The Kremlin paid an army of more than 1,000 people to create fake anti-Hillary Clinton news stories targeting key swing states, the leading Democrat on the committee looking into alleged Russian interference in the US election has said.

Senator Mark Warner, the Democrat ranking member, and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Republican Senator Richard Burr, appeared together at a press conference to give an update on the investigation ahead of the first witnesses appearing today.

Mr Warner said: “We know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports – and we’ve got to get to the bottom of this – that there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas.

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“It’s been reported to me, and we’ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.

“An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hi-jack the most critical democratic process, the election of a President, and in that process, decided to favour one candidate over another.”

The key states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania which Mr Warner named all fell narrowly - and unexpectedly - to Donald Trump.

Shape Created with Sketch. The controversial orders Donald Trump has already issued Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The controversial orders Donald Trump has already issued 1/9 Trump and the media White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer takes questions during the daily press briefing Getty Images 2/9 Trump and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Union leaders applaud US President Donald Trump for signing an executive order withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington DC. Mr Trump issued a presidential memorandum in January announcing that the US would withdraw from the trade deal Getty 3/9 Trump and the Mexico wall A US Border Patrol vehicle sits waiting for illegal immigrants at a fence opening near the US-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas. The number of incoming immigrants has surged ahead of the upcoming Presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, who has pledged to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. A signature campaign promise, Mr Trump outlined his intention to build a border wall on the US-Mexico border days after taking office Getty Images 4/9 Trump and abortion US President Donald Trump signs an executive order as Chief of Staff Reince Priebus looks on in the Oval Office of the White House. Mr Trump reinstated a ban on American financial aide being granted to non-governmental organizations that provide abortion counseling, provide abortion referrals, or advocate for abortion access outside of the United States Getty Images 5/9 Trump and the Dakota Access pipeline Opponents of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines hold a rally as they protest US President Donald Trump's executive orders advancing their construction, at Columbus Circle in New York. US President Donald Trump signed executive orders reviving the construction of two controversial oil pipelines, but said the projects would be subject to renegotiation Getty Images 6/9 Trump and 'Obamacare' Nancy Pelosi who is the minority leader of the House of Representatives speaks beside House Democrats at an event to protect the Affordable Care Act in Los Angeles, California. US President Donald Trump's effort to make good on his campaign promise to repeal and replace the healthcare law failed when Republicans failed to get enough votes. Mr Trump has promised to revisit the matter Getty Images 7/9 Donald Trump and 'sanctuary cities' US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January threatening to pull funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" if they do not comply with federal immigration law AP 8/9 Trump and the travel ban US President Donald Trump has attempted twice to restrict travel into the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries. The first attempt, in February, was met with swift opposition from protesters who flocked to airports around the country. That travel ban was later blocked by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The second ban was blocked by a federal judge a day before it was scheduled to be implemented in mid-March SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP/Getty Images 9/9 Trump and climate change US President Donald Trump sought to dismantle several of his predecessor's actions on climate change in March. His order instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to reevaluate the Clean Power Plan, which would cap power plant emissions Shannon Stapleton/Reuters 1/9 Trump and the media White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer takes questions during the daily press briefing Getty Images 2/9 Trump and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Union leaders applaud US President Donald Trump for signing an executive order withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington DC. Mr Trump issued a presidential memorandum in January announcing that the US would withdraw from the trade deal Getty 3/9 Trump and the Mexico wall A US Border Patrol vehicle sits waiting for illegal immigrants at a fence opening near the US-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas. The number of incoming immigrants has surged ahead of the upcoming Presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, who has pledged to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. A signature campaign promise, Mr Trump outlined his intention to build a border wall on the US-Mexico border days after taking office Getty Images 4/9 Trump and abortion US President Donald Trump signs an executive order as Chief of Staff Reince Priebus looks on in the Oval Office of the White House. Mr Trump reinstated a ban on American financial aide being granted to non-governmental organizations that provide abortion counseling, provide abortion referrals, or advocate for abortion access outside of the United States Getty Images 5/9 Trump and the Dakota Access pipeline Opponents of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines hold a rally as they protest US President Donald Trump's executive orders advancing their construction, at Columbus Circle in New York. US President Donald Trump signed executive orders reviving the construction of two controversial oil pipelines, but said the projects would be subject to renegotiation Getty Images 6/9 Trump and 'Obamacare' Nancy Pelosi who is the minority leader of the House of Representatives speaks beside House Democrats at an event to protect the Affordable Care Act in Los Angeles, California. US President Donald Trump's effort to make good on his campaign promise to repeal and replace the healthcare law failed when Republicans failed to get enough votes. Mr Trump has promised to revisit the matter Getty Images 7/9 Donald Trump and 'sanctuary cities' US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January threatening to pull funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" if they do not comply with federal immigration law AP 8/9 Trump and the travel ban US President Donald Trump has attempted twice to restrict travel into the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries. The first attempt, in February, was met with swift opposition from protesters who flocked to airports around the country. That travel ban was later blocked by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The second ban was blocked by a federal judge a day before it was scheduled to be implemented in mid-March SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP/Getty Images 9/9 Trump and climate change US President Donald Trump sought to dismantle several of his predecessor's actions on climate change in March. His order instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to reevaluate the Clean Power Plan, which would cap power plant emissions Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

The Senate Committee will examine whether the Trump campaign co-ordinated with the Russians to hire the army of trolls.

Mr Warner and Mr Burr were keen to stress they were unified in the investigation, in spite of reported in-fighting along political lines.

Mr Burr said he did not want to “take snapshots” of where the investigation stood but hinted the committee had spoken to Ret Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Mr Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence who stepped down from his post after ties to foreign governments were revealed.

A parallel investigation is running in the lower House of Representatives, but this has been marred by calls for chairman Devin Nunes to step down following allegations he is co-operating with the White House.

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A CBS poll revealed half of Americans now believe the Russians interfered with the election to help Mr Trump, while 10 per cent believe there was Russian interference but that it was not specifically designed to benefit the tycoon.

Speaker of the House, Republican Paul Ryan, said the US had a responsibility to the rest of the world to get to the bottom of the alleged Russian interference.

“They’re doing it to other countries right now," he said.

"We all knew this before the election, we all knew Russia was trying to meddle with our election, and we already know right now they’re trying to do it with other countries.”

Seven staffers are probing Mr Trump’s alleged links to Russia and said his son-in-law Jared Kushner had agreed to be interviewed by the Senate committee, although it is not known if he will appear under oath or on camera.

Journalist Adam Chen, now a staff writer at the New Yorker but a freelancer when he investigated alleged interference in the US election, claimed in a podcast with Longform that a large number of Russian trolls were now churning out support for Mr Trump

“I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.

A total of 20 individuals have been asked to appear before the committee members for private interviews, but no names apart from Mr Kushner’s were confirmed during the press conference.</s>Tim Kaine on Russia investigation: ‘I can tell you, this is not fake’

When did Tim Kaine have an inkling that something funny was going on in the 2016 election? Probably the morning that he woke up to dozens of hate-filled voicemails.

“WikiLeaks had dumped my cellphone number. I used to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The Russians were able to hack into the DNC, and they were able to get my number. WikiLeaks dumped it out. And then my voicemail filled up with really creepy messages,” Kaine said, admitting that the experience left him feeling “pretty paranoid.”

To the rest of the world, it was politics, but to Kaine, recounting the experience for a group of reporters in Waynesboro on Friday, it was also personal, forcing a change in phone number, which he shrugged off as not being “a big deal.”

There were other inklings to something funny going on in the campaign before the Sept. 13 Guccifer 2.0 leak that ensnared Kaine’s personal info.

Two months earlier, for instance, on the day that Kaine was nominated by the Democratic Party to run for vice president, then-Republican nominee Donald Trump actively encouraged hackers to dig up dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said at a July 27 news conference.

“I remember hearing that and thinking, it’s like fiction,” Kaine said. “Nobody would say that who wants to be president. Our head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is telling us that Russia is our chief adversary. Who would say this?”

Kaine said he didn’t personally realize the full extent of the impact of the hacking until the Jan. 6 report that formally accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering a campaign to influence the U.S. election and hurt Clinton’s candidacy.

“And, yeah, it kind of makes me feel sick to my stomach,” said Kaine, who serves on two Senate committee, Armed Services and Foreign Relations, that are being briefed regularly on the investigation into the Russia hacks.

The investigation has taken an unusual turn with the odd machinations of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who appears to be colluding with the Trump White House to provide political cover in the guise of leading a congressional inquiry.

Kaine said Nunes has taken what should be a “watchdog” role as the chair of the Intelligence Committee and turned it into a “lapdog role.”

“This week was a very damaging week. It turned the House process … it shut the ignition off. I don’t know that they can recover from that,” Kaine said.

The Senate process has been bipartisan, and it will need to continue to be, according to Kaine, to maintain a sense of legitimacy.

“We have to keep it bipartisan. That’s why the House thing is blowing up, because there’s no bipartisanship,” Kaine said. “But when Mark Warner and Richard Burr stand up together and say the Trump Tower was not wiretapped by President Obama, we can tell you we’ve done the investigation, there was no wiretapping, that’s so much better when it’s said by a Democrat and Republican than when it’s just said by a Democrat. If we can keep it together, and always reach the conclusions and then announce the conclusions, when we can announce them, in a bipartisan way, it leads the American public to have more confidence in it.”

Kaine is among those who expects the Trump team to continue to try to deflect attention from the investigation as much as it can.

“The Trump administration, they either say this is partisan, or they say it’s fake. And I can tell you, this is not fake,” Kaine said. “I’m very, very involved in this. I was a victim of it, and now I see a lot of the intel. It was not fake, and the full extent of it has not yet been completely told, but it will be.”</s>The Senate Intelligence Committee stepped up its public role in investigating Russia's attempts to hack the 2016 election, as the House investigation descended into chaos this week.

There have been a lot of twists and turns in the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Here's one more - General Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, has offered to testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution. He doesn't seem to have found any takers on that offer. But he has found an apparent supporter in President Trump, who tweeted this morning, quote, "Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt, excuse for big election loss by media and Dems."

This all comes at the end of a day where there were already several other developments on the Russia story, all swirling around these questions - what exactly did Russia do? And did it collude with anyone close to Donald Trump? Two congressional committees are looking into that answer, but they seem to be taking very different paths.

NPR congressional reporter Scott Detrow's been following all of this, and he joins us in the studio this morning. Hi, Scott.

MARTIN: So let's start with this most recent development. What should we make of the reports about Flynn seeking immunity?

DETROW: Well, like you said, there don't seem to be any takers on this offer yet, either the FBI or the congressional committees. Flynn's lawyer says this is simply about Flynn protecting himself. He said in a statement, and I'll just quote, "no reasonable person would submit to questions in such a highly politicized witch hunt environment without assurances against unfair prosecution." But Flynn's critics immediately dug this clip up from last year when Flynn was criticizing Hillary Clinton during the campaign.

MICHAEL FLYNN: People like Hillary Clinton, I mean, five people around her have had - have given immunity, to include her former chief of staff. When you are given immunity, that means that you've probably committed a crime.

DETROW: Flynn, of course, is a key person in all of this. He was fired after misleading Vice President Mike Pence and others about the nature of a conversation he had with Russia's ambassador during the transition.

MARTIN: So this Flynn story is grabbing all kinds of headlines this morning. But so much seems to be going on with these Russia investigations. It's hard to sort out what is actually important moving forward substantively and what has been just political theatrics.

DETROW: So I think the best way to go through what happened with the House investigation yesterday is chronologically because otherwise it'll get even more confusing. So yesterday afternoon, the White House sends a letter to the chairs of the two congressional committees saying you had asked for information about whether intelligence about U.S. citizens was mishandled and leaked. We now have some. Please come to the White House to look at it.

Adam Schiff, top Democrat on the House Committee, responded saying this is very weird timing given that The New York Times had just reported that two White House staffers were the ones who gave those documents to Devin Nunes last week which sent the committee into this whole tail spiral.

ADAM SCHIFF: Are these the same White House staff that reportedly discovered them in the ordinary course of business? And if they are, they just walk down the hall or across the plaza and they can present it to the White House staff or the president himself at any time. So why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?

MARTIN: So Adam Schiff, other Democrats say Nunes should now step down, recuse himself from this investigation because of all of this. So where is that now? Is there any indication Nunes could step down?

DETROW: Well, that would be up to, you know, Republican leaders. And so far, they continue to back Devin Nunes. We've now seen one House Republican, Walter Jones of North Carolina, say that he should recuse himself. Another House Republican, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, has not said that but has basically said this House investigation is at a gridlock and it's time for the Senate to take over. There was one interesting comment from House Speaker Paul Ryan yesterday.

PAUL RYAN: I think you're right, this has gotten a little political. Let's take a pause. And let's just get all the evidence, all the documents and find out what happened.

DETROW: So that's an acknowledgement from Ryan that this has really hit the rails.

MARTIN: Yeah. So - interesting to hear Paul Ryan say that and also focusing attention in some way on the Senate investigation which is launching this week. A lot of pressure on these people now as we see the House investigation kind of go off the rails in some ways. They've got to make sure this is a different kind of experience.

DETROW: Yeah. And they are making a point to present a bipartisan front here. They held their first public hearing yesterday. It was informational, big picture, experts talking about what Russia was trying to do in terms of meddling in the United States elections, doing the same thing in Western Europe.

One interesting expert was Clint Watts, who's from the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. He walked the panel through just how intricate these efforts are, how Russia has actually, at points, come up with whole armies of Twitter trolls - Twitter bots to kind of spread information and even given them identities who look like Midwestern swing-voter Republicans.

CLINT WATTS: So that way whenever you're trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information is true, it's much more simple because you see somebody and they look exactly like you, even down to the pictures.

MARTIN: So we heard from experts yesterday on hacking and cyber and these bots. Did any of the witnesses have anything to say about the alleged role of President Trump or his campaign aides in any of this?

DETROW: Watts did say something about that. And it wasn't in terms of any sort of evidence of collusion or anything like that, but just - he said - stating a reality from his point of view. He was asked at one point, so Russia's has been trying to spread misinformation for years, why were they so effective this time? And he said, well, basically because Trump himself was willing to spread false information as well.

WATTS: He denies the intel from the United States about Russia. He claimed that the election could be rigged. That was the No. 1 theme pushed by RT, Sputnik news, white outlets all the way up until the election. He's made claims of voter fraud, that President Obama's not a citizen.

MARTIN: So two investigations underway now. What happens next?

DETROW: We don't know. (Laughter) A lot of the serious work happens behind closed doors. And there's no set timetable. So we just don't know when hard conclusions will happen. But it seems like there's some sort of leaked development one way or another multiple times a day at this point.

MARTIN: NPR's Scott Detrow keeping us up to speed. Thanks so much, Scott.</s>More than 1,000 people were hired by Russia to produce fake news about Hillary Clinton in swing states during the US presidential election, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee has claimed.

Speaking at a press conference, Senator Mark Warner, the leading Democrat on the committee, said there had been reports of "internet trolls" working in key swing states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to influence the election through "fake news". Crucially, President Trump won all of those states.</s>More than 1,000 people were hired by Russia to produce fake news about Hillary Clinton in swing states during the US presidential election, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee has claimed.

Speaking at a press conference, Senator Mark Warner, the leading Democrat on the committee, said there had been reports of "internet trolls" working in key swing states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to influence the election through "fake news". Crucially, President Trump won all of those states.

Warner, appearing at the media briefing with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Senator Richard Burr, said, in comments carried by The Independent: "We know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports, and we've got to get to the bottom of this, that there were upwards of 1,000 internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers, which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas."

Suspicions around Russia's alleged involvement in the US presidential election arose in October 2016 after the emails of the Democratic National Committee were hacked – with a leaked report from the CIA in December 2016 stating the hacking was intended to produce a Trump election victory.

The US intelligence community said, in a report released on 6 January 2016, that they believe Russia's intention was to influence the election in favour of Trump and that the order to do so came from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Memos compiled by a former MI6 agent also claim members of Trump's camp colluded with Russia – with an investigation into the Kremlin's alleged involvement in the election ongoing.

Warner, whose committee is responsible for investigating the alleged interference by Russia, added: "It's been reported to me, and we've got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving [news] off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, 'Clinton is sick', or 'Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source' – fake news.

"An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hijack the most critical democratic process, the election of a president, and, in that process, decided to favour one candidate over another."</s>(CNN) – The Senate Intelligence Committee heard chilling testimony on Thursday about the extent of Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election. CNN has been digging into the sophisticated Russian campaign to issue “fake news” reports.

Experts have a benign phrase for fake news and other forms of Russian meddling. They call it “active measures.” It means using information, rather than force, to beat your opponent from the inside out. Thursday CNN got chilling new information on the methods used by Russian hackers and trolls as they try to create chaos and fear in America.

It started with several tweets, alleging a terrorist attack on the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, last summer. Russian state media outlets ‘R.T.’ and ‘Sputnik’ posted variations of the story. Soon even Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort apparently thought it was true, repeating it on CNN. “There’s plenty of news to cover this week that I haven’t seen covered. You had the NATO base in Turkey being under attack by terrorists.”

No attack had in fact occurred at the base. Researchers say it’s an example of fake reports, spread online, on-purpose, with the help of pro-Russian users, in what’s believed to be a disinformation campaign supported by Vladimir Putin. All designed to influence elections and sow dissent and confusion in the west.

Clint Watts, of the Foreign Policy Research Institute said, “They have a coordinated information campaign and a deliberate strategy. So they pick their objectives in the information space.”

In another case, a leaked e-mail from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, in which she asked a question about a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, was spun into a fake story alleging she was sick. Triggering allegations and chatter that the Democratic Candidate had the disease.

Researchers said the story was shared and re-posted by pro-Russian sites and read 8-million times. Evidence, experts say, of how Russia was trying to throw last year’s election.

Watts said, “Once they build an audience with their accounts, it’s very easy to do that, just through amplification. Anytime you have the ability to promote a story hundreds or thousands of times, that puts it into trending feeds. Once it’s in a trending feed, it takes on a life of its own.”

Experts who researched Russia’s fake news campaigns testified Thursday before the senate intelligence committee, explaining how Putin’s government uses an army of “trolls,” online critics who push their agendas to confuse and frighten audiences in the west.

An idea that played out dramatically on the ShowTime series “Homeland”: a “troll factory,” where hundreds of employees toil away, posting fake tweets under fake names. Their marching orders: post phony stories and tweets, and spread them as widely as possible.

Experts say the real-life troll factories used by Russians may not look as slick as the TV version, but they are real. They said paid trolls who spread fake reports can amplify their impact using “bot nets,” thousands of other people’s computers, infected with viruses, and harnessed to do their bidding.

Analysts say Putin’s goal is to create distrust among Americans and their allies in their political systems.

Professor Keith Darden of the American University said, “They didn’t just want to discredit the elections. They wanted to discredit Hillary Clinton. Sowing division in the E.U., these are all things that are good for Russia.”

When asked about accusations of Russian interference in America’s election, Vladimir Putin said, quote, “read my lips: No.” However, experts who testified before congress said, we can expect Putin’s government to continue supporting ‘fake news’ campaigns. They said for Putin, it’s easy, effective, and best of all for him it often can’t be traced directly back.</s>Newspapers in Sweden and Norway have vowed not to run April Fools Day stories this year, amid concerns about propagating fake news.

The concept of fake news became strong during the US presidential election in 2016 when Donald Trump insisted that false news stories about him were being published – an accusation he has continued to make since becoming president.

Trump has targeted reliable and well-established news services with allegations of running 'fake' stories, despite scant evidence to back up his claims.

Despite scepticism about many of Trump's allegations, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russia's alleged involvement in the US election said it had been reported that 1,000 people were hired by Russia to produce fake news about Hillary Clinton in swing states during the election.

In addition, fake news stories have been created and shared on social media platforms, prompting Swedish and Norwegian news outlets to pledge not to run any joke stories on 1 April.

The editor-in-chief of Västerbottens-Kuriren told Swedish news agency TT: "Historically, we've had super-successful April Fools jokes. But because of debates and discussions about the media's credibility being connected to fake news, we didn't want to do it this year."

The Local reported Magnus Karlsson, editor-in-chief of Swedish daily Smålandsposten as saying: "We work with real news. Even on 1 April."</s>Last week, Facebook made a significant intervention into the debate around ‘fake news’, trialling a new feature (for now, just in the US) which both alerts users when an article they are trying to share has been disputed by fact checkers, and appends a disclaimer if the user decides to share it.

This is a significant escalation from Facebook’s previous response to the issue, a community-led reporting feature which was widely praised as an example of responsible practice by a tech company. So far, the new feature has not received much scrutiny from the digital rights community. It should; the implications are troubling.

Before we go into why, it’s useful to think first about where the concept of fake news comes from. The phrase came to prominence in the context of the US election, as part of a broader story of Russian interference. Fears over Russia have continued to frame the debate in the US – see the (now debunked) PropOrNot list, and the recently introduced bill to investigate RT America – but fake news has since become a global phenomenon.

Despite this, pinning down what fake news actually refers to can be difficult. In December last year, Hillary Clinton memorably described an “epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda”, a confusing elision of different types of media which points to a wider definitional instability. Anything and everything can now be described as ‘fake news’, whether that’s polls, the entire media, or even individual people. Acknowledging this, one of the producers behind the recent CBS 60 Minutes special on fake news took pains to clarify that the programme’s focus was “not the ‘fake news’ that is invoked by politicians against the media for stories that they don’t like”, but rather “stories that are provably false, have enormous traction in the culture, and are consumed by millions of people.”

What is only hinted at in this formulation (with the phrase ‘enormous traction’) is the role of the digital environment ­– and social media in particular – which is often posited as the key driver of fake news and the related phenomenon of ‘post-truth politics’. In a Guardian interview on this topic, the editor of Snopes – one of the four fact-checking outfits which will power Facebook’s new tool – described social media in terms of an “opening of the sluice-gate”; “the bilge”, as he put it, “keeps coming faster than you can pump.” Like Clinton’s description of an “epidemic of malicious fake news”, social media is presented here as uncontrollable, riddled with infection — and toxic.

If only we could close the gates again! Before social networks, so the story goes, news – at least in open media markets like the US – was real and authoritative, based on fact rather than hysteria. “We all know that politicians have lied before,” an op-ed in The Humanist acknowledged in 2015, “Yet I sense a shift in the landscape of post-truth America. We’ve crossed some kind of frontier.”

When considering these arguments, it is important to remember that in 2003, several years before the advent of Facebook, virtually every US newspaper, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, published articles vouching for the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – claims which were later comprehensively debunked. Does this qualify as fake news? If not – why not?

To be clear, I am not trying to argue that the digital environment cannot, in some cases, exacerbate the spread of misinformation, or facilitate its transmission. The internet’s radical empowerment of freedom of expression and access to information, while overwhelmingly positive for democracy and participation, also of course carries the potential for abuse. Facebook and other businesses have a role in making sure that their platforms are secure, healthy spaces for debate, freedom of expression and assembly. This requires thoughtful product design and user policies, which may include measures to deal with deliberate misinformation.

But there are clear problems with the approach Facebook is currently trialling. First of all, its very premise — that it is possible to unproblematically assess the veracity of news using fact checkers – does not stand up to any scrutiny. Fact checkers are not themselves immune to accusations of partisan bias. And even if they were, an obvious philosophical problem remains: is there even such a thing as objective truth? What we understand as fact is inextricable from questions of power, representation, geography and time. It’s important to remember, when considering the implementation of a fake news filter on the world’s largest communications platform, that people used to think the earth was flat, and doctors used to recommend smoking to patients.

To some this might seem like an academic, abstract problem, especially since most of the articles affected by Facebook’s filter would probably be egregious and offensive – like the article used in the feature’s US trial, which claims Irish people were brought to America as slaves.

But consider how a fake news filter might shape the way a user experiences their timeline; if, for instance, one in every ten articles were to appear with a disclaimer. Perhaps this would discourage that user from reading, or sharing, an inaccurate story; or would give them, at least, a more critical framework through which to assess it. Undoubtedly this is the outcome that Facebook would like to see.

But what about the stories which aren’t flagged up by the fact checkers? Mistakes – whether minor or serious – are not uncommon, even among highly respected media organisations, and are often only discovered after publication; the Washington Post, for example, had to quietly qualify or withdraw two of its biggest stories last year. A fact checker would be of little use here. Indeed, the silence of Facebook’s fact-checking feature on a given article could even subconsciously encourage a user to let their guard down when reading it, and suspend their critical faculties. It is hard to see how this would improve or enrich political and intellectual culture.

Fake news, and the anxieties and structural problems for which it serves as a proxy, isn’t going anywhere. Facebook’s initiative is just one of many in the pipeline; in Germany, a draft law currently under consideration would impose fines of up to €50 million on platforms found to host fake news; while Factmata, a Google-backed startup, aims to apply a Facebook-style fact-checking system to search engines.

It’s beyond the scope of this article, brief and speculative as it is, to offer solutions, other than to suggest that, rather than seeking a silver bullet, we need a more holistic view of the phenomenon – one which centres the critical faculties of people, and attends to the structural factors which make people turn to ‘fake news’ in the first place.

A recent statement by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), suggesting schools should teach children how to spot fake news in schools, potentially offers a useful starting point, and warrants further discussion. The Democracy Fund’s announcement of a $1 million fund to tackle misinformation is also welcome, particularly in its acknowledgement that a range of solutions – including stronger independent media organisations – is going to be needed.

Above all, we need a much broader conversation on this issue. All of us – businesses, civil society, media organisations and technical communities – have a role to play in this debate. It would be unwise to leave it just to the fact checkers.</s>SECURITY RESEARCHERS believe they have found a smoking gun that Russian agents had been meddling with Hillary Clinton's emails in the run-up to the US elections.

Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Mark Warner also believes it has evidence that 1,000 operatives in the employ of the Kremlin wrote anti-Clinton 'fake news' to derail the campaign.

These findings are not binding proof but will be submitted as part of the official investigation into the 2016 Elections.

A group of hackers working for Russian Military Intelligence sent a total of 19,315 malicious links to 6,730 people between March 2015 and May 2016 - before the election battle officially began.

The comedy aspect to all this comes with the rather slapdash methods employed by the hackers, who used bit.ly links and kept their profiles public, making the evidence pretty easy to gather.

Motherboard reports that the spear phishing email campaign, which mimicked a Google log-in screen, resulted in 470 marks giving away their passwords, though it's not thought that Clinton herself was amongst them. SecureWorks warns, though, that they only counted clicks made on the same day that the mail was sent, meaning that the actual figure could be much higher.

These hacks formed the basis of the email leaks that dogged Clinton during her campaign. Guccifer 2.0, a hacker accused of being a front for the Russian hacking community prepared a statement for the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in which he said: "The publicly available evidence that implicates Russian intelligence agencies in the 2016 active measures campaign is extraordinarily strong.

"The DNC hack can be compared to a carefully executed physical break-in in which the intruders used uniquely identical listening devices; uniquely identical envelopes to carry the stolen files past security; and uniquely identical getaway vehicles."

Russia has consistently denied involvement in manipulating the US election but there has been a distinct stench of burning from Putin's trousers, which may or may not lead to full combustion. µ</s>Setting the Stage of the Press-President War

US ruling ideology and Washington power have become unstuck as never before. A war of opposing certitudes and denunciations is waged day to day between the long-ruling US corporate media and the White House. Both continuously proclaim ringing recriminations of the other’s ‘fake news’. Over months they both portray each other as malevolent liars.

US bully pulpits are now beyond show disagreements and successful media inquisitions of the past. Slanderous accusations long confined to vilifying the designated Enemy have crept into accusations of the President himself. ‘The Russians are coming’ is returning as the final recourse of smear to stop deviations from the global program of hugely profitable enemy hate and perpetual preparations for foreign war.

The ruling big lies of the US money party and corporate globalization have divided into opposing camps. The Press and the President denounce each other non-stop on the public stage, while US dark state agents take sides behind the scenes.

Fake news is the medium of battle.

Beneath the civil war of official narratives, cognitive space opens for truth long suffocated by ‘the Washington Consensus’. Even the US-led G-20 has recently agreed not to automatically condemn ‘protectionism’ as an economic evil. The battle slogan of transnational corporate rule over 30 years has been quietly withdrawn on the global stage.

Is the big lie of ‘free trade’ finally coming to ground? It has long led the hollowing out of societies and life support systems across the world in a false mass promotion as “freedom and prosperity for all”. In fact beneath the pervasive fake news, a closed-door transnational corporate command system forces all enterprises across borders into a carbon-multiplying trade regime with thousands of rules to protect the transnational corporate looting and ruin of home economies and environments as the only rights enforced.

Propagandist names and fake freedoms are proclaimed everywhere to conceal the reality. The corporate-investor regime has stripped out almost all evolved protections of workers, ecologies and social infrastructures. Non-stop liquidations and roboticizations of local jobs and enterprises are reversed in meaning to ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ and ‘higher living standards’, the very opposite of the facts. Destabilization and bombing wars attack resource-rich and air-defenceless societies outside the circle of treaty subjugation.

False news allows every step. Even the happy-face Trudeau regime is taken aback by the tidal shift to national priorities. Its ministers scuttle around the US in near panic to find common cause for restoring the unaccountable regime. Multiplying carbon, disemployment and ecological plunder are ignored throughout in the longest standing fake news of all –‘economic growth”.

In fact, there is no real economic growth in universal life necessities or reduction of waste. The only growth is of volumes and velocities of transnational money exchanges, foreign commodities, and private profits to the top.

‘More prosperity for nations and the world’ means, decoded, more transnational corporate-state treaties to deprive nations of their rights to organization and production for citizens’ real needs as well as organically regulated protection of environments and ecosystems.

The consequences covered over by pervasively false cover stories are speeded-up ecocidal extractions, permanent disemployments, and wastes hemorrhaging into cumulatively more polluted oceans, air, atmosphere and life habitats. Corporate-state solutions of carbon markets for pollution rights have nowhere reduced any of these life-and-death crises, but only further and selectively enriched transnational corporations.

As for the Obama solution, “we need more Canadas”, fake news again conceals the reality. Beneath the global celebrity hype covering empty and broken promises, Canada’s Trudeau regime is essentially a brand change of PM rhetoric to advance transnational corporate dictates as ‘free trade’ and to ensure oil pipelines out of the most polluting oil basin in the world, Alberta’s tar-sands, are built through water basins and indigenous lands across Canada and the US. One cannot help but observe this is Trump’s plan too, and overrides Trudeau’s promises to protect Canada’s first peoples.

I recently sent a letter to my local MP requesting evidence for what PM Trudeau promises over months of repetition that “more free trade” means “a better life for those in the middle class and those wanting to join the middle class”. As always, there is no evidence to support the non-stop false news from the PMO. Revealingly, the “middle class” turns out to be people making $180,000 a year slated to get significant tax cuts.

Trump’s rogue elephant charge on Washington-led lies, war, and dispossession of the working class is no solution to life-blind corporate globalization. Trump in office is a US nationalist oligarch commanding policies even more blindly rapacious in despoliation of the environment and transferring far more public wealth to the rich.

The common ground of all our lives, collective life capital, does not exist for any government in ‘the free world’ or any policy of ‘globalization’. The lies that must be promulgated to advance the private corporate agenda are built into its transnational command system from the beginning.

Out of the Ruling Memory Hole with the Internet Commons

Joining the dots shows that every step of US money-party ‘globalization’ has, in fact, been driven by fake news.

No corporate media tolerance has been given in a quarter of a century to any voice demanding accountability to the common life-ground of citizens. A new game of numbers has proceeded instead. At most, a euphemistic ‘climate change’ has been endlessly debated while the totalizing destabilization of human and planetary life cycles remains without a name or collective response. Only more profitable market panaceas which do not reduce any pollution continue to divert from the deepest degenerate trends destroying the planetary life host.

On the upside, the big lies of ‘free trade’ and ‘humanitarian wars’ have been called into official question for the first time by the Trump presidential campaign, and he has been elected against the official line. Yet opposing camps are still at each other’s throats. So the perpetual fallback on accusing the long-designated foreign enemy is triggered by the fallen establishment. The fake news chorus of Russia’s aggressions now includes collusion of the Trump administration with its officials to win the US election. This mainspring diversion from reality is called back from the dead witch-hunts of the past. As then tool, facts do not count, only accusations do. The official media line is almost predictable: Russia is behind Trump’s election victory. As always, reverse projection is the mass-psyche operation to blame an official Enemy to divert attention from the life-and-death facts. The Enemy is once again accused of doing what the US has always done worse as the reason for attacking It. Russia is the usual placeholder in this reverse-blame operation. The 2016 US election of Trump is the latest variation.

Meanwhile throughout the election and its aftermath, the new transnational internet commons including Wiki-leaks over a decade has increasingly laid bare the greatest propaganda machine in history now in many-leveled crisis. The long normalized half-truths, one-sided slanting of the facts, and non-stop fallacies of inference are coming out into the open as never before. The pretexts and lies for US imperial bullying and war are exposed beyond any corporate-media gate.

This time the accusation is “interference and attack on the US presidential election” with no evidence of wrongdoing or vote manipulation whatsoever. Yet as in the long past, the method is smear with no evidence for the accusations. Ever more media repetition and shadowy insinuation does the job. It has always worked before, why not again since all the other media buttons pushed on taking down the Trump peace initiatives with Russia and opposition to globalization of US jobs have failed.

Having wondered during the election campaign whether we could be “friends with Russia” and promoted diplomatic relations into his administration, Trump can be named as the enemy in hiding to be rooted out. The real problem the fake news never mentions is that he threatens the cornerstone of the US war state over 70 years.

So when Trump won the election with his heresy still intact, the ever-ready accusation of evil-Russia connection moves into high gear although the target is the opposite of communist and an epitome of capitalist riches and connections. We see here the historical mind-lock compulsion to blame the Enemy Russia and smear whoever dissents from it, even if it is a bully-capitalist president. There are very big stakes in keeping the game going.

Yet the no-profit and unpaid analyses from the internet commons have no such ulterior motive and interest in false accusations. With more objectively informed analysts than the commercial press and unimpeachable facts like WikiLeaks going to tens of millions of readers across the world, the genie is out of the bottle. The official grand narrative and its normalized big lies are coming apart at the seams.

So blame as usual is diverted onto the accepted Enemy, now conniving with Trump to attack the 2016 US presidential election. Beneath the fake news, the fact is that positive diplomatic relations with Russia not only threaten to stop the highly profitable permanent war against it, but spike the longest pretext for US war and military domination now moving through Ukraine.

The free internet commons cannot be gagged for telling the truth. Freedom of speech in the US cannot be openly stopped without fatal loss of legitimacy of rule.

So the rest follows. All the non-corporate and non-profit messages from the critical sites on the internet commons which are speaking against the US war state inside are now vilified as ‘fake news’. A third, unofficial protagonist has entered the battle with no private profit or career motive or corporate boss to serve and a wealth of proven professional knowledge and talent at work. It has to be denounced to sustain the big lies of the ruling money-war game which is in deepening crises and conflicts all the way to the unprecedented US President-Press civil war.

The Harvard Proclamation of a New Memory Hole

The innermost fount of US ideology and war, Harvard University, has now stepped in. It is officially naming and denouncing US-critical internet sites for ‘fake news’.

Not even the medieval Church went so far in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum of prohibited writings. It was at least innocent of scientific method and openly declared its dogmas. Not Harvard.

Underneath notice, all the sites it attacks are internet commons, and none are financed by private corporate donors and captive institutions while Harvard and the corporate media are. This is the real battle agenda underneath, the long war to privatize the news for profit as everything else with anti-establishment internet criticism now the target.

In the background, Harvard University has long propagated an unexamined academic method. It normally cuts off any faculty or learned source of opposition to the private corporate rule of America and the wars of aggression to impose it on the world. Accordingly, the underling grand narrative equations of the US is Good and the designated Enemy is Evil is not questioned. It is presupposed. Malevolent motives are always assumed of the designated Enemy, down to Harvard-produced geostrategic economic and war models. So when a host of internet commons sites challenge the grand narrative framework, Harvard and satellites denounce them to stop people reading them. A long list of critical sites is accused without criteria, proof or evidence as all spreaders of ‘fake news’.

What is not recognised here is that only on the internet commons can the process of truth be free from ruling pressures to control message for external sponsors.

Here there is no commercial-profit condition to speak and write, and no livelihood dependence on private profit. There is no inducement to avoid life-and-death issues in academic obfuscation or ad-vehicle style. Internet authors not on the payroll can be free of the game of all games behind the scenes – enriching the rich further with no life-coherent criterion of truth.

These underlying conditions of the internet commons and free speech itself cannot be recognised by the academy or the corporate press without undercutting their proclaimed status as the only legitimate founts of truth. The internet commons is a new world of competitive capacities to research, understand and disseminate not bound by private money patronage (as over centuries in Harvard University).

When challenged in this way, Harvard (and the official press) are set back on their heels. They cannot think the facts through because their instituted presumptions have long been what they must presuppose and not question to acquire their credentials and pay for public speech. They must attack what calls all this into question if it effectively speaks truth to power to expose or de-legitimate the ruling system narrative as false. Harvard and the US press thus follow the reigning method of reverse projection. They accuse the effective opposition of ‘fake news’.

The most revealing fact here is that Harvard authority as other academic administrations proceed in name-calling without any valid argument or demonstration – the very basis of reasonable conclusion. Yet this is such a long tradition of presumptive accusation allowed against anyone designated as the Enemy, and anyone else exposing the falsehood of the ruling US story of moral superiority over all others and God’s blessing to lead the world by force or money.

This is why only dissenting sites from the official storyline of US freedom and rightness in all things are accused as ‘fake news’. Accusation of opposing positions is so well-worn into conditioned brains that endless repetition locks it in as self-evident. This is why attributions of vile motive are automatic from Harvard or the New York Times for any outside leader opposing US interference in their countries including elections. US hypocrisy here is staggering, but unreported. In fact, Harvard’s life-blind elite of war criminal geo-strategists, economic modellers and so on are fawned upon within the wider corporate rule they serve.

None can engage critical facts and thought challenging the US moral superiority assumptions because they have never been required to consider them. So they denounce them as once the Church denounced apostasy. In the end, US system worship is a war-state religion. It eliminates all enemies to its right to rule. Its globalizing system institutes the market laws of God. War crimes are God-blessed justice.

Freedom of Speech, the Process of Truth, and the US Constitution

Led by senior academics, journalists and technical expertise, the internet commons provide for the first time impartial witness and free speech open to public examination and circulation across borders. They are free from corporate-rank dictate and private copy-right control.

In consequence, the internet commons are liberated from private corporate profit as controlling goal. Those who know what they are talking about can speak truth to dogma and power without words to appease editors, business boards and ad revenues. Truth itself is not defined, but its principle of process is a more inclusively consistent taking into account towards life-coherent conclusion

Despite Google black-holing of radical legal facts, CIA penetration of Wikipedia, and so on, the internet commons’ freedom of speech is far beyond anything guaranteed in the US constitution. In fact, the ‘sacred US Constitution’ that all presidents give oath to “preserve, protect and defend” guarantees in the end only freedom of public speech to private money demand.

Long before the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision reverse-titled as “Citizens United”, the US constitution was structured to one overriding end – to remove prior limits to private-money right over all else, including to begin, the rule of British law and the lands of the first nations West of the Appalachians.

This is why no common life interest exists in the US Constitution from the start. People’s universal human life necessities of water, food, protection and liveable environment are ruled out a-priori. This is why civil rights themselves were first federally enforced by the ‘commerce clause’ protecting freedom of commercial bus passengers including blacks to cross borders.

It is also why the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the equal rights of freed slaves ended up being the legal basis for private-profit corporations and wealthy funds to acquire the constitutional rights of living persons (e.g., to freedom of speech for big money to buy elections and to avoid government access to financial records).

Even the iconic rights of “life, liberty and happiness” turn out to be in fact only private market rights which allow corporate ‘fictive persons’ to unlimited money wealth, protection against public redistribution, and the freedom of private wealth alone to speak to America by buying corporate self promotions and election attack ads.

The US Constitution fix goes all the way back to 1787. As professor of constitutional law at Chicago’s iconic Kent College of Law, Matthew Stanton, explains in personal correspondence:

Russia the Enemy: the Deus ex Machina of Fake News

We may recall that the corporate-press and Wall-Street-enriched candidate for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, started the accusation of ‘fake news’ to explain her defeat. As establishment mask of the politically correct masses with the money-war party as her paymaster, Clinton blamed her fall in the 2016 US election on the new enemy she saw arising against the official story and herself. When the ‘glass mirror’ story line did not take, she joined forces with the corporate media on another plane. ‘Fake news’ misled Americans. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV Networks, and other establishment tale tellers saw pay-dirt far beyond Clinton’s failed bid for president.

In fact, the corporate mass media were losing marketability by the escalating appeal of free social media. The once all-powerful press propaganda system has been increasingly deserted. The ‘fake news’ story provided a media base to condemn free internet news and commentary as immoral. The 2016 election became the leverage for a big market grab back.

Very soon it was not just ‘fake news’ to spike news cycles and subscriptions. War as peace and corporate globalization as freedom found its long place of rule – the enemy of Russia to blame. Now the news can be that Russia hacked and attacked the lost 2016 election. Russia may be a hollowed-out shell by global corporate and oligarch dispossession. But it can still continue as pretext for US-NATO war crimes and aggression reverse-blamed on it. As the European breadbasket and newly discovered fossil-fuel rich nation, Ukraine is a very big prize. Now in Ukraine’s US-led coup aftermath and ethnic civil war, evil Russia can be an ace card again to accuse for attacking the US election.

Since Russia led by Putin is drawing the line as in Crimea to support the Russia-speaking region against US-led war crimes under international law (documented in previous articles), all roads connect. “Russia’s uncontrolled aggression” is reverse-projected onto the victim again in a glorious new use. Reverse blame it for interference in the US election of Trump and kill Russia-US peace initiatives at the same time. No fact is required to verify the accusation, and no law broken is needed to insinuate treason of whoever relates with Russia’s officials in peace initiative. It can work even against an elected US president.

At the same time, the US’s own record attacking other nations’ elections and societies is thereby erased as well – continually orchestrating mass-murder and dictatorship to sabotage the electoral process from Vietnam and Chile to Ukraine in 2010 and Latin America social democracies since.

If it were a story of reverse projection by a mass-murderous psychopath, it would be too much to believe. Yet it now runs the US news cycle as the big story unfolding with no evidence of US illegality, force, or non-compliance with international law. The accusations run by themselves in US media culture and across the empire. So as 2017 Spring breaks, endless media insinuations of treason seep into the populace from corporate media sites across borders with backrooms and Congress setting up for another presidential inquisition.

It is interesting to observe two precedents. Past inquisitions were unfolded soon after Bill Clinton said in India, “it’s time to level up rather than down in global trade” and Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protections Agency, stopped corporations from outsourcing US jobs, and made peace with China as Trump sought with Russia.

The ludicrous hypocrisy, factual vacuum, and war-drums of blame-the-enemy go into high-volume operation again, led by an attack-dog media against the elected US president whose only action has been to have business-like relations with Russia. Few observe the immense stakes of the US media and war establishments in this process. Cui bono? – who benefits? – is the question never asked.

What’s new? The perpetual red herring of ‘Russia aggression’ takes everyone’s eyes off the ball – including the continuing US-drone mass murder and ecological wars built into the Trump agenda. Canada’s oil and mining corps and big banks sneak behind the pervasive fake news with a smiling Trudeau front. NATO demands more money behind Trump now fulsomely praising what he earlier campaigned on as “obsolete”, as he has done with the CIA he also condemned. Those hoping for a new departure under Trump from the big lies and war crimes as normalized operations watch in a combination of horror and hilarity.

Who connects the dots? Beneath official notice, the ruling goal of US empire is blind to its consequences of human and planetary life ruin. It has to cover itself in false news to carry on. This is why fake news is not a temporary phenomenon of the Trump era. It is the necessary veil of illusion of an eco-genocidal system. The symptoms and trends are everywhere. But a US-led prism of false inversions of reality regulates consciousness, perception and reaction to ‘steer the course’.

This is true of both sides of the Trump divide, and also in corporate Canada as the US’s largest trading partner, branch-plant and resource cornucopia. What is new is that the ruling illusions are divided against themselves at the top of the US political and ideological system. The Trump phenomenon reflects the rupture. The US empire is in deep crisis from its cumulative destruction of social and natural life support systems. Its carcinomic multiplication of private money demand with no tie to the production of means of life is the reality beneath all the false news.

Nothing is life secure. The ‘global security system’ protects only money values and sequences through life hosts. Peoples everywhere compete to make it go faster to survive. The ruling concept of ‘economy ‘inverts the systematic depletion, degradation and despoliation of the life capital of organic, social and ecological life. Universal necessities of human and fellow life are stripped, polluted and wasted as ‘efficiencies’.

President Trump has gone into the political ring to fight it out with the political establishment on a nationalist capitalist level. He is losing money in the short term. But his program in office is completely eco-blind, and the opposing mass media follow suit. All they can focus on is demonizing normal relations with the official Enemy Russia. Meanwhile Trump has all but abolished the EPA and cut off all federal funding for restoration of the Great Lakes, the most important source of fresh water heritage on the planet.

These supreme crimes under international law are recognised by none on stage. In Canada, a Nazi progeny and neo-Nazi supporter of the violent coup and civil war in Ukraine is made Foreign Affairs Minister and hustles her connections throughout the US to keep the attack-Russia juggernaut going as in the past under a continuous barrage of ethnic prejudices and fake news.

The pattern is clear but unspoken. The Enemy Russia is the auto-pilot of fake news to divert from US and client leadership failure on almost every level. Relations of mutual respect with Russia’s ambassador are ‘collusion’ and taboo.

The Reality Beneath the Questions not Asked

How does disclosure of Hillary’s Clinton’s apparatus theft of the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders get blamed on Russia? The question is not asked. The Washington mass media and visible Congress focus instead on accused “collusion with Russia” with very big stakes in the new inquisition show. Suspicions without substance run free in the mass media once the designated Enemy is smeared onto the target, even if elected president.

Who knows that the US joined the armed forces of Britain, colonial Canada and Japan to crush the 1917 Russian Revolution on behalf of the Czarist autocracy and Western capitalism? More deeply, who names the governing objective behind all the shows of force and accusation over a century since? To be managed successfully, attention must be diverted from the facts of US-led war crimes and public looting within and without US empire proclaimed as ‘world freedom’.

The new President and his Exxon Secretary of State seek business-like relations with Russia. Very big powers are coming into conflict over business and war within the US empire. Big oil in both leviathan countries are pitted against the US Enemy-and-smear establishment which has long run the show with big oil formerly leading it. Now transnational big oil in the US and Russia are leading out of the blind alley of war against each other which has so totally failed to bring benefits to either side in the long term, and has almost reversed civilization.

The dots again are not joined. The completely counter-productive war against Russia to keep the US money-war state going is deepened by Wall Street. The falling price of oil is driven beneath notice by Wall Street which has successfully short-future-traded oil down to establish its money-printing powers by debt as supreme over its rival substitute, while diverting everybody’s attention from the greatest fraud in history still going. Observe that Wall Street remains untouched even from its multi-trillion dollar heist from public and pension coffers from 2007 on.

Blame Russia is the normal chorus which Wall Street benefits from as the ultimate leader of the ruinously anti-productive money-war system. It pays off so well to the money party in more public dollars appropriated by its control and issue of money debt for everything that exists; the pervasive military-industrial complex which never gets reversed even in the peace after the planned destruction of the ‘Evil Empire’; and the corporate mass media in front turning the fake news system over continuously to promote, idealize and divert from the global empire’s war and occupation powers. The neo-con and neo-liberal war strategists alike are built into the dark state as managers uniquely dependent on Russia as the Enemy.

So it is in all their self-maximizing interests to sustain perpetual accusations of some enemy’s evil as the great cover-up story of US empire and it inherited war-crime system. Joined to despotic local oligarchies, this axis dismantles ever more societies for corporate, bank and military plunder and jackal payoffs everywhere (including the academy). There is no limit or borders to the established system invasion, and all is at the expense of public treasuries and of life support systems across domains.

President Trump does not break the fatal ruling cycle. He demands that vassal states should pay for their US military protection, a new global extortion supporting new NATO oligarchies against change which accompanies his stripping of environmental protections to pay for more war powers. Trump behind his populist bluster is a paradigm example of instituted US capitalist greed and aggression. Yet the fact that hate of the Enemy is smeared even onto him for not hating Russia too reveals the ultimate pretext of the US-NATO war machine. Behind the US-led perpetual arms build-up, border threats and bombings of mostly innocents across the globe while blaming the terrorists for the horrors now built into the global ‘growth’ system is fake news as continuous cover story. The war-criminal drone mass murders continue on unnoticed. The bank looting of public wealth is instituted more broadly. The universities, health systems and public infrastructures are privatized for profit with no life criteria of outcomes.

Trump is dispossessing the American common wealth for big US money in line with the Reagan public-looting machine before him. It drained public revenues into a black hole of US debt, blamed acid rain on trees, and portrayed orchestrated mass murderers of socialists in Afghanistan and Nicaragua as ‘freedom fighters’. What has changed in the corporate media’s fake-news today?

Trump in office is the opposite of the anti-establishment candidate he promised to be. He wars on the US Environmental Protection Agency (its only collective life protective organization). He fractions corporate taxes in a giveway to the rich beyond Reagan’s $500-billion tax cut. He privatizes the public’s falling infrastructure for speculators and developers’ long-term private tolls, profits and control for private profit at taxpayers’ expense.

Who in the corporate media or Congress questions any of it?

The Trudeau regime to the north imitates the new massive scheme of privatizing public infrastructure. But it disguises it in terms of public investment in public goods. The big banks and speculators on both sides of the border are the winners whatever the corporate media and state cover story. The common wealth is sold off under pervasive fake news masquerading as responsible and for the public good. But the drive-wheel policy mechanisms for ever more dismantling of the living earth and redistribution of more public wealth upwards to the rich march on beneath conscious comprehension.

Trump does not hide the privatization for profit of America’s public infrastructure and stripping of public health and environmental protection policies once he has rising stockholder support in office. The Trudeau Liberal party masqueraded as the social democrat NDP in promising whopping public investment to win the election, but when in office lets the giant privatization boondoggle trickle out in sunny avoidance of the facts.

The monumental schemes of robbing the commonwealth at every level are led by slanted and selective reports through every step across ever more domains. But a constant across US empire is Russia the Enemy to justify it all. In the deepening life support crises of this ruling axis, Russia’s projected ‘attacks’ still lead the show.

The Life-Blind Moral DNA of US Rule

With no common ground but belief in God’s blessing over all nations and the greatest killing machine in history to enforce it, US ideology may seem to be a psychopathic rationalization writ large.

Yet the US national morality tale governs perception so that the a-priori life-blindness is not recognised even by philosophers. The US continues to be ruled at home and abroad without life-value ground or compass. So as the US-led global market system multiplies its demands on organic, social and ecological life systems, it moves inexorably towards a few multibillionaires with more wealth than 99% of the population, steering planetary depredation to ruin as freedom and growth.

How else would a global cancer system behave? Yet almost none recognise that this system overrides life requirements at every level. The reformer Trump selects for even more wealth and power to the home rich. He attacks evolved environmental research and regulations with no better alternative. He seeks to repeal Obamacare with no public option considered. His nationalist and cost-cutting program is essentially life-blind.

The baseline of crisis goes all down to the moral DNA of the US project and its evolved economic, political and ideological system. The innermost value driver is long presupposed without question by even US moral philosophers and social scientists as the first principle of their models. Atomic self-maximization towards more private money-value without limit is the meta-program.

In consequence, the ‘global free market’ the US leads and imposes has no feedback loops to protect human or planetary life against hollowing them out for transient commodities, private profit and wastes on every level. The ruling system is structured only to ensure more money demand and commodities to those who have money to pay. Any accountability to universal life necessities is ruled out a-priori from the US Constitution, ruling market doctrine, and received theories.

As I have commented in articles prior to his presidency, “Trump is America come to meet itself”. But the US cover story has not yet been decoded in its master functions of legitimation and idealization. What makes the eco-genocidal system acceptable to human consciousness is an ultimate story line and moral syntax that transforms it into heroic liberty, individualism and moral supremacy.

This moral syntax has been imprinted into US empire since its original revolution against Britain to invade the America West to the Pacific Ocean to appropriate and destroy all the life and life support systems of the developed first peoples there as ‘freedom’, ‘development’ and ‘self-defense’. What is required for the grand narrative’s success is to hide the reality of continuous eco-genocide by continuous false representations as the virtue and truth others fail to understand.

This first principle the justifying morality tale entails the second – that an alien Enemy must always be blamed for the system’s destructive attacks on barriers and resistance to it. Conversion of all life and life support systems to limitless self-maximization of the US system and its richest citizens then proceeds under cover of fake news with wars of acquisition and control represented as courageous and beneficent for all.

For-profit private corporations are the ever more empowered legal vehicles of this transnational system which is set to select for systematic self-maximization of the rich by all market, state and war means that can be constructed to enable it, starting with the US Constitution (as explained above). This set-point is built into the legislative, judicial and executive branches so that today the system outcome is a constitutionally ordered money-party control of all three branches of government as well as the funding systems of social sciences and philosophy.

Fake news in the widest sense provides a continuous cover story to mask and justify the underlying program which is not seen – the money-war party’s limitless take from life within and without the US that depends on a designated Enemy as perennial pretext to strip the US and global commonwealth against effective opposition or change.

Prof. John McMurtry FRSC is the author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Solution and the three-volume study, Philosophy and World Problems, UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), Paris-Oxford.
A Congressional witness states that Russia hired 1,000 people to create anti-Clinton 'fake news' in key U.S. states during the election.