One of the features of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US is the panic that it has induced among the ruling classes and all the organizations that they use to maintain their grip on power. Normally these groups could exercise their power discreetly in the shadows and let the electoral game play out, knowing that whoever wins will be subservient to their interests. But Corbyn and Sanders are too great a threat to the power structure to ignore or take likely and the rulers have been forced to become more overtly involved in the process in order to stop them.

The process is more obvious in the UK. Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal write that with days to go before the British General election on the 12th, the UK intelligence establishment has pulled out all the stops to join with the British oligarchs and corporate media to prevent any chance of the socialist becoming prime minister. The effort has relied upon the most highly dubious sources to make allegations against Corbyn. Wse have already seen the anti-Semitism attacks. Now it is that he is a pawn of Russia.

The popular socialist leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, could be on the verge of becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom. And the mere possibility is terrifying British intelligence services and the US government.

Since Corbyn was elected to the head of the Labour Party in 2015, in a landslide victory after running on a staunch leftist and anti-war platform, the corporate media has waged a relentless campaign to demonize and delegitimize him.

With just days remaining before UK’s national election on December 12, British intelligence agencies and US government-backed organizations have escalated their attacks on Corbyn, borrowing tactics from America’s Russiagate hysteria and going to great efforts to portray him — without any substantive evidence — as a supposed puppet of the dastardly Kremlin.

These government-sponsored attacks on Corbyn, a lifelong anti-imperialist and former chair of the Stop the War Coalition, are far from new. In December, The Grayzone reported on the Integrity Initiative, a UK government-funded secret network of spies, journalists, and think tanks that rehabilitated Cold War-era information warfare to demonize Corbyn and smear anti-war leftists as Vladimir Putin’s unwitting foot soldiers.

But as polls show more and more popular enthusiasm for Labour and its socialist program on the eve of the vote, and as the prospects of a Corbyn-led government become increasingly plausible, Western government spooks have rapidly laundered avalanches of disinformation through the press, desperately trying to undermine the party’s electoral efforts.

Dozens of misleading hit pieces are circulating in the press that treat PSYOP specialists and regime-change lobby groups funded to the hilt by Washington, NATO, and the weapons industry as trustworthy and impartial.

British journalist Matt Kennard has documented at least 34 major media stories that rely on officials from the UK military and intelligence agencies in order to depict Corbyn as a threat to national security.

The article goes on to expose the background of Ben Nimmo, who alleged that the NHS dossier that Corbyn obtained that revealed the secret design to put the NHS for sale in a future Conservative trade deal with the US, was obtained as part of a ‘Russian operation’ and thus, in thse heated times, automatically discredited. The charge was accepted uncritically and came across to the US via The Daily Beast.

Not one outlet covering story bothered to inform readers who Nimmo was, or offered any detail on the powerful state forces behind Graphika.

In fact, Nimmo is not a data expert or a journalist, but a former NATO press officer who previously consulted for the covert Integrity Initiative propaganda farm, which was funded by the UK Foreign Office and dedicated to spawning conflict with Russia.

Turns out @benimmo – the guy who habitually identifies real people as Russian bots – is a former travel & fantasy fiction writer with no journalistic or security expertise. And he works for a military-intelligence front that has a special relationship with certain media outlets. https://t.co/mXwxE6IRKD

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 4, 2019

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Nimmo also works as a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank in Washington.

As The Grayzone has reported, the Atlantic Council is a corruption-stained money dump for Ukrainian and Middle Eastern oligarchs, as well as Gulf monarchies, the arms industry, the British Foreign Office and the US State Department.
…

On December 6, Reddit announced that its platform had been used by “suspected” Russian actors to publish the scandalous NHS dossier that become a centerpiece of Corbyn’s campaign against Johnson. As usual, the primary source for Reddit’s claim was the Atlantic Council, which it credited with “provid[ing] us with important attribution.”

Reddit’s Director of Policy, Jessica Ashooh, is the Atlantic Council’s former Middle East Strategy Task Force Deputy Director, and an ex-official of the government of the United Arab Emirates. She was hired by the social media giant in 2017, at around the same time that Senate Select Intelligence Committee co-chair Sen. Mark Warner was demanding more government control over Reddit on the grounds that it was a potential vehicle for Russian influence.

In the US, a similar effort has been undertaken to stop Bernie Sanders, but uses different tactics. In this case, given the importance of media coverage in US elections, the effort has taken the form of essentially blacking him out or even flat-out lying about how well he is doing, with little reporting on his high poll numbers and the enthusiastic crowds at his rallies, combined with a huge promotional effort to boost other candidates like Pete Buttigieg in an effort to squeeze Sanders out of the spotlight and give the impression that his candidacy is irrelevant or even over. The supposedly ‘liberal’ MSNBC has been a big part of this effort.

Over the two months, these six programs focused on Biden, often to the exclusion of Warren and Sanders. Sanders received not only the least total coverage (less than one-third of Biden’s), but the most negative. As to the substance, MSNBC’s reporting revolved around poll results and so-called electability.

But Ryan Grim reports that this media blackout could have the opposite of the intended effect.