As The Kochs Acquire Ownership of Time Inc.- More About Where On The Spectrum Of Left/Right Politics That Publishing Organization Was Once To Be Found Plus More About What Once Did and Didn’t Get Said/Published In The U.S. Media

As the Koch Brothers were stalking ownership of Time Inc., (the Time Life empire that includes the once mighty Time Magazine), I wrote here from a standpoint of somewhat unique personal experience about how, whatever we may worry that Time will become, subject to Koch influence, that Time Magazine was not exactly a very liberal magazine to begin with.  In the course of doing so, I wrote about my uncle, Ralph Delahaye Paine, a Time/Life man of significant stature in his time.  See: Kochs Move To Acquire Ownership In Time/Life, Which On The Political Spectrum Was Previously. . . (Let Me Tell You) - Our Media, Never In a Good Place, Shifts Toward. . ?? Friday, November 17, 2017.

Time Inc. currently publishes Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune and Entertainment Weekly.

Since I last wrote, the Koch ownership acquisition has gone forward.  And since that time I have come across and had a chance to remember and think about a letter in praise of my uncle written after his death to Fortune magazine by revered economist and writer John Kenneth Galbraith.  It expressed Galbraith's opinion of where on the political spectrum Fortune magazine (not necessarily Time) was under the stewardship of my uncle: That Fortune was “with some exceptions . . . by the standards of the time dangerously to the left.”
   
The Koch acquisition of the interest in Time Inc. is reportedly causing consternation about Time’s editorial direction internally on the part of Time staff and one former Time editor, Charles Alexander has promulgated his worry that his 23-year of work at Time work will go "down the drain."  Although he admits that Time was a “conservative publication” under publisher Henry R. Luce with that “bias” persisting “for a long time after Luce’s death in 1967," Mr. Alexander points out Time Magazine’s important converge of climate change, a subject about which the Kochs, in the fossil fuel industry, have invested long and massively to spread disinformation about.

Jane Mayer, author of "Dark Money," about the Kochs and how they have built up their political machines and influence, obtained thoughts on the Koch Time Inc. investment from Emily Bell, a professor of professional practice at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for an article in the New Yorker.  Bell said that she doubts that the Kochs have put six hundred and fifty million dollars into the purchase of a media company saddled with ailing print publications only for financial reasons: “It can’t just be the return on investment, because, if so, you’re in the wrong asset class,” she said.

When ownership of publications changes hands, It is not just the future slant of the publication that should be worried about.  Sometimes what had been published in the past vanishes or becomes less accessible.  That is what recently happened when the Gothamist, providing coverage of local New York City news, was acquired by an opinionated conservative Republican buyer.

That’s one reason why we need libraries.  Not everything is available on the internet; not everything remains on the internet.

One thing you can’t currently find on the internet is the letter, published in Fortune, that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in tribute to my uncle Ralph Delahaye Paine after his death in January 1991.  In it, Galbraith expresses his view that the writing in Fortune magazine, under my uncle could be considered on the left for that day and age.  I can offer that Galbraith's assertion to balance out the observation I made when previously writing about the pending Koch investment in Time Inc. that Time magazine was not very liberal when reporting about the Vietnam War.

Ralph Delahaye “Del” Paine Jr. in the FORTUNE years

To reiterate, Fortune is one of the publications in which the Koch’s have acquired an ownership interest.  Here is what Galbraith wrote about my uncle and the time he spent working under him at Fortune:

IN TRIBUTE TO DEL PAINE

I read in January of the death of Ralph Delahaye “Del” Paine Jr., who was editor and managing editor of FORTUNE from 1941 to 1953 and publisher from 1953 to 1967. I share with the present editors and the readers of FORTUNE my admiration and affection for a truly notable and much-loved figure in the history of journalism.

In the autumn of 1943 I joined the editorial staff of FORTUNE. I was never more content. Gathered under Paine was perhaps the most remarkable community of writers ever brought together on one magazine. Archibald McLeish, Dwight McDonald, and James Agee had but recently departed. The inimitable Eric Hodges of Blandings fame, Wilder Hobson, and the Davenport brothers, Gilbert Burke, and others were very much present. All were young; all shared an unqualified respect and affection for our young editor, then in his mid-30s.

With some exceptions we were by the standards of the time dangerously to the left. For some, like Dwight McDonald, Marx was a far from irrelevant figure. More generally, the New Deal was seen as an essential design for escaping the widespread economic devastation of the Great Depression. It was Del’s task to make us reasonably acceptable to our business readers.

This heated with intelligence, tact, and charm.  He was assisted by the thoughtful view, strongly supported by Henry R. Luce, that businessmen would rather read well-written, interesting, politically debatable articles with pleasure and comprehension then basically unintelligible prose with which they might agree. The acceptability, even prestige, of the magazine affirmed the rightness of this view.       

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
Cambridge Massachusetts

The letter, clipped from Fortune, hangs in my mother’s hall.  I’d like to think that when John Kenneth Galbraith himself died in 2006 my mother returned the favor by writing to Galbraith’s family, his four sons included, to recollect some of the flattering things my uncle had to say about Galbraith, but I am not sure that happened.

John Kenneth Galbraith was not just a famed economist and writer; he was also a member of John F. Kennedy’s administration serving formally under Kennedy as ambassador to India.  The other day I was listening to John Kenneth Galbraith’s son, James K. Galbraith, explaining how Kennedy involved his father to support him in his efforts to pull out of the Vietnam War.  James K. Galbraith is an economist and writer like his father who teaches as a professor at the University of Texas.  The discussion was on Austin’s KUT public radio station program Views and Brews hosted by Rebecca McInroy and he was speaking with Dr. John Newman, a retired U.S. Army Intelligence Officer and historian, about his book “JFK and Vietnam.”  (V&B: JFK and Vietnam – What We Know & Why It Matters, May 18, 2017.  You may want to save this link if you want to find this talk again: Google’s algorithm doesn’t have this showing up quickly making it hard to find.)
   

Ultimately influential, Dr. Newman’s book documents with first-hand research evidence of JFK’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam just before he was assassinated, confirming and fleshing out accounts that the senior Galbraith shared with his son James.  That book championed by James Galbraith is as of now recently available, but it was published 26 years prior only to be suppressed and pulled from bookstore shelves by its publisher.  That was despite the book's being reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review Section by Kennedy special assistant and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. who also said "This commanding essay in critical history is the most authoritative account anywhere of President Kennedy's Vietnam policy and it is fascinating reading as well." Plus it was endorsed by former CIA head William Colby.

When the NSA failed to stop the book with unsuccessful claims its information was classified the publisher cooperatively made the book unavailable anyway.  That is another example of why who owns the media is so critically influential what the public hears or reads about.  Similarly, after 9/11 Michael Moore’s publisher was going to pulp, unpublished, a book it had printed that it felt was too critical of George W. Bush.  When that book was rescued by a librarian leading comrades it became a bestseller.

The KUT discussion was months prior to the release this year of Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” on PBS, but Galbraith and Newman already knew and were dismayed that the Burns 18 hour documentary left out of its narrative any reference to Kennedy’s likely withdrawal plans.  Another similar failure of the Burns documentary, at least in tone, that I found jarring is that while it covered the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a relevant major national event, the documentary, epically focused on Vietnam as its subject, didn’t note the incredibly strange resonance that King’s April 4, 1968 assassination was on the one-year anniversary of King’s historically pivotal April 4, 1967 Riverside Church denunciation of the War.

It is interesting to review what is and is not deemed acceptable to express as the events of history re-contour the landscape around us.  A lot of what gets said has to do with who are the gatekeeping owners and sponsors of our media.

I just recently rewatched on Turner Classic Movies the film “Seven Days In May” about an attempted military takeover of the United States Government.  The film was made from a novel of the same name published in 1962 written by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, political journalists familiar with Washington D.C. who researched their subject.  The film was made with help, assistance and encouragement from the Kennedy administration, Kennedy reputedly believing it depicted threats that were real at the time.  It was due for release in December 1963, which would have been just days after Kennedy’s November 22, 1963 assassination.  Because of the assassination, release of the film was delayed until mid-February of 1964.

There are rumors that, after the Kennedy assassination, Frank Sinatra pulled from circulation director John Frankenheimer’s already released (October 1962) previous film, “The Manchurian Candidate,” explicitly about a conspiracy orchestrating a political assassination in order to takeover the U.S. presidency.  Even if the film wasn’t widely shown for a time after the assassination, according to Wikiepdia, those rumors have been disproved, and, additionally, the film was apparently revived at a cinema in Brooklyn, New York two months after the assassination.

Nevertheless, it is said that the Kennedy assassination also affected what was ultimately the content of Dr. Stangelove, another film released soon after the assassination, at the end of January 1964.  The film was a satire about strategies of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) devolving into nuclear Armageddon. Stanley Kubrick, the director, had filmed a War Room pie fight to end the film, “the best pie fight ever filmed.”  However, the pie fight seemed tone deaf after Kennedy’s killing, including a portion where George C. Scott’s character General Buck Turgidson holding in his arms a pie-stricken U.S. president played by Peter Sellers as president says:

Gentlemen, our beloved president has been infamously struck down by a pie in the prime of his life! Are we going to let that happen? Massive retaliation! 

The scene reportedly got as far as a test screening that occurred right around the time of the actual assassination.  More likely Kubrick would have sacrificed the scene anyway realizing that no matter how technically executed it may have been it did not sync properly with the film’s satire.  In addition, according to its screenwriter, Terry Southern, studio executives were apparently skeptical of the scene from the beginning plus they were beginning to turn on the film and disavow it as ‘un-American” or “anti-military.”

Monday, September 10, 1962, evaluating the book “Seven Days in May” before Kennedy’s assassination and before the movie was made, New York Times reviewer Orville Prescott started out by putting it in the genre of  Sinclair Lewis’ “ironically” titled "It Can't Happen Here."   He noted that the authors “are both experienced newspaper men. .  Both employed in the Washington bureau of the Cowels publication and judged by this book, they view the course of future events with considerable alarm and [t]hat they know much about the Washington scene, the routine life inside the White House and inside the Pentagon.”   Prescott, however, offers no rousing endorsement of the book concluding that with “stock characters” the prose does not “make the most of” its plot coming across like a “parlor game” that “as a whole never seems real.”  Acknowledging that it is scheduled to become a movie Prescott offers that “it ought to make a better movie than it is a novel.” Notwithstanding, the novel was a bestseller with an appreciable run.

Returning to mention the novel in his writing again a few weeks later about “Fail-Safe,” like “Strangelove” dealing with the specter of nuclear Armageddon (October 24, 1962), Prescott commented that “according to several of this autumn's new novels, the near future is going to be even more unpleasant than most of us sensible pessimists expect.”  While Prescott opines that “Fail-Safe” “cannot fail to chill the spinal columns of its readers,” and his verdict is that it was a “slam-bang thriller” despite its “deficiencies as fiction,” he concludes, much like he did with the novel “Seven Days in May,” that the authors “have no gift whatever for characterization” the “prose is commonplace” and the “dramatization . . crude and mechanical.”   Again, the novel was, nevertheless, a bestseller.  He does credit the authors for having done “considerable research assembling declassified material” and with basing the novel on a real incident. 

“Fail-Safe” too became a film, coming out after, but on the heels of  “Dr. Strangelove” (October 7, 1964).  The film, although a drama rather than comedic, was so similar to “Strangelove” that “Strangelove” director Kubrick filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against it (both were Columbia Studio pictures), settling that suit based on an agreement that “Fail-Safe” would come out after his film.  The devastating nature of the Kubrick comedy probably severely undermined and helped account for the poor performance of “Fail-Safe” at the box-office.
             
The New York Times Bosley Crowther review of the film “Seven Days in May” necessarily came out after the Kennedy assassination.  Under those circumstances, the “suffering cats and little kittens!” exclamation accompanied lead-in of the review dealing with a film about “not too farfetched speculations” seems oddly lighthearted.  (Does that translate to “farfetched”, but not too “farfetched”?)  To wit:

It's beginning to look us though the movies are out to scare us all to death with dire and daring speculations on what might happen, any day in Washington.

First we had "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," . .  .  Now, . . . we are offered a similarly fearsome prospect of the crisis that might occur if another Air Force general planned to seize control of the Government.

. . .  One might ask what we're coming to if such shocking thoughts are penetrating the deep domes of Hollywood!

Rod Serling

Crowther credits that the film “gathers a sense of actuality and plausibility.”  Actually, the script was obviously written with great seriousness by Rod Serling, of his very best.  It has none the `this-is-fantasy' or `this-is-speculation' veneer with which Serling avoided censorship with his Twilight Zone scripts.   Many of the Twilight Zone scripts Serling wrote were trenchantly antiwar.  By creating that science fiction fantasy anthology series Serling, sorely vexed by censorship, mainly from television sponsors, but not always just sponsors, side-stepped such censorship (a clever ruse?).

Crowther praises Serling for one sentiment expressed by the film’s fictional president, played by Frederick March, who says that the enemy is not the general, but the nuclear age: “It happens to have killed man's faith in his ability to influence what happens to him.”  To me (at least in 2017) incorporation of the sentiment that Serling apparently recycled from the original novel rang hollow.  The film as praised by Crowther and others is safe for its audiences, and perhaps for the larger world of the-powers-that-be, in that it hopefully holds out democracy, its institutions, the constitution, and basic human decency as strong enough to triumph.  And it also sticks with the idea that the mutinous generals, still principled, just have a different calculation of what to do in face of their fear of nuclear weapons. . .

. . . What the film never offers is any idea of how the money side of armaments can perpetuate their continuation and even use.

“Seven Days in May,” like “Strangelove” and “Fail-Safe,” is also about the balance of terror with Russian as a threat and the potential for worldwide nuclear holocaust.  A plot point of analysis is whether the U.S. military coup, if successful, would have provoked the Russian attack the generals wanted to forfend against.  Similar to how Crowther couches his praise for “Seven Days in May,” “Fail-Safe” is sometimes praised as a superior to “Strangelove’s” treatment of the same subject matter for being more soberly adult or mature, because it launches its speculative disaster scenario from the presumption of good intentions on the part of those in the military industrial complex.

Crowther’s review of “Seven Days in May,” says that the `plausibility’ of the plot (which takes place in what was then the future- May 1974) does not extend to “one twist,” which is the supposition of a large secret military base- some 3000+ men- in El Paso, Texas.  Next to the Mexican border El Paso is the actual location of Fort Bliss, one of the largest military complexes of the United States Army and very active in recent years as the largest training area in the United States, plus the home of other security facilities.  It is the home of one of the privately-owned ICE immigrant detention centers about which the public knows little these days even as these private ICE centers operate outside most conventional laws and the United States and ICE funding and private ownership of ICE centers is increasing dramatically.  If “Seven Days in May” was remade in another update, the takeover of the government would not be by the military, but by an even less accountable joint operation between the military and the mercenary corporations the military industrial surveillance complex now contracts out to.

When it comes to the military industrial surveillance complex interesting questions can be raised about what one can write about.  That is certainly the topic of director Steven Spielberg’s new “The Post” film concerning publication of the Pentagon Papers that documented decades of lies by the U.S. government about the Vietnam War (to get back to one of original subjects), which the government enjoined the New York Times from publishing as a violation of the espionage act.  The papers were copied and furnished by  Daniel Ellsberg a United States military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation at the time.

That was Daniel Ellberg’s role then.  Ellsberg is only now, with his new book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” detailing information from his “top-secret nuclear studies, his front row seat to the Cuban missile crisis” (the crisis that helped set the national consciousness for the nuclear war subject films discussed here) when Ellsberg was a consultant with the Pentagon and the White House.  According to his account, Ellberg himself drafted plans for nuclear war and was privy to plans for nuclear war that were “insane” and “evil” in the hundreds of millions of people that would have been killed world-wide.


The question of what one theoretically can and cannot publish about the military can be interesting. 

"Red Alert"- Original title

The book “Red Alert” from which “Dr. Strangelove” was made was published in 1958 in the United Kingdom.   It was written by Peter George, an ex-RAF intelligence officer under the pseudonym Peter Bryant.  The later more popular “Fail-Safe” was published in the United States.  Terry Southern, screenwriter for “Strangelove,” asserts that because “national security regulations in England, concerning what could and could not be published, were extremely lax by American standards” George was able to “reveal details concerning the `fail-safe’ aspect of nuclear deterrence . . . that, in the spy-crazy U.S.A. of the Cold War era, would have been downright treasonous” and thus give all the “complicated technology of nuclear deterrence in Dr Strangelove” a base “on a bedrock of authenticity” that gave the satirical film the strength of credibility.

Keeping the military’s secrets about the potentially absurd destruction of the entire world at its hands is one thing.  Avoiding the more omnipresent censoring influences of commercial interests is another.  Rod Serling bridled at the censorship that emanated from the TV sponsors who readily rankled at the slightest hint of anything in a script that could `threaten’ corporate profits: For instance, Serling told of how the line, “Got a match?” had to be eliminated from the script of “Requiem for a Heavyweight” because the sponsor of the show as Ronson Lighters, and how the Chrysler Building had to be painted out of the New York skyline of a show that was sponsored by Ford Motor Company.

In this day and age of merging conglomerates the heavy hand of commercialism is more consequential with one the most overriding humankind-destroying concerns being that climate change misses getting reported on, almost as if it were a classified secret itself.   Because that reporting would affects profits; Not because we are afraid of the Russians.

It is one thing that the Kochs and fossil fuel companies spend phenomenal amounts of money to spread misinformation about climate change.  We moreover have to deal with how in 2016, the year of the national presidential elections, already scant reporting of climate change was reduced drastically and questions about climate change were left out of the presidential debates.  In 2017 the national networks and corporate media managed to report on extraordinary hurricanes and massive wildfires continually breaking records without mentioning climate change.

And now, as the Kochs acquire their ownership interest in Time Inc. we, like former Time editor Charles Alexander, must worry that what is motivating the Kochs is their desire to have the public see even fewer references to climate change and its world-destroying implications.  As media ownership concentrates overall throughout the country we may similarly worry that we will achieve less insight and learn less about what we need to know concerning the current day equivalents of the Vietnam War as well as all the things that the military industrial surveillance complex is up to that we would want to know more about.  .  .

.  .  As much of the discussion here makes evident, media in our culture is an all enveloping cocoon.  What does or does not get through in the way of ideas and possibilities because of who owns or sponsors that media affects our thinking mightily.

Although not perfect, Time magazine may have produced good climate change reporting and Fortune may have been, for its era, to the left in reporting economic matters, but with more and more of the kind of events we see represented by the Koch's Time Inc. ownership acquisition, we are moving ever further away from the the balance we had in the media then, whatever it was and such as it might have been.

Kochs Move To Acquire Ownership In Time/Life, Which On The Political Spectrum Was Previously. . . (Let Me Tell You) - Our Media, Never In a Good Place, Shifts Toward. . ??

Before we get to the "Time Goes Bye" part of this article (Koch Brothers stalking ownership of the once mighty Time Magazine), let's speak of "times gone by." 

I want to tell you a story that involves looking way back.

At the time of which I am speaking I was quite certainly in college, although when I think back remembering it feels almost as if I was still in high school, that I was so recently out of.  Since I was listening to WBAI on the radio, I had to have been in college and that means the year was probably 1970 or 1971.

On WBAI I heard a truly startling and appalling story about recent events in the Vietnam War.  I was sure it was going to be big news and probably would have a big influence on a lot of people when they too learned about it.  I wanted to see how else it would be reported, and I waited with eagerness for my weekly Time Magazine to come out and see how the story was featured.  When Time came out I scoured the week’s Vietnam War coverage and the event wasn’t there at all, not even a hint.  I was fit to be tied.

Once upon a time I had supported the Vietnam War, in high school seeing it in the basic good guy/bad guy terms in which my father had explained it to me: We were helping good guys against bad guys.  By the time of the story I am telling, I had shifted over in my thinking to oppose the war, having been chagrined to learn that by that time I did shift I was only just catching up with father’s own changed thinking to oppose the war.  Somehow, father and son, we had neglected to have that updating conversation before I told my father how increasingly troubled I was by the way I could not reconcile and sort through to believe that there were any truly good reasons for fighting a bad war.

My father, who voted for Lyndon Johnson instead of Barry Goldwater, was a Republican.  He was firmly against the war before he died at the end of 1968.  In addition, although I knew there were reasons my father had disliked Robert Kennedy based on my father's own early personal, youthful encounters with Kennedy (my father was from a similar Irish Catholic family that had contacts with the Kennedys), my father supported Robert Kennedy and his campaign for the White House that terminated with his assassination.  My father liked Kennedy’s stance on race relations (about which my father was growing increasingly passionate) and on the war.

Unfortunately, my memory is dim so I cannot tell you exactly what incident happened in Vietnam that went unreported by Time, but I was outraged and I was going to do something about it.  I called the Editor In Chief of Time Magazine to complain.

You might think this was absurdly presumptuous of me to do, and how could I possibly get through to someone of his stature.  I did get through, and I was encouraged to make the phone call by my mother.  My uncle, Ralph Delahaye Paine, Jr., had been an important man at Time/Life.  Among other things he had been Managing Editor and Publisher of Fortune Magazine, part of that Time/Life/Fortune triumvirate.  Part of our family lore (and there were many stories about my uncle) was how my uncle had been in charge of the Time/Life staff as they retreated back as the Nazis advanced through Europe and France and my uncle remembered vividly how vital it was for him to get everyone successfully out ahead of time.  Many of that Time/Life staff he sought to get out safely were Jewish.

The editor of Time Magazine took my call.  I am named after my uncle.  (And to be 100% complete, my daughter, born days after my uncle died in 1991, is now also.)  I played the relationship card, mentioning names, when I made my call as my mother encouraged me to do.  The editor’s secretary took my information and the editor picked up.  I am not going back at this time to check on that editor's name.  As I am telling a story after a long intervening time where my memory has some fogginess, it is probably better to leave names out.

What I remember was that the editor graciously took my call.  He probably enjoyed talking with me as an unusual break in his day.  I remember that he was more than polite, but I think I detected some bemusement on his part respecting my naive passion as he explained that there is lots of news to print and editorial decisions to be made and that not everything can always be printed.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  I was too young to have heard many of these kinds of explanations in my life and, no doubt I was out of my league knowing little about how best to express things in this kind of situation.  Some young people are savants and have natural instincts about these things at a very young age: Not me.

I don’t think my energy on the subject carried me over to write an official “letter to the editor” in hopes that it might get published.  I couldn’t have whipped one out at that point in my life and I certainly didn’t yet know the formula for quickly commanding attention, or tricks to succinctly synthesize the politically complicated.  My unwritten letter with respect to something that Time had not deigned to mention in the first place would not have been published, I’m sure.

I tell this story mostly to emphasize that, back in the day, Time Magazine and the Time/Life publishing empire were not exactly found on the left of the political spectrum in terms of the way they saw the world or what they chose to report.  I also tell the story to bring up and emphasize that where you get your news can powerfully affect your point of view because of what is and is not included.

After a few more years of reading both Time and Newsweek cover to cover every week (they were both weeklies for those who have forgotten or were not around), I finally terminated my subscription to Time because I found it so much more conservative than Newsweek when reporting on the same items.  Part of me felt a bit like a traitor.

And it also seemed as if I was acting against my own self interest: I owned a tiny amount of Time Incorporated stock that had been given to me as a baby present.  Escalating in value in those past decades, it was, in fact, my sole success with stock ownership.  My father had coached me in learning the benefits of investing in the stock market by encouraging me to buy Studebaker stock with some of my saved allowance combined with his contributed subsidy.  The purchase was not a good idea: Studebaker was an American automobile manufacturing company and in 1963 they closed the plant in South Bend, Indiana where they were based.  I learned then that what happens to stock when companies fail to thrive is not pretty.

Nowadays, what is happening to the stock of ever less profitable legacy news organizations like Time is not pretty, except that the stock of Time Magazine after a period of decline has reportedly just jumped up 25% percent because the Koch bothers, Charles and David, are circling around to engineer a takeover of the ownership.

This is yet more frightening news about the ownership of our news sources.  We are seeing that as income and wealth inequality become ever more pronounced, as the finances of news organizations grow increasingly anemic (reducing their relative price to that of play things), and as the government fails to enforce anti-monopoly laws and regulations, the sources of much of our news is increasingly supplied by just a few disproportionately wealthy men (or their corporate extensions) that hold some very peculiar ideas.  Those ideas include bizarre thoughts about how everyone else should sacrifice so that they can become wealthier, how we should continue to destroy the planet with exhumation and burning of fossil furls, and the glories of spending on weapons and waging wars.

But, to go back a bit, this is just the half of it, because however much worse it can be to have “news” provided by the likes of the Koch brothers, what I indicated at the outset with my story about Time Magazine and its previous conservative non-reporting about the Vietnam War, doesn’t do justice in giving you a true flavor for how biased-by-omission so much news media reporting has been in this country over the years.

Last week, Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017 at the age of 92.  Among other things, Mr. Herman was coauthor with Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” Some say he was the principal author.  That important and influential book was about how media cooperates with the powerful so that the electorate capitulates to what those in power want.  That consent manufacture includes a lot of non-reporting (and skewed reporting) of events that happen in our world.  In this vein, The New York Times virtually didn’t report Mr. Herman’s death.

The disregard was mutual. . .

. . . We understand that Mr. Herman’s last published work was about the New York Times.  It was about the Times' omissions and some very unreliable reporting on the part of the Times over multiple decades, a complete disaster if for those endeavoring to formulate their world view. His article ran in the July/August 2017 edition of Monthly Review: Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies- The New York Times, 1917-2017.  The article covers a lot of ground.  And, (to get around, in a sense, to where we began) it includes a section about misleading reporting about the Vietnam War by the Times, with criticisms you might not have thought of until you hear Mr. Herman express them eloquently with many others.

I suggest you read it next.  Consider your read of Mr. Herman's last solemn article as a commemorative mediation on things missing: the lost, the departing, and things lost when they were never included in the first place.

Two Guests On Democracy Now, Andrew Cockburn and Masha Gessen, Speaking On Subjects 9/11 Both Seem To Invite Listeners To Read Between The Lines: What Are They Saying Here?

Andrew Cockburn and Masha Gessen on Democracy Now

Two recent guests of Democracy Now, Andrew Cockburn on September 13th and Masha Gessen on October 5th, both seemed to be inviting viewers or listeners to the program to `read between the lines” and hear something more than what they were actually saying when they spoke on 9/11 topics.  Can one “read between the lines' with a program that one “watches” or “listens to”?  Well in any event the question is whether they intended their audience to hear something more than just what they said. . .

. . And if they did, what were they saying while not actually saying it?

Andrew Cockburn was on Democracy Now to explain a lawsuit making progress against the Saudi Arabian government based on a growing cornucopia of evidence that people in the Saudi government were clearly involved in supporting the men identified as the 9/11 hijackers.  During his interview Mr. Cockburn (or former Senator Bob Graham via an inserted clip) made a number of fascinating points.

To Wit:

    •    The Bush administration, people like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had a “concocted story” about what actually happened on 9/11.
    •    The Bush administration did not want the public to figure out that the identified hijackers could not have done it alone, that only with support of the sort of resources supplied by a government (a nation-state) could the 9/11 plot have been carried out.
    •    The Bush administration did not want the American public to figure out the extent that Saudi Arabia was involved in the plot.
    •    The Bush administration wanted instead to pin the plot elsewhere, particularly on Iraq against which it wanted to wage war.
    •    The torturing of detainees in Guantánamo was for the purpose coercing false confessions and false information to help buttress the concocted story.
    •    Saudi Arabia has a close and symbiotic relationship that runs very, very deep with the U.S. defense industry and military-industrial complex that involves a huge amount of expensive contracted for armaments and even personal relationships.
    •    And ditto, Saudi Arabia also has such a relationship with the oil companies.
    •    A critical lead in discovering much more about what really happened was, as an investigator for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees investigating the attacks noticed, that one of the hijackers had been in contact with an FBI informant.
    •    The then-head of the FBI, Robert Mueller (now investigating allegations about Donald Trump), strenuously attempted to stop that investigator from doing what he needed to do (going to San Diego) to discover most of what we now know about the Saudi connection to 9/11.
    •    A Mr. al-Bayoumi, a Saudi agent, at least according who everyone in the FBI, was in close contact with the hijackers (who was basically “their case officer, it seemed”), found them a place to live in San Diego, opened a bank account for them, helped them, introduced them to people who helped them get flying lessons, helped them to get driver’s licenses, and more.
    •    Mr. Bayoumi himself worked for a company owned by the Saudi Ministry of Defense, but never showed up to work.
    •    There were checks from the Saudi Embassy in Washington that went in a pretty straightforward (if indirect) procedure to the hijacker, or to Mr. Bayoumi for the purposes of looking after the hijackers.

Here are the parts of the interview transcript covering the above.

Democracy Now On Lawsuit About Who Was Responsible For 9/11

FORMER SENATOR BOB GRAHAM:  They even had a concocted story . .  My feeling is that what happened is they wanted to go to war with Iraq, had wanted to, particularly people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and it was embarrassing to find out that the information that was becoming available seemed to more point to Saudi Arabia as having been the country that aided the 9/11, rather than Iraq. And so, the response to that is, let's suppress the information about Saudi Arabia's involvement . . as we push hard to get authorization for war in Iraq.

ANDREW COCKBURN: . . . there's one thing that the Bush administration and Senator Graham agreed on, which was that the-for the hijacking, for the 9/11 operation to succeed, they had to have had the support of-the structured support of a nation-state, I mean, the elaborate-in terms of money, in terms of contacts, in terms of-you know, these were a bunch of, basically, sort of hicks, who-most of them, who arrived in this country, didn't speak English, didn't know people. And they were all taken care of and found places to live and given money and, you know, steered to flying lessons. You know, it was a very sophisticated or well-organized operation. And that had to have been-in Graham's view, and, it seems, in mine, too, had to have been done by a state. Now, the Bush administration tried to say it was Iraq. In fact, they so wanted it to be Iraq, or wanted people to believe it was Iraq, that prisoners-interrogators at Guantánamo were under instructions to torture detainees in Guantánamo into admitting, falsely, this link between Iraq and the 9/11 hijackings.

* * * *
. . . the relationship with Saudi Arabia . .  runs very, very deep . . . the huge financial benefits that flow at least to the U.S. defense industry, the U.S. military-industrial complex, in terms of arms contracts, consultancy contracts for retired general officers. You know, there's just a very close sort of symbiotic relationship between the two. The whole relationship of the oil companies to Saudi Arabia . .

* * * *

[Michael] Jacobson was an investigator on the . . .  the joint inquiry by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees . set up right after the attacks . .  noticed an odd discrepancy, an odd mention in FBI files here in Washington, that seemed to say—that said that one of the hijackers had been in contact with an FBI informant. And he thought, "This is quite interesting." And he wanted—he put in to go to San Diego. This is a hijacker, sorry, I should say, who had been living in San Diego. He pushed to go to San Diego to look into the files in the local FBI office. Interestingly, the then-head of the FBI, Mr. Mueller, Robert Mueller, now investigating the Trump—allegations about Donald Trump, pushed—moved heaven and earth to stop Jacobson going to San Diego. Nevertheless, the committee insisted he do so. And he went there and found most of what we know about the Saudi connection.

He found that in the files they had—there was plenty of information about a Saudi agent, Mr. al-Bayoumi, who everyone in the FBI, certainly, out there believed was a Saudi agent, who had been in close contact with the hijackers, who had found them a place to live in San Diego, had opened a bank account for them, had helped them—well, introduced them to people who helped them get flying lessons, helped them to get driver’s licenses—had basically been their case officer, it seemed. This was all turned up in—I mean, I could go on. You know, there’s other people. There were checks that went from the Saudi Embassy in Washington that went, more or less—I mean, indirectly, but in a pretty straightforward procedure—to the hijacker, or to Mr. Bayoumi, for looking after the hijackers. Mr. Bayoumi himself worked for a company owned by the Saudi Ministry of Defense, but never showed up to work.

Now on to the pertinent part of the other Democracy Now interview with award-winning author, journalist Masha Gessen, author of "The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia."  Ms. Gessen has gained attention telling people that in our new political landscape we all have to develop our talent for listening through a "cacophony of lies."

The overall interview was wide ranging but at one point Democracy Now’s Nermee Shaikh asked Ms. Gessen what she thought the effects of 9/11 were on the U.S. government.

Responding, Ms. Gessen made these points:

    •    That 9/11 was our “Reichstag fire.”
    •    The Reichstag fire in Germany was used by Hitler in 1933/1934 who had just been appointed chancellor as a “pretext for restricting political freedoms” while the government claiming “extraordinary power.”
    •    That in Germany this was done pursuant to what in 1934 Germany was called a “a state of exception,” and in the U.S. after 9/11 was “state of emergency that went into effect three days after September 11th has never been lifted.”
    •    That the War Powers Act passed with one dissenting vote three days after September 11th, continues to be in effect and has been used by President Obama and now by President Trump.
    •    We have a now 16-year run of an increasing concentration of power in the executive branch (including military power and surveillance) from George W. Bush, through Obama and now on to Trump.
    •    This chain of events created the possibility a politician like Trump able to get elected in this country running for “autocrat.”

When Ms. Gessen referred to the example of Gerrmany’s  “Reichstag fire” (actually 1933)  as a  “pretext” for Hitler’s government to limit personal freedoms and arrogate massively greater power to Hitler she did not directly allude to the fact that, although it is still debated, there is a general consensus that the “Reichstag fire” was quite likely an inside job, a false flag operation carried out by the Nazis themselves for the purpose of gaining the pretext they then seized upon.  (Various German courts acted to posthumously overturn the conviction of Marinus van der Lubbe the one man, a possibly mentally deficient drifter, accused and convicted and quickly executed by the Nazi's and in 2008 he was posthumously pardoned.)

Ms. Gessen did, however, refer to talk “early on in the Trump presidency” of prospective future terrorist attacks that were characterized as “inevitable” and sure to be opportunistically seized upon by the Trump administration for the pretext of consolidating power.  That talks sounds almost like, even if it is not exactly, a warning of a concern respecting a possibly false flag in nature.  Ms. Gessen allowed that she thinks this “trope has sort of faded a little bit.”  Indeed, in November right after the election, Bill Maher on his HBO program specifically referred to the notorious German Reichstag fire as a false flag operation launched by Hitler himself and asked his audience and panel “Don't you think that they would have that in their mind?” He said this while suggesting that Trump and conceivable Trump administration officials like “Christie and Guiliani” would be less constrained by the “rule of law” than Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.  Where can one find other instances of this “trope” before it "faded"?: Not sure.

Here are the parts of the interview transcript covering the second set of bullet points above.

On Democracy Now: Journalist Masha Gessen on Effects of 9/11

From interview of award-winning author, journalist Masha Gessen, author of The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.

NERMEEN SHAIKH:     Now, in one of your pieces, you talked about the effects-I mean, the kind of looking at the longer view-the effects of 9/11 and the concentration of power in the executive branch. Can you say what you think some of the historical-although not that long ago-reasons are that Trump was elected?

MASHA GESSEN: So, that was a piece that I wrote when I was asked to write about the looming Reichstag fire, if you remember. I think this trope has sort of faded a little bit. But early on in the Trump presidency, a lot of people were saying, "Oh, he's going to use an event to consolidate power, to create a state of exception, right? And that event is going to be like a terrorist attack. And, of course, you know, the terrorist attack is inevitable. It's just a question of how Trump is going to use it."

    My argument is basically that our Reichstag fire-and the Reichstag fire, as I'm sure you know, is, in 1934, the Reichstag, the parliament building in Berlin, burned, and Hitler, who had just recently been appointed chancellor, used it as a pretext for restricting political freedoms in really profound ways, in ways that-to create a state of exception, what his favorite legal theorist, Carl Schmitt, called a state of exception, which is when the sovereign claims extraordinary power.

    Well, I think that that has all happened in this country, and it happened in the wake of September 11th. The state of emergency that went into effect three days after September 11th has never been lifted. It was renewed by President Obama every September for seven years of his presidency, the seven Septembers that he was president. We continue to be in the state of emergency. The War Powers Act passed with one dissenting vote three days after September 11th, continues to be in effect and has been used by President Obama and now by President Trump. And there's also been a 16-year run of concentrating-increasing concentration of power in the executive branch-under George W. Bush, basically, in the interest of shoring up more military and surveillance power; under President Obama, for some of the same and some other reasons, having to do with a Congress that was intent on paralyzing him. But basically, I think that chain of events did a lot to create the possibility of Trump, to create the very possibility of a politician who could run for autocrat in this country and get elected.

The question is worth asking again: Watching these episodes of Democracy Now does it seem that things are being almost said with people not completely willing to say them?  As if saying certain things is proscribed?

And what is being said?  . . .  Well if the game is for these Democracy Now guests to beat around the bush and ultimately not say something, we are not going to ruin the game and say it for them here.

Death of Roger Ailes Puffs Wind Into Sails of a False Meme: The Corporate Mainstream Media As Liberal

New York Times and "On The Media" Coverage of the death of Roger Ailes allowed Ailes to make specious argument from the grave, in the end serving the financial interests.

The death of Roger Ailes could have been an occasion to note that the presence of Fox News on the corporate news spectrum (like the growing Sinclair Broadcast conglomerate and others) moves the already corporatist and hence conservative slant of mainstream media somewhat further to the right.

Instead, the death of Mr. Ailes was used to deceptively buttress the notion that Mr. Ailes himself worked hard to promote, that corporately owned mainstream media instead of being conservatively and routinely supportive of vested monied interests, is, instead, “liberal” or “progressive.”  The eulogies making this post mortum assessment don’t promote the Fox News Network that Mr. Ailes helped birth as “fair and balanced,” per the motto Mr. Ailes affixed to the network, the assessments instead make Mr. Ailes false fact practices seem almost “fair” or at least part if a fair game because it was “balancing.”

Somehow as they engage in this misleading-slight-of-hand the pundits manage to sound judiciously sober.

What am I talking about? . .

 . .  I am talking about the the impression you would likely have gotten from reading of Mr. Ailes death in the New York Times, which styles itself as the paper of record though hardly being reliable in that regard.

 . . . More disconcerting was hearing commentary on Mr, Ailes’ death from “On The Media,” a WNYC based public radio program the exists to provide and overarchingly accurate meta-perspective on the nation’s media generally.  It’s sad because I would normally recommend “On the Media” for being reliable in meeting higher standards.

I don’t think I am being too harsh here.

Before I get to the capper from “On the Media” here is what you could read in the New York Times:

•      Roger Ailes: The Man Who Mined a Divided America (The Fox News creator made a fortune creating a cultural safe space for Americans pining for the way things were), by Jim Rutenberg, May 18, 2017

    . .  Roger Ailes saw a divided country but an undivided news media. And he set out to change it.

    . . . Mr. Ailes built a network, the Fox News Channel, that would speak to and for those Americans he said were being ignored and disrespected. . .

    * * *

    His network . .  presenting news with an approach he called "fair and balanced," an indictment of the rest of the news media as excessively liberal.

•     Roger Ailes, Who Built Fox News Into an Empire, Dies at 77 (Mr. Ailes exerted wide influence on American politics with his conservative Fox News, only to be undone by sexual harassment allegations.), By Clyde Haberman, May 18, 2017

"If we look conservative," he said, "it's because the other guys are so far to the left." In his mordant humor, CNN stood for Clinton News Network and CBS for Communist Broadcasting System. What Fox News did, he said, was apply a necessary corrective.

* * * *

Almost immediately he called on Mr. Murdoch, who longed for a news network of his own and shared Mr. Ailes's belief that existing news organizations were far too liberal. They created Fox News in fairly short order.

You get the same impression from the video news version the Times posted- Roger Ailes: Polarizing Media Mastermind, May 18, 2017.

“On the Media” much more explicitly described the corporately owned media Ailes was purportedly providing a balance against was actually liberal. progressive, not conservative.

•     A Bill of Indictment, May 19, 2017

FOX News Channel was founded on . . .  one great truth, that mainstream news media were voices of liberalism, . .  a journalistic mentality that largely overlaps with progressive thinking. Reform, truth to power, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, liberal democracy is the consensus . . .

In one fatal summary valedictory “On The Media” framed the entire existence of Fox News exactly as the sort of he-said-she-said contest that OTM normally inveighs against.

Instead of suggesting that Ailes genius was an atunement to the voice of a forgotten and neglected populace why didn't any of these summings up report on the money that catapulted Fox into existence in the mid 1990s before it gain traction with with manipulative falsehoods?

It is worth noting that Fox reportedly was paying cable television providers $11 a subscriber to put it on the air when it launched rather than the convention, which was the reverse, for the cable providrs to pay the content provdiers.  See: Bold grab for subs: Murdoch offers $11 to carry Fox News. (News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch to launch Fox News channel) May 6, 1996 and Media: Entrepreneurs race big cable companies to get new cable services to viewers, by Geraldine Fabrikant, May 6, 1996.

$11 per subscriber plus the forgone spread that would normally have been paid to a provider instead is quite a substantial portion of the overall average cable bill.  I don't know what it was in 1996, (bills have been increasing rapidly in recent years) but in 2001 the average cable bill was reportedly $48.00.

Consider the Fox News tactic of paying to be broadcast with how much other networks want to be paid their retransmission fees. In 2013 CBS went off the air in major cities because of the retransmission fees it demanded it be paid.  In March of 2010 a standoff between Disney’s ABC and cablevision affected the broadcast of the Oscars that year.

The political slant of corporately owned media media is a problem because it is corporately owned.  The slant of corporately-owned Fox News is likewise a problem, and that is similarly because of the money behind it.

New York Times Launches New Section: War

The new "War" section that will be appearing regularly through the week in the New York Times starting today, the first day of this month.

The New York Times is launching a new section to its daily print edition: “War.”  The new section, which will run multiple days during the week, will, according to the Times description of it, be most closely analogous to its “Sports” section that runs regularly throughout the week.

The new section will replace several other sections the Times is discontinuing, including the Tuesday “Science” section, the Wednesday, “Food” section (previously named “Dining”), the Thursday “Style” section and, long a candidate for discontinuance,  the Sunday “Metro” section.

With the United States military now deployed in 70% of the world’s recognized nations, 147 out of 195, an increase of eighty percent since 2010, you pretty much need a score card to keep track of all the skirmishes and battles we are winning around the world by having our teams kill so many people on the other side of these contests.  This section will provide that kind of organization with box scores for each country broken down separately, making it far easier to tell which country and which conflict is which.

Commenting, General Mad Dog Mattis, Trump’s Secretary of Defense, said that the new section with its ongoing scores will be much appreciated by the government saying that it will give the American public a more convincing sense that the nation is making progress with the escalating casualty figures, like recently in Mosul,  laid out in a with more emphatic and celebratory fanfare, “We invest significant resources, in these efforts,” Mattis said, “and it’s important that citizens who often vote, think that we are getting results.”

The box scores will focus on officially released calculations with respect to combatants on each side, not figures that are considered just collateral to the conflict.  

While rationale for the new Times section stems partly from the fact that the United States spends a huge percentage of its budget, more on war than all the rest of the world, and more even than the other significant military powers combined, the new War section will not report on the financial costs or aspects of these world-wide mobilizations.  That job will be left to the "Business" section according to the Times description of what is planned.  “We will be following the pattern and approach we use with the Sports section when we report about such complex and challenging things as the public financing of sports arenas.  Like sports, war in this country is big business, even bigger business than sports, but the business side of things, everything concerning the flow of dollars (and who gets them) is for other people to read about, not the general public whose jobs is to root for us to win when our boys fan out in the field.”

Launching the War section to replace other sections of the paper reflects societal change as well as solves some problems for the paper.  The Times stressed that, in a fast changing world, how the paper is organized is not written in stone.   For instance, Times readers surely noticed when the Times discontinued its once separate “Technology” section, a staple for many years.  Now, instead, if you want to read about the technology and perhaps its implications for surveillance, the Times has substituted by publishing just a few tech-related articles regularly every Thursday, the day the Technology section used to run, plus it covers day-to-day any important tech developments during the week as they occur.

Cutting the Science section at this time makes sense for the Times because the Trump administration is cutting way back on science funding, eliminating climate change information from federal website pages and subjecting federal scientists to gag order restrictions about communicating with the press thus ensuring that the Times will have fewer press release based stories about science to feature.   Conversely, the Trump administration’s budget new budget proposes to increase U.S. military spending by an amount that is roughly equal to the entirety of all of Britain’s military spending.

Recent spending chart from the Times.

One thing not yet decided is whether the new Times War section will cover what happens when increased U.S. Military spending pushes more surplus war equipment out for use by local police departments.  Coverage of this could slipstream nicely within the general ambiance the section expects to cultivate.

The Times is tapping a member of a well known patrician family to helm the new section as editor: Worth Atherton Snarell.  His family has a long history of being represented in the nation’s military exploits, going back to the American Revolution, in nearly all the major wars the United States has been involved in, nearly continuously since its inception and also has had many members who were war correspondents, and under the auspices of Times patriarch Arthur Hays Sulzberger worked and journalists and for the CIA.
  
In terms of precedent, Mr. Snarell noted that Democracy Now titles its five-day a week hourly news broadcasts “The War and Peace Report.”  We are doing something very different said editor Snarell: “For one thing, we are not dealing with ‘peace’ at all.  Peace is far too flummoxing, subtle and challenging to think about for a public that expects the kind of excitement that keep its entertained and when you get into that kind of thing it confuses what we are supposed to keep straight in our mind about who the good guys and who the bad guys are supposed to be. “

The first issue of the section will publish today, April 1, 2017.   Look for the its letter of introduction to the readers from editor Worth A. Snarell.

The Good News Is That There Are Books You Can Delve Into To Reflect Upon Life In Fascist Dystopias. The Bad News Is Whether What Your Choice To Do So Says About You Gets Communicated To . . . And Could You Consequently Lose Essential Freedoms?

Donald Trump's assumption of the presidency has everyone reading about life in dystopias.  His meeting with vote-suppressing meister Kris Kobach. . . Would you like to read about real life?

G-Damn!  Three featured New York Times articles in on virtually the same subject in just three days. .  What books Americans are reading! . . .

. . .  It must be pretty important!

And it is!  It is important to know that Americans are reading!  And what the multiple Times articles all tell us is about the incredible surge of Americans now choosing to read novels about fascist dystopias.

Three NY Times Articles About The Sudden Popularity of Books About Fascist Dystopies Tell Us  . . .

Below are the Times articles with some extracts.  Please not that I have bolded to supply, in one small respect, some emphasis.  (Enjoy the overall repetitiveness of these articles overall.) 

•    Uneasy About the Future, Readers Turn to Dystopian Classics, by Alexandra Alter, January 27, 2017

"The Handmaid's Tale" is among several classic dystopian novels that seem to be resonating with readers at a moment of heightened anxiety about the state of American democracy. Sales have also risen drastically for George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984," which shot to the top of Amazon's best-seller list this week.

Other novels that today's readers may not have picked up since high school but have landed on the list this week are Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, "Brave New World," a futuristic dystopian story set in England in 2540; and Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a satire about a bellicose presidential candidate who runs on a populist platform in the United States but turns out to be a fascist demagogue. On Friday, "It Can't Happen Here" was No. 9 on Amazon; "Brave New World" was No. 15.

The sudden boom in popularity for classic dystopian novels, which began to pick up just after the election, seems to reflect an organic response from readers who are wary of the authoritarian overtones of some of Mr. Trump's rhetoric.

* * * *

. . .  Since the inauguration, sales of the novel ["1984"] have risen 9,500 percent, according to Craig Burke, the publicity director for Signet Classics, a paperback imprint at Penguin. . .

* * *

"It's a frame of reference that people can reach for in response to government deception, propaganda, the misuse of language, and those are things that occur all the time," said Alex Woloch, an English professor at Stanford University who has written about the roots of Orwell's political language. "There are certain things this administration is doing that has set off these alarm bells, and people are hungry for frames of reference to understand this new reality."

•    Why `1984' Is a 2017 Must-Read, by Michiko Kakutani, January 26, 2017

The dystopia described in George Orwell's nearly 70-year-old novel "1984" suddenly feels all too familiar. A world in which Big Brother (or maybe the National Security Agency) is always listening in, and high-tech devices can eavesdrop in people's homes. (Hey, Alexa, what's up?) A world of endless war, where fear and hate are drummed up against foreigners, and movies show boatloads of refugees dying at sea. A world in which the government insists that reality is not "something objective, external, existing in its own right" - but rather, "whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth."

"1984" shot to No. 1 on Amazon's best-seller list this week, after Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to President Trump, described demonstrable falsehoods told by the White House press secretary Sean Spicer - regarding the size of inaugural crowds - as "alternative facts." It was a phrase chillingly reminiscent, for many readers, of the Ministry of Truth's efforts in "1984" at "reality control."

* * *f

Not surprisingly, "1984" has found a nervous readership in today's "post-truth" era. It's an era in which misinformation and fake news have proliferated on the web . .   sow doubts about the democratic process.

•    George Orwell's `1984' Is Suddenly a Best-Seller, by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, January 25, 2017

George Orwell's classic book "1984," about a dystopian future where critical thought is suppressed under a totalitarian regime, has seen a surge in sales this month, rising to the top of the Amazon best-seller list in the United States and leading its publisher to have tens of thousands of new copies printed.

* * * *

Prof. Stefan Collini, a professor of intellectual history and an expert on Orwell at the University of Cambridge, said that readers see a natural parallel between the book and the way Mr. Trump and his staff have distorted facts.

* * * *

“That kind of unreality that is propagated as reality is what people feel reminded of, and that’s why they keep coming back.”

It’s great that there are books, recognized classics, that you can delve into to think more deeply about the thought control, lack of freedom, lack of democracy, and lack, even lack of reality, that is possible in fascist dystopias.  Reading such books you may even find tools to deal with such dsytopias and to stave them off. . .

The Bad News: What Reading These Books Tells. . .

But there is a flip side.  Have you thought about the bad news, about how reading those very same books could actually cause you to loose your political freedoms and political rights?  Have you thought that it might deprive you of your right to elect the president?  Deprive you of your right to elect any of the government officials who are supposed to represent you?

Consider this: Your choice when you read these books will say things about you (just as those articles in the Times wanted to make that exact point) and think about who that will be communicated to.

Certainly you have noticed that when you shop for something online everyone seems to know exactly what you have been shopping for?  You shop for underwear, a new refrigerator, a certain kind of electronic equipment, or even a medicine, and all of a sudden the advertisements and a emails are following you around suggesting to you and reminding you about how, where and when to buy that underwear, that new refrigerator, that electronic equipment, and the medicine you were interested in.. .

  . . Since I have been researching this article Hulu is following me around with an ad telling me to watch `The Handmaid's Tale.' 

Amazon Says. . .

The little bit of emphasis I provided with my bolded text above called attention to how the purchase of these dystopia books involved, in all the instances being cited, sales that were being kept track of by Amazon, which despite having opened its very first brick and mortar store recently, does almost all of its selling through the internet.  Amazon is also a huge monopoly, increasingly vertical in multiple respects, able to use the data it collects to undercut its own sellers, which, because it should therefore be subject to anti-trust actions, puts it in a significant and inextricable relationship with the federal government.  What kind of relationship exactly does Amazon have with the federal government?: Well, for one thing, it’s head, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post, which has a powerful lot to say about the stature of all the government officials who regulate Amazon.

Amazon says: “Customers Who Bought [Orwell’s `1984'] Also Bought-  `Brave New World' by
Aldous Huxley,  `Animal farm: A Fairy Story,' by George Orwell, `It Can't Happen Here,' by Sinclair Lewis.”

Amazon says: “Customers Who Bought [Sinclair Lewis’ `It Can't Happen Here'] Also Bought-  `1984,' by George Orwell,  `Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley, `The Origins of Totalitarianism,' by Hannah Arendt, `The Handmaid's Tale,' by Margaret Atwood, `The Plot Against America,' by Philip Roth.”

AND customers Who Bought Orwell’s “1984" and Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can't Happen Here” also voted for. . .

Running The Electorate Through A PRIZM That Divides Into A Spectrum. . .

What begins with commercial marketing soon migrates to the political realm.

In his recently published “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble To Get Inside Our Heads,” author Tim Wu writes about the revolution in advertising that occurred in the 1970s with the advent of PRIZM* (Potential Ratings in ZIP Markets).  It was a way to profile Americans for targeted advertising that, computers doing the sorting, used public census data about the U.S. population spread throughout the nation’s newly created ZIP codes to go beyond the simplest categorizations (“young or old,” “male of female,” “black or white,” “Northerners vs. Southerners”) and subdivide and geographically locate forty characteristically distinctive identified “clusters” or “subnations,” not one United States, “all calling the same continent home.”

(* Not to be confused, despite the ominous similarity of name or potential similarities, with the National Security Agency PRISM surveillance program that whistleblower Edward Snowden made famous that collects data from at least nine major U.S. companies, including,Google, Microsoft, Apple, Skype, YouTube, AOL and Yahoo.)

Wu explains that PRIZM could be used so precisely for marketing maneuvers that in 1982 the Coca-Cola company was able to introduce Diet Coke, its new diet cola, without cannibalizing the sales of TaB, the diet cola it already had on the market.  It did so by avoiding, “advertising Diet Coke in Tab clusters, and even began mailing TaB drinkers coupons for their preferred cola, so as to neutralize any collateral damage.”  In this regard, Wu tartly observes:

It was entirely in keeping with the ultimate claim of PRIZM that you could say different things to different people and win them all.  And it goes a long way toward explaining the system’s later importance in politics.

Tim Wu's book: "it goes a long way toward explaining the system’s later importance in politics."

From "Microtargetting" to "Nanotargeting"

With computers and the data we now collect about people, political marketing and targeting of potential voters has gone a long way beyond PRISM.  On a segment of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” broadcast in July, well before the presidential election, Barry Bennett, a former adviser to the Trump campaign and the former campaign manager for Ben Carson, explained to NPR host Robert Siegel the phenomenal precision with which the electorate can be sliced and diced for political action, selective communications, get out the vote operations, etc:

SIEGEL: What about other aspects of, you know, what had been modern political campaigning - microtargeting specific groups, a get-out-the-vote operation, having staff out there? You think it's all going to be proven to be obsolescent in this cycle?

BENNETT: No. No, I think that, you know, what we used to call microtargeting - I guess what we have now must be nanotargeting because we've gotten so much better at it. And we now have personality scores on the voter file. I - not only can I tell if you love or hate guns, but I can tell you what emotional response I can elicit from different kinds of messages.

SIEGEL: This is all to decide whether I'm worth working on to get me to the polls...

BENNETT: Yes.

SIEGEL: ...Or calling up again.

BENNETT: Whether I want you to vote - go vote or whether I think you're a lost cause. So - I mean, all that has really, really progressed. But I can now target you through Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or even Snapchat because we know a lot more about you. I mean, we used to be very proud that we had, like, 50 sets of data points on you. Now we have 8,000, 9,000, 10,000. And, you know, we can go through every tweet you've ever made and append that to the voter file.

(See: Former Trump Adviser Gives Closer Look At A Non-Traditional Campaign, July 11, 2016.)

It’s frightening enough that U.S. voters can be selectively misled with nano-tailored lies and misrepresentations.  Its frightening too that these lies can be efficiently injected into your little bubble of consciousness through Facebook which acknowledged that during the last leg of the it changed its algorithm to allow more false news favorable to Trump, frightening that there were armies of Twitter bots, a superior one in Trump’s case, to target you for such communications.

Banishing Unwanted Voters

That’s frightening enough, but what’s more frightening is that after a campaign has communicated with you through all the various means at their disposal, and once they have decided it’s not “worth working on” on you to get you “to the polls,” that it’s not worth “calling up again,” and when the decision they have made about whether they “want you to vote” is that they don’t want you to vote. . . . Well, you need to understand that means are being undertaken to ensure that voters, in fact, don’t vote, or that, if you do vote, your vote is not counted.

There are all sorts of ways to neutralize the voters whose votes are not wanted.  Some of the nasty old traditional ones involve deceptive practices like distributing in a neighborhood where you don’t want people to vote, flyers with the wrong date for an election (maybe only in Spanish), or incorrectly informing people like students that they can’t vote.  It can involve insanely long lines to votes in those neighborhoods where voters are to be stymied while there are short lines in neighborhoods where voting is encouraged.  Voters can be suppressed through voter ID laws that become even more effective at discriminating between who can and can’t vote if motor vehicle registration/drivers license/ID offices are shut down in poor and ethnic neighborhoods and if you allow gun licenses to serve as voter ID.

The neutralization of votes can also sometimes show up in the exit polls.  It's because so many of the ways to neutralize votes involve not counting the votes of people who, overcoming other obstacles, believe they actually they succeeded in voting, and whose votes should have been counted, that investigative reporter Greg Palast who specializes in these issues (with many others agreeing with him) thinks that Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote by about 3 million, also did not actually win the electoral vote.  And that, according to a PBS Frontline documentary, is apparently what Trump’s own campaign experts and the nation’s top Republicans believed too.

What spoils things so that the cast votes of voters don’t get counted?: Voting machines so broken or deficient that they are incapable of counting votes is one maneuver.  Such machines get deployed in the particular neighborhoods where votes are to be squelched.  Trump ostensibly won the state of Michigan by just 10,704 counted votes, but Palast calculates that there were more than 75,000 votes in Michigan that went uncounted mostly in “historically Democratic” Detroit and Flint, Michigan, majority-black cities.

Palast in his research, investigation and reporting also focuses in on the voter purges using a Republican-launched company called Crosscheck of thousands, entering the stratosphere of six digit territory,* that converts into uncounted provisional ballots the votes targeted for elimination of voters with Black, Hispanic, Asian and Muslim names.  These eliminations are pretexted on claims the eliminated names, across many different states with Republican governments, are similar enough to suspect either double registration and voting, or voting by convicted felons.**  Palast’s review of the documents and interviews of the perpetrators of these schemes (watchable in his film “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”) demonstrate the pretexts to be farcical.  As intensely as Republicans loudly crying wolf have searched they have found virtually no evidence of voter fraud (which is punishable by a significant federal sentence of five years in prison.). . .virtually no evidence.

. . . As of now, Trump is fielding new pretexts for purging: suspected non-citizenship, or unacceptable Muslim beliefs.

(* 449,922 voters purged in Michigan, 589,393 purged in North Carolina, 270,824 purged in Arizona.)

(** With an unprecedented level of mass incarcerations, discriminatory in nature the rules against those convicted of felonies voting is a significant disenfranchisement of black voters in itself.)

And finally, as voting forensic expert Jonathan Simon has been covering for fifteen years there is the question of unverifiable voting machines, such as in Pennsylvania that can be hacked and all too likely have been.

Trump Team And Exit Polls Agree In Concluding Trump Did Not Win The Election 

All of this adds up to a huge difference between the counted votes and the probably now more accurate exit polls, which is why those agreeing with Mr. Palast think Trump didn’t actually win the election and why even Trump’s own experts apparently agreed.

The Frontline documentary, “Trump Road To The White House,” is flawed in ways that I someday must write about, but its beginning quoting experts from the Trump team is telling:

    NARRATOR
On Election Day, Donald Trump and his senior campaign team were huddled at Trump Tower.
    KATY TUR, NBC News
They went into election night believing that they were going to lose.
    NEWS REPORTER
As the polls close across the country.
    NARRATOR
AT 5 o'clock they received the first exit polls.
    NEWS REPORTER
We're counting down to the first poll closings right now.
    DAVID BOSSIE, Trump campaign adviser
 When we got those early returns, the exit polls, and I actually got it about 5:01, we all had a little bit of a gut punch.
    NEWS REPORTER
If Trump wants to win, he's got to hold onto Florida and North Carolina.
    FRANK LUNTZ
In state after state he was so far behind that I knew that he was going to lose, because the exit polls don't get it wrong.
    TONY FABRIZIO, Trump campaign pollster
We were getting crushed in like Michigan, Pennsylvania. I mean just- and so, from like 6 o'clock on, you know, we're all like, "Oh my god."
    NEWS REPORTER
And look at all these wins we're projecting for Hillary Clinton right now. Take a look at the electoral map now Hillary Clinton is taking the lead.
    NARRATOR
It seemed to confirm what the media and political establishment had been saying for months.
    NEWS REPORTER
Hillary Clinton has a lead in North Carolina.
    NARRATOR
Donald Trump never had a chance.
    NEWS REPORTER
And the Clinton campaign is increasingly confident about.
    FRANK LUNTZ, Republican pollster
Every senior Republican that I talked to, with only one exception, thought that Trump was going to lose.
    NARRATOR
But as the votes were counted in Florida, a surprise.

Yes that’s Republican pollster, Frank Luntz saying: “In state after state he was so far behind that I knew that he was going to lose, because the exit polls don't get it wrong.”

Myths of "Divided Half" of Nation Supporting Trump And That "The Russians Did It"

Along with Times reporting on popularity of dystopian classics, an image of the D.C. Womens March, over one million strong

Nevertheless, Donald Trump was proclaimed the victor in the election.  What, the Tea Party suddenly grew in size and took over the nation?  How so?  Even with the Kochs footing the bills, the Tea Party's biggest ever muster was maybe 70,000.  In contrast, we recently saw millions pouring out across the country, and in Washington D.C. (not to mention the rest of the world), in profound and urgent dissatisfaction with Trump.  The Women's March. The D.C. March alone was almost certainly over one million marchers.

Six of the demonstration cities, clockwise from upper left: Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Denver, Boston, New York City, Austin

Six more of the demonstration cities, clockwise from upper left:Montpelier, San Jose, Asheville ,St. Paul, Indianapolis, San Diago

We have been offered new mythologies to explain the incongruous election result: i.e. that the country has grown exceedingly divided with a huge rise of White nationalism (even as Obama’s, our black president’s, outgoing approval ratings is 58%, the highest favorability rating of any president in 24 years, while Trump’s incoming ratings are the lowest, reported as low as 32%.), or that the Russians “hacked” the election.  Either of these perhaps both absurd excuses for how Trump got pronounced winner of this election is a distraction from the main issue.*

(* Ironically, one of the Times articles quoted above about how `literarily' Orwellian our current plight is, while citing the issue of "fake news," cites as settled truth the Russian interference in our presidential election, which largely unsubstantiated reports may itself involve an unhealthy dose of fake news- emphasis supplied: Not surprisingly, "1984" has found a nervous readership in today's "post-truth" era. It's an era in which misinformation and fake news have proliferated on the web; Russia is flooding the West with propaganda to affect elections and sow doubts about the democratic process.)

Trump Telegraphs More Voter Disenfranchisement To Accompany Increasing Voter Dissatisfaction

It’s increasingly obvious that Donald Trump’s vociferous claims that the popular vote was stolen from him are motivated with the goal of obscuring the reverse: The electoral vote was stolen.

In this regard, even the NY Times, in its tepid grey way, is now giving some notice to an essential thing it and the rest of the media have been regularly neglecting to keep front and center reporting about the election: That voter purges were one of the ways the electoral vote was stolen, and, with Trump’s cranky complaints about too many voters voting against him, the likely plan is to engage in a lot more of these disenfranchising voter purges.  Here from a Times editorial (emphasis supplied):

 Mr. Trump is telegraphing his administration's intent to provide cover for longstanding efforts by Republicans to suppress minority voters by purging voting rolls, imposing onerous identification requirements and curtailing early voting.

 "This is another attempt to undermine our democracy,” said Representative Barbara Lee of California. . .

    * * * *

Voter suppression initiatives have grown increasingly common since the Supreme Court invalidated a central provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, making it easier for local authorities to tweak election rules in a manner that disenfranchises particular groups of people.

Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department aggressively fought these efforts. Lawsuits filed by civil rights advocates and the Justice Department led a federal appeals court in 2013 to strike down a North Carolina voter ID law that justices concluded had been designed to target African-American voters with "surgical precision." Litigation in a similar Texas case is now on hold, pending guidance from the new attorney general.

See:  Editorial- The Voter Fraud Fantasy, by The Editorial Board, January 27, 2017

Despite the nod in this editorial, the Times, the paper of record, has done virtually no reporting about either Mr. Palast’s work (unless you roll back decades) or about Crosscheck coordinating Republicans to eliminate voters from the 30 controlled states.

Jim Crow Hatching Eggs

Two similarly themed cartoons by Brooklyn's Mark Hurwitt, both equally eloquent

It’s not just similar names of people who sound like they are likely minorities that these data bases used for purging are keeping track of; Palast in his film points out how the data bases also list whether voters are black or white.

The purging and other forms of voter suppression have been widely recognized as an extension of the old Jim Crow barriers to voting while black.  That’s reason enough why Palast calls Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State from Kansas who is one of those most principally responsible for the deployment of Crosscheck, “Mr. KKK.”  Kansas, (the third “K”) is the home state of the Koch Industries (the nation’s second largest private company with “Kansas and the Kochs being linked nearly inextricably”).

From Palast's: “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”- Tracking Koch money through to Kobach.

In his film, Mr. Palast follows a money trail from the Koch brothers (Koch, Donor's Trust, Numbers USA, Farmers Branch Texas, Kris Kobach) to trace $100,000 through to Kobach.  He also traces the flow of Koch money through to the Heritage Foundation promoting Crosscheck and the pretextual bases for it.

In his film, Palast reviews a Heritage Foundation brochure, "Does Your Vote Count," toting the work of Crosscheck

Kobach has defended his ties with “The Social Contract Press (TSCP), a group classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a white nationalist publishing house.”

It is a short step, a micro-millimeter from “we don’t want you to vote because you are black, Asian, or Muslim,” to “we don’t want you to vote because you think that people who are black, Asian, or Muslim should have their votes counted.”  And none of this is far away from “anyone who disagrees with us should have no say in running the government.”

Gerrymandering To Neutralize Your Vote based On What You Read

Before we move on, there is another way in which the votes of undesirable voters can be naturalized: Gerrymandering.  Because of gerrymandering, the composition of the House of Representatives does not mirror the electorate. In 2012, the Democrats got 1.4 million more votes (counted votes) than the Republicans for the House of Representatives and yet could not take control of the chamber. This puts the Democrats at a horrible disadvantage, something that is rarely mentioned and not clearly explained by papers like the New York Times.

Once again, everything the manipulators know about you from your ethnicity to the increasingly available micro variables indicative about how you think, like the magazine subscriptions you order for your reading, can be used in calculating whether they want to neutralize the effect of your vote. David Daley,  the publisher of the Connecticut Mirror, is the author of a new book on gerrymandering, titled “Rat-f**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy,” has explained what current technology means in the regard (emphasis supplied):

Gerrymandering, over the years, has certainly been a bipartisan game. Both sides have done it for a long, long time. However, the difference here really is the technology. What you have right now is a program called Maptitude. It is a - an extremely powerful program. It comes preloaded with all of the census data, with all of the demographics and ethnicity and economic data you could possibly imagine. Then you can add on to that all of the public record data sets, voting records. You can add on to it a cloud's worth of consumer preferences, of magazine subscriptions, of ZIP Code data. This wasn't the case in 2000, it wasn't the case in 1990. It certainly wasn't the case in 1810. A partisan mapmaker right now has so much information in front of them that they can draw lines that are essentially unbeatable for a decade.

See: On The Media- How the Election Is Actually Rigged, Oct 21, 2016.

If they know enough about you and your neighbors to peg you as undesirable voters, then about the only way you won’t suffer the neutralizing effects of gerrymander is if you live in a community that is just too homogeneously interlinked for them to draw the lines they way they would like.

This gets us back to those people reading books about dystopian fascism.  Haven’t those book readers now self-identified themselves, at least to Amazon, as part of a national subset who would, in certain eyes, constitute undesirable voters?   People, who for instance might be likely to “think that people who are black, Asian, or Muslim should have their votes counted.” . .

. . . And, if you have gotten at least this far reading this article, you probably do “think that people who are black, Asian, or Muslim should have their votes counted.”   Thus your reading of this article probably also identifies you to certain people as someone undesirable to vote- (Sorry. Too bad you looked!)

How Fascist Governments Look Askance At The Readers of Books

The reading of books has always had a touchy relationship with totalitarian regimes.  In this day and age the ability simply to monitor what books are being read is probably an initial first stage satisfactory in and of itself especially when coupled with the ability to regulate voting.  But in countries like Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Pinocette’s Chilean dictatorship (supported by the Unites States), books that had content that was perceived to be threatening were banned and burned.  Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451" dystopia conceptualized a government that banned all books as being too intrinsically likely to the stimulation of individualist thought.

All communications, not just books, are important to authoritarian governments because the government wants to control the messages.  In “Fahrenheit 451" the populace, not reading books, pays constant attention to large viewing screens taking up entire walls displaying government promoted broadcast media.  Most of our media broadcast on the public airwaves, skimpy on real news (like the minimal reporting about Crosscheck by the Times) come to us via a few corporate conglomerates with plenty of government interrelationships.  The corporate mainstream media was certainly complicit every step of the way into getting to the final declaration that Trump had somehow won the presidency.

The latest update about doing away with net neutrality and other FCC rules to protect the public?

Trump and comrades moved first day to rewrite and eliminate information from government websites, including the eradication of available information about global warning and climate change.  The information flowing through to us is likely to become much more constrained if the predicted move to dispense with net neutrality under the Trump administration succeeds.  In that case, the flow of information from the corporate conglomerates is apt to be prioritized above all else.

And here is another thing to think about when it comes to our modern day computer existence where our parallel virtual selves exist electronically in the new social media agora where bouncing electrons supplant physical contact: It's not just your vote that can be squelched, it's you voice that can be squelched too.  With surveillance and social media interaction the government has the tools to tamp down and see to it that the message does not get through from those who are influencers and who might cause others to vote a way they would not like.

Surveillance And Libraries

Indicative of how important what people may be reading in books is, in 2006, it was revealed that there had been a longstanding fight secretly going on since the initiation of the PATRIOT Act with the government wanting to surveil libraries and librarians resisting.  The fight was secret because the librarians were subject to a gag order not to reveal what the government was seeking to do.  Librarians were the first to ever win a fight against the PATRIOT Act, protecting the libraries as zones of privacy.

Perhaps, you’d like to repair to your local public library if you want to read novels and other books about fascist dystopias, especially if you think that Amazon, with nothing to stop it, would be too likely to pass your information on to the government?  The problem is that the fight about surveillance of reading in the libraries has continued.  Further, the introduction of digital books (Amazon is the unquestionable leader in that field) and computer interfaces for accessing books, which may be increasingly kept off site, results in a more recent sort of de facto end run around the victory for privacy it was announced that librarians had won in 2006.  Point of disclosure: I am co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries and have testified on this exact subject before the New York City Council (video also available).

Beyond surveillance, digital books and their content also have a creepy impermanence: The content of digital books (like material on the web) can be altered even as your read them and, as famously happened with Amazon's deletion of George Orwell's "1984" from the tablets of people Amazon had sold them to.

The Role Surveillance Plays In Authoritarian Societies

On Thursday, February 2nd Amy Goodman on Democracy Now asked journalist and author Andrea Pitzer to “describe the role mass surveillance plays in authoritarian societies.”  (Pitzer, who writes about “lost and forgotten history,” is the author of the soon to be out “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” i.e. those of the Holocaust, in the Philippines, Southern Africa, the Soviet Gulag, detention camps in China and North Korea, Guantanamo.)

Responded Pitzer:

Well, over time, we've seen that it's very hard to have an authoritarian or a totalitarian society, a state that runs, without a secret police. And you can't-what you need the secret police for is to gather information secretly. The surveillance techniques and abilities that we have today are really unparalleled in history. And while we can't yet be sure what the Trump administration's motives are, what they have at their disposal is far greater than what was had in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany. I'm thinking in particular of Himmler complaining that he had trouble keeping track of all the people he needed to, because he needed so many agents. But when you have the kind of technology that we do, you don't need as many people, if you have the right tools to use. And so, the ability to gather that kind of information and then potentially use it, domestically or on foreigners who happen to be here, I think is something that's worth paying attention to and to be concerned about.

The Unholy Amalgam of Surveillance, Profiling and Voter Suppression (And White Supremacy)

Now, with the ascendancy of the Trump administration to power, we see new thresholds apparently about to be crossed in terms of combining surveillance, profiling and voter suppression.  There has been widespread worry already about Trump's appointment of Steve Bannon, variously described by the new-fangeled euphemism of "alt-right," "white supremacist" and "Nazi," to the National Security Council while demoting and limiting the participation of the director of National Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
 
At the same time the Washington Examiner reported that Trump was likely to appoint the vote-suppressing Kris Kobach with his white supremacist associations to a high position, possibly as secretary, the actual head of, Homeland Security, which engages in a substantial amount of surveillance.  He didn't get the position of secretary but is still up for a high position that could be at Homeland Security.  Kobach was previously at Homeland Security.  He was one of the people in place under Attorney General John Ashcroft ready to spring into action after 9/11 when his job, according to Esquire reporting about his voter suppression effort, was "weeding out foreign travelers in the wake of 9/11-and Kobach's program was so deeply involved in racial profiling that it was shut down."  And to be clear about pedigree, in the spring of 2001, prior to 9/11 Ashcroft was focusing programmatically on the suppression of theoretical double voting and felon "fraud."

Trump meeting with Kris Kobach, prospective appointee to Homeland Security.  Insert on left is close up of Kobach's photographed document with profiling, voter suppression plan.

In November Kobach met with Trump and the Daily Kos ran an article Be afraid, very afraid: Kobach plan as Secry of Homeland Security, by VaallBlue, November 21, 2016 warning that, "Kobach made no effort to hide what he proposed to Trump if he becomes the new head of the DHS.

Mr. Kobach met with president-elect Sunday, November 20th. Standing smilingly beside Trump Kobach held under his arm documents clearly visible and thus photographed that referred to plans about tracking and persecuting Muslims, building a wall and, apparently voter suppression with "a plan to issue regulations about voter rolls along with amending the National Voter Registration Act."  And "Kobach's plan refers to some use of the Patriot Act with some action taken to 'forestall future lawsuits.'"

A converging overlap of surveillance, profiling and voter suppression is deadly to democracy, particularly when those with an agenda are motivated toward the obvious extreme abuse it portends. It means that you can lose your vote when that can simply by reading about fascist dystopias. . .  It's not just that neutralization of your vote that can be effected by boxing you into a gerrymandered district based on what you read, as now is already obviously done.  Although you may be reading this here for the first time, current technology is such that your choice of reading material can target you for having your specific vote purged.  There is nothing to prevent Amazon from passing that information along (he/she read "1984" and "It Can't Happen Here") to a campaign.

And the powers of the government when it comes to such surveillance are even greater.  You can't even go to a library (where increasingly the administrators may want you to read your books more expensively, electronically on Amazon) without serious concerns that the government won't surveil you there too as you try to read these books in privacy.

In 2007 Kris Kobach bragged in an e-mail message sent to state Republicans in Kansas about the party's accomplishments that year, including that “To date, the Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years.”  In response to criticism, Christian Morgan, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, asserted defensively that “caging voters” was “just a term of art,” explaining that `what the party has done is try to identify voters and their views on certain issues,’ “We cage that person's information,” he said.  Then when the election comes around, the GOP will . . .  

The wise axiom "just because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done" is a longstanding one.  Unfortunately, I am afraid it is an axiom not taken to heart by many of those engaged in the rough and tumble of politics for whom I think the operative concept is that `anything that can be done will be done.'

In Brooklyn, Green Party Holds Voting Justice Even With Palast and Stein

On left, Jabari Brisport Green party candidate for City Council 35th district, Jill Stein middle and Greg Palast on right.  From coverage by Cat April Watters at Hot Indie News.

I had a chance to meet Mr. Palast just recently.  The Green Party in Brooklyn set up a Voting Justice panel discussion of the uncounted votes that featured Mr. Palast and Green Party presidential candidate and vote-count-litigant-challenger Jill Stein (available via a now posted live Facebook stream -47,000 views the last time I looked).  It was the evening of Groundhog Day. Perhaps the Green Party set the discussion up on Groundhog Day for symbolic effect?: With the goal that we don't get into a loop of repeating events where this kind of injustice happens over and over again, self perpetuating and locked in?

From the video stream. Jill Stein at the event.

Mentioning the example of Mr. Kobach I asked the panel (about 1:27 in the video) about the threat of combining voter suppression, profiling and surveillance, all aligned in one package.

It was Jill Stein who replied (at 1:52:43):

Let's see, voting and surveillance: Yes absolutely the surveillance is really awful, problematic. There's all kinds of links between them. In the same way we have to democratize our vote, I think we have to put massive limits on surveillance. And it's not rocket science about how we do that. We really need to stand up and protect our right to privacy and the need for due process and for warrants. . . . We see Trump doing this so blatantly now, trying to just scare us all into thinking, you know we have to lock the Muslims out, and they try to justify it by talking about how scary it is.

Well, the bottom line is that we do not achieve security by building walls: We achieve security by establishing justice. If you want peace at home you need justice abroad. We need to push back this mythology that the only way to be secure is through surveillance. We don't achieve security through surveillance.

It was Benjamin Franklin, I think, who said: "Those who would sacrifice freedom for the sake of security will wind up losing them both."

And that's what's happening!: So we have to say no to both of those intrusions.

Where The Heck Are The Democrats On Protecting Us?

You may ask: `Where are the Democrats? Why isn't Hillary Clinton sounding the alarm? Why did Hillary Clinton jump in to challenge the vote counts only after Jill Stein and the Green Part were already doing so and readily raising millions in a matter of days to do so?'

Most of those attending the Jill Stein, Greg Palast event seemed to concur in a ready answer that agrees with my own: The Democrats are more than a little bit pregnant with vote purging that occurred on their home ground.  In Brooklyn, the borough of New York City where the Groundhog Day Voting Justice panel was held, more than 200,000 Brooklyn democratic voters were, under suspicious circumstances, purged from the voting roles almost certainly helping Hillary declare a triumph over Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders. And with the Democratic National Committee actively working against Bernie sanders we saw in multiple states the same "red shift" in exit polls with Hillary Clinton (like Trump in the general election) incongruously getting a greater proportion of the votes than people said they cast for her.

Oh, and as for that "Russian hacking"?  Jill Stein said that night: "I 'haven't seen convincing evidence of of the Russian hacking. . . .  I was not looking for Russian hacking, but any hacking, or tampering and not limited to bad guys overseas."   I think that most of those in the room that night agreed that "Russian hacking," while an emotionally satisfying gambit to let Americans off the hook for Trump's so-called election, is just a distraction from the accountability than needs to be demanded of the people who really, in all likelihood, are responsible for stealing the election.