AARON SWARTZ DIED FOR MORGAN’S SINS

AARON SWARTZ DIED FOR PIERS MORGAN’S SINS
Greg Palast
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/aaron-swartz-died-for-piers-morgans-sins

In 2000, Aaron Swartz had just released his astonishing invention, RSS, to ease the flow of information and news around the internet. Around the same time, one of Piers Morgan’s stringers hacked into the phone of Sir Paul McCartney’s wife and stole some highly personal, and highly valuable, information – the type of gossip used to sell Morgan’s grotty little scandal sheet, The Daily Mirror. The idea of Piers listening in on private phone messages, whether he remained zipped or not, is too creepy to think about. But he did it. Often. Electronic burglary for profit is a crime in the UK and USA both.

Editors and executives from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation were arrested and face hard time for knowing about it and covering it up. Not Piers, though.

Then there was the little matter of his insider stock trades, called a “fraud on the market” in the United States where it would earn you substantial time breaking rocks on a chain gang. The scheme Morgan profited from was elegantly simple and utterly criminal. Two of Morgan’s influential financial columnists would make recommendations to the rubes reading The Mirror. Morgan and his so-called reporters bought the stocks just before they would print the names of their picks – which would, of course, immediately shoot skyward. Morgan pocketed tens of thousands of pounds. His co-conspirators, the reporters, got jail time. Not Piers. He admitted to the profiteering and walked away with a fine.

There was yet another fraud. In 2004, Piers ran laughably staged photos of British troops “torturing” an Iraqi. Except they weren’t in Iraq and the Iraqi was a swarthy Brit soldier posing with his mates. Piers sold a lot of tabloids with this fakery. Just like he sold a lot of pulp on a fabricated story about my penis. When he was confronted with the clear evidence the “torture” photo was a con, Morgan still claimed the story was true, even if the photos lied. But the story was a lie. Piers defended running the fantasy as truth – just as he continued to stand by his discredited expose of my knicker knockwurst.

Piers’ obvious journalistic talents were simply too stellar for American news media to ignore and he was subsequently given CNN’s top news interview programme, after proving his analytical credentials by winning Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice. All he had to do, was get there. Solved by the little matter of sneaking across the border surrounded by a cloud of criminality. In 2011 alone, the Obama Administration was proud to have deported 188,382 alien residents for evidence of criminal activity, from a boyfriend having a joint in your car, to ancient records of crimes confessed under torture. God Bless America.

The US law, especially the mellifluously titled, “Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act” of 1996, bar work visas to those who have admitted to “the essential elements of a crime” including fraud and white collar felonies involving more than $10,000. The US Embassy can exercise its discretion. And no one is more discrete than the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Mr. Louis Susman, whose credentials are listed as “prolific fundraiser for [the] Democratic Party” and former Vice-Chairman of Citibank. Susman’s embassy did a thorough review of Piers’ visa. (Here is a photo of Ambassador Susman with Piers at the CNN launch party of Morgan’s show.)

This was no ordinary visa, but what is known as the rare O-1 “Genius” visa, supposedly granted for the “individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts…”. Nobel Prize laureates, for example. Or, Piers Morgan.

Giselle Bonilla is no genius. Giselle, age 7, was denied a visa to the US; she hoped to transfer bone marrow to her dying five-year-old sister. Immigration attorney Santiago Juarez of New Mexico told me, “Immigration is one of the most politicised agencies in the government” tilted to the rich and connected.

What does Morgan have to do with the horror of the arrest and death of Aaron Swartz?

It’s the story of How The System Works – and Who It Works For.

Swartz was the Robin Hood of America’s Information Liberation Front.

Swartz, after creating RSS, went on to co-found Reddit, then social activist group Demand Progress and was named Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics. From there, he led the national uprising against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have criminalised the spread of information and corporatised its control – all by the age of 26. (Makes you question what the hell you’ve been doing all these years.)

But Aaron won’t see 27. Last January, Swartz was arrested and charged with crimes that could put him away for 35 years.

I’ve read the indictment. The charge would have made Pinochet blush – and Torquemada proud. The prosecution said that Swartz had planned to make public millions of university research papers that had been sequestered by an information monopoly called JSTOR. The Internet was supposed to bring us freedom by making the world’s information available to all. No tyrant, no corporation, no commercial or political monopolist could keep vital information from the least village. Electronic democracy, the free flow of information, has always scared the crap out of the political and commercial oligarchs. SOPA and JSTOR were two of their responses.

If JSTOR were operating when Isaac Newton published, only a well-heeled elite would have the secret of thermodynamics. If Newton worked for Microsoft, we’d be paying a royalty for the use of gravity.

Just yesterday, I used JSTOR to look up university research papers on assault weapons. Thank you, Aaron. Because of Aaron Swartz’ planned emancipation of JSTOR documents, and the public disgust at his persecution, the JSTOR monopolists agreed to voluntarily release some (though not all) of this crucial research without charge.

But the Information Lords still insisted on collecting their pound of Aaron’s flesh: imprisonment, silencing – just as they have imprisoned and silenced his fellow information liberator Pvt. Bradley Manning, source of the WikiLeaks.

Aaron could not morally accept a plea deal that would discredit his life’s work; and the alternative, prison, would be unbearable to the depression to which great minds are susceptible. Two weeks ago, Aaron hanged himself.

Was Aaron a thief? Was Manning? In the case of the Manning WikiLeaks documents, these were US government cables laying bare the ugliest skullduggery of government and corporate co-conspirators.

Who is the rightful owner of this information? A document called The Constitution says, “We, The People.” (The Bill of Rights is now available on JSTOR free of charge.)

Aaron released documents from publicly funded research at public institutions required by the public for our health, safety and democracy (cf. assault rifle studies above). Theft by wire, the main charge, was meant to bust those who made money off stolen or misused information. Meant to catch those like, say, … Piers Morgan.

Another count against Aaron: denying professors access to information while computers were down during the hunt for the leak. Odd:  Aaron was making it easier to access the information. Did he deny the oligarchs the ability to extract a monopoly rent for information rightly belonging to us? He did. And by stopping the “Stop Online Piracy Act” he stopped the theft of our online discourse. He had to be punished.

But not Piers.

Because Piers is the information counter-revolutionary. I joke about Piers and his attack on my passion pickle – but, as I’ve explained, his only interest was to smear a reporter to discredit news of the corporate takeover of the Blair government.

The week of October 15, The Nation magazine cover broke our story that Mitt Romney and his Wall Street donors had ripped off the US Treasury for $4 billion. That’s the week Piers had the four Romney boys on his show to talk about the joys of their trust-fund childhood.

You might find it ironic that the government gave Morgan, the fraudster, a Genius visa while indicting Swartz, a true genius.

But that’s the genius of the system. Democrats and Republicans, Microsoft and Citibank, not to mention the Chinese Politburo, need a huckster like Morgan who, for a mere $2 million from Time Warner (CNN’s owner) will present whatever tickles his bosses and betters, whether fawning on the feckless landlords of the planet (“Romney is one of the least principled politicians I’ve ever met – and [so] Mitt Romney might just save America”), or merely distract the public with celebrity tittle and titties.

Should we deport Piers? Yes: certainly America’s Got Talent has got to be a deportable offense. But as long as the puppeteers dangle $2 million strings, they’ll find a new willing puppet with the genius to let the show go on.

PIERS MORGAN AND MY PEE-PEE

Greg Palast

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

This is the third in a four-part series on Alex Jones, guns, Piers Morgan and Palast's penis.

Now, if this were a movie, you would hear the audience scream, "DON’T TAKE THE KEY! DON’T GO UP THOSE STAIRS!"

The reporter part of my brain was screaming, too: 'THIS SMELLS BAD.' But I couldn’t hear a thing because, while I was out for the story, the memory of Ms Jamaica’s hand in my pocket had drained the blood from my cerebellum.

I went up those stairs. Unlocked the door.

BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE, DON’T TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS!

I took off my pants.

When the door opened and Ms Jamaica’s husband walked in (this scamp has a husband?!), I thought, 'No problem.'

But there was a problem: the photographer and reporter from The Mirror.

Touché, Piers.

The Mirror’s page one splash, in letters bigger than they used for "Hitler defeated": SEX SCANDAL ROCKS LABOUR CONFERENCE.

Page two headline: UNDERCOVER MAN’S SNEAKY NIGHT AT LABOUR HOTEL.

Page three headline: FROM THE LIAR TO THE LURKER.

And mucho photos of me and the Distraught Damsel.

And, in The Guardian – my paper – Simon Hoggart reported overhearing The Mirror’s editor, one Piers Morgan, receiving his “thank you” from the Prime Minister’s press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, for “what you did for us” – for “Tony”. Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, the Dark Prince and for those even more powerful in the darkness behind The Prince.

When the ruling class needs to screw us, they hire a screwdriver. And one of their favourite tools is Piers Morgan.

Other men might have suffered deportation, criminal indictment or at least banishment from a network that has “News” in its name. If not that, Piers is a virtual Swiss Army knife of appliances in the service of our betters.

My story began in 1998. A consultant for a Texan company named Enron was shopping to buy influence with the Blair Government, obtained the icky details of how huge US and UK corporations (Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Tesco, the Texas lottery operator and Enron) used cash and political favours to rewrite laws and obtain inside information worth its weight in gold.

But the Enron man was really Guardian-Observer reporter Greg Palast wearing a wire and taking notes in meetings in “Enron’s suite" at the Tower Hotel, in the ruling-class watering hole of The Reform Club and sipping Lambert Brut in the Banqueting Room at Westminster where King James lost his head.

And at the centre of the Casbah of Corruption was the man known as The Prince of Darkness – one Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s Karl Rove – his Rasputin – and his boy protégé, Derek Draper, better known as “Dolly” (don’t ask), one of my unwitting and witless sources.

My investigative report, “Lobby-gate: Cash for Access,” took over television news and all the front pages. But Piers Morgan, Blair’s vassal, covered The Mirror’s front page with a not too pretty photo of me under four-inch high letters: "THE LIAR."

Of course I lied. That’s my job. To get the tapes and documents. But the tapes and documents didn’t lie.

That was 1998. Fast forward a year to 1999 and I’m walking into Ms Jamaica’s room. I won’t repeat her name (even infamy is currency in our world), but will mention that she was Prince Mandelson’s newest toy: his and Blair’s candidate for the Labour Party executive.

Weirdly, it had been me who’d suggested she hook up with Mandelson. She was trying to get into politics and into my pants. I didn’t object to either. I told her she was what Mandelson desperately needed: a “two-fer” – black and female – his perfect cat's-paw candidate.

(If this is all getting a bit complex, welcome to my life and my somewhat distinctive methods of investigation. For the full story, check out my book Vultures’ Picnic.)

A year later, after breaking my Lobby-gate story, I remembered Ms Jamaica and hoped, correctly, that Mandy’s latest political beard was still interested in “dancing”. Oh, she was, but now the Labour Party minders had kept her under lock and key at the party conference where she was running for the top post. When they found out that their nemesis, Greg Palast, was escorting her to the New Statesmen ball, they whisked the foolish little lady safely away from her hotel room – after having her leave a key.

Once me and my penis grabbed the key and fell into the honey trap, they called the master truth-twister, Piers, who ran the story as me sneaking my way into her room. (That’s a crime, by the way, and Labour demanded that Jamaica and her hubby file a police complaint. I only avoided arrest and getting dumped to the curb by The Guardian because a hotel clerk blew the whistle. He signed an affidavit revealing that Ms Jamaica had given him the key with a request I go into her room and wait for her.)

And Ms Jamaica? Labour slandered her, dumped her, let the press savage her. Boo hoo. Except for The Mirror, which continued the fantasy story. In May 2004, The Mirror finally fired Piers for yet another fake story that Morgan refused – in the face of photo evidence – to retract.

So do I have it in for Piers Moron (as Private Eye calls him)? Naw. The Blairs, the Mandelsons and the corporate powers that fund them will always find their stooges, fluffers, enforcers, reputation hit-men, liars-for-hire and goons.

Moron’s just more craven, more malleable, more enthusiastically scumbag-ish than most, and so paid more than most – in both cash and, it seems, legal protection.

I’ve said that Morgan must be deported from the USA; a fugitive from justice. No joke. We’ll get to that in the next column.

But Morgan’s moral crime is more serious than visa violations and even the felonies of which he boasts. Piers Morgan rents himself as the punisher for the powerful, assault weapon for the privileged.

After all, I can’t believe that Piers, personally, gives a damn about Greg Palast’s pleasure pickle. It’s only that by agreeing to smear those who expose corporate corruption, that Piers Morgan – and too many like him – can curry favour with their corporate media masters and their politician toy boys.

Weapon of Mass Distraction

Greg Palast
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/alex-jones-guns-piers-morgan-and-my-penis-part-two

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

This is the second of Palast's weekly columns for VICE – beginning with a bang: a four-part series on Alex Jones, guns, Piers Morgan and Palast's penis.

George Bush told America he’d keep us safe from terrorists by having us take off our shoes at the airport.

Yesterday, Barack Obama again took the Oath of Office. And this Obama 2.0 is also going to save America from insane killers – by limiting ammo clips to ten bullets instead of 30.

At a television press conference about the Newtown school massacre last Wednesday, a tearful President called this, “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this”.

It won’t.

But, once again, we get to pretend that our presidents protect us and save us from what is murdering us and destroying us.

But The Great Assault Rifle Debate, like the War on Terror, is just another Weapon of Mass Distraction.

In all fairness to Obama, he also called – as Bush did – for a massive increase in the number of FBI files kept on Americans. I feel safer already, don’t you?

Here’s the facts, ma’am: There are about 4.5 million assault rifles in American civilian hands. That’s around the same number as in tiny Switzerland (population: eight million). Tens of thousands of Swiss keep a 9mm Sig Sauer, like the one used by the Newtown killer. But we don’t see the Swiss sweeping dead kids out of their schoolyards.

The weapon of America’s deadliest mass killer, Timmy McVeigh, was fertiliser. Maybe we should ban bullshit, but that would shut down Washington and all five major TV networks.

At his assault-gun dog-and-pony show on Wednesday, Obama shed tears for the murdered victims, as well he should. But where are his tears for the victims of the MACT?

Let me explain. Last month, Obama bullied his own Environmental Protection Agency into watering down the “MACT” standards – the limits on industrial boiler pollution.

Under this loosened “MACT” rule, industry will get to triple the hydrogen chloride and triple the particulate filth they may dump into the air. The White House crows that Obama’s bending over on this rule will save corporate polluters $1.5 billion (£945 million) a year. Yippee!

The EPA’s well-hidden data also shows that Obama’s back-down will mean that 9,000 more Americans a year will die – most of them asthmatics, like me. (Don’t send flowers.)

The number of kids among the 9,000 dead represent too many Newtowns for me to bear to calculate. Obama’s giving death a big head start: By his EPA chief’s own estimate, the higher crud limits will cause 60,000 new cases of childhood asthma each and every year.

If children die from gunfire, Obama has tears for TV. But if your child suffocates in industrial goo, neither Obama nor the news give a flying fart if your kid chokes or croaks.

So, rather than take away assault rifles, we’d save far more children by taking away the President’s easy access to executive orders.

And the Republicans? Obama killing 9,000 more asthmatics annually is just not enough for them. So, to placate these GOP industry stooges, Obama threw them the severed head of his EPA chief, Sheila Jackson, pushing her to resign.

Here’s a real life-saving proposal: Rather than spy on gun buyers, the FBI should do background checks on Congressmen – and if they have a history of taking donations from polluters, ban them from voting on life-and-death laws.

According to Senator Dianne Feinstein, assault weapons kill 43 people a year. That works out to a rate of 0.9 per 100,000 weapons. By comparison, there are 3.5 per 100,000 on-the-job deaths. In other words, having a job is four times more deadly than having a machine gun.

The National Rifle Association likes to use statistics like these cynically. (“Hey, bullets are safer than golf balls.”)

But I calculated these stats for another reason: Why AREN’T we talking about workers killed by their jobs? It’s a rolling massacre; Newtown times 2,000. In other words, why isn’t our media – why isn’t our President – talking about what’s really killing us and WHO is killing us?

On January 2, 2006, an explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia killed 12 miners. The communications lines required by law that might have saved them were missing. The mine is owned by International Coal Group. ICG is controlled by a hedge fund, which, in turn, is controlled by billionaire Wilbur Ross. I’ve worked with Wilbur. Nice guy. His wives are nicer. At least, every time I open Hampton’s Magazine, the latest one always looks blonder and younger.

Wilbur felt just terrible about his dead miners, so he went on TV and asked the American public to send donations to help their families. He didn’t say whether to send your money to his beach home in the Hamptons, to the one in Palm Beach or to his condo in Manhattan.

When we talk about guns control, we are talking about Them and Us. The point of gun laws is to protect the Newtowns and the Wilbur Rosses from what I’d call the renegade Armed Wing of the lower classes.

But what is there to protect the working class from the Wilbur Rosses? Maybe we could reduce the massacres caused by profit maximisation by issuing billionaires and corporations a strictly limited number of employee hunting licenses.

If some berserker is caught putting lead bullets in his pistol, he gets jail time; a corporation dumps lead poison into your water supply and gets a tax break.

If we really want to save the lives of the innocent, let’s skip the distracting chit-chat about ammo clips and grenade launchers. Rather than gun control, I think it’s time to talk about the entire American death-machine -- from desert wars to class wars; a death machine owned and operated by an elite that is out of control.

Alex Jones is the radio host who flamed Piers Morgan on prime-time TV over gun laws and the Bill of Rights. To Jones and his audience in the American heartland, arming themselves is their defensive reaction to a system that brutalises and tyrannises them. Obama got close when he said that the victims of systemic, unending unemployment, “get bitter, [and so] they cling to guns”.

But rather than bring back their jobs, the President has chosen to grab their guns.

Just this month, the Pope of Hope joined hands with Republicans to raise the regressive Social Security payroll tax by 50 percent, costing a typical working family $1,000 (£630) a year. The sum is devastating in most homes, and an assault on the economy, an “anti-stimulus” that economists agree will cost 400,000 jobs.

The power elite has dumped America (and most of Europe) into an economic Guantanamo and told us to fill out job applications with an eraser.

So Alex Jones says don’t “cling” to your guns, get them ready. With our jobs and freedoms swindled and swiped, he says, only the weapon in our hand saves us from naked tyranny. (At least Alex doesn’t peddle the NRA baloney that assault weapons are for “sport”.)

Certainly, Hitler paused rather than take on the weaponised Swiss in the Alps. And in Venezuela, after a group of oil company executives and media barons literally kidnapped the President, an armed citizenry rose up and restored their elected leader. Oddly, Jones said that Chavez took away the public’s guns. In fact, Alex, Chavez handed out thousands of rifles to “well-organised militias”, which guarantee Venezuela’s democracy against another violent corporate coup d’état. (See my film: The Assassination of Hugo Chavez.)

But America isn’t Switzerland and it sure as hell isn’t Venezuela. Because here in the US, as in Europe, the war against economic aristocrats and autocrats has already been lost. The occupation of Main Street by Wall Street is complete.

After all, Alex, in 2000, it was you who brought to America my BBC report that George W Bush had stolen the presidential election. Yet, no one picked up a gun to fight Bush’s corporate junta when they ransacked our treasuries and erased our Bill of Rights. Instead, Americans took up arms to march, at Bush’s command, into Iraq.

And that’s why, in the end, they’re not going to kick in your door and take your guns. They don’t need them. You’ve already surrendered your jobs to Mexico, your Social Security to the finance sharks and your Bill of Rights to the War on Terror, all without firing a shot.

So they’ll let you keep your rifle, your toy, your little rattle. You’re no threat to these guys. They know it and you know it.

Unless...

We take heed of the words of John F Kennedy that, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

Want to end the slaughter? Let’s not debate gun control.

Let’s talk about a revolution.

Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast

Alex Jones Versus Downton Abbey

Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Friday, January 18, 2013

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

This is the first of Palast's weekly columns for VICE – beginning with a bang: a four-part series on Alex Jones, guns, Piers Morgan and Palast's penis.

Alex Jones is right. Deport Piers Morgan. NOW. Send him back. In chains.

But not because Piers doesn’t believe in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. (I mean, really, who gives a shit what Piers Morgan believes?) Piers Morgan should be turned over to Scotland Yard forthwith because he’s a criminal. And because of what he said about my penis, which we'll get to later.

This year's big YouTube hit so far – excluding the video of the guy sucking an umbrella out of his dog’s anus – is the footage of Alex Jones stuffing a figurative umbrella up Piers Morgan.

It shows Alex Jones – the host of one of the only intellectually substantive, fact-heavy forums on American radio – going nuclear on prime time. In notably high decibels, Alex was trying to explain to Piers why America has a Bill of Rights while England has David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Paul McCartney.

Before I enumerate the charges against Morgan, we need to ask two questions. Why did Alex Jones seem to lose it on air? And why is it so important to the media elite to ridicule him and dismiss him as a fruitcake and a buffoon – just another scary, Texan gun-nut – while they venerate Pus Moron – the scoundrel, the faker, the wanker – like he’s Thomas Jefferson?

What was really behind Alex’s freak-out?

The yell from Alex’s throat was not his own voice alone – it was the choric cry of his millions of listeners in the forgotten heartland of America. It was the scream of the screwed.

It’s not about guns. The shoot-out between Jones, rough-voiced and real, versus Morgan, faux journalist with the snooty accent, is a metaphoric battle. The movers and shakers on Morgan’s guest list versus the moved and shaken across the Great Plains who listen to Jones; the privileged 1 Percent versus Jones’ 99 Percenters; those who got the gold mine versus those who got the shaft.

It’s about the comfortable in Manhattan, West Hollywood and Islington who watch Downton Abbey and dream of the days when the servants were grateful just to shine their masters’ silver. Jones speaks for the lower decks on the Titanic – those under the waterline, who know that the ship has hit the iceberg while the rich are cramming bottles of champagne into the last life boats.

Of the 31,672 gun deaths in America in 2010, the majority – 61 percent – were suicides. The real killer is despair. Why such desperation? What in the American dream is so nightmarish that death is a better choice?

Jones’ fierce journalism talks to those waiting in the dark.

Their jobs have been taken to China, their homes to foreclosures, their pensions to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, their freedoms to Guantanamo – so, they’ll be goddamned if they’ll let you take their guns.

Some don’t know where to turn, so they attack blacks and Jews and immigrants. Jones tells his audience not to get distracted by these false targets; the “false flags that the New World Order uses” to keep guns pointed the wrong way. (For that, he’s been blasted as a “Zionist shill” by Real Jew News.)

The true issue – the danger – Jones says, is not from our assault rifles, but from the assault on working people in Greece and in Manchester and in Toledo by a dangerous group of jackals whose weapons are the IMF, the Euro, JP Morgan, “austerity” and the “debt ceiling”.

I love Alex Jones. If I were a woman, I’d appear on his show in my highest heels and shortest mini-skirt.

Journalistically, Jones has iron balls.

Example: In Britain, BBC Television Newsnight and The Guardian splashed a report of mine on finance vultures. These speculators effectively seized the money given by the US and Europe to Africa to end cholera and AIDS epidemics.

Billionaire Paul Singer, the big Republican donor, the vulture who savaged the Congo (and Mitt Romney’s business partner) had one of his stooges call the BBC to spike our story: “We have a file on Greg Palast.” Some of it, apparently, fabricated by Piers Morgan.

While the BBC ran the story regardless of the threat, my investigations of Singer, despite gaining the cover of Nation, were suddenly pulled from US airwaves, including Piers' CNN. A major news service said it was spiked not by editors, but by "high up". Even MSNBC said, coyly, that the story was “too complex for our viewers”.

But not Jones’ audience. “This is complex,” Jones told me, “so we’ll give you a full hour to explain it.” Which is part of the reason Alex is such a hero in the US – he has the cojones to venture where the mainstream media fear to tread.

Look, I don’t agree with a whole lot of Alex’ opinions and theories, and Lord knows he doesn’t agree with mine. But whenever I have the facts, he wants them. And he’s not afraid to take his listeners deep into the twisted matrix of flim-flams in the market for Greek credit default swaps or into the murky waters of IMF privatisation schemes in Latin America.

And Piers’ “news” show? His dream guest, he said, would be Lindsay Lohan. Rejected by Lindsay, he settled on discussing the great issues of the day with Kim Kardashian.

Coming up:
Part Two – Deport Piers Morgan: Slimes and Crimes
Part Three – Assault Gun Ban: Weapon of Mass Distraction
Part Four – Piers and my Penis

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Alex Jones: Best Night of Television Ever

Jon Rappoport
NoMoreFakeNews.com
January 8, 2013

Piers Morgan (CNN) thought he might pump up his horrendous ratings and avoid having to go back to England. So he invited Alex Jones to come east and appear on his show.

They would discuss gun control and the petition to have Morgan deported. It would be good television. An interesting conversation. Perhaps things would get contentious.

But Morgan’s producers and bookers had made a fatal error of judgment.

To say Alex was loaded for bear is a vast understatement.

He crashed the television party in a way it’s never happened before.

You could call it: the internet invades mainstream media. But that doesn’t begin to do it justice.

This was one man attacking the whole rotting corpse of major media, attacking the fascists of the federal government, attacking the psychiatric/pharmaceutical cartel for dispensing drugs that cause people to kill other people, attacking the host of the show for daring to come to these shores with his putrid put-on Brit arrogance, attacking the brain-dead premise that fewer gun murders equals a far, far better nation (England), swearing an oath that the US government will not disarm the citizenry…and Alex made all this happen in just the first seven minutes of the interview.

You could go back in the archives and comb through the history of television in this country and never find seven minutes like this. Never.

It broke through the fake civility of moronic, pundit-driven, stacked-to-the-ceiling-with-utter-bullshit news programs like a car driving through a showroom window at 80mph.

Go to Infowars and watch it.

Then tell yourself you’re not dreaming, because you’re not. It happened.

If you were, by chance, tuned to the BCS championship game between Alabama and Notre Dame and missed the real slaughter on CNN, catch it.

According to Alex, one of Pier’s producers broke down and cried during the interview. Oh dear. Horrid. I hope the producer had friends to console her in their little mutually constructed elite bubble. Cocktails, tranqs, perhaps a visit to a shrink might be in order. No doubt, this is a case of PTSD, and might necessitate a long recovery.

No, the idiots at CNN were definitely not ready for this. They were blindsided. Piers tried to remain calm. That was his only strategy. He would be the voice of reason. Stiff upper lip and all that.

It worked about as well as waving a feather in front of a typhoon.

Which, when you think about it, is how the people of England handle their fascist government and their falling-apart society. “Look at us, we’re clueless with feathers.”

No doubt Piers is telling himself he stood up to the cave man from Texas, revealing to the American people how pernicious gun owners are. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it all.

Instead, this was cardboard television reality taking a dozen torpedoes amidships.

Alex did it exactly the way you’re supposed to do it when you want to destroy the whole stinking mess all at once. You give no quarter. You go on the attack from the first moment. You don’t let up.

You ignore the nicey-nice stuff.

I’m sure there are some boomer gun advocates out there who think Alex “presented an unfortunate face of the responsible gun-owner community.” They’re dead wrong. They don’t understand what an attack against tyranny requires. They never have.

You put the fascists on the defensive. That’s rule number one. You put them through the wall into the next county. You hit them with the truth so hard they never recover. That’s the goal.

It happened last night.

I watched the whole curtain of the television Matrix explode. I watched it with a joy that comes from knowing, for a long time, what such a moment would look like if it ever came to pass.

Then it did.

Thank you, CNN. This was your finest moment, your only authentic moment in all your years of building an insane consensus about reality.

Thanks, Alex. You came through like a champion.

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at:

http://www.nomorefakenews.com

Alex Jones Meets Piers Morgan

YouTube URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWQPZ-taYBs

Robalini's Note:

Boy, the Alex Jones on CNN story is sure becoming big. Which is why whether or not he won the battle, he definitely won the war. I watched it again, and the question of if he was "right" or "wrong" seems obtuse. This was an over-the-top Andy Kaufman-like performance that will not go away.

But here's a little quote from his performance, cited in an MSNBC article that was of course dismissing him:

“The megabanks that control the planet brag that they’ve taken over… They’ve taken everybody’s guns but the Swiss and the American people, and when they get our guns, they can have their world tyranny while the government buys 1.6 billion bullets, armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters, predator drones–armed now in U.S. skies being used to arrest people in North Dakota. The Second Amendment isn’t there for duck hunting; it’s there to protect us from tyrannical government and street thugs.”

Now, I'm not saying I agree with everything he says, but it does show beneath the genius buffoonery, there is some substantial thoughts and some serious, provocative ideas. There does seem a method to his madness.

CNN's Piers Morgan: stories were published based on phone tapping

CNN's Piers Morgan 'told interviewer stories were published based on phone tapping'
Piers Morgan, the CNN broadcaster, has said that newspaper articles based on the findings of people paid to tap phones and rake through bins were published during his time as a tabloid newspaper editor, it can be disclosed.
Jon Swaine, New York
27 Jul 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8664704/CNNs-Piers-Morgan-told-interviewer-stories-were-published-based-on-phone-tapping.html

Mr Morgan, a former News of the World and Daily Mirror editor who is now a high-profile television presenter in the US, has spent the past week categorically denying ever printing material derived from phone hacking.

He spoke out after being accused by a Conservative MP and political bloggers of being involved in the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, for which he used to work.

“For the record, in my time at the News of the World and the Mirror, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone,” he said last week on CNN, where he now hosts a talk-show.

But it has emerged that Mr Morgan gave a notably different response when asked during an interview with the BBC about his potential involvement in covert "gutter" journalistic practices during his time as a tabloid editor between 1994 and 2004.

“What about this nice middle-class boy, who would have to be dealing with, I mean essentially people who rake through bins for a living, people who tap people’s phones, people who take secret photographs, who do all that nasty down-in-the-gutter stuff,” he was asked on BBC's Desert Island Discs in June 2009. “How did you feel about that?"

Mr Morgan replied: “To be honest, let’s put that in perspective as well. Not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work.

"I’m quite happy to be parked in the corner of tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to, and I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do,” he told the programme's host, Kirsty Young.

“I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide, and certainly encompassed the high and low end of the supposed newspaper market.”

The discovery of Mr Morgan’s comment, first hinted at by the Guido Fawkes political blog, came after Trinity Mirror, the parent company of The Daily Mirror, announced it had opened an investigation into editorial standards at its newspapers in light of the phone hacking scandal.

Clive Goodman, a reporter for The News of the World, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the newspaper, were jailed in 2007 for illegally hacking mobile phone voicemails. News International, the paper's parent company, initially said the scandal was limited to a "rogue reporter" but in recent weeks conceded it was in fact widespread.

The News of the World was shut down and several more arrests have been made, including Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor hired by David Cameron to be the chief spokesman at 10 Downing Street and Rebekah Brooks, Mr Murdoch's former British newspaper chief. But News International has made clear it believes hacking was widespread among other tabloids.

At the weekend James Hipwell, a Daily Mirror financial columnist between 1998 and 2000, said that illegal phone hacking was “endemic” during Mr Morgan's editorship. "You know what people around you are doing,” he said.

Last week Mr Morgan was accused in a parliamentary committee by Louise Mensch, the Tory MP for Corby, of publishing an article in 2002 about an affair between Sven Goran Eriksson, the England football coach, and Ulrika Jonsson, the television presenter, which he knew had been obtained via phone hacking. He denied this and demanded an apology during a nine-minute row on live television.

Sources close to Mr Morgan said that he was referring to the tabloid industry in general. In a statement, he said: “I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone. I am not aware, and have never seen evidence to suggest otherwise, that any Mirror story published during my tenure was obtained from phone hacking.”