KC Gets KKFI Community Radio And Kultcha That Y'all Don't Get...,

pbs.org   |  [Cerrone's "Supernature" playing] Woman: The disco sound was just wonderful.

It was exciting, powerful, you know, spank you, and you just had a good time.

Barry Walters: Disco brought together Black Pride, women's liberation, and LGBT culture.

It was the coming together of that that made it so powerful.

Allen Roskoff: Listening to the music and letting yourself go, you become a different person.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ There was this powder keg chain reaction that happened that made it suddenly totally take over the airwaves.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ Jake Shears: It was, of course "Saturday Night Fever" that really, like, tipped everything over, that, like, tipped the scales.

It just set the world on fire.

Disco was on everybody's lips.

Clubs were packed every night.

♪ Woman: Studio 54, I created it as a playground.

Sex, drugs, disco, whatever you need.

Singer: ♪ Angry with the man ♪ ♪ 'Cause he changed their way of life ♪ Bill Bernstein: In the late seventies, the outsider became the insider.

Singer: ♪ Take their sweet revenge ♪ Woman: The Black disco diva was a breakthrough persona.

Someone like Donna Summer, she was a disco queen.

Don't forget Gloria in all her gloria.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ I think that era music allowed the disco diva to have this stage to be adored and celebrated.

♪ Candi Staton: Disco freed me.

It saved me.

[Cheering] ♪ Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ [Protestors shouting] ♪ Richard Nixon: In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the nation.

Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me.

Woman: In the mid-1970s, the United States was not a happy place.

There was the Watergate scandal, and any faith that Americans had in government was shaken to its core.

What percentage of the American people do you think still have confidence in President Nixon?

Well, among young people, very few, I'd say less than 25%.

Nixon: Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

P.A.

announcer: Nixon has announced he will resign as president of the United States at noon tomorrow.

Roskoff: In my life and everybody I knew, Nixon was detested, but it was an intense period of time.

You knew you were living history.

You knew that this is monumental.

♪ [Machineguns firing] George McCrae: Was a hard time because of the Vietnam War.

Also a nuclear bomb threat And Russia, you know.

that they might drop a bomb any day.

"Oh, my God.

What we gonna do?"

♪ Farrington: The flip side of this dark moment is that when life gets hard, you party harder.

[Gloria Gaynor's "Never Can Say Goodbye" playing] ♪ I was living in New York in the 1970s.

All we wanted to do was dance to disco music.

Gaynor: ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ David Depino: There was a freedom.

It was like express yourself was so welcome and wanted, and music was the common denominator.

Gaynor: ♪ Heading for the door ♪ ♪ There's a very strange... ♪ Nicky Siano: I mean, it was just igniting people's dance souls.

Gaynor: ♪ It says, "Turn around, you fool" ♪ ♪ "You know love him" ♪ Man: Why is everybody rushing and flooding the doors of discotheque?

Oh, I think it's because with all of the hardships that are going on in the world today, people need a place to go and relieve tension and release their anxieties, and discotheques are a great place to do just that.

Gaynor: ♪ Say goodbye, boy ♪ ♪ Ooh, ooh, baby ♪ ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ No, no, no, hey ♪ ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ Say goodbye ♪ ♪ Oh, no, I ♪ Reporter: Gloria Gaynor is a rock 'n' roll singer whose records have really never made it before until she decided to specialize in a brand-new rock 'n' roll musical style called disco music.

Gaynor: ♪ All gonna work out ♪ ♪ But there's that same unhappy feeling ♪ ♪ And that anguish and that doubt ♪ Depino: She made you raise your hands up and want to touch the ceiling while you were dancing and screaming.

When Gloria was doing her thing, I think she was the First Lady of Disco.

♪ Say goodbye ♪ ♪ It is so ♪ ♪ I don't want to let you go ♪ Vince Aletti: She was one of the earliest people to have a major presence in the clubs, was, you know, Queen of Disco before there was such a title.

Gaynor: ♪ No, no, no, no, no, ooh ♪ Gloria, did you ever think this would happen?

No, I really didn't.

Not like this, anyway.

I always thought I would sing eventually, but I never thought all this would happen.

♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ No, no, no, no, no, no, no ♪ Woman: I think disco means to most people, probably it means a lot of fun.

To me, it meant a change.

♪ Farrington: In the early seventies, Black women were caught between a rock and a hard place.

Statistically, they were at the bottom of the heap.

They earned less than most any other group, male or female.

They were victimized by a notorious government-sponsored report called the Moynihan Report.

It was a report that discussed what were the particular problems of Blacks and Jews and Puerto Ricans.

Black women were literally blamed for the problems of Black men.

Black women were heads of their families, too matriarchal, too strong, and unfortunately, when scholars produce a document that is government-approved, people tend to believe it, and so rather than fight against this, which was virtually impossible for a group that oppressed to do, they tried not to be like that.

Nona Hendryx: You had to work hard to fit in, and to fit in, you're gonna be quiet.

You're not gonna bring all your loud culture with you or whatever it is and make demands.

You're gonna try and fit in.

[Church choir singing] Ward: When I was growing up, the only time that people heard my voice, I was singing.

My father had been a minister, so we just had to kind of stick to what we were told to do.

I just wanted to sing.

Woman: ♪ I can hear Jesus calling me ♪ Choir: ♪ Calling me ♪ Staton: The pastor called me up on the stage, and I started singing, and the church people started shouting and screaming and standing up and waving.

"Sing, baby!

Sing that song."

That was the beginning.

♪ Ohh ♪ Woman: The gospel diva or the soul diva, that's a really powerful, full-bodied sound that moved into the mainstream in the sixties.

Man: Sarah Dash, Nona Hendryx, Patricia Holt, known as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles.

♪ Somewhere over ♪ ♪ The rainbow ♪ Hendryx: In the sixties, se were a traditional girl group, and we dressed alike.

We did the kind of, you know, lead singer with backing singers waving their arms and looking very nice.

Farrington: Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles were fulfilling a vision of Black womanhood that was on the tail end of the early sixties Motown era.

They embodied that non-threatening persona that America wanted to place Black women in.

♪ Hey, hey, oh, oh, oh ♪ Hendryx: We were expected to carry ourselves a certain way in the public, you know, well-dressed, well-behaved.

That's how it was.

♪ Really do come true ♪ Staton: In the music industry, we were fighting, trying to get out of that box that we were put in in the sixties, so disco was wonderful.

Royster: Disco did offer Black women new opportunities.

Disco did give space for Black women to kind of add soul and funk and depth to a lot of different kinds of music to kind of take center stage like Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles.

[Labelle's "Lady Marmalade" playing] ♪ Woman: My next guest stars are the hottest girl group in America.

Man, they are truly hot, and they've got the hottest single, too, "Lady Marmalade," and here they are-- Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, and Patti LaBelle known throughout the music industry as Labelle.

♪ Go, sister, soul sister ♪ ♪ Flow, sister ♪ ♪ Go now ♪ ♪ Go, sister, soul sister ♪ ♪ Flow, sister ♪ ♪ He met Marmalade ♪ ♪ Down in old New Orleans ♪ ♪ Struttin' her stuff on the street ♪ Farrington: When Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles changed their name, they changed their look, and they changed it dramatically.

♪ Da da ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ ♪ Mocha ♪ ♪ Mocha chocolata, ya ya ♪ Hendryx: Patti LaBelle And the Bluebelles were a girl group, right?

Labelle were a girl band.

♪ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?

♪ ♪ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

♪ Ana Matronic: Labelle looking like they just, like, beamed in from some crazy, funky galaxy.

It was just so over the top and so amazing and so out there.

That to me meant a certain kind of freedom.

♪ Oh, gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ The architect of the look of Labelle was Legaspi.

He also designed the look for KISS.

Patti LaBelle: ♪ Ahh ahh ♪ Farrington: He also designed the look for Funkadelic.

Labelle: ♪ Coucher avec moi ce soir?

♪ Larry was already sort of making things that looked like a futuristic look, and then with us being open to even going further, he began to design more.

♪ More, more, more ♪ Farrington: I was mesmerized and delighted to see my people in a way that was unlike any way anyone had ever imagined them.

Labelle: ♪ More, more, more ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya da da ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ Hendryx: Just singing songs that felt right to us or mattered to us, and the audience were responding to it.

♪ Touching her skin, feeling silky smooth ♪ ♪ Ahh ♪ ♪ Ahh ♪ Royster: Lady Marmalade is talking about, I mean, basically sex tourism and sex work.

♪ Roar until it cried ♪ All: ♪ "More, more, more!"

♪ Royster: Women don't often get center stage, or if there is a story that's being told, it's also a story that's about titillation or about fetishization.

Hendryx: It's like a playwright, you know, someone describing something as opposed to judging it and in a way that-- not celebratory, but in a way that was not downtrodden and horrible and that this is just yet another aspect of life.

[Indistinct chatter] Royster: I really think that music is really important in terms of creating social change, and in this moment, you know, music was reflecting Black women's lives in a way that it hadn't ever been.

Staton: I was so glad disco came in.

You know, good music, good lyrics, songs that had a meaning to them.

In the sixties, we were known as R&B singers.

♪ I'd rather be lonely ♪ ♪ Than to lose you ♪ My songs were, like... ♪ I'm just a prison ♪ and begging men not to leave me and "Oh, God, if you leave me, I'm just gonna die," you know, I mean, this was the kind of songs they would play on us.

Women.

Women.

Men could sing anything they wanted to sing.

So to make a long story short, disco freed me.

It saved me.

♪ You know, I been married a few times, and I don't mind telling it because, you know, I was in one of those type of marriages, but it was dangerous.

It was a really a dangerous marriage.

So I was doing Las Vegas with Ray Charles.

I was opening for Ray Charles.

The last night, I decided I was gonna just sit in the audience and watch Ray do his show, and my ex-husband, he was looking for me, and he couldn't find me, and I was in the audience, and he kept walking up and down the aisle.

I saw him.

And that's the night when he went completely nuts.

My suite was on the--way up on the 20th-something floor, and he pushed me.

You know, he was pushing me all the way through the lobby to the elevator, and then we get to the floor.

He said, "I'm--I'm gonna kill you tonight.

"I tell you what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna throw you off the balcony."

20-something floors.

He picked me up, and had me--holding me over the banister like this, and I'm like, "This man is gonna kill me tonight.

"How in the world?

Well, how am I gonna get out of this one?"

I said, um, "You know you're in this hotel, "and it's owned by Mafia.

This is Las Vegas.

We're in Las Vegas now."

I said, "You got to get out of here.

"You got to walk out of here.

"How are you gonna feel with my body splattered at the bottom and my name is on the marquee?"

And I said, "You won't make it out of Vegas."

He thought, and he brought me back in, and he said, "I'll tell you what I'm gonna do.

I'm just gonna shoot you."

So I laid--I just, you know, I was so tired.

I just laid down on the bed.

I said, "OK.

Shoot me."

I went to sleep.

He had the gun like this.

I said, "Just shoot me.

I won't know it.

I just--forget it."

That's how "Young Hearts Run Free" came about.

Younglings Lack Usefully Intact Living Memory History

 

Before Y'alls Time - But We Don't Have Any Voices Like Carl Rowen Any More...,

LATimes  |  If you’ve ever heard that soothing voice or read those scholarly sentences, you’d know it’s him. Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan has a signature style.

That jowly baby face and genial manner have been fixtures among the talking heads on PBS’ “Inside Washington” since 1965. His voice can be heard on 25 major-market radio stations broadcasting “The Rowan Reports,” a daily radio commentary. He has written seven books, some of them bestsellers.

But lately, Rowan, an elegant and polished black man of 69 years who writes and speaks in the terse and precise prose common among the well-educated of his generation, has become something of an attack journalist on a self-appointed mission to bring down the current leadership of the NAACP.

His bitterly critical columns, distributed by the King Features Syndicate and published in 100 newspapers across the land, are the major reason the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People is facing its greatest crisis. NAACP Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis was forced to resign late in the summer amid allegations first raised by Rowan--that he used the organization’s money to settle a sexual discrimination suit brought by a former employee, opening the organization’s financial practices to unprecedented public scrutiny.

Rowan’s current target is NAACP Board Chairman William Gibson, who had been Chavis’ most ardent supporter. By repeatedly demanding that Gibson resign, Rowan has set himself apart from most mainstream reporters--black or white--who tend to steer clear of pointed and determined criticism of the NAACP. But Rowan relishes the combat of writing to incite change--regardless, he said, of whether his targets are white-led government institutions, such as the FBI under former director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, or the current NAACP leadership.

During a wide-ranging interview conducted recently in the living room of his rambling northwest Washington home, Rowan defended his hard-edged columns. He called them “a service,” written with the intention of educating the public and instigating reforms within an organization he views as necessary to the interests of African Americans.

Rowan rejected the argument that he is bent on destroying the NAACP. In fact, he says, the organization absolutely has a role in the post-civil rights generation. “Take this (recent mid-term) election. The NAACP in a good and normal time would have been out there for weeks trying to get blacks out to vote,” he said. “They have been virtually paralyzed by all their money troubles and could only do a little trifling stuff.”

Once Gibson is out of office, Rowan said, and a new management team is in place, he will use his column to urge supporters to send money back into the NAACP.

“There is a group preparing for the moment when (Gibson) steps down so they can say to the nation, as I will say, ‘The time has come to rush to the rescue to the support of this organization because the United States would be a lesser place without an NAACP,’ ” Rowan said. “But no way will I ask anybody to give a nickel as long as (Gibson) is there at the head of the NAACP because I know the extent to which the meager funds of the NAACP have been abused.”

Rowan also brushed aside suggestions he was an “Uncle Tom” or tool of the mainstream media, noting his 43 years as a Life Member of the NAACP. Among the highlights: Rowan “worked closely with (then NAACP attorney) Thurgood Marshall in the days way before Brown v. Board of Education.”

What Has Robbed The American People Of Their Outwardly Expressed Religion?

theatlantic  | Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.

Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.

Imagine, by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.

I’ve come to believe that something like this story is happening, except with organized religion playing the role of restaurants. On an individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations.

And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.

Senseless Bloodbath In The Moscow Region

sonar21  |  Americans are by-and-large decent, genial folks. But when it comes to history, most have the memory of an Alzheimer’s patient. Sam Cooke was speaking for most Americans when he crooned, “Don’t know much about history …”. So I will make this simple — America’s hatred of Russia has its roots in the U.S. Government’s post-WW II embrace of Nazis. Tim Weiner writes about this in his essential book, Legacy of Ashes. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Berlin, U.S. Army intelligence recruited and relied on German General Reinhard Gehlen:

“During World War II, General Gehlen had tried to spy on the Soviets from the eastern front as a leader of the Abwehr, Hitler’s military intelligence service. He was an imperious and cagey man who swore he had a network of “good Germans” to spy behind Russian lines for the United States.

“From the beginning,” Gehlen said, “I was motivated by the following convictions: A showdown between East and West is unavoidable. Every German is under the obligation of contributing his share, so that Germany is in a position to fulfill the missions incumbent on her for the common defense of Western Christian Civilization.” The United States needed “the best German men as co-workers…if Western Culture is to be safeguarded.” The intelligence network he offered to the Americans was a group of “outstanding German nationals who are good Germans but also ideologically on the side of the Western democracies.”. . .

“But in July 1949, under relentless pressure from the army, the CIA took over the Gehlen group. Housed in a former Nazi headquarters outside Munich, Gehlen welcomed dozens of prominent war criminals into his circle. As Helms and Sichel feared, the East German and Soviet intelligence services penetrated the Gehlen group at the highest levels. The worst of the moles surfaced long after the Gehlen group had transformed itself into the national intelligence service of West Germany. Gehlen’s longtime chief of counterintelligence had been working for Moscow all along.”

In the wake of this debacle, the CIA failed to recruit and run any significant sources in the Soviet Government. The CIA had very few officers who spoke Russian and swallowed whole hog the belief that the Soviets were intent on conquering the world and that it was up to the United States — relying heavily on the CIA — to stop the Soviets. That became the cornerstone of American foreign policy and explains the CIA’s obsession with regime change. No one in the intelligence hierarchy was encouraged or permitted to raise the alternative view — i.e., the Soviets, fearful of a Western invasion, took firm control of the European nations on its western border and installed governments that would served the Soviet interest. The CIA started its life as a new bureaucracy in Washington firmly committed to destroying the Soviet Union.

One of its first projects was recruiting and funding an insurgency with Ukrainians who had sided with the Nazis. While that effort was crushed by the Soviets, it served to further convince Stalin and others in the Soviet hierarchy that the West was in bed with Nazi survivors and could not be trusted.

The failure of the CIA to predict critical world events was an early distinguishing feature of the CIA from the start. The Soviets detonated their first nuke on August 29, 1949. Three weeks later a U.S. Air Force crew flying out of Alaska detected traces of radiation beyond normal levels. Weiner recounts what happened next:

“On September 20, the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years.”

The CIA’s leaders knack for getting it wrong continued with the failure to heed warnings that China was going to intervene on behalf of North Korea in 1950. Here is Weiner’s account:

“The president left for Wake Island on October 11, 1950. The CIA assured him that it saw “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea…barring a Soviet decision for global war.” The agency reached that judgment despite two alarms from its three-man Tokyo station. First the station chief, George Aurell, reported that a Chinese Nationalist officer in Manchuria was warning that Mao had amassed 300,000 troops near the Korean border. Headquarters paid little heed. Then Bill Duggan, later chief of station in Taiwan, insisted that the Chicoms soon would cross into North Korea. General MacArthur responded by threatening to have Duggan arrested. The warnings never reached Wake Island.

At headquarters, the agency kept advising Truman that China would not enter the war on any significant scale. On October 18, as MacArthur’s troops surged north toward the Yalu River and the Chinese border, the CIA reported that “the Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.” On October 20, the CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were there to protect hydroelectric power plants. On October 28, it told the White H ouse that those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers. On October 30, after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was unlikely. A few days later, Chinese-speaking CIA officers interrogated several prisoners taken during the encounter and determined that they were Mao’s soldiers. Yet CIA headquarters asserted one last time that China would not invade in force. Two days later 300,000 Chinese troops struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into the sea.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? While it is true there were some solid intelligence officers in the ranks of the CIA, any attempt to raise a warning that flew against conventional wisdom or defied what the leaders wanted to hear was ignored or punished. The failures of the CIA leadership to correctly predict the Soviets producing a nuclear bomb and the Chinese invasion of Korea are not isolated incidents. When it comes to big, critical issues — e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tet offensive, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9-11 plot, weapons of “Mass Destruction in Iraq” and Russia’s ability to survive western sanctions and spin up its defense industry to outpace the U.S. and NATO countries combined — the CIA missed them all.

If .45 Was The Commander In Chief - Why Didn't He Decapitate The Intelligence Community?

roburie  |   While the Washington Post has long been considered the mouthpiece of the CIA, the New York Times has been more effective at carrying water for it in recent years. The recent longish Times article entitled The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin contains  recitation of CIA-friendly talking points that portrays it as indispensable to ‘our’ ability to commit pointless, petty atrocities against Russia as the US  sacrifices more Ukrainians in its misguided war. Missing from the piece is any conceivable reason for the US to continue the war.

The oft ascribed motive (and here) for the CIA’s existence is to act as the US President’s secret army abroad. The wisdom of this arrangement has been debated over the years. Former US President Harry Truman, who oversaw the founding of the CIA from its predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), later regretted the decision and argued that the CIA should be brought to heel. Later, the Cold War presented cover for the CIA to act badly under the cover of national defense.

In Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men,  the CIA paid people to pretend to be communists so as to convey the fiction that the CIA’s effort was about ‘fighting communism’ rather than stealing Iran’s oil. Similarly, in the US coup that ousted Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz for daring to raise the minimum wage paid by foreign-owned industries in Guatemala, also featured fake communists intended to convince the American press that the CIA was fighting for freedom and democracy rather than to steal wages from poor people for the benefit of rich Americans.

Together, these imply that fake communists had been more effectively demonized by Federal agencies than other available out groups because of the threat they didn’t pose to American capital. Recall, in 1919 Woodrow Wilson sent the American Expeditionary Force to join the Brits, French, and Japanese in trying to reverse the Russian Revolution. Later, through the Five Eyes Alliance, ‘the West’ spent the post-War era attacking the Soviets while alleging that they were responding to political violence that they (Five Eyes) started.

Oddly, given recent history, the claim that the CIA is the President’s secret army still appears to be the received wisdom in Washington and New York. This is odd because while the CIA appears to be acting as Joe Biden’s secret army in Ukraine and Israel, it went to war with (the duly elected President of the US) Donald Trump for his entire four years in office. While Mr. Trump played the victim of the US intelligence agencies to perfection, he didn’t do what many normal humans would have done in his circumstance--- clear out the top few levels of management at CIA, the FBI, and NSA and see where this leaves ‘us.’

Implied is a reversal of political causality whose proof can only be deduced. Is Biden directing the CIA, or is the CIA directing Biden? For instance, while Biden was Barack Obama’s point-man in Ukraine before, during, and after the US-led coup there in 2014, Mr. Obama was publicly arguing that Ukraine was of no strategic value to the US. With Donald Trump following Mr. Obama as President, the CIA likely saw its 2014 coup in Ukraine going to waste. This interpretation sheds a different light on the Hunter Biden laptop fraud perpetrated by 51 current and former CIA employees.

(FBI informant Alexander Smirnov has been convicted of nothing related to the new charges of ‘Russian interference.’ As was proved with Russiagate, charges are easy to make, difficult to prove. No one--- not a single person, was convicted on the now antique charges of Russian collusion. Those who were convicted were convicted on process charges unrelated to the collusion charges. This use of the law as a political weapon is called lawfare).

The view in this piece is that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 because Barack Obama threw several trillion dollars at the malefactors on Wall Street who blew up the global economy while he pissed on the unemployed, the foreclosed upon, and every working person in the US. In so doing, an income and wealth chasm was rebuilt between the public welfare recipients who run Wall Street and Big Tech and the former industrial workers whose jobs were sent abroad as the final solution to the ‘problem’ of organized labor.

With the current panic in the US over the rise of the BRICS (China and Russia), the same politicians and economists who thought it wise in 1995 to gut the industrial base with NAFTA are now busy launching WWIII. These people never learn from their mistakes. For instance, it apparently never occurred to them that outsourcing military production might come back to bite when geopolitical tensions inevitably flared again. Likewise, just-in-time production and inventory management produced economic brittleness / fragility that created problems when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Biden was a known quantity when he was appointed by Barack Obama to be President in 2020. The CIA, acting in league with the FBI, had spent prior years softening up the American public with lies about US foreign policy, lies about American history, lies about Donald Trump and his supporters, lies about their own roles in rigging American elections, lies about the American-led coup in Ukraine, lies about Russian military ambitions, and lies about US plans for the destruction of Ukraine. To be clear, these American agencies weren’t lying to the Russians. They were / are lying to the only people who believe their bullshit--- Americans.

So, where is this going? With the CIA’s and FBI’s undermining of the elected President’s (Trump) political agenda and its open efforts to rig the 2020 election in favor of his opponent (Biden), it certainly appears that the CIA is now running the US. Biden’s foreign policy team---Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland emerged from the Clintonite death cult buried deep within the bowels of the American foreign policy establishment, That they appear to be as uninformed and arrogant as their policy outcomes to date suggest they are is only a surprise inside Washington and New York.

However, this is at best a partial explanation. What is surprising about US foreign policy is how ignorant of world history, US history, basic diplomacy, military tactics, economic relations, and basic human decency the American political leadership is. It’s almost as if the answer to every foreign policy conundrum of the last century has been to bomb civilian populations, kill a whole lot of people, and then pretend it never happened. Vietnam? Check. Nicaragua? Check. Syria? Check. Iraq? Check. Ukraine? How can the body counts be hidden from beleaguered, clueless, citizens so effectively?

Some recent history: the US launched a war against Russia when it (the US) invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked coup there in 2014 (see here, here, here) and ousted its elected government. The Russians had taken issue with the US / NATO surrounding it with NATO-allied states (maps below). Years earlier, as Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Putin had approached former US President Bill Clinton about Russia joining NATO. Mr. Clinton ‘spoke with his people’ before telling Mr. Putin no to joining NATO as he reneged on George H.W. Bush’ s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border.

A bit of additional history is needed here. The USSR was dissolved in 1991 to be replaced by non-communist Russia surrounded by former Soviet states. Ukraine is one such state. The political – economic reference point of post-Soviet Russia was an anachronistic form of neoliberalism. Recall, Americans had been told since at least the early twentieth century that ‘communism’ was the ideological foe of Western liberalism. Current Russian President Vladimir Putin is proudly anti-communist. But the US MIC (military-industrial complex), of which the CIA is a part, needs enemies to justify its existence.

Following the dissolution of the USSR (1991), there was discussion inside the US regarding a ‘peace dividend,’ of redirecting military spending inflated by the Cold War towards domestic purposes like schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure. However, the CIA had been so hemmed in by Federal budget constraints that it had inserted itself into the international narcotics trade forty years prior in apparent anticipation of just such an event. With the (George H.W.) Bush recession of 1991, an election year, the peace dividend was rescinded.

Why Did The NYTimes Report On CIA Operations In Ukraine?

scheerpost  |  We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to add what degree of urgency it can to this question.

Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds “the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the agency’s commitment.

More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple. It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there for a reason.  

To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.

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Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media  and broadcasters.

Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the latter to their independence and integrity.

The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,” Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take that step.”

We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.

America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep