Week in Review Discussion on Loud & Clear (12/27/2019)

The Week in Review

Friday is Loud & Clear’s weekly hour-long segment The Week in Review, about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. Today they focus on a new Rachel Maddow critique and a broader Russiagate wrapup, the history of American politics, CIA-funded propaganda and arts, the 2020 race, one positive Sanders piece, Warren’s chameleon-like practices, Biden’s standing, Israel’s Likud election, and the new interviews out with the Navy Seal accusers of Ed Gallagher. Brian and John speak with Jim Kavanagh, editor of thepolemicist.net, and Sputnik News analyst and producer Nicole Roussell.
[My related article: Investigation Nation: Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics] 

Listen to "The Week in Review" on Spreaker.

Loud & Clear is a daily program of news, commentary, and political analysis on Radio Sputnik, hosted by Brian Becker and John Kiriakou, featuring independent experts, activists, and political writers. (Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.)

The Long Leash: Avant-Garde Culture as "Propaganda Asset"

Take a look at this article from The Independent, on the "long leash" of the CIA's Propaganda Assets Inventory.

"It was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world."

Besides confirming that Althusser pegged it with the concept of the "ideological state apparatus," this article is a reminder that:

1) The CIA -- the one that gave us coups, assassinations and torture, as well as Jackson Pollock -- was run by Ivy League-educated liberals, and

2) Much more than we like to think, we are the manipulated subjects of¹ a system in which, even when you think you're singing that cool, cutting-edge, outlaw song, you're still dancing to someone else's tune.

Modern art was CIA 'weapon '

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War 

By Frances Stonor Saunders  The Independent, Sunday 22 October 1995

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years... 

Go to full story

Note
¹"Manipulated subject of" is a phrase from Herman Melville's great novella, "Benito Cereno." Phrase and story are perfectly apt here.

CIA Director convicted of torture charges!

No, it can't happen here, but it does happen in countries that actually have an independent judiciary:

Italy's ex-intelligence chief given 10-year sentence for role in CIA kidnapping

Glenn Greenwald

"This entire case reveals vital facts about the culture of impunity for high-level officials that prevails in the US even when they commit the most egregious crimes:

"First, it is completely inconceivable that anything like what just happened in Italy could happen in the US. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the highest-level US officials had systematically committed felonies under the War on Terror rubric, both political parties, bolstered by a virtual consensus of the DC press, united to block all forms of accountability. A sacred rule in US political culture is that high-level state officials are to be shielded from all accountability, let alone criminal punishment, for how they abuse power.

"In sum, US officials are not subject to the rule of law but reside above it. Neither party's establishment nor their Adversarial Press Corps would ever tolerate the CIA Director being prosecuted for his crimes the way Italy's just was."

[Read entire article]