March 01, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  For over two years RussiaGate discourse has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream US media political journalism and, because US media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage. The timing has been catastrophic. The Trump Administration has shredded environmental protections, jettisoned nuclear agreements,   exacerbated tensions with US rivals, and pandered to the rich. In place of sustained media concentration on the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society driven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of supposed collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

The discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the US is a State whose electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system led, principally, by the rich and answerable, principally, to corporate oligopolies, and is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination ( https://davidkorten.org/plutocracy ).

US electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an electoral college that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts have been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems. Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements, the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections) ( https://www.pippanorris.com/electoralintegrityinamerica ). Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/us/politics/michigan-republicans-power.html ).

Democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilities the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists. Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates ( http://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consolidation/ ). The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is well documented. Current US media coverage of the US-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point  https://www.rt.com/op-ed/450741-venezuela-media-coverage-bias/ .

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