The Ellisons. All images: public domain
By Dennis Broe
When it turned out the Iran war was going south and it was obvious with oil and gas prices zooming, presaging the global inflation to follow, the Trump administration decided to admit this with a slogan that all their spokespeople repeated endlessly – “Short Term Pain for Long Term Gain,” – a slogan which has come back to haunt them.
What the war actually is resulting in is Short Term Gain (For Trump his other crony members of the Epstein elite) amidst Long Term Pain (for everyone else), not only in the U.S. but globally. Although the way that’s expressed on the homefront is not only globally, which we don’t care that much about, but in the U.S., where to disrupt a pampered class’s comfort even an ounce is disastrous.
The oil president, who just declared war also on wind and sun sources of energy, attempting to bribe France’s Total into cancelling its windmill projects off the U.S. East Coast, is not only profiting from the rise in oil prices but may also be manipulating the market by capitalizing on false information, in a form of insider trading that would make even Nancy Pelosi blush.
With oil prices at 100 dollars a barrel, because of Iran’s blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, the administration posted on social media that a U.S. ship had guided an oil tanker through the strait. On that information, prices immediately fell to 80 dollars a barrel. The social media post was then deleted, which means that anyone with a put option on the price of oil, allowing them to sell based on knowledge that the posting was false, would have cleaned up.
The war is going badly, not only financially but also militarily, as Trump is now asking for an additional $200 billion because the U.S. is running out of ammunition. This is of course a boon for Trump’s buddies in the arms industry, already larger than its next nine global competitors put together.
Military spending: USA vs the world. Information from GlobalFirePower
The order for the day for an already compliant media is suppression of information both in the U.S. and in Israel, where it is illegal, at a penalty of five years in prison, to photograph any of the Tel Aviv carnage. But the footage seeps out showing the Israeli capital, where most of the industry and population is concentrated, suffering major hits.
The myth of the vaunted Iron Dome is shattered but the Iron Dome now is the Israeli control of information, that is, the Iron Dome is now pointed in the direction of reporters, the press and anyone with a camera making sure not that no missiles get in but that no information gets out of Israel.
Nevertheless, a disaster of this scale cannot be entirely hidden – or can it? Trump’s head of the FCC threatened any media outlet that published adverse information on the war – elsewhere known as the truth – that they could lose their broadcasting license. And the self-proclaimed secretary of war Pete Hegseth, complaining about CNN’s coverage, was publicly drooling over the fact that the Zionist funders of the IDF, Israel’s genocidal military, in the form of Larry and David Ellison’s Paramount, would soon be taking over the company so that no truth or criticism would be allowed.
The New York Times, as if to prove that the administration had nothing seriously to fear from them, published “16 Reader Questions on the War in Iran and Our Reporting—Answered” or “16 Questions in Search of a Lie.” The first question, chosen by The Times editors is deliberately misleading – “What explains Trump’s turnabout on foreign wars and nation building?” – since it frames the question in a way that suggests that Trump alone is making these decisions, leaving out the effect of Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby, the U.S. attempt to seize Iran’s oil and control a choke point for world oil and the fact that the war is a last ditch effort of a fading empire to maintain its power.
One aspect of the reporter’s answer is that Trump, on the eve of his 80th birthday, is “focused on his place in history” which reduces a complex war to the errant wanderings of a single madman.
The next question is equally misleading and also results in a misleading answer. It asks how the U.S. was able to locate Khameni and kill him, a question which validates U.S. power. The reporter responds in kind that U.S. sensors allow it to track anybody, anywhere in the world, that the U.S. is all-powerful – leaving out the fact that Khameni did not hide his whereabouts and deliberately sacrificed himself to unite his country.
This unification is then disputed in the next question, which asks what share of the country supports the government. The reporter estimates 20 percent and says “many Iranians,” not naming a number or a percentage, are fed up with their rulers. This characterization directly contradicts the footage of millions in the streets every night in Tehran and in the country as a whole, as both hardliners and reformers have come together to oppose U.S. bombing and regime change. And so the lies continue.
Last point about the media concerns social media. A question that isn’t being asked by the mainstream media is why, unlike the war on Iraq waged with very similar faulty premises, there is little outpouring on the part of the Left, with most of the principled criticism instead coming from the right with Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Judge Napolitano, Margery Taylor Green and Candace Owens leading the way.
The idea is to keep the Left paralyzed in a U.S. Israeli campaign that is like that waged by the tobacco industries in the ’70s and ’80s. Then it was apparent that cigarettes caused cancer, and like the oil industry in the ’90s and 2000s when it was beyond reasonable doubt that that industry was a major contributor to global warming.
The idea here in mainstream and more especially in social media, which is used more by the left, is to raise enough doubt to immobilize people, to keep them off the streets. Thus, there is the supposed feminist critique and the concern for the treatment of Iranian women under the government, but not concern for these women being bombed; and also a refusal of the fact that women in Iranian society are everywhere in high profile positions and outnumber men in Iranian higher education.
There is a good deal of trolling of any kind of support for Iran’s stand against American imperialism in the Middle East backed up by its bases, which have become targets and are now being evacuated. Israeli propaganda or hasbara, since the American population opposes this war, is now hidden but omniscient, as the battle for the control of social media is now being waged alongside the Ellison’s overt coup, effectuated on mainstream media.
There is also the Left’s tendency to disparage not only already existing socialist countries but also countries that are leading the fight for sovereignty and against U.S. global imperialism and Israeli divine-right expansion. The worst of these is exhibited by the former Greek Syriza economic minister, a voice of resistance in that crisis, Yannis Varoufakis, who has chosen the moment when Iran is under maximum attack to criticize its momentary turn toward neoliberal policies, which the regime has course corrected. He blames that, and not the 45 years of sanctions, coups and bombing, for the inability of the government to meet the needs of its people. In this current instantiation, Varoufakis is a Piers Morgan look alike, accomplishing the same befuddling that is Morgan’s stock in trade.
Finally, aiding this immobility is the supposed progressive wing of the Democratic Party, who, like the voices on social media, are nominal outliers, like California’s Ro Khanna, who has been very good with the Republican Thomas Massey on both Epstein and in the failed attempt to get Congress on the record as supporting or opposing the war.
Ro Khanna, in his “daring” move, has proposed a tax on the oil companies profiting from the war, in what is being billed as a giveback to the American people. However, with Trump openly suggesting that the war and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz may require troops on the ground, the point of this tax is to rally support, entirely lacking at the moment, for sending American bodies off to be annihilated.
In this war, as Yeats says, “the best”—the supposed Left—”lack all conviction,” while the worst—Trump, Netanyahu, Hegseth and the rest of the Epstein elite— “are filled with passionate intensity.”
So what is to be done?
What is to be done about the sorry state of contemporary media and the need for accurate information in the time of a global war? One answer is, there is already a space to contest the dominant narrative, as was pointed out in a previous article – alternative podcasters on YouTube.
However, that space is owned and managed by Google and that entity (and its parent company Alphabet) is involved in the war with AI Pentagon contracts and the company has shown itself more than willing to demonetize and censor these voices in the wilderness.
What about nationalization of these now combined AI and media conglomerates? Under a Trump or Starmer government that would hardly mean creating an open space, as we’ve seen in a BBC either cheering on or obfuscating the causes of the war, and in Trump’s threat to intervene in favor of the Ellison Paramount takeover of Warners.
The first citizen/government initiative, beyond the needed breakup of these behemoths who are currently contemplating spending 9 trillion dollars on securing their stranglehold on information, is to finance a comparable people’s entity. Such a force would employ open source AI code, readily accessible to all, and distribute content that would describe the current conjuncture. It would locate it in a local and also in a global context that would unite workers’ struggles in the North with the struggle to throw off the yoke of neo-colonialism and maintain independent sovereignty in the global South.
This article is a preview of Short Term Gain for Long Term Pain, Episode 4 of Lies, More Lies and Damn Media Lieshttps://liesmoreliemedialies.substack.com/
