Trump Signals Intent To Begin Refilling Guantanamo Torture Center with Non-White People [Guinea Pigs]

From [HERE] The Trump administration appears to be making its first moves toward fulfilling a campaign promise to fill the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with “bad dudes.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein visited the prison on Friday to get an update on current operations, the first concrete action the administration has taken on the facility since taking office. 

Up until now, Guantanamo has been running on autopilot; the executive order from former President Obama calling for the facility to be shut down is still technically the law of the land. 

But President Trump promised during the campaign to “load it up with some bad dudes,” and Sessions has called it a “very fine place” with no legal reason not to send new detainees there. 

Supporters of keeping the facility open and sending new detainees there are confident Trump will fulfill that promise, even if little movement has been made. 

“We have taken off the table the silly ideas that the previous administration had about Guantanamo,” said David Rivkin, constitutional litigator and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who served under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the White House counsel’s office and the Justice Department.

Obama, having failed in his efforts to close the facility, left Guantanamo with 41 detainees. Five of those detainees were cleared for transfer by either the interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force set up in 2009 or the interagency Periodic Review Boards set up in 2011. 

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As Trump Prepares to Steal Another Election ACLU Files Suit Against White House Vote Fraud Commission

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From [HERE] The American Civil Liberties Union is suing President Trump's vote fraud commission, charging that the body isn't following federal law requiring it to be open to the public. The lawsuit joins a growing number concerning the commission that have been filed by civil liberties groups in recent days.

It also comes as an email was sent by Vice President Mike Pence's office to states telling them to hold off on sending voter data requested last month.

Although the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, led by Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has held only an initial meeting by telephone since it was created two months ago, that first meeting was not open to the public, the ACLU charges. "Since the [law] applies to all meetings, even telephonic meetings, the commission has already violated [the Federal Advisory Committee Act]," ACLU staff attorney Theresa Lee tells NPR.

The commission is planning a meeting on July 19 that would be available to the public only by video link. However, that doesn't count as "open," Lee says, "because it does not provide the opportunity for sufficient public oversight as required by law, and is notably inaccessible to any citizens without a computer and a broadband internet connection."

The ACLU's suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, is similar to another one filed Monday by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. At least two other organizations, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Public Citizen, are also suing the Trump administration over alleged violations of privacy resulting from the commission's efforts to collect voter data.

Last month, the commission sent a letter to all 50 states asking for detailed voter registration data as part of its investigation. More than a dozen states have refused to comply. Many of the rest have said they can't provide all the information requested because of state law.

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Seattle Approves New Income Tax Only for Wealthy Residents

From [HERE] Seattle’s wealthiest would become the only Washington state residents to pay an income tax under legislation approved by the City Council, a measure designed as much to raise revenue as to open a broader discussion about whether the wealthy pay their fair share.

The council voted unanimously Monday to impose a 2.25 percent tax on the city’s highest earners. Personal income in excess of $250,000 for individuals and in excess of $500,000 for married couples filing joint returns would be taxed.

The measure is certain to face a court challenge from opponents who call the tax proposal illegal, unconstitutional and a waste of taxpayer money. If passed, city leaders are likely to keep expanding and increasing the tax over time, they said.

The council is “going to unanimously adopt an illegal income tax that has no hope of taking effect and will waste taxpayer resources on litigation the city is sure to lose,” said Jason Mercier, who directs the center for government reform with the Washington Policy Center,

Supporters of the new tax say the city’s economic growth and prosperity has created significant wealth and opportunity, but it has also exacerbated the affordable housing crisis that has put a strain on those in lower income brackets.

Washington is one of seven states without a personal income tax, and a state law passed in 1984 prohibits a county, city, or city-county from levying a tax on net income.

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Harvard Study Finds Homeowner Disparity Between Whites & Blacks is at Its Highest in 70 Plus Years of Data

From [HERE] Michelle Coleman has never owned a home.

Ideally, she’d like a small house with a yard for gardening and room for her children and grandchildren to visit.

She lives in a four-plex in Kansas City for $600 a month, and hers is the only one that doesn’t have a working air conditioner — a big problem in July. She doesn’t want to spend her own money to fix the air conditioner, and of course her landlord still expects her to pay her rent even though it has not been fixed.

“I’m just tired of renting,” Coleman said.

“Any extra I get, I want to put into a home, not lining someone else’s pockets.”

She’s one of a growing number of African-Americans in Kansas City — and the nation — who don’t own a home.

Across the U.S., homeownership rates appear to be stabilizing as people rebound from the 2007 recession that left millions unemployed and home values underwater, according to a report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

But the report found African-Americans aren’t sharing in the recovery, even as whites, Asian-Americans and Latinos slowly see gains in home-buying. The center said the disparity between whites and blacks is at its highest in 70-plus years of data.

Experts say reasons for the lower homeownership rate range from historic underemployment and low wages to a recession-related foreclosure crisis that hit black communities particularly hard. This disparity is a symptom of its cause, the system of white supremacy/racism, a white over Black system of domination and vast unequal power. 

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New GOP Bill Would Make it Nearly Impossible to Sue Police or Hold Them Accountable for Abuse

From [WashPost] and [HERE] Keeping with the Trump administration's law-and-order rhetoric, Republicans in the House and Senate recently introduced a bill they're calling the Back the Blue Act of 2017. The Senate bill was introduced by racist suspect, John Cornyn (R-Tex.) (in photo below), and is co-sponsored by 15 senators, all Republicans. The identical House bill was introduced by Ted Poe (R-Tex.), and includes five co-sponsors, also all Republicans, all white. The bill would create new federal crimes, impose federal police over the will of local officials and voters and shield police officers from virtually any civil liability, even in cases of egregious misconduct. 

This bill is in the first stage of the legislative process. It was introduced into Congress on May 16, 2017. It will typically be considered by committee next before it is possibly sent on to the House or Senate as a whole. It has a 1% chance of being enacted according to Skopos Labs (details). [MORE]

It proposes to significantly weaken a key rights protection statute, Section 1983 of the US Code, by limiting the ability of victims of illegal and unjustified police violence to receive compensation for harm. Specifically, the bill would limit liability in situations in which the victim had had some involvement with a felony or “crime of violence,” including property damage. Police are already protected from liability if the use of force is justified. Section 1983 lawsuits have been a primary way for ordinary people to hold police and government officials answerable for violations of their rights. They have also provided an important incentive for police departments to prevent abuses by their officers.

Let's look first at the new federal crimes. The bill would create new federal crimes for killing, attempting to kill or conspiring to kill a state or local law enforcement officer who works for a police agency that receives federal funding. Because nearly all police agencies receive some sort of federal funding, including most local sheriffs departments and town police, the bill basically makes it a federal crime to kill, attempt to kill or conspire to kill any police officer (as well as anyjudge or first responder). The bill would also allow for the federal death penalty in such cases, and it would impose limits on the ability of defendants to file habeas petitions in federal court after they've exhausted their appeals.

The legislation would make also it a federal crime to assault any law enforcement officer (again, using the hook of federal funding). An assault resulting in bodily harm would bring a federal mandatory minimum of between two and 10 years in prison, depending on the severity of any injuries to the officer, plus an additional 20-year mandatory minimum if a dangerous weapon was used "during and in relation to the assault." An assault not resulting in bodily harm would carry a sentence of up to a year in prison.

While Republicans are fond of touting principles like federalism and local control over criminal-justice policy when it comes to, say, federal oversight of abusive police, this bill would let a Trump-appointed district attorney overrule local officials if he or she didn't like the way they were handling a case involving an assault or killing of a cop. For example, a number of jurisdictions across the country have recently elected district attorneys who promise a more reform-oriented approach to law enforcement. In a few places, such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Houston, the new DAs were elected specifically after campaigning on policing issues, or in response to a past incumbent's inattention to police abuse. If this bill passes, a U.S. attorney more sympathetic to law enforcement could thwart those efforts by, for example, charging a high-profile victim of police abuse with the new federal crime of assaulting a police officer. It wouldn't be difficult. We've seen plenty of video now where a clear victim of police brutality was initially arrested and charged with battering one of the officers who beat him.

A federal prosecutor might also pursue federal charges against someone like Henry Magee, the Texas man who was cleared by a grand jury after killing a police officer during a marijuana raid on his home. Magee said he didn't know the raiding officers were cops, and fired his gun in self-defense. Or against Ray Rosas, who was acquitted by a jury after shooting at three police officers who raided his home in search of drugs.

In fact, the bill explicitly authorizes federal prosecutions in cases in which "the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence" or "a prosecution by the United States is in the public interest and necessary to secure substantial justice." Which is to say that the bill leaves such decisions wholly up to the discretion of federal prosecutors, regardless of the will of the officials or public at the state and local level. In Philadelphia, longtime civil rights attorney Larry Krasner just overwhelmingly won the Democratic primary for DA, and is heavily favored to win the general election. He has vowed to stop seeking the death penalty in the city. If he's elected, a federal prosecutor could in theory re-try any case involving the killing of a police officer to essentially override Krasner and win a death sentence. Regardless of how one feels about the death penalty, doing so would be contrary to the will of the voters and local officials, and an abdication of those principles of federalism and local control that Republicans claim to hold dear.

But perhaps the most disturbing part of the bill is the new restrictions it puts on suing police officers for constitutional violations. As we've discussed here several times before, it's already extremely difficult to even get in front of a jury with a claim against law enforcement, much less win an award. Police officers are protected by qualified immunity, which requires you to show that not only were your rights violated but also a reasonable police officer should have known that the actions in question were a violation of the Constitution. Under this bill, even if you can show all of that, if the police can show that the violation and resulting injuries were "incurred in the course of, or as a result of, or ... related to, conduct by the injured party that, more likely than not, constituted a felony or a crime of violence ... (including any deprivation in the course of arrest or apprehension for, or the investigation, prosecution, or adjudication of, such an offense)," then the officers are liable only for out-of-pocket expenses. What's more, the bill would bar plaintiffs from recovering attorneys fees in such cases.

This means that if the police raid your home with a search warrant for pot and shoot you dead, even if your family can show that the shooting was unlawful, the police would be liable only for something like funeral expenses if they could show that "more likely than not," you had sold some pot, or at some point possessed a large enough quantity of the drug to merit a felony charge. In some jurisdictions, merely resisting arrest is a felony. In theory, this could mean that under a scenario in which the police falsely arrest you, you resist, and they then severely beat you, if they could show that the beating was the result of your resisting, not the false arrest, you could be barred from suing for anything other than the cost of treating your injuries. If the resisting charge could be filed as an assault, that's already a felony in most jurisdictions, and even where it isn't, under this bill it would become a federal felony.

If this bill passes, it would become nearly impossible to sue the police in all but the most egregious instances of abuse, and even then, only in cases where the victim is basically beyond reproach. These sorts of lawsuit are incredibly expensive. The relatively rare large award is the incentive for civil rights attorneys to take on these cases in the first place and can often be what funds their ability to take on cases less likely to pay out large damages. Removing the ability to collect compensatory or punitive damages, or even recover attorneys fees, basically means it would become even more difficult for victims of police abuse to find representation. If there's even the slightest chance that the police could convince a jury that the plaintiff engaged in conduct that was even "related" to a felony or violent crime, there's no incentive for them to take the case.

“This bill would not protect police officers from danger,” said John Raphling, senior criminal justice researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Instead, it protects police departments from accountability, and removes important incentives for those departments to monitor themselves and improve the quality of their policing.” 

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Trying to Unring a Bell, Trump's Justice Dept says Racism Problem was Solved by Texas' New Voter ID Law, Urges No Liability

Due to It's Shrinking White Votary, the GOP Must Suppress the Growing Non-White Votary to Maintain its Control . [Already, California, Illinois and New York are lost. The GOP has not carried any of the four in seven presidential elections. When Texas – where whites are a minority and a declining share of the population – tips, how does the GOP put together an electoral majority? [MORE]

Electionologist and investigative journalist Greg Palast, explains 'the GOP's white votary was not large enough to elect Donald Trump. That is, it is too small unless the GOP quietly rigged the election by various means. [MORE]

From [MintPress]  Texas’ new voter identification law fully absolves the state from having discriminated against minority voters in 2011, and courts should not take further action in a battle over the state’s old voter ID law, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice argued in a legal filing Wednesday.

“Texas’s voter ID law both guarantees to Texas voters the opportunity to cast an in-person ballot and protects the integrity of Texas’s elections,” the filing stated.

Federal lawyers were referring to Senate Bill 5, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law last month. It would soften a 2011 voter ID law — known as the nation’s most stringent — that courts have ruled purposefully burdened, Latino and black voters. If allowed to take effect, the law would allow people without photo ID to vote if they present alternate forms of ID and sign affidavits swearing a “reasonable impediment” kept them from obtaining what was otherwise required.

“S.B. 5 addresses the impact that the Court found in [the previous law] by dramatically reducing the number of voters who lack acceptable photographic identification,” the justice department argued, adding that U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos should “decline any further remedies.”

The filing came as Ramos is weighing whether SB 5 fixes legislative discrimination she and other courts have identified, and it highlighted Trump’s dramatic departure from his predecessor on voting rights issues.

Former President Obama’s Justice Department originally teamed up with civil rights groups against Texas throughout the long-winding legal battle over the ID law, known as Senate Bill 14. The civil rights groups argue SB 5 doesn’t absolve lawmakers from intentionally discriminating against minority voters by passing the 2011 law and wouldn’t properly accommodate those voters going forward.

Chad Dunn, a lawyer representing some of the challengers, said the reversal shows the Justice Department “simply has no more credibility in this litigation.”

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What It Means to Collude? Trump’s Son Met w/ Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton

From [NYTimes] President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.

The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.

The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help. 

And while President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving members of his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to have included his eldest son. It came at an inflection point in the campaign, when Donald Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a surrogate, was ascendant and Mr. Manafort was consolidating power.

It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. But the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.

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Trump Jr Re-tweets a Meme of Daddy in a fighter jet shooting down a CNN Plane w/a Rocket

Go daddy! Donald Trump, Jr. has retweeted a video. [MORE] idiocy from Trump beliver, "saboteur365" who was impressed that Trump wore an American flag lapel pin, unlike other world leaders who wore a special G20 pin during a photo-op. "His pin truly did put America First." And the Great Brain Robbery rolls on. 

Degenerate Trump Claims North Korea is Dangerous

Puppet Servant of Crimeth Inc,, [Trump's] Little Boy Re-tweeted a Meme of Daddy in a fighter jet shooting down a CNN Plane w/a Rocket in video above. 

From [AntiWar] On July 6, CNN reports, “President Donald Trump chided North Korea for its recent missile tests, saying it is ‘behaving in a very very dangerous manner.’” Particularly motivating Trump’s expression of angst was this week’s test of the Hwasong-14, which the North claims (and the US seems to believe) is “capable of hitting any part of the world, along with nuclear weapons.”

But since Trump wants to talk about dangerous behavior, let’s.

Kim Jong Un’s regime has, in recent months, test-fired a handful of missiles harmlessly into the ocean.

Only two months ago, Donald Trump ordered the firing of 59 missiles at military bases situated on the territory of a sovereign nation with which the US is not at war (Syria).

The US government is worried that the North may be close to developing the launch capability to hit the US with one of its 13-30 atomic fission weapons boasting explosive yields of up to the equivalent of 30 thousand tons of TNT

The US, by the way, possesses nearly 7,000 nuclear weapons with yields of up 1.4 million tons, and 450 Minuteman 3 ICBMs to carry them. It’s also the only nation on Earth that’s ever used atomic or nuclear weapons in war.

North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 and hasn’t invaded another country since.

How many countries has the US invaded since then? There’s not room here to list them all, but right off the top of my head I can think of six just since 2001 (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and Syria). The US maintains military bases in more than 70 countries around the globe.

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Racist Suspect MD Governor Claims the 81% Graduation Rate in PG County is Due to Manipulation of Student Records

From [HERE] and [[HERE] *The high graduation rate of Black students in Prince George’s County, Maryland has Republicans calling for an investigation into grade inflation, medium.com reports.

The county is home to 7 out of the 10 richest African American communities in the United States.

Prince George’s County, MD is one of top 7 out of the 10 richest African American communities in the United States. More African American wealth is gathered in the county than anywhere else in the US. 

So it came as a shock when Maryland’s Governor, Larry Hogan, requested an investigation into data showing increased graduation rates in the county. The governor claims that grades and credit counts are being altered to increase the rate.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has asked the Maryland State Board of Education to investigate the allegations that Prince George’s County educators have been altering grades and credit counts to boost the high school graduation rate.

The allegations claim that the 81 percent graduation rate is due to the manipulation of student records.

 In a June 25 letter to the four Prince George’s County Board of Education members who brought the alleged corruption to light, Hogan states that whistleblowers within the school system will be afforded full protection under the law.

In a June 25 letter to the four Prince George’s County Board of Education members who brought the alleged corruption to light, Hogan states that whistleblowers within the school system will be afforded full protection under the law.

In his request to the Maryland State Board of Education, Hogan points to two more instances in which local officials have also echoed these allegations.

Prince George’s County high school principals sent out a statement in response to the allegations, stating that elected officials and “aspiring politicos” want control over the school system, which is the largest recipient of county funds, “by any means necessary.”

“A high school diploma should never be used as a political pawn to twist the perception of the entire school system,” said the June 21 statement.

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“Show Me Your Papers” & “Open Your Eyes” as Border Sheriffs Expand Iris Surveillance of Non-Whites

From [Intercept] SINCE HIS INAUGURATION, President Donald Trump has found little funding for his “big, beautiful wall.” In the meantime, however, another acquisition promised to deter unauthorized immigrants is coming to the border: iris recognition devices. Thirty-one sheriffs, representing every county along the U.S.-Mexico border, voted unanimously on April 3 to adopt tools that will capture, catalogue, and compare individuals’ iris data, for use both in jails and out on patrol. Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, the company behind the push, has offered the sheriffs a free three-year trial, citing law enforcement’s difficulties in identifying unauthorized immigrants whose fingerprints can be disfigured through manual labor or self-inflicted wounds.

Iris recognition is just the latest surveillance technology helping fortify what the White House hopes will make up a “digital wall,” a concept that many border sheriffs view as less intrusive than Trump’s envisioned 30-foot barricade stretching from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California. For law enforcement, the tool promises to help identify people without reliable fingerprints and to deter repeat border crossers. And for Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, which frequently goes by BI2, rapid border expansion means its existing national iris database will receive a huge influx of biometric information on unauthorized immigrants, boosting its product’s capabilities to potential law enforcement clients across the country.

While this high-tech approach to immigration enforcement has not generated anything close to the controversy of Trump’s proposed wall, the campaign to expand iris scan collection on the border is of a piece with the president’s denunciations of Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.

According to John Leonard, senior vice president of BI2, the company’s decision to give away this technology was, in part, motivated by law enforcement’s alleged struggles with violent unauthorized immigrants. “The frustration law enforcement has is this: ‘Alright, I got this criminal, the guy raped three kids. He’s back in my community again. I don’t even know who he is, and the federal government has never given me what I need,'” Leonard said during a video call with The Intercept.

“You get all these people that say, ‘Well Trump is going after all these illegals, these immigrants, who have made America great.’ Well there’s a lot of immigrants that have made it great, but there’s a lot of assholes, too,” he said. “So BI2 is stepping up to the plate and donating this.”

IN THE COMING months, BI2’s iris recognition devices will be installed in every sheriff’s department along the U.S.-Mexico border. Each department will receive both a stationary iris capture device for inmate intake facilities and, eventually, a mobile version, according to Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez of Val Verde County, Texas, who currently serves as the president of the Southwestern Border Sheriff’s Coalition.

The technology works by taking a high-resolution image of a person’s iris with a special infrared illumination camera, and then creating an individualized iris template based on that image. The templates exploit nearly 240 unique characteristic elements in the iris, compared to the 40 to 60 used for fingerprints, resulting in far fewer false matches. To make an identification, BI2’s iris recognition program compares an individual’s iris against the over 987,000 iris scans held in its private database, which collects images from over 180 law enforcement jurisdictions nationwide.

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Ct says Undocumented Children Detained by Feds are Entitled to Bond Hearings to Determine Release

From [HERE] Undocumented immigrant children detained by federal authorities are entitled to hearings to determine whether they should remain confined, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that immigration authorities must abide by a 1997 legal settlement that established a policy for the detention, release and treatment of minors in immigration custody.

That agreement, named the Flores settlement after the teenage girl who brought the original case, stipulated that a child in deportation proceedings be afforded a bond hearing before an immigration judge.

The federal government had argued that Congress passed laws in 2002 and 2008 that abrogated the settlement, terminating the minors’ right to a bond hearing.

The Ninth Circuit panel disagreed, saying that neither law abolished the bond-hearing requirement for unaccompanied minors.

“Rather, the statutes leave ample room for immigration judges to conduct bond hearings for these children,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the court.

“In the absence of such hearings, these children are held in bureaucratic limbo, left to rely upon the agency’s alleged benevolence and opaque decision making,” he said in a 40-page decision, which noted evidence submitted by the plaintiffs that minors were held for months, and even years, without hearings to review the basis for detention.

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US Govt Keeps Demanding Info About Users From Twitter: Judge allows lawsuit over requests to move forward

From [HERE] A federal judge is allowing Twitter to move forward with a lawsuit against the Department of Justice and FBI over restrictions that social media sites face on disclosing the amount of national security requests they receive from the government.

District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California on Thursday night dismissed the government’s motion to get an expedited decision on the case and ordered that Twitter’s attorneys be given security clearances.

“We are continuing our fight for more transparency at @Twitter under the First Amendment!” Vijaya Gadde, the company’s general counsel, tweeted.

Twitter filed the lawsuit in 2014, arguing that the restrictions it faces on disclosing national security requests are unconstitutional.

Rogers ruled that the government failed to persuade the court that Twitter’s arguments should be dismissed.

“The Court finds the Government has not met its high burden to overcome the strong presumption of unconstitutionality on the record before the Court,” she wrote in her decision. “The Government’s restrictions on Twitter’s speech are content-based prior restraints subject to the highest level of scrutiny under the First Amendment.”

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New Facebook & YouTube Rules Enable Elite Whites to Better Control the Domain of Discourse & Chill Speech

According to Amos Wilson, "the most effective means of disseminating and reproducing ideas in society, and in the Afrikan American community in particular, is to have that community perceive their dissemination and reproduc­tion as the work of disinterested, unbiased, non-manipulative, liberal yet authoritative, White American individuals, groups, or institutions, or as flowing from sources independent of the marked influence of the powerful. Thus, White America strongly pushes and projects the powerful mythology of independent, liberal American media, universi­ties, and other information processing establishments. That is, America loudly congratulates itself for what it calls its "free press" and mass media which permit the free exchange of ideas. Most Black Americans utilize White media and these factors as their primary, if not sole, source of information. Most are not mindful of the fact that the American press and mass media are privately owned, profit-making, White elite-controlled corporations. The press is one among other institutions, "and one of the most important in maintaining the hegemony of the corporate class and the capitalist system itself," advances Parenti.

If the press cannot mold our every opinion, it can frame the perpetual reality around which our opinions take shape. Here may lie the most important effect of the news media: they set the issue agenda for the rest of us, choosing what to emphasize and what to ignore or suppress, in effect, organizing our political world for us. The media may not always be able to tell us what to think, but they are strikingly success­ful in telling us what to think about ....

It is enough that they create opinion, visibility, giving legitimacy to certain views and illegitimacy to others. The media do the same to substantive issues that they do to candidates, raising some from oblivion and conferring legitimacy upon them, while consigning others to limbo. This power to determine the issue agenda, the information flow, and the parameters of political debate so that it extends from ultra-right to no further than moderate center, is if not total, still totally awesome.

The central aim of the ruling elite's ideology process is to define the "domain of discourse." That is, the corporate elite seeks to define the limits of "acceptable ideas" and to define what is worth talking about, worth learning, teaching, promoting, and writing about. Of course, the limits of the "acceptable," the "responsible," are set at those points which support and justify the interests of the elite itself. To a great extent the elite ideology process essentially involves the reinforcement of long-held, orthodox "American" values, perspectives, practices and ideals (which the system of power relations has already indirectly shaped to begin with). These factors are the ideological bases of elite power. It is a well-known fact that propaganda works best "when used to reinforce an already existing notion or to establish a logical or emotional connection between a new idea and a social norm." [MORE]  

Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men From Hate Speech But Not Black Children. From [MintPress] In the wake of a terrorist attack in London earlier this month, a U.S. congressman wrote a Facebook post in which he called for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them,” declared U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. “Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”

Higgins’ plea for violent revenge went untouched by Facebook workers who scour the social network deleting offensive speech.

But a May posting on Facebook by Boston poet and Black Lives Matter activist Didi Delgado drew a different response.

“All white people are racist. Start from this reference point, or you’ve already failed,” Delgado wrote. The post was removed and her Facebook account was disabled for seven days.

A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. For instance, Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was deleted for attacking whites in general.

Over the past decade, the company has developed hundreds of rules, drawing elaborate distinctions between what should and shouldn’t be allowed, in an effort to make the site a safe place for its nearly 2 billion users. The issue of how Facebook monitors this content has become increasingly prominent in recent months, with the rise of “fake news” — fabricated stories that circulated on Facebook like “Pope Francis Shocks the World, Endorses Donald Trump For President, Releases Statement” — and growing concern that terrorists are using social media for recruitment.

While Facebook was credited during the 2010-2011 “Arab Spring” with facilitating uprisings against authoritarian regimes, the documents suggest that, at least in some instances, the company’s hate-speech rules tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities. In so doing, they serve the business interests of the global company, which relies on national governments not to block its service to their citizens.

One Facebook rule, which is cited in the documents but that the company said is no longer in effect, banned posts that praise the use of “violence to resist occupation of an internationally recognized state.” The company’s workforce of human censors, known as content reviewers, has deleted posts by activists and journalists in disputed territories such as Palestine, Kashmir, Crimea and Western Sahara.

One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.

The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.

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Angelo Carusone explains how Facist Trump & his media allies target any critical press

From [MediaMatters] MARK THOMPSON (HOST): That was the most immature thing I have ever seen. And it appeals to the immature group of people that support [Trump]. 

ANGELO CARUSONE, MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT: Yep, and that's I mean -- and that's ultimately what his big argument and approach is, is -- during the campaign one of the things we had talked about occasionally was that Trump does really believe in this 10 percent theory, which was this idea that had percolated in talk radio starting around 2009, which was that you really only need 10 percent of the country. And as long as you have 10 percent, and they're incredibly fervent in their support of you, that it doesn't really matter. Because that 10 percent you can utilize in order to persuade others and to silence or to bully them into basically subjugation. That could just just basically use that 10 percent as the tip of the spear to sort of do whatever you want. And he really does in -- deep down inside, really really believe that. 

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Well, the thing I can't understand is, just two weeks ago, all they were doing was freaking out about how a Shakespeare play that has repeated -- where the leader has always been swapped out for the current leader, the president, was a violent, terrible assault. I mean they were talking about whether or not the people there needed to be be put in jail. They were leading boycotts against the play. That somehow that was absolutely off the wall, totally not just unacceptable, but in some cases the right wing was arguing that it was illegal to have that play running because of the fact that they believed that it incited violence and all this other stuff. And yet, they could have - they could be comfortable with the kinds of imagery coming from the Office of the President that literally depicts actual violent acts against a consistent source of criticism that he's levied against. And I would point out that the GIF is scary. The even scarier thing that he's done, from my perspective, has been that because CNN has really dug in on this -- and look I think CNN has problems, I mean they were one of the biggest enablers of Trump during the campaign -- but the fact of the matter is that they are doing journalism and reporting in many situations and what Trump has done recently -- yesterday the White House administration started to argue that if CNN doesn't start behaving well, that they are going to squash the -- their acquisition, their merger. And that to me is -- I don't like the idea of media consolidation. I think their merger should be stopped anyway, but I think it's important to consider the idea that the White House would use the Justice Department as a weapon against a news outlet because they don't like the coverage.