Tag: foreign policy

U.S. govt-linked PR firm ran fake news networks for right-wing Latin American regimes

Another CLS Strategies partner, Juan Cortiñas, boasted on the firm’s website that he has represented top right-wing leaders and major corporations in Latin America, including the Venezuelan opposition.

Since the fake news ring was exposed, however, CLS Strategies has edited its website to scrub some of these compromising materials, removing the bios of associates like Feierstein and Cortiñas.

This controversy underscores how US PR firms, elite Washington insiders, and foreign opposition groups work in tandem to promote right-wing regimes in Latin America while astroturfing opposition to democratically elected left-wing governments.

Given the extensive links CLS has to the Democratic Party, this scheme also highlights the bipartisan consensus around regime change and support for corrupt neoliberal leaders linked to death squads and drug trafficking.

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Oliver Stone rejects Bill Maher’s Russia concerns, claims US intel ‘not reliable’

Liberal filmmaker Oliver Stone took “Real Time” host Bill Maher by surprise with his dismissal of the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report outlining Russia‘s interference in the 2016 election.

Maher highlighted from the report, which was released earlier this week, that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had “directly and indirectly communicated” with Russian national Konstantin Kilimnik and other pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine during the election — in addition to Trump ally Roger Stone being linked to the WikiLeaks dump of Clinton emails.

But that prompted a dismissive wave of the hand from Stone, the 73-year-old director of “JFK,” “Platoon,” and other films.

“You can’t really think that a Russian president … should be able to rat-f— our elections like this, can you?” Maher asked.

“Oh Bill, I’ve known you all too long and I think you’re sophisticated enough to know — we have to question everything that comes out of our intelligence agencies,” Stone responded. “If you haven’t learned that by now, you’ve got a long way to go still.”

“So they’re lying?” Maher asked.

“Intelligence agencies are not reliable. They’ve been screwing with America going back to the Vietnam War, going back to the Iraq Wars, the Afghanistani wars,” Stone continued. “It’s very hard to find out the truth from them. Everything they publish — the rumors, the anonymous sources, the think tanks, the anti-Russia — it all adds up into this ball of wax that becomes enormous. And then they have people like you, who are skeptical generally, believing it. I would really triple-check everything, every one of those sources.”

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TikTok and America’s fake Internet Freedom War

Just about every layer of America’s media and political class shares his view that China is a force of pure undemocratic evil that needs to have its kneecaps shot out. From the respectable prog-left, to the radical center, and the right — the push to restrict China’s incursion into America’s telecommunication space enjoys multi-spectrum partisan consensus. Everyone who is anyone backs Steven Bannon’s vision. So no surprises there.

What interesting about seeing this “the Internet is a threat” stuff put into an official presidential executive order is that for years the Chinese government has been basically saying the same exact thing: that the Internet is a dangerous weapon that can be wielded by an aggressive foreign power.

But instead of being seen as a sensible and correct position — which it was, especially in the beginning — China was mocked and criticized as a weak, authoritarian power that’s afraid of letting its people communicate freely with the outside world. “THIS IS WHAT CHINESE COMMUNISM LOOKS LIKE,” we were told. “THIS IS HOW EVIL THEY ARE!”

Meanwhile, as if to prove China’s point, America launched bottomless-dollar initiative to make sure China wouldn’t be able to control its own domestic Internet space. Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this came to be known as America’s war for “Internet Freedom” — a war which actually started back in the early 2000, when this privatized Pentagon tech first began to go global.

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