Corporate Media Utterly Fails Russia Story
An important thing to keep in mind is that one can have two thoughts at a time. On one hand, Russia is no longer the communist threat that was the Soviet Union, we’ve numerous treaties meant to draw down our mutual nuclear armaments, and it wasn’t so long ago it was met with derision and jest when Mitt Romney asserted in a 2012 Presidential debate with Barack Obama that Russia was our foremost geopolitical threat. On the other, Putin is a former KGB operative who wishes to restore the fatherland to past prominence while assassinating and imprisoning journalists and political opponents along the way.
Same goes with the “Russia hacked the election” and “Trump/Russia collusion” narratives. I certainly believe that Trump and his businesses have sizable loans from Russian banks and he reportedly had a Moscow Trump Tower deal in the works during the campaign. Perhaps it went as far as the lifting of sanctions which would kick-start a multi-billion deal between Russia and Exxon Mobile (cough, cough…Rex Tillerson). And perhaps the numerous, previously omitted meetings between Trump campaign surrogates Sessions, Flynn, Manafort, Stone, Ivanka, Junior et al were to that effect.
All of that must be investigated by congress in a bipartisan manner, and, likely, criminally investigated.
Now we come to the “Russia hacked the election” story. First, it’s beyond hypocritical for the US to feign outrage considering the number of assassinations and coups and propping up of puppet dictators we’ve carried out across the globe. We even bragged about our influencing the Russian election of Boris Yelstin, twice!
That said, we don’t want our elections to be tampered with so we must enact aggressive elections reform beginning with replacing our easily hackable voting machines to restore the confidence in our elections outcomes. We need to rid ourselves of gerrymandering and the electoral college system and myriad other things that have exactly zero to do with Russia.
On to the DNC and Podesta emails: The result of the hacks was that we learned the dirty truth about some of our elites and they didn't want to talk about the substance so instead they whined about the source and manner. Jon Podesta left his phone in a cab for over 24 hours before falling for a phishing scheme and giving up his password like a moron (not really a hack). As far as the DNC, they too were not so much hacked as lifted since the files were transferred at too fast a rate to have happened over the internet. Oh, and the DNC refused to hand over their servers to investigators and instead used a private security firm, Crowdstrike, who stand to profit by gaining more government contracts by sowing Red Scare fever.
In an effort to prove their findings, Crowdstrike claimed Russia was to blame for what US intelligence has eerily labeled the “Grizzly Steppe” hack since the Russian military used the same malware to target Ukrainian Howlitzers. That story was completely fabricated as the number of disabled tanks did not come from the Ukrainian government and the malware doesn’t feature GPS. And while that malware has been used by Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, there has been no credible evidence provided that they, or Guccifer 2.0, are Russian government intelligence.
No matter, corporate media have played fast and loose with this whole Russia thing and simply parroted whatever claims have been made by the Deep State and establishment Democrats along the way: There was a fake news story about Russia hacking Vermont’s power grids. In fact, a single laptop unconnected to the grid was infected with malware. There was a fake news story about Trump having a direct server with a Russian bank when it was simply generic marketing emails.
It was widely reported that 17 intelligence agencies (including the Coast Guard) agreed that Russia had meddled in the election. Actually, that claim was made by the NSA and the Director of National Intelligence. There were reports that 21 state elections systems had been hacked by Russia when they had actually been illegally scanned by the NSA.
Most of the corporate media Russia narrative has been nonsense.
Do I believe that the Kremlin preferred Donald Trump and that they would like to influence our election? Of course. But when a fight is rigged it’s the loser who gets the payoff.
It was Hillary Clinton who was part of the decision during the Obama administration to sell 20% of US uranium to Russia while her husband took the largest speaking fee of his life ($500k) and the Clinton Foundation took $150m from Russian financiers.
When this nugget was pole tested by the Clinton campaign leading up to the 2016 election they found it hurt them more than any other fact. In order to muddy the waters on the whole topic as politicians do, the Clinton campaign began pushing this whole Trump/Russia thing. In the days following their loss to the monster who is Donald Trump, they decided to push the Trump/Russia narrative as one of the main reasons – alongside James Comey and, of course, those pesky progressives - that they lost the election.
Obviously James Comey doesn’t drive ratings and because of who owns them corporate media doesn’t want to talk about the robust internal policy debate regarding the future of the Democratic Party and whether they should fight for things like single-payer, free college, ending drug wars and mass incarceration, Wall Street reform, taking corporate cash, and public financing of elections. So, instead, MSNBC spends 80% of the time feeding into xenophobic Red Scare nonsense that only drives us closer to World War Three, mutually assured destruction, and nuclear holocaust.
P.S. the Steele dossier means nothing to me even if true.
