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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/fake_news_curated_by_the_deep_state_government_spin_doctors_control_the_news_cycle

 Fake News Curated by the Deep State: Government Spin Doctors Control the News Cycle

Let’s talk about fake news stories, shall we?

There’s the garden variety fake news that is not really “news” so much as it is titillating, tabloid-worthy material peddled by anyone with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an active imagination. These stories run the gamut from the ridiculous and the obviously click-baity to the satirical and politically manipulative.

Anyone with an ounce of sense and access to the Internet should be able to ferret out the truth and lies in these stories with some basic research. That these stories flourish is largely owing to the general gullibility, laziness and media illiteracy of the general public, which through its learned compliance rarely questions, challenges or confronts.

Then there’s the more devious kind of news stories circulated by one of the biggest propagators of fake news: the U.S. government.

In the midst of the government and corporate media’s carefully curated apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s own role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works.

Why?

Because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media. They don’t want us to be more discerning when it comes to what information we digest online. They just want us to be leery of independent or alternative news sources while trusting them—and their corporate colleagues—to vet the news for us.

Indeed, in recent years, Facebook and Google have conveniently appointed themselves the arbiters of truth on the internet in order to screen out what is blatantly false, spam or click-baity.

Not only does this establish a dangerous precedent for all-out censorship by corporate entities known for colluding with the government but it’s also a slick sleight-of-hand maneuver that diverts attention from what we should really be talking about: the fact that the government has grown dangerously out-of-control, all the while the so-called mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation—the U.S. government.

As veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward blew the lid off the Watergate scandal, reported in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece, “The CIA and the Media”:

“More than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency... There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services... Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters... In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Bernstein is referring to Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein shows, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA.

Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news. Bernstein writes: “Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.”

In fact, in August 1964, the nation’s leading newspapers—including the Washington Post and New York Times—echoed Lyndon Johnson’s claim that North Vietnam had launched a second round of attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. No such attacks had taken place, and yet the damage was done. As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon report for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, “By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.”

Fast forward to the early post-9/11 years when, despite a lack of any credible data supporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction, the mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon to sound the war drums against Iraq. As Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian put it, “our government … used its immense bully pulpit to steamroll the watchdogs… Many were gulled by access to administration insiders, or susceptible to the drumbeat of the government’s coordinated rhetoric.”

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder, one of the only news agencies to challenge the government’s rationale for invading Iraq, suggests that the reason for the media’s easy acceptance is that “too many journalists, including some very famous ones, have surrendered their independence in order to become part of the ruling class. Journalism is, as the motto goes, speaking truth to power, not wielding it.”

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only it’s been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

Thus, whether you’re talking about the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the government’s invasion of Iraq based upon absolute fabrications, the Russo-Ukrainian War, or the government’s ongoing war on terror, privacy and whistleblowers, it’s being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies. “The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.”

But wait.

If the mass media—aka the mainstream media or the corporate or establishment media—is merely repeating what is being fed to it, who are the masterminds within the government responsible for this propaganda?

Davies explains:

The Pentagon has now designated “information operations” as its fifth “core competency” alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites.

This use of propaganda disguised as journalism is what journalist John Pilger refers to as “invisible government… the true ruling power of our country.”

Clearly, we no longer have a Fourth Estate.

Not when the “news” we receive is routinely manufactured, manipulated and made-to-order by government agents.

Not when six corporations control 90% of the media in America.

Not when, as Davies laments, “news organizations which might otherwise have exposed the truth were themselves part of the abuse, and so they kept silent, indulging in a comic parody of misreporting, hiding the emerging scandal from their readers like a Victorian nanny covering the children’s eyes from an accident in the street.”

And not, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, when media outlets have become propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.

After all, as Glenn Greenwald points out, “The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function.”

So where does that leave us?

What should—or can—we do?

I’ll close with John Pilger’s words of warning and advice:

Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all — and I believe that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn’t true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn’t true of the United States. In all the years I’ve been a journalist, I’ve never known public consciousness to have risen as fast as it’s rising today…yet this growing critical public awareness is all the more remarkable when you consider the sheer scale of indoctrination, the mythology of a superior way of life, and the current manufactured state of fear.

[The public] need[s] truth, and journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers of power. I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people’s movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken… In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web... The best reporting … appears on the web … and citizen reporters.

The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people. We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship.

....

https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/party-like-its-1907

Party Like It's 1907

Bitcoin.com News (BCN): In your recent work you’ve drawn similarities between the current banking debacle and The Panic of 1907 and the 2008 financial crisis. How does what we’re witnessing unfold now with SVB, Signature Bank, Credit Suisse, and others, compare to past financial crises?

James Corbett (JC): In 1907, a run on Knickerbocker Trust, one of New York's biggest trust companies, precipitated a bank run and a 50% drop on the New York Stock Exchange. In its official page on the event—dubbed "The Panic of 1907"—the Federal Reserve calls it the "first worldwide financial crisis of the twentieth century." According to the Fed, the panic was caused by rumours about Knickerbocker Trust's insolvency, and the crisis was ultimately averted by the "legendary actions" of J. P. Morgan, who personally oversaw the bailout of the banking system.

What the Federal Reserve does not note in its official history of the 1907 panic is that—as even Life conceded decades later—the rumours that sparked the entire affair were themselves planted by George W. Perkins, one of J.P. Morgan's business partners. Also missing from the Fed's whitewashed history lesson is the fact that Morgan used it as an excuse to eliminate his banking competition (the Knickerbocker Trust) and rescue his banking associates (the Trust Company of America, which had extensive ties to many of Morgan's clients.)

Fast forward to 2023. It's interesting to note that even Bloomberg is reporting an eerily similar pattern of rumours and Morgan-as-saviour in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank:

"Prominent venture capitalists advised their tech startups to withdraw money from Silicon Valley Bank, while mega institutions such as JPMorgan Chase & Co sought to convince some SVB customers to move their funds Thursday by touting the safety of their assets."

And, as The Financial Times later confirmed, the immediate effect of SVB's trouble and the resulting regional bank instability was to send depositors flocking to the perceived safety of the largest banks, including, of course, JPMorgan Chase.

[NOTE: The parallels have become even more obvious since this interview was conducted. The New York Times has even gone so far as to dedicate an entire puff piece to disgraced JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, touting his role in "rescuing" the banking system once again.]

BCN: In your March 17 episode of New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato, “Crypto Contagion Banks Get the Runs,” you allude to discrepancies in the official story surrounding the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, referencing audits of the institution just prior to its demise. Similarly, Signature Bank board member Barney Frank said recently that he was surprised at the collapse of Signature Bank as well, and that regulators were trying to send an “anti-crypto message.” In your view, is what we’re seeing now engineered?

JC: Yes, this bank "contagion" is an engineered phenomenon. But in order to understand that phenomenon, we need to ask a further question: On what level has it been engineered?

As it turns out, although there are multiple factors that contributed to SVB's downfall—including its concentration on ESGs and DEI and other forms of "woke" investing—the immediate proximal cause of the bank's crash was its weird predicament: it had too much cash.

You see, banks make money by lending out their customers' deposits . . . and when I say "make money" I mean they literally make money. In the topsy-turvy world of banking, a high loan-to-deposit ratio (LDR) is seen as a good thing, with an 80—90% LDR held up as an ideal figure. However, SVB, with just $74 billion in loans against $173 billion in customer deposits, found it had too much cash sloshing around in its coffers.

So it decided to park that money in the safest (but not really safe), risk-free (but not actually risk-free), good-as-gold (but not literally good-as-gold) investment: long-term US Treasuries. After all, the only way it could possibly lose money in US Treasuries is if the Fed started hiking rates like crazy, and they haven't done that in decades! What could go wrong?

Oh, wait . . .

So, long story short, SVB loaded up on nearly $120 billion worth of long-term Treasuries when they were at 1.78% yield and the climb to 5% yield meant SVB had to book billions in losses. In fact, its 2022 Annual Report, which came out in January, showed that the bank was sitting on $15 billion in "unrealized losses" from its bad bond bet, which, for a bank with $16 billion in total capital, is kind of a bad thing.

So yes, the fall of SVB was engineered . . . by the Fed. This crisis is the direct result of the Fed attempting to back out of the disastrous, decade-and-a-half-long artificial bond bubble it blew to stop the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. And what caused the Global Financial Crisis? The disastrous, nearly-decade-long artificial housing bubble that the Fed blew to stop the dotcom bust and the 9/11 slowdown and the Enron/Worldcom fraud fallout.

BCN: You’ve noted that the current crisis could be used as an excuse to usher in central bank digital currencies more quickly. In your view, how might such an event play out and who would be the biggest winners and losers?

JC: To answer this question, let's ask another question: Why is the Fed so interested in The Panic of 1907, anyway? It's because, as they themselves assert, the crisis caused by that particular banking panic "inspired the monetary reform movement and led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System."

Of course, like everything else that comes out of the banksters' mouth, that statement is a lie. Actually, it's two lies.

First, it’s a lie of commission: the monetary reform movement—which became a popular political force after The Crime of 1873 and encompassed the Free Silver movement and bimetallism and William Jennings Bryan and the cross of gold and, yes, The Wizard of Oz—was most certainly not "inspired by" The Panic of 1907.

And secondly, it’s a lie of omission: the Fed conveniently leaves out the other part of its creation story—not just the Morgan-backed rumours that precipitated the panic in the first place but also the infamous Jekyll Island meeting that actually led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

Those reservations notwithstanding, the general point stands: the generated crisis of The Panic of 1907 did lead to an upending of the existing monetary order and the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Similarly, it would be hard to imagine a full-scale revolution in the banking system today that didn't originate with some kind of banking crisis. What is beyond doubt is that governments the world over would not hesitate to use any such crisis as an excuse to implement their new digital monetary order. After all, the House Financial Services Committee tried to slip the creation of a digital dollar into the original COVID stimulus bill. Do we really think that emergency legislation for a new digital currency isn't waiting in the wings, ready to be unleashed on the public in the event of the next crisis?

When that crisis does lead to the pre-planned CBDC "solution," we can expect that it will play out in a broadly similar fashion to The Panic of 1907 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. In both cases the fallout just so happened to benefit certain interests. In 1907, Morgan managed to consolidate his banking interests, eliminate his competition, act as the benevolent saviour of the economy and convince the public of the need to hand the monetary reins over to the banking cartel. In 2008, it was crony-connected institutions like AIG and (of course) J.P. Morgan that benefited from the unprecedented banking "bailout," and the crisis helped cement the rise of new financial giants like BlackRock. So it would not be surprising to find certain banking interests using the opportunity of a generated banking crisis to eliminate their competition and consolidate their control in the banking world.

And, as I've talked about before, not every banker stands to benefit from the implementation of a retail CBDC. In fact, to the extent that CBDCs cut the commercial banking middlemen out of the existing monetary circuit, it actually goes against the interests of the commercial bankers.

But, of course, the real losers in the event of such a crisis, as always, would be us: the general public. In the worst-case scenario, the central banksters would seize the opportunity to implement the "programmable money" nightmare of total monetary control.

BCN: If nothing is done to check the implementation of CBDCs and the financial surveillance and spying they potentially afford, when will we see them reach global ubiquity?

JC: I can't give you a date. But I can say that if nothing is done to check their implementation, CBDCs will reach global ubiquity.

If I were to make a forecast about their implementation, my prediction would be that we will not go from a zero-CBDC monetary system to a 100%-CBDC monetary system all at once. CBDCs will co-exist alongside other forms of payment for some period of time, and they will look and function differently in different jurisdictions. Some will be full retail and wholesale CBDCs, some will serve one function or other, some retail CBDCs may be administered directly by the central bank, others will certify banks and other financial institutions to act as intermediaries, issuing wallets to the public.

But in whatever form they come and at whatever time they arrive, the initial CBDC implementation will be the proverbial camel's nose in the tent. From that point, it's only a matter of time before CBDCs start to become instruments of monetary surveillance and control.

BCN: How can everyday individuals help maintain and improve their financial privacy and economic sovereignty in the current chaotic climate of so-called banking contagion?

JC: Are you ready for some good news? We don't need some elaborate plan or high-level access to high-tech gadgets to thwart the CBDC agenda. The simplest tool for preserving our economic independence is already in our wallets: it's cash.

As I said above, CBDC will almost certainly co-exist with other forms of payment when it is first introduced, so cash will still be an option unless and until the public is conditioned to accept a completely cashless economy.

Of course, the ongoing War on Cash is already making it more and more difficult to use cash for conducting certain transactions. "Coin shortages," the fear of "dirty money" and incentives for using electronic payment are further enticing people away from using cash. That's why we have to make a conscious decision to support businesses that accept cash and commit ourselves to using cash on a regular basis. Numerous such ideas have been proffered in recent years, from agorist.market's "Black Market Fridays" to Solari.com's "Cash Friday."

That's not to say that cash is our only (or even our best) option. I have long advocated a "Survival Currency" approach, where people experiment with different forms of money to find out what works for them. There are community currencies, barter exchanges, local exchange trading systems, precious metals, crypto, the miracle of Wörgl and many other examples of ways that people can transact outside of the purview of the central bankers.

As long as you are part of a community of like-minded people that are willing to participate in free exchange, there will be no shortage of monetary ideas to try out.

BCN: And speaking of contagion, there are some connecting the recent banking turmoil with the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset initiative, designed ostensibly to address the so-called COVID-19 pandemic — essentially asserting it is all part of a larger plan to set up a global financial surveillance grid. Is there any basis for such ideas, in your view, or is this just the stuff of wild conspiracy theory?

JC: On one level, the intense focus on the World Economic Forum's Great Reset and its supposed threat that "You will own nothing and you will be happy" is misplaced. Yes, Klaus Schwab and his cronies are certainly power-hungry schemers, but the Great Reset is simply the latest rebranding of a very old game of global control, and the World Economic Forum is only one (relatively minor) player at the table.

Call it the New World Order or the International Rules-Based Order or the International Economic Order or The Great Reset or whatever you want, and pin it on the Bilderbergers or the Trilaterals or the World Economic Forum or whoever you want, the threat is the same: a world in which humanity is at the mercy of a clique of unaccountable technocrats.

I do not invoke the name of technocracy loosely. I mean it in the real, historical sense of the term, as "a system of scientifically engineering society" that is predicated on an economic system in which every transaction is monitored, calculated, databased, tracked, surveilled and allowed or disallowed by a central governing "technate" in real time. Such a system will involve digital IDs for every citizen, and, of course, a digital currency that can be programmed to function at the whims of the technocrats.

That such a system of control is now technologically possible is now undeniable. That there are interests like the World Economic Forum that are working toward the implementation of such a system is only deniable by those who refuse to listen to the technocrats' own pronouncements.

BCN: From where you sit, is there a cryptocurrency white pill in all this?

JC: The promise of cryptocurrency continues to be what it has always been: a cryptographically secure tool for transacting in the countereconomy.

But if people don't know what the countereconomy is (let alone why they would want to be transacting in it), then what good is it? If it's seen as just another get-rich-quick investment, just something whose measure is to be valued in dollars, just another asset that should be regulated by the SEC and dutifully listed on your tax form, then it will be nothing more than a convenient stepping stone to the CBDC nightmare.

We can either choose to inform ourselves about agorism and the countereconomy or we can continue trading in the bankster-approved mainstream economy and accept whatever monetary order the banksters thrust on us.

The choice is ours. For now.