader.

Consequently, this sentence by "Reuters" is, essentially, a vicious lie, a historical distortion, against Russia, covering up for a U.S. government that really is taking aggressive actions against Russia (the overthrow of their next-door-neighbor and subsequent arming of it and economic sanctions against Russia), to which Russia is defensively responding — as it must do.

Furthermore, no one denies that Obama’s agent on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, has even acknowledged (7:43 on this video) that “we have invested over five billion dollars” to prepare this coup to yank Ukraine into the U.S. orbit.

Furthermore, when, right after Yanukovych’s overthrow, the EU sent its own investigator to Kiev to find out whether Yanukovych’s government had initiated the violence that had caused his downfall, they found, to their shock, that it was instead “someone from the new coalition [that had already replaced Yanukovych]” who actually did it; i.e., Washington — definitely not the EU itself, but also not the Yanukovych government (whom we blamed for it).

Furthermore, the day before the Wikipedia account says that the Maidan demonstrations against Yanukovych even started, a member of Ukraine’s parliament actually  had already described in detail the operation that already was functioning inside the U.S. Embassy to organize the coming Maidan demonstrations; organization of those demonstrations had actually begun in the Spring of 2013, well before the alleged start, and even before the alleged precipitating event.

The rest of the "Reuters" article quotes what it alleges to be provocative allegations from the Russians, such as a Russian’s statement that, ”It’s clear that measures taken by NATO to strengthen the bloc and increase its military capabilities are far from being defensive.” No actual evidence is presented that’s contrary to any of those Russian allegations against NATO.

Then, it closes with a vague statement from NATO, alleging “Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine” — ‘aggression’ that’s unsupported in this ‘news’ report.

So, the article closes with an entirely unsupported allegation of “Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine,” which comes at the end of a string of innuendos and unsupported propaganda to cause uncritical readers to believe that Russia is instead the side that’s spreading unsupported propaganda — against the U.S.

But, obviously, if Russia were to be spreading propaganda here, then it is actually extraordinarily well-supported on a factual basis, including even videos of the events themselves — irrefutable and unrefuted high-quality documentation. And this means that it is truthful ‘propaganda,’ if it can authentically be called propaganda at all (which is a question of how one would define that term).

It is up to the reader here to determine “How Reliable Is Reuters?” and “how high the journalistic standards are of the "Reuters" ‘news’ organization.” My purpose has been simply to supply the evidence on the basis of which those questions can be rationally answered:  they can be rationally answered only upon the basis of the evidence, which has been presented here — and which the Reuters ‘news’ report ignores altogether.

———-

(Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

← Sex-Partying, Teen-Hooker-Funding DEA Agents Get Slap On Wrist, None Fired

HEAD of the FBI’s Anthrax Investigation Says the Whole Thing Was a SHAM →

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

 *   it's theater with a serious point. McCrory refuses to disclose his tax returns. Not for last year. Not for any year.

Nor will McCrory say much about his current post with Moore & Van Allen, a law firm that also employs lobbyists in Raleigh. McCrory is neither a lawyer nor, by his reckoning, a lobbyist, which allows him to skirt the state's disclosure requirements for lobbyists. Instead, he is listed as his firm's director of strategic initiatives: "Nature of business: policy consultant/client development marketing."

On the form he filed as a candidate under the state ethics law, McCrory wasn't required to list his clients at the firm, how much they paid him or what they want from government. He was required to list sources of income over $5,000. He listed his salary at Moore & Van Allen in that category.

Unlike Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who's been widely criticized for not revealing enough of his tax history, even though he did disclose his 2010 income tax return and a 2011 estimate, McCrory's refusal to share his personal tax returns is total and unyielding.

At the state level, if McCrory were a different candidate with a more robust record in public office or in business, the question of how much he's been paid and by whom might be dismissed as an effort to divert attention from his accomplishments. McCrory, who's worked hard to master the art of the political shuck-and-grin, is trying his best to brush it off as nothing the public should be concerned about.

So far, he seems to be succeeding. Polls have consistently shown McCrory with a four-to eight-point lead over his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton, despite his critics' and Dalton's chiding. Dalton did release his 2011 and 2010 tax returns, which show he earned $161,000 and $140,000 respectively. Dalton no longer practices law, and his income is mostly what he makes as lieutenant governor — $123,000 annually, according to the Associated Press.

Still, the money question is continually asked of McCrory, as it was last week by an Asheville Citizen-Times columnist and with a television interviewer on News 14's Capitol Tonight program. This is because his public record is so scant and his employment history so — as the Citizen-Times' Jon Ostendorff put it — "kind of secretive."

. . . McCrory has long been secretive about his finances. He served as mayor of Charlotte for 14 years, and for all of that time he was on the payroll at Duke Energy, the giant Charlotte-based utility. But neither he nor Duke would say exactly what he did for the company, except that he was considered a full-time employee and had no management responsibilities. Nor would they say how much he was paid. (Prior to being mayor, he had a series of jobs with Duke, the last of which was as an employee training manager.)

. . . A few things are known about McCrory's income. He sits on the board of directors of Tree.com, a mortgage lending corporation also known as Lending Tree. McCrory went on the board in 2009, when he was still mayor of Charlotte. He was paid, according to the corporation's disclosures, a total of $140,833 in fees and stock awards in his first year on the board, almost all of which overlapped with his final year as mayor. He was paid another $215,000 in 2010 and 2011, for a three-year total of $355,833.

In 2006, while mayor, but before joining the Tree.com board, McCrory wrote to the state Department of Commerce urging that the company be offered a generous incentives package to remain in North Carolina — a more generous one than the $24 million the state was offering at the time.

That letter, included among McCrory's mayoral papers at UNC-Charlotte, provided grist for a TV attack ad. It accused McCrory of advocating for tax breaks for a company with questionable lending practices, and was later paid $140,000 to sit on its board while he was still in public office.

The ad, paid for a group called N.C. Citizens for Progress, which gets the bulk of its money from the Democratic Governors Association, prompted McCrory to threaten a lawsuit for defamation. But McCrory never filed it. Instead, Citizens for Progress sued him, demanding that he admit the ad was true. The suit is viewed as an attempt to force McCrory to disclose more about his sources of income. It's unclear whether the suit will result in any court action before the November election.

On his state ethics form, McCrory listed Lending Tree as one of his sources of income exceeding $5,000. He also listed Kewaunee Scientific Corp., a manufacturing firm headquartered in Statesville where he is a director, and three firms for which he was paid consulting fees. All paid him at least $5,000. He wasn't required to disclose how much more or what he did for them.

Moore & Van Allen's lobbying clients, according to the firm's disclosures, include the N.C. Petroleum Council, which supports fracking and drilling for oil and gas in offshore North Carolina waters. McCrory also supports fracking, drilling and nuclear power, a position that aligns with Duke Energy's policy.

Another Moore & Van Allen client, International Internet Technologies, LLC, sells products to Internet gaming parlors. The firm was one of the two that went to court last year and successfully argued that the state law against sweepstakes gaming parlors should be struck down,.There's no indication that McCrory is involved with the company, however.

. . . Tax cuts, "streamlining bureaucracy" and easing business regulations were the themes he touched on with the Kiwanis members in July, a package he equated with freshening North Carolina's "brand" of low taxes and a well-educated workforce.

How would he maintain educational quality in North Carolina while cutting taxes? "We have to do more with less," he replied.

No. In NC we have to do everything with the hardly anything that is now received in taxes from corporations and the rich.

Thanks to the thugs who now rule us.

The Healing Blues Project needs your support.

NC Residents Warned Not To Drink Water In State