55 people have been arrested during an occupation which is ongoing at the Bank of America building in San Francisco. Most of the participants are from UC Santa Cruz, with others from the occupations in Oakland and San Francisco. ABC 7 in San Francisco has live video of the police arresting protesters inside the bank on the first floor, which is also a high rise office building. For a ustream of the rally outside in their support, go here.

Labels: Activism, Alternative Media, Bay Area, California, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism, Police, Sub-Proletarianization of America

From a US diplomatic cable released by wikileaks, describing communications between the public affairs office of the US embassy in Doha and then Al Jazeera Managing Editor Wadah Khanifar on October 18, 2005:

¶7. (C) PAO raised the question of an Al Jazeera website piece published in the last week, listed under the heading Special Coverage, and containing Live Testimony Concerning Tal Afar. The site opens to an image of bloody sheets of paper riddled with bullet holes. Viewers click on the bullet holes to access testimony from ten alleged eye witnesses who described recent military operations in Tal Afar.

¶8. (C) Khanfar said that, in accordance with an earlier promise to PAO (Ref B), he had taken a look at the piece and had two images removed (two injured children in hospital beds, and a woman with serious facial injury). PAO pointed out that the testimony of a doctor in the piece also implied that poison gas had been used on residents of Tal Afar and that the appearance of the piece, in particular the bloody bullet hole icons, came across as inflammatory and journalistically questionable. Khanfar appeared to repress a sigh but said he would have the piece removed. Not immediately, because that would be talked about, but over two or three days, he said.

¶9. (C) He said he had told the website staff that in future, when they want to add an item to the Special Coverage section of the website, they should send a draft of the idea over to his office. (Note: The AJ website is located in a separate building across town. End note.) He noted that until two or three months ago, the website staff had enjoyed much more autonomy. Now, however, website director Abdel Aziz Al Mahmoud attends the weekly editorial meetings at the TV channel offices, and the website staff is being pulled under the umbrella of the same editorial standards as the TV channel. I don't say that such things are not going to be repeated on the website, but it is a learning process, said Khanfar.

Khanifar resigned from Al Jazeera earlier this week upon the release of this cable, as well as some other ones, by Al-Akhbar in Lebanon.

Labels: American Empire, Iraqi Deaths, Mainstream Media

UPDATE: Was there any doubt that Bill Keller adores Christopher Hitchens? Bullies that give their thuggery an intellectual gloss, like Paul Wolfowitz as well, make him swoon. I'd love to hear what Hitchens privately thinks of Keller. I can't imagine that it's very flattering.

INITIAL POST: Krugman concisely condemns Keller's self-absorbed rationalization for his mistaken support for the invasion of Iraq, and posts it to his New York Times blog on the morning of 9/11:

How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

Within the overall context of the post, which specifically indicts those who exploited 9/11 for the purpose of generating public support for the invasion of Iraq, it is hard to see this statement as anything other than a thinly veiled criticism of those at the New York Times, like Keller, who publicly advocated for the invasion. He may well have decided to post it after reading Keller's evasion of responsibility earlier in the week. Refreshingly, Krugman, unlike Keller, is able to reach his own conclusions about such matters in the absent of manipulative references to his children.

One can certainly quibble about Krugman's statement. He doesn't object to the invasion and ongoing occupation of Afghanistan as well. At the time, he wasn't much of a voice against going forward with either invasion. To quote Patrick Buchanan, he hid out in the tall grass. Regardless, he pissed all over the sentimental, sanctimonious coverage of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 by the Times, and he did it with an extraordinarily timed post as the ceremonial events were taking place: The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Labels: 9/11, Iraq War, Mainstream Media, Neoconservatives, New York Times, Occupation of Iraq

UPDATE: For those completists among you who want a comprehensive deconstruction of the dishonesty of Bill Keller when it comes to his support for the invasion of Iraq, and his subsequent complicity in the support of the New York Times for it and war on terror more generally, consider this excellent article by Greg Mitchell. Not surprisingly, he thinks much more highly of Paul Wolfowitz than he does Julian Assange:

Keller mentions Paul Wolfowitz in passing but fails to note his lengthy profile of the war architect in the Times magazine from Sept. 22, 2002. Sample quote: Paul Wolfowitz, who is interesting and complicated, has been cast since Sept. 11 in the role of zealot... . The shorthand version of Paul Wolfowitz, however, is inadequate in important ways. It completely misses his style, which relies on patient logic and respectful, soft-spoken engagement rather than on fire-breathing conviction. Keller described three important things Wolfowitz brings to the table, including something of a reputation as a man who sees trouble coming before others do, his long anxiety about Iraq being one example. Another striking thing about Wolfowitz: an optimism about America's ability to build a better world.

There's an old adjective that applies to Keller here, bootlicker. Kiss ass is a contemporary synonym.

INITIAL POST: The self-absorbed mendacity of the people at the New York Times who supported the invasion of Iraq after 9/11 is almost beyond belief, or, at least, it would have been beyond belief pre-9/11. Turn out that Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the Times from July 2003 until June 2011, was partially persuaded to advocate for the invasion of Iraq because of the birth of his second daughter:

But my prudent punditry soon felt inadequate. I remember a mounting protective instinct, heightened by the birth of my second daughter almost exactly nine months after the attacks. Something dreadful was loose in the world, and the urge to stop it, to do something — to prove something — was overriding a career-long schooling in the virtues of caution and skepticism. By the time of Alice’s birth I had already turned my attention to Iraq, a place that had, in the literal sense, almost nothing to do with 9/11, but which would be its most contentious consequence. And I was no longer preaching the real-world vigilance of intelligence and law enforcement.

So, let's get this straight, Keller decided to take a public advocacy role for the invasion of a country that presented no threat to the US so that he could feel more secure about the safety of his daughters. The US just had to go and kill a bunch of Arabs in Iraq, and destabilize the society, so that he could sleep less fitfully. Of course, the fact that many of the children of Iraq, 28% according to one medical estimate, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence of the invasion and subsequent violence goes unmentioned in his rambling, evasive mea culpa.

For Keller, the lives of his daughters, and those of the children of other people like him, are personal, intimate and justify the embrace of irrational violence, while those of the people of Iraq are merely faceless numbers. In the end, Keller can only bring himself to characterize the invasion as a monumental blunder, while seeking mitigation for his role in of promoting it, because, after all . . Whether it was wrong to support the invasion at the time is a harder call . . as he begrudgingly admits his error.

Needless to say, I am angered when I read such self-serving, expedient rationalizations for the embrace of violence in the service of the US empire. I have a four and a half year old son, and, unlike Keller, I have never emotionally responded to global violence, even when experienced within the US, with the urge to advocate for the indiscriminately killing of others. But then, unlike Keller, I don't perceive the people of Iraq, or the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia, for that matter, as quite so otherly as he does. He is, in effect, using his children as rhetorical human shields to defend his depraved response to 9/11. He is so desperate to defend himself that he has put this in print where it will haunt his two daughters, Alice and Molly, for the rest of their lives.

Shockingly, one cannot even describe Keller's response as a desire for retribution, because the people of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. This is a bloodlust beyond vigilantism, a perverse moral failure beyond that examined in a famous film on the subject, The Ox Bow Incident. Here again, Keller exposes his particularly manipulative form of dishonesty when he describes Iraq as a place that had, in the literal sense, almost nothing to do with 9/11. Having placed himself under the bright klieg lights of his own personal interrogation, he, like many garden variety fraud artists, can't fully admit their culpability. Like, yeah man, I might have co-signed that check when confronted with irrefutable proof of their signature. If Keller was subjected to a real interrogation by the police, the detectives would conclude that there was something hinky about him. Keller just can't come clean.

As you might expect, Keller attempts to recover the sympathy of his audience by complaining about how people frequently confront Times' reporters and condemn them as propagandists for the war on terror. Again, we are subjected to another one of those evasive, hinky mea culpas ineptly crafted to reestablish credibility while ensuring that no one is responsible:

For years, our early stories hyping Iraq’s menace (and to a lesser extent what people like me wrote on the opinion pages) fed a suspicion, especially on the left, that we were not to be trusted.

John F. Burns, a correspondent who chronicled the tyranny of Hussein while the man was still in power and stayed on to cover the invasion and aftermath, recalls the reflexive hostility he encountered as a Times reporter on trips home. We were all liars, warmongers, lapdogs of Bush and Cheney and so forth, he told me.

Whatever we wrote — no matter what it was, and no matter how well documented — was dismissed as Bush propaganda, added Dexter Filkins, who covered the battlefields and politics of Afghanistan and Iraq for The Times before moving last January to The New Yorker. That was probably going to happen anyway, but the paper’s real failings gave those criticisms more credibility — and longer legs — than they deserved. Remember that the right-wingers (and a lot of the military) hated us at the time, too, since the war had started to go badly from the get-go, and we were reporting that.

Poor Bill, John and Dexter, so maligned from all sides while trying to file honest reports and opinions. Predictably, one searches Keller's article in vain for any reference to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. Nor does he mention that he held up the publication of an article revealing the scope of warrantless domestic wiretapping by the Bush administration for over a year after the 2004 election, and subsequently refused to respond to inquiries initiated by the Times' Public Editor at the time, Byron Calame, relying upon, as here, the issuance of a written public statement. Calame concluded that the explanation of the delay by those involved was woefully inadequate. All in all, Keller comes across as a careerist with little concern for the consequences of his actions with an exaggerated confidence in his ability to talk himself out of trouble when he can insulate himself from public accountability.

Labels: "War on Terror", 9/11, Afghanistan, American Empire, Iraq War, Iraqi Deaths, Mainstream Media, New York Times, Occupation of Iraq

According to Pace Lattin of Technorati, AOL is for sale after purchasing the Post. If only Rupert Murdoch would buy it and shut the Post down, that would be great. Arianna would have to come up with a new scheme for making money off the work of others.

Labels: American Culture, Liberals, Mainstream Media

UPDATE 2: George Cicariello-Maher, a participant in the protests in response to the killing of Oscar Grant by BART police in Oakland in 2009, examines the complex sociology of riots such as those that convulsed London:

Essential to the imagery of the irrational mob is the insistence that the bulk of the destruction is centered on working-class communities, and here the logic is fundamentally colonial. The poor and the Blacks can’t be trusted: look what they do to their own. Incapable of governing themselves, they must be taught civilization, by blows if necessary. Here again Oakland resonates, as after the riots there a solitary African braid shop, one of many whose windows were smashed, became the media symbol of the irrationality of rioters hell-bent on destruction and nothing more. It is worth noting that the poor rarely own anything at all, even in their own communities.

To break this narrative, we must read the actions of the rebels as well as listening to their words. While working-class communities have indeed suffered damage (we should note that working-class communities always bear the brunt of upheaval), there has been less talk of more overtly political targeting: police stations burned to the ground, criminal courts windows smashed by those who had passed through them, and the tacitly political nature of youth streaming into neighboring areas to target luxury and chain stores. On just the first night, rioters in Tottenham Hale targeted Boots, JD Sports, O2, Currys, Argos, Orange, PC World and Comet, whereas some in nearby Wood Green ransacking the hulking HMV and H&M before bartering leisurely with their newly acquired possessions.

This tendency was seemingly lost on analysts at The Guardian, who were left scratching their heads when the riot locations did not correspond directly to the areas with the highest poverty. And it’s not just the lefty news outlets that let such details slip: Danny Kruger, ex-adviser to David Cameron observed that: The districts that took the brunt of the rioting on Monday night were not sink estates. Enfield, Ealing, Croydon, Clapham... these places have Tory MPs, for goodness’ sake. A mob attacked the Ledbury, the best restaurant in Notting Hill.

While refusing to denounce the rebellions, socialist thinker Alex Callinicos nevertheless suggests that such looting is a form of do-it-yourself consumerism… reflecting the intensive commodification of desires in the neoliberal era. This view misses the far more complex role of the commodity during a riot, which was as evident in Oakland as in Venezuela: not only is the looting of luxury consumer items far more complex than Callinicos suggests, but the argument of looting as consumerism would have a hard time explaining both the destruction of luxuries and appropriation of necessities that often ensues.

Referencing the attention to police misconduct engendered by the riots in Tottenham, Cicariello-Maher observes:

This isn’t the only time riots have worked, either: in 2009 Oakland, it was riots and only riots that led to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the death of Oscar Grant.

UPDATE 1: lenin explains Starkey within the context of the racist right in the UK:

But this raises the question of what Starkey was trying to do. Clearly, he earnestly expressed his own views as a High Tory historian with a monarchist, nationalist bent. Yet, he evidently went farther than the political establishment, including the mainstream right, is prepared to go at the moment, and may well have gambled with his future television career. In fact, there would be a strong case for his being arrested and charged with incitement to racial hatred. There are two answers that make sense. The first is that is that the entire aggressively offensive performance was a calculated attempt to injure and smear the targets of its racialised invective. It was malice. And it was intended that racists should enjoy this degradation, uttered with relish as it was. The second is that the presentation, in its deliberately excessive way, invited the disgust and disorientation of the audience, such that, amid a generalised moral panic, he would recalibrate the scales of what is publicly acceptable in a radical way. The pathfinders of the racist right often seek the "chorus of execration", as Powell put it, revelling in the temporary ex-communication, enjoying the ambiguous status of the heretic and the prophetic. This is both because they expect to be vindicated, and because they can enjoy the spectacle of their execrators making use of the space of relative 'respectability' that their provocation has created.

INITIAL POST:

Why did British youth loot their neighborhoods after the killing of Mark Duggan? British historian David Sharkey has the answer. British society has been degraded by blacks and black culture, inducing whites to talk like illiterates and steal whatever strikes their fancy. Contrary to BBC claims to the contrary, the interviewer, Emily Maithis, allowed him to elaborate on his theories of racial contamination without criticism. Other participants in the panel discussion, Dreda Say Mitchell and Owen Jones, did challenge Sharkey, but in remarkably understated fashion. Personally, I think that they should have just walked out.

Such gentle inquiry was in marked contrast to how another BBC interviewer, Fiona Armstrong, treated Darcus Howe when he sought to explain the social conditions associated with the riots, going so far as to assert he had participated in a riot himself:

It was so bad that the BBC was forced to issue an apology. Expect a more and more blatant recourse to racism and xenophobia to mask the sub-proletarianization of Europe as suggested by these BBC interviews.

Labels: Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Germany, Mainstream Media, Racism, United Kingdom

A few weeks ago, Arianna Huffington, and other investors associated with her, sold The Huffington Post to AOL. Besides receiving millions of dollars, she was appointed to some position within AOL related to news and opinion content. As most of you know, Huffington built up the Post by relying upon articles and columns submitted by people for free. In the beginning, the writers were primarily celebrities, as this was the initial cachet of the Post, the opportunity to read the opinions of high profile entertainment figures. But, over time, the Post gravitated towards the work of individuals with some sort of journalistic or political connection to the subjects that they wrote about.

Now, with Huffington pocketing a lot of money partially as a consequence of their efforts, some of these writers, as well as some journalists, have expressed anger that none of the money obtained through the sale to AOL is going to them. We have even been subjected to such nonsense as the notion that some provided their work for free because they considered the Post a political enterprise, part of a movement to challenge the ascendancy of the right in the US. Of course, it's ludicrous, and I don't have the slightest bit of sympathy for them. Huffington made it clear from the inception that the Post was a business enterprise, subsequently obtaining approximately $20 million in outside capital several years ago. She made no secret that she wanted to grow the readership for the purpose of increasing the Post's profitability, and did so by highlighting celebrity gossip on the site. Perhaps, we have an example of a particular kind of paradoxical liberal thinking among these writers whereby they really believed that they could change the world with the assistance of a self-serving Internet entrepreneur like Huffington.

Furthermore, and perhaps more insidiously, Huffington was also clear about the constraints upon content imposed by her business plan from the beginning as well. She solicited Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com to post opinion pieces on the site shortly after the Post was launched, and then quickly dropped him when he, quite predictability, expressed his hostility to Zionism. Conversely, the pro-Israel apologetics of Alan Dershowitz have been an enduring feature. She personally expressed support for Israel on the site when it attacked Lebanon in 2006. Since the election of Obama, the Post has been known, in contradistinction to a site like firedoglake, as a cheerleader for the Obama presidency.

Does Arianna do such things for profit, or does she believe them? We will never know. But the writers should have known what they were getting into. For their own reasons, they decided that they would undermine the efforts of their brethren who have been insistent upon compensation for their work, and submit their writings to the Post for free. In this, Huffington is correct, there was a deal, and the writers thought that they could promote themselves by grabbing onto her coattails. Instead of acting in solidarity with others who were attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a place where capital expropriated the work of writers for free for its benefit, they played along in the expectation that, through their association with the Post, they were be among the few winners, some of the few writers who could actually earn a living by publishing over the Internet. Or, they were so intoxicated by the opportunity for exposure, that they were grateful just to have their work posted there. Or, maybe both. In any event, they, as the title of this post says, got exactly what they deserved.

Labels: American Culture, firedoglake, Liberals, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism

On Friday night, Keith Olbermann announced during his MSNBC program, Countdown, that it was his last show. There is much speculation that his departure is related to the approval of the merger of NBC and Comcast, as Olbermann was a highly visible public critic of media consolidation. If the Internet reports that I have seen are accurate, he has also frequently engaged in rather strident criticisms of prominent political figures, which, although often legitimate, tend to trouble employers who rely upon these same people to facilitate regulatory approvals.

Although I didn't watch his show very much, and found his Witchfinder General routine with Sarah Palin tiresome, I've always had a fond spot for Olbermann. Back when I used to watch a lot of professional sports on cable back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I enjoyed Olbermann's cool, ironic demeanor on ESPN. Curiously enough, he was low-key when other announcers were hyperbolic and he consciously punctured the machismo stereotypes associated with professional athletes. On a cable network centered around inflating the social significance of professional sporting events to the point of entertainment absurdity, Olbermann went against the grain, implicitly reminding us that, in the end, it's just a game, and, often, a ridiculous one.

So, I wasn't that surprised when ESPN and Olbermann parted company, although his departure was allegedly prompted more by his substance abuse problems and prima donna antics away from the camera. He was an incongruous presence among a stable of predominately male announcers who generally came across as people channeling their failed childhood desires to become professional athletes themselves into sports broadcasting. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that Olbermann had resurfaced on MSNBC, infusing American politics with the same exaggerated hysteria that he had so deliberately rejected while working at ESPN.

His supporters called him an heir to the journalistic tradition of Edward R. Murrow, mistaking style for substance, and, even there, Murrow never launched the sort of strident condemnations for which Olbermann became both notorious and wealthy (it is rumored that he will receive the remaining 30 million dollars on his two year contract with MSNBC). In that, they have done Morrow and Olbermann a disservice. For Olbermann, it appears that he lost any sense of restraint as evidenced in his recent commentaries about Palin and, just before he was taken off the air, the upcoming retirement of Joseph Lieberman. Calling one of the most powerful political figures in the US a delusional liar, one known for using his personal influence to punish his perceived enemies, is not a good career move if you want to remain in the the rarified air of high visibility and lucrative compensation.

But, as someone engaging in a rare instance of media criticism from the left, I have a simpler problem with Olbermann, one that has not elicited much comment. His evaluation of Lieberman was misguided, and, as with Palin, obscured the reality of social conflict in the US. Yet again, Olbermann provided us with another characterization of Lieberman as a political rogue, a mercenary who has cynically manipulated the political system to achieve his grotesque goals. Nothing could be further from the truth, as I have explained on several occasions, such as, for example, here and here. Lieberman is no sociopathic rogue, but, rather, a person who has, with the assistance of others, reshaped the Democratic Party in his own image.

Hence, Lieberman can now safely retire, having achieved his life's ambition. US foreign policy remains rabidly pro-Zionist, and continues to pursue policies of regime change (in Iran, Honduras, and Venezuela), with recourse to military force if necessary (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, possibly, in the near future Iran). It recognizes no legal or national constraints upon its actions, reserving the right to seize, incarcerate and attack people in response to any real or manufactured threat. Domestically, the US has adopted economic policies designed to concentrate consumption in the top 20% of the population, while the remainder of the populace is subjected to more and more insecurity through the evisceration of social welfare spending and job benefits. All of these policies have been implemented by a Democratic President, and, until January 2011, through a Democratic Congress. Going forward, they will be perpetuated through bipartisanship masked by stage managed confrontation between the Republicans and the Democrats.

Instead of addressing this, Olbermann took the easier path: characterizing the problems faced by the US as a consequence of our inability to confront the deranged personalities that we have elevated into positions of authority and influence. Such an approach made for good ratings, and, by extension, good compensation for Olbermann, but failed to engage the pernicious truth about the American socioeconomic system. Perhaps, Olbermann recognized the limitations of working within the mainstream media, and tried to induce us to think in this way as best he could by implication, and if so, I respect the effort. His sort of urbane populism may have been the limit of what can be expressed through the commercial media. Maybe, this will be liberating for Olbermann, but only if he finds a way to take NBC/Comcast's money and discover a new voice for himself outside the commercial mainstream.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Joseph Lieberman, Liberals, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism

UPDATE 1: Over at firedoglake, they are, as they often say about inopportune statements of political figures, walking it back. Today, Jane Hamsher is now saying this:

I don’t care if they find Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map in Jared Loughner’s bedroom. She didn’t cause him to do what he did. What she did do, undeniably and indisputably, was act irresponsibly in the midst of an extremely volatile situation. On the fifth straight day of violence and threats against members of Congress over the health care bill, when everyone from John Boehner on down was calling for the attacks to stop, Palin released her crosshairs map and tried to prove she was not a weenie by telling people to reload, not retreat.

David Dayen has also accommodated himself to the new liberal line as well:

Right now, the public isn’t ready to believe an argument that Jared Loughner was motivated by right-wing rhetoric. Fortunately, nobody has said that, because it’s the wrong claim to make. Nobody has claimed that crosshairs on a map or talk of Second Amendment remedies is specifically to blame (some on the right have blamed heavy metal music and a skull in his backyard, and that’s just as silly). The main claim is that the toxic stew of noxious rhetoric, particularly in Loughner’s home district and home state of Arizona, creates an environment that amps up a lunatic fringe. Loughner couldn’t help but trip over that, and indeed his writings do have a cockeyed resonance to some of the really far-right groups like Posse Comitatus and the Patriot movement. That doesn’t make those practitioners of angry rhetoric culpable, but it sure doesn’t mean what they’re doing helped, either.

Leaving aside the obvious, that liberals were, in fact, trying to induce the public to believe that people like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, as well as amorphous groups like the Tea Party, bore responsibility for the Tucson killings, the new line isn't very compelling. Indeed, it's pretty hard to understand as demonstrated by Hamsher's muddy analysis. Palin didn't cause Loughner to do what he did, but acted irresponsibly. I guess that's what you fall back upon when you are caught out with no evidence. After all, how does one defend one's self against that? If it justifies a political death sentence, as she asserted in regard to Palin yesterday, then there are lot of other politicians and commentators who are going to find themselves sentenced along with her.

More specifically, Hamsher condemns Palin because she exhorted people to reload, not retreat. Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it, unless you frequently peruse the comment pages at firedoglake. One wonders whether Hamsher is going to double the number of moderators going forward. Dayen's iteration isn't any more helpful. Let's see, they aren't culpable, but they haven't helped, either. Like millions of others Americans, I guess. Looks more and more like Olbermann, the Witchfinder General of American liberalism, is hanging out there in the wind by himself. Anyway, I should probably not be so hard on Hamsher and Dayen, just look at the bright side, and recognize that firedoglake is trying to extricate itself from this embarrasing episode, and return to what it does best, exposing how the Obama administration continues to make policy decisions in favor of the plutocracy at the expense of the rest of us. If so, not a moment too soon, because they aren't many journalists and websites that do it better with such dogged persistence.

INITIAL POST: All that's left is to forcibly seize Sarah Palin, put her in the helicopter position, place a dunce cap on her head and turn up the klieg lights for a round of self-criticism. Maybe, it can be staged live on an upcoming Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

If Sarah Palin, whose website put and today scrubbed bullseye targets on 20 Representatives including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics - she must be repudiated by the members of her own party, and if they fail to do so, each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully foretelling, and they must in turn be dismissed by the responsible members of their own party.

If the Tea Party leaders who took out of context a Jefferson quote about blood and tyranny and the tree of liberty do not understand - do not understand tonight, now what that really means, and these leaders do not tell their followers to abhor violence and all threat of violence, then those Tea Party leaders must be repudiated by the Republican Party...

If Glenn Beck, who obsesses nearly as strangely as Mr. Loughner did about gold and debt and who wistfully joked about killing Michael Moore, and Bill O'Reilly, who blithely repeated Tiller the Killer until the phrase was burned into the minds of his viewers, do not begin their next broadcasts with solemn apologies for ever turning to the death-fantasies and the dreams of bloodlust, for ever having provided just the oxygen to those deep in madness to whom violence is an acceptable solution, then those commentators and the others must be repudiated by their viewers, and by all politicians, and by sponsors, and by the networks that employ them.

Of course, the most obnoxious aspect of Olbermann's statement is the degradation of the Tucson tragedy into yet another media circus, with Olbermann engaging in the television equivalent of a staged food fight with Beck and O'Reilly in order to improve his ratings, although I will concede that there is the happy coincidence that he does, no doubt, believe what he says. Few things are more pleasing than when ones values are congruent with one's economic self-interest.

Naturally, Olbermann doesn't allude to any reports that Loughner was actually influenced by anything that Palin has said or done, because, last time I looked, there aren't any. Indeed, I haven't encountered any reports that Loughner has ever mentioned Sarah Palin in any context, or even knows who she is, despite numerous interviews of friends and classmates, as well as information taken from his Facebook page. You'd assume that he does, given her celebrity, and her frequent appearances in Arizona, but, if so, it hasn't been reported.

And, likewise with the Tea Party and Glenn Beck. Has anyone encountered anything to indicate that Loughner was aware of the mischaracterized Jefferson quote and Beck's obsession with George Tiller? Did Loughner pay any attention to Beck and the Tea Party at all? Apparently, Loughner did describe a woman who read a poem about an abortion in one of his classes as a terrorist for killing the baby, so, maybe, by Olbermann's journalistic standards, that's enough to establish a connection to Beck.

We may have also encountered a curious instance of projection whereby Olbermann has subconsciously attributed his experiences to Loughner, something which may partially explain the hysterical liberal response to Tucson more generally. If liberals like Olbermann paid scrupulous attention to Palin, the Tea Party and Glenn Beck, then, without question, Loughner did as well. Factual confirmation is unnecessary. Such projection results in the erasure of Loughner as a human being with an independent agency, reducing him to a recepticle for liberal fears and anxieties about the far right.

Amazingly, liberals like Olbermann, and other bright, skillful ones like Jane Hamsher, should know better. We are, as they say, in the early innings, and there is much still to be learned about Jared Loughner and why he decided to try to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. As I observed yesterday, Timothy McVeigh made reference to the Second Gulf War as one of his justifications for the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One cannot exclude the possibility that Loughner will make reference to other reasons for his actions, ones that will prove embarassing to liberals, such as, just to throw out a few, the bank bailout, the failure to provide assistance to people facing foreclosure, the war in Afghanistan, or even more obscure possibilities, such as US support for Saudi Arabia. Loughner the person still possesses an unpredictability that Loughner the liberal caricature does not.

Which is why I persist in my stubborn insistence upon factual substantiation for the liberal claims that the atmosphere created by Palin, the Tea Party and Beck was responsible for the Tucson tragedy. There are lots of reporters out there on the story, as well as many federal and state investigators as well, they shouldn't be too hard to find. I appreciate readers of this blog, whatever their political persuasion, that forward such information to me, as I do in any other context. After all, I can't read, watch and listen to everything. Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't point out the brazen hypocrisy of Olbermann's statement that Beck and Bill O'Reilly should apologize for having provided just the oxygen to those deep in madness to whom violence is an acceptable solution.

Any list of such people that does not start with President Barack Obama, former President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others, should be promptly disregarded as self-serving. For they, more than any others in this society, have been perpetually insisting that violence is an acceptable solution to the global challenges faced by the US. And, more than that, they have unapologetically asserted that the US may kill people indiscriminately in order to achieve their aspirations for global domination. While I find people like Beck and O'Reilly detestable, they are merely the media house servants for those who are truly responsible for having persuaded many Americans that the US must engage the rest of the world through policies of preemptive war, preventive detention and torture.

Hat tip to Jack Crow.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Barack Obama, firedoglake, Liberals, Mainstream Media, Political Violence, Sarah Palin, Tucson Tragedy

Assalamu alaikum — consider this a checkpoint!

No Temple for the God of terrorism at Ground Zero. ANB

A small explosion occurred about 9:35 p.m., just after the man was seen outside the mosque.

The vandals also cut a pipe, allegedly thinking that it was a natural gas line.

Back in the day, I participated in clinic defense in Davis and Sacramento when the religious right targeted clinics that provided abortion and birth control services. There was an arson of a clinic across from McKinley Park in East Sacramento. But that was mild compared to what happened elsewhere. Throughout much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a concerted campaign of anonymous threats and violence directed towards driving abortion clinics out of much of the country, and the perpetrators succeeded.

Now we are reliving the same experience, except that this time, Muslims are the target of the religious right. Just as its previous participants concluded that reproductive rights services could be eliminated by threatening the employees of such facilities and vandalizing them, the current generation is focusing upon mosques as a means of pursuing the goal of driving Muslims out of their communities. The methodology is a common one on the right, the populist instigation, with the the mainstream media serving as a megaphone, of factually unconnected acts of violence and intimidation in the service of a broader effort to prevail through fear.

Accordingly, in this instance, the media characterizes it primarily as a conflict in various places around the country over the construction of new mosques, a zoning dispute, as it were, with the so-called Ground Zero Mosque being the most highly publicized instance. But the question posed in relation to the proposed Islamic community center in New York City, how far away from Ground Zero is acceptable, get to the heart of the matter, because the answer is increasingly outside the United States, as opposition to two other mosques in the greater New York City region, as well as the eruption of opposition to mosque projects in other parts of the country, indicates.

So, through a combination of religious right intimidation and media hyperbole, the Islamic community center has already been reduced to the status of an the architectural equivalent of a Guantanamo detainee. Upon release, the US finds it difficult to find any country, including the detainees' country of origin, willing to accept them, and there is no location within the city in which the proponents of the community center can seek to construct it without vehement opposition. By concentrating on the conflict in Manhatten in the Hearst tradition, the media has participated in the intensification of more hostility towards Muslims even as it fails to connect the opposition to new mosque construction with the nascent effort to get rid of existing ones.

Hence, for the larger public, an emerging nativist campaign, reminiscent of the ones that resulted in the forced deportion of Latinos in 1930s and the subsequent internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, remains largely unrecognized, allowing its religious right participants to manipulate populist sentiment to generate more support while ensuring that only the targets of its effort, Muslims, know their true intention. In fact, when one combines the opposition to new mosques with the vandalism directed towards existing ones, it becomes evident that the campaign can be summarized with the slogan Get Rid of the Muslims by Getting Rid of the Mosques. As the attack upon the taxi driver today suggests, we may be about to enter a more violent phase marked by random assaults upon Muslims consistent with the dramatic increase in hate crimes against them after 9/11.

Labels: Islam, Mainstream Media, Political Violence, Racism, Religion, Sleeper Cells

Investigations into the February 12th night raid in Khataba village in Afghanistan are discovering that the truth is worse than we could have imagined:

US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.

Despite earlier reports we have determined that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men, said Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Nato spokesman. The coalition continued to deny that there had been a cover-up and said that its legal investigation, which is ongoing, had found no evidence of inappropriate conduct.

A senior Afghan official involved in a government investigation told The Times: “I think the special forces lied to McChrystal.”

Why did the special forces collect their bullets from the area? the official said. They washed the area of the injuries with alcohol and brought out the bullets from the dead bodies. The bodies showed there were big holes.

As you might have guessed, US media reported on this raid by credulously accepting the NATO explanation, until Afghan investigators and the London Times forced the truth out into the open. In an excellent article posted at Salon today, Glenn Greenwald places this incident within the larger context of NATO's success in persuading the media to accept its false, propagandistic descriptions of events in Afghanistan. Interestingly, Greenwald documents how an Afghan newspaper published, right after the attack, a more nuanced, more accurate description of it, primarily because the reporter talked to the residents of Khataba as well as NATO press officers.

And therein lies the problem. US newspapers and cable channels, to the extent that they attempt to cover the war in Afghanistan at all, look to official sources for the most accurate information. Conversely, like some American feminists, they consider the accounts of Afghans themselves to be the least credible, and, as noted by Greenwald, don't bother to even inquire about them, much less report them.

It is tempting to ascribe this phenomenon solely to nationalistic pressures associated with war coverage, but that would be a mistake. Elite newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have always practiced this method across the board, even before there was a war on terror. Articles invariably follow a pattern: official US sources first, other friendly official sources second, and, if the reporter gets that far, local accounts and concerns. Of course, sources from governments or groups considered hostile by the US are presented last, with an appropriately dismissive tone. The pattern, with minor variations, is followed without fail regardless of whether the subject of the article is a foreign or domestic subject.

And, as we have learned in relation to the invasion of Iraq and a possible attack upon Iran, off the record official US sources are considered more credible than on the record statements from anyone else, even more credible than direct evidence that refutes them. So, what we have here is a style of propagandistic journalism, a style that predates the war on terror and invasion of Iraq, but one that has become more crude and transparent because of the sensitivity of public opinion.

Of course, the New York Times has finally reported that US troops were responsible for the deaths in Khataba, but, naturally, placed the following emphasis upon it:

The disclosure could not come at a worse moment for the American military: NATO officials are struggling to contain fallout from a series of tirades against the foreign military presence by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has also railed against the killing of civilians by Western forces.

The dead Afghans, it seems, are merely a backdrop for those poor US and NATO officials that now have to deal with the unpleasantness of being caught out in a lie, a kind of deceased human scenery, as it were, like mannequins used to display the lastest fashions at Saks Fith Avenue. Or, perhaps, like a multitude of Banquo's ghosts, causing panic attacks among officials and American reporters alike. And that Karzai! Can't someone get him to shut up? Note the use of the verb railed in the characterization of his objections to civilian killings by US and NATO forces, a subtle way of suggesting that he is either hysterical or exaggerating them.

And, then, finally, there are those pro-war feminists again. Maybe, someone can get around to asking them how the war in Afghanistan is for the benefit of the women there, when US troops are shooting and killing pregnant women, and then, afterwards, carving the bullets out of their bodies.

Labels: "Support the Troops", "War on Terror", Afghanistan, American Empire, Death Squads, Feminism, Mainstream Media, NATO, Sadomasochism

American policymakers and their representatives are scrupulous about not putting themselves in a position of actually having to engage informed critics of US policy in the Middle East, and American media assists them through the exercise of self-censorship in regard to the range of opinions that it requires such policymakers to address. But, here, there is an actual debate between General Richard Myers, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and As'ad Abukhalil about Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Myers literally doesn't know what hit him.

Curiously, Abukhalil lets Myers get away with implicitly stereotyping Arab governments as uniquely corrupt in contrast to the developed world when Myers speaks as if only Arabs are adversely influenced by money. Abukhalil could have also acidly inquired, and, yes, General Myers, where perchance does this money come from? Maybe, he thought it was all rather obvious to the audience, which, if I am any indication, it was. But Abukhalil scores a body blow when he accurately characterizes the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as efforts to colonize the two countries, a statement that so shocked Myers, who has been sheltered from such a blunt discourse in the US, that he could only absurdly sputter that the US actions are altruistic. Apparently, he's never heard of Paul Bremer and what Bremer unsuccessfully tried to accomplish in Iraq.

As it became more and more obviously that Abukhalil was mopping the floor with him, Myers could only fall back to that old American populist standby, anti-intellectualism, comically comparing Abukhalil to the purported academics that erroneously advised the Bush administration that Iraqis would welcome the US military presence in their country. Again, Abukhalil let this one pass, again apparently recognizing that he did not have to underscore the ridiculousnes of this comparison for the audience. If I may hazard one constructive criticism of Abukhalil, it would be that he should point his figure at the monitor less frequently as he makes his argument. Oh, did I mention that network that aired the interview? PBS? CNN? MSNBC? No, Aljazeera English.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism, Occupation of Iraq

Can you imagine the furor that would have erupted if Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post had submitted this for publication?

The referendum on the construction of synagogues with the star of David is no different. No one quite says what the real issue is, but everybody knows: As grotesquely unfair as a referendum to ban the star of David may have been to hundreds of thousands of ordinary, well-integrated Jews, I have no doubt that the Swiss voted in favor primarily because they don't have much Zionist extremism -- and they don't want any.

Of course, we all know that she probably would have been fired, despite having served on the Post's editorial board from 2002 to 2006. But, she didn't have any problem getting this past the editorial page editors and into the paper:

The referendum on the construction of minarets is no different. No one quite says what the real issue is, but everybody knows: As grotesquely unfair as a referendum to ban minarets may have been to hundreds of thousands of ordinary, well-integrated Muslims, I have no doubt that the Swiss voted in favor primarily because they don't have much Islamic extremism -- and they don't want any.

Sometimes, antisemites reveal themselves not by their true opinion of Jews, which they conceal, but, rather, by their opinion of Arabs and other non-Jewish semitic peoples. Contrary to the efforts of orientalists like Bernard Lewis to persuade us otherwise, anti-semitism can, and has been, directed against non-Jewish people. Indeed, we can fairly say that it is thriving these days, as Applebaum's views are frequently expressed, in more virulent form, by American religious fundamentalists and Zionists when they describe the purported attributes of Islam, or, more specifically, the Palestinians.

Along these lines, it is important to note that representatives of the right in Europe cynically embraced philo-semitism after World War II, as a way of both cynically distancing themselves from fascism, especially Nazism, and resisting the left. Hence, a German rightist historian, known for his revisionist biography of Hitler, attacked Fassbinder for being an anti-semite because of his controversial 1975 play, Garbage, the City and Death, a play in which a Jewish character assumed the norms of his oppressors, and, thus, was unable to provide an alternative to the anguished protagonist. The embrace of Israel by the racist British National Party in Britain is the most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon.

A similar sort of philo-semitism is currently on display now. Religious fundamentalists strongly identify with Israel even as they hope that a conflict between Israel and its neighbors will bring about the second coming of Christ. Meanwhile, US military intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia is partially justified by the need to defend Israel, despite the fact that Israel clearly has the military means to protect itself. The conflation of Judaism and Israel is a common thread that seems to run through most current opportunistic expressions of philo-semitism, as it would otherwise be impossible for the people engaged in the practice to achieve their ends.

Hat tip to the Angry Arab News Service.

Labels: American Empire, Anti-semitism, Christian Fundamentalism, Israel, Mainstream Media, Religion

No, the New York Times isn't talking about a Tory, some especially obnoxious backbencher known for making inflammatory comments to turn out his Olde England base. No, it's Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party:

The occasion was the appearance on “Question Time,” the BBC’s flagship politics program, of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, whose goal to “take back Britain” includes incentives that encourage the mass repatriation of Britain’s nonwhite immigrants, coupled with a deep hostility to Islam, which Mr. Griffin has described as “a wicked and vicious faith.” He has also spoken of his “repugnance” for lesbians and gays, and advocated the end of civil contracts for same-sex relationships.

His record includes having denied the Holocaust, suggesting that some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were built after World War II for the purposes of Jewish propaganda, and conceding, under questioning by a biographer, that Hitler may have made some mistakes. “Yes,” he said, according to the biographer, Dominic Carman, “Adolf went a bit too far.”

Awfully big tent they have over at the Times, one that accidentally supports the conflation of Anglo American imperialism, both domestically and abroad, with racism, religious intolerance and homophobia. One can only imagine what Jack Nelson would have said about it. After all, the Times couldn't even describe Griffin accurately in the headline as a racial separatist, but, I guess that designation is reserved for black nationalists. As to the larger, more troubling problem regarding the legitimation of the BNP as a respectable political movement, lenin, over at Lenin's Tomb, has addressed it extensively over the last month or so.

Labels: Islam, Mainstream Media, New York Times, Racism, United Kingdom

Former Atlanta Constitution and Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson is dead. Very few journalists successfully challenged the official version of history as he did:

The next year Mr. Nelson went to Selma, Ala., when Sheriff Jim Clark’s deputies and state troopers arrested more than 3,000 demonstrators there, beating many of them, as they demanded that blacks be allowed to register to vote. Mr. Nelson covered the Selma-to-Montgomery freedom marches, including Bloody Sunday, on March 7, 1965, when 600 marchers were attacked with billy clubs and tear gas.

Then came a scoop. On March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit, was killed by gunfire from a passing car as she and another civil rights worker were driving from Selma to Montgomery. The next day four Ku Klux Klan members were arrested.

“Nelson sensed immediately that there was an untold story in how the F.B.I. had cracked the case so speedily,” Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in their book “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation” (Knopf, 2006).

“He began tapping the network of law enforcement sources he had started cultivating during his years as an investigative reporter,” the authors added. “Within days, he supplied readers of The Los Angeles Times with the answer: One of the four men in the Klan car when the shots were fired was an undercover F.B.I. informant. It was a remarkable exclusive.”

Another exclusive came in February 1968, when three black students were shot to death and 27 others were wounded by state troopers at South Carolina State College, a black college in Orangeburg. The troopers claimed that the students had charged them, hurling bottles and bricks.

Mr. Nelson went to the local hospital, introduced himself as “Nelson, with the Atlanta bureau” — he did not say “F.B.I.” — and asked to see the victims’ medical records. What he revealed became known as the Orangeburg massacre.

“It was eye-popping; they were shot in the soles of their feet, in the back of the head,” Mr. Nelson said in the interview. “Even today, if you ask somebody about the Orangeburg massacre, hardly anybody has a clue. But if you ask about Kent State, where it was white people, everybody knows about it.”

In 1970, Mr. Nelson learned that the F.B.I., in a sting operation, had given two Ku Klux Klansmen $36,500 to enroll Kathy Ainsworth, a sympathizer, pretending that it was for a plot to dynamite the home of a Jewish businessman in Meridian, Miss. When she and another Klansman arrived with the dynamite, a gun battle broke out and Ms. Ainsworth was killed.

“Nelson’s story of entrapment and the use of agents provocateurs raised more moral and legal questions than the F.B.I. was prepared to answer,” Time magazine wrote in October 1970. “Ever since, Nelson has been on the F.B.I.’s list of untouchable people.”

Most people under the age of 40 probably have trouble believing that journalists have been anything other than stenographers for the power elite. And, admittedly, a lot of them always have been. But not Jack Nelson.

Labels: African Americans, Civil Rights, Mainstream Media, Obituaries, Police, Racism

In a story that got little attention a several days ago (with the exception of the ever alert Gaius), President Obama expressed a willingness to provide tax breaks to struggling newspapers:

The president said he is "happy to look at" bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

"I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called "Newspaper Revitalization Act," that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin's Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

Gaius is supportive, quite rightly expressing concern about the prospects for information in a world without newspapers, raising the spectre of an endless diet of corporate sponsored information. But I'm not sure that I agree. First, the quality of newspapers has declined significantly in the last 20 years, with my local newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, being a classic example. Like most papers outside of the major metropolitan areas, it runs the same syndicated columnists, with minor variations, from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune over and over and over again, supplemented with a few uninspiring locals.

Second, much the same can be said of the national and international news articles that they publish, with some exceptions at the larger papers (to its credit, McClatchy, the parent company of the Bee, has retained much of the excellent core of international journalists that it inherited from Knight-Ridder, even if it doesn't quite know what to do with them). Smaller papers have almost completely abdicated any independent role in the coverage of national and international stories by relying upon articles from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Post, if not wire services like the Associated Press, United Press International and Reuters. Next time you get a chance, go through your hard copy, printed newspaper, and see how many articles come from these sources.

Local coverage? Don't even go there. Through a combination of staff cuts and transparently self-serving political and economic motivations, the Bee reads a lot like the greensheets of 30 to 40 years ago, you know, those small town papers financed by the advertising dollars of car dealers, real estate agents and local businesses, resulting in a bland, inoffensive product that met with their approval. Young, inexperienced Bee reporters rarely get the stories right, and the overall perspective of the coverage is pro-business, pro-developer (no matter who much public subsidy they get) and, of course, anti-union. My guess is that most papers around the country are similar to the Bee, if not more blatantly right-wing and pro-business. No wonder the British paper, the Guardian, gets so many visits to its website from Americans, and even started publishing a weekly for the US market in recent years.

As a consequence of consolidation, staff reductions and investor pressures for profitability, newspapers display a degree of conformity not seen in my lifetime. If large papers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the wire services are dictating most of the content of the opinion pages as well as the content of many of the articles of the vast majority of US newspapers, why should any of these papers get bailed out? Why can't we just go directly to directly to the source and read the articles there? It's a hard question to answer, isn't it?

With conformity also comes ideological rigidity. Quick, name 5 newspapers that editorialized against the invasion of Iraq? Hard to do it, isn't it, although I'm sure that there were a few. Name 5 newspapers that editorialized against the invasion of Afghanistan. You'd have to do an hour Google search to answer that one. And, of course, we all remember the obsequious coverage afforded the Bush administration in both instances, if not outright complicity, as with Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New York Times, with their stories about WMDs reminiscent of William Randolph Hearst's successful effort to get us into a war with Spain in 1898.

In relation to economics and workers rights issues, it is arguably even worse. I can't think of a single newspaper in this country that opposes the free trade policies enshrined by NAFTA and GATT, although they must be some. Most papers cover business and investment stories avidly, but cover ones affecting people in the workplace with less and less frequency. Not surprising, given that most newspapers are part of national and international media conglomerates. Beyond this, newspapers are increasingly focused on entertainment and sports, and not hard news.

There is, however, a larger problem. People just don't read as much anymore, and, by and large, get their information through television and the Internet. Providing subsidies to newspapers, institutions that have been uniquely hostile to the emergence of competition from the Net, will do nothing to change these trends. The public no longer wants to get information from sources centered around the illusory objectivity of corporate newspaper chains. Of course, there are significant social implications to this, as we will live a world where it be more and more necessary to read subjective sources of information with a critical eye, but then, we really had to do that with so-called objective newspapers, anyway. Newspapers remain quite arrogant about their essential gatekeeping function of deciding what is credible information and what is not, despite their desultory record in recent years, and no amount of tax credit subsidy is going to persuade the public to respond to that favorably.

Ultimately, if the government is going to subsidize any media, including newspapers, it should instead focus upon the creation of diverse, inclusive institutions that run counter to the recent trend of consolidation and control by finance capital. Analogous to the bailout of transnational banks and brokerage houses, there is the objection that, if newspapers are so important, why should we preserve them in the hands of the same people who have failed so miserably, and stripped them of their journalistic credibility?

The answer apparently lies in the fact that, just as banks and brokerage houses constitute the monetary spine of the global neoliberal economy, newspapers are a part of a transnational medium of communication, along with television, radio, and, possibly, even music and movies, necessary to establish its credibility. Accordingly, given the control of our political institutions by capital, as evidenced yesterday in the health care debate in the Senate Finance Committee yesterday, and the fondness of the Obama administration for the expansion of oligopolies throughout the US economy, the prospects for an inclusive alternative are nil.

Labels: American Culture, American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism, New York Times

If you click on the link, you will be virtually transported to an excellent article by Alexander Cockburn about gossip, a subject that has interested him for decades. Interestingly, Cockburn never makes the connection, but one can certainly identify gossip as one of the first manifestations of postmodernism, because nothing bespeaks the collapse of metanarratives, such as say, the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom, as well as cultural fragmentation, like gossip.

Perhaps, this overstates the case, though, because, gossip has always been a prominent feature of American history, one need only recall the vicious slanders against Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln. From the country's inception, gossip has always answered the call of resistance against the prospect of social change. As Gore Vidal observed, in a quote from Cockburn's article:

"Gossip?" Gore Vidal said to me. "Gossip is conversation about people. In the United States there has never been actual discussion of issues whenever a personality could take its place. We do that because we can never examine the sort of society we live in. Therefore candidates are rated according to their weight, color of eyes, sexual proclivities, and so forth. It avoids having to face, let us say, unemployment—which is a very embarrassing thing to have to talk about. Anything substantive is out. Otherwise somebody might say this is a very bad society and ought to be changed."

Indeed. His observation raises a troubling question, though, because while the emergence of the United States, and its attendant economic, social and cultural values, have commonly been recognized as the cutting edge of modernism, a modernism that fully flowered in the 20th Century, such an emergence apparently carried within it the seeds of its own demise. Capitalist rationality, the annihiliation of time and space through new forms of communications, ultimately served to gratify the public obsession with personality through gossip, thus undermining the social order associated with it.

Labels: American Culture, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism

I was casually cruising the Internet today, and came across this:

Brittney Gilbert has been blogging personally since 1999 and professionally since 2005.

What in the world does this mean? Blogging is now a profession? One that involves recourse to an acquired expertise? Or, should I just translate this to mean that Gilbert wasn't paid for her blog from 1999 to 2005, but has been since then?

And, if so, what, if anything, should I conclude from that? That a blog has been recognized as superior in content and quality because someone else discovered the blog and paid the blogger to continue to do it? Otherwise, why distinguish between the time that you blogged without pay and the time that you did? In any event, my experience has been that most personal blogs are far superior to the so-called professional ones.

Labels: American Culture, Bay Area, California, Mainstream Media

You have to give the devil his due. Al Giordano nails it regard to what is currently happening in Honduras, revealing why the US is so fearful of it:

Strip away all the sensationalism, distortion, simulation, ideological axe-grinding, flotsam and jetsam of media coverage of events in Honduras over the past month and it still boils down to one central conflict:

The coup regime fears, and was imposed as a last line of defense against, Citizen Power.

Citizen Power – Poder Ciudadano, in Spanish, which was the credo on the posters and ads of Manuel Zelaya’s victorious 2005 presidential campaign – manifested itself this year in popular demands for a referendum on whether to write a new Honduran Constitution via democratically elected representatives to a constitutional convention.

It’s that simple, and the coup regime’s fear of authentic democracy is exactly why the failed talks in Costa Rica between the two sides have now ended without agreement on anything at all, as foreseen here and elsewhere.

Typically, though, Giordano concludes with his new line of defense to exonerate Obama from the deficiencies of US policy:

The analyses that assign all the responsibility for the coup’s success or failure to Washington are, in reality, quite dismissive of – and insulting to the people who organized - those victories from below and their consequences.

Immanuel Wallerstein, however, hits the nail on the head with this point:

What about the United States? When the coup occurred, some of the raucous left commentators in the blogosphere called it Obama's coup. That misses the point of what happened. Neither Zelaya nor his supporters on the street, nor indeed Chavez or Fidel Castro, have such a simplistic view. They all note the difference between Obama and the U.S. right (political leaders or military figures) and have expressed repeatedly a far more nuanced analysis.

“It seems quite clear that the last thing the Obama administration wanted was this coup. The coup has been an attempt to force Obama's hand.

That’s not to say that efforts to unforce that hand in Washington aren’t worthy. We’ve done plenty of that, too. But to obsess upon a weakened empire that no longer has the absolute power to determine history in Latin American lands while also largely ignoring the struggle from below inside Honduras – a faux pas that most of the Washington-centric leftish analysis has committed – is to dismiss and disrespect the strides already made by organized peoples throughout this hemisphere.

Sigh. Giordano at his ludicrous, irrational best, utilizing his favorite rhetorical technique, the invocation of false binary oppositions. Please, someone tell him that the left and its intellectual advocates have moved beyond structuralism.

To state the obvious, we do not dismiss and disrepect the efforts of the Hondurans and their supporters in Central America to reverse the coup by observing that the Obama administration is perfectly willing to harvest the rewards of it, the disempowerment of Zelaya and the social movements associated with him, through the work of its mediator, Oscar Arias. Instead, it is complimentary, because it encourages people here in the US to pressure the Obama adminstration to take more forceful action on behalf of the coup resistance on the ground.

So far, regardless of whether the Obama administration knowingly assisted the coup plotters, or greenlighted their plan, it is evident that they have become his adoptive children, a means by which he believes that he can achieve his aspiration of rendering Central Americans as deferential to elites as Americans. In this respect, I disagree with one of the primary themes of the Wallerstein piece linked by Giordano. Wallerstein maintains that Obama has been wiggling ever since the coup.

Well, maybe he is, after all, isn't that usually the case these days? But Secretary of State Clinton hasn't been, and neither has Oscar Arias, and Obama is allowing them to speak and act on his behalf. Both have acted in a calculated, deliberate way to force Zelaya to return to Honduras under terms that legitimize the coup (the Arias coaliton government proposal, now dead, required that the coup pepetrators be granted political amnesty and permitted to serve in the government). There has not been anything erratic or confused about what they have done.

Meanwhile, US and European media now describe Zelaya and Micheletti as rivals, and the current government of Honduras as an interim one. One suspects that Lanny Davis has passed this public relations strategy along to appropriate State Department personnel for use in off the record, background briefings. Fortunately, it hasn't deterred the people of Honduras from taking to the streets to demand the return of their president.

For Giordano to suggest that Obama could not bring this coup down today (even if it might take several days to play out) by observing that the US no longer has the absolute power to determine history in Latin American lands is disingenous in the extreme. Of course, no country has the absolute power to do anything (yes, we are dealing with one of those calculated, manipulative word choices by Giordano), but there are clearly measures that Obama could undertake to bring this situation to a conclusion, such as cutting off all military and economic assistance. Of course, Obama has no interest in them, because it would empower the people of Honduras to pursue an alternative to the neoliberalism imposed by the US.

And, finally, we are treated to the factionalism that so characterizes Giordano these days: But to obsess upon a weakened empire that no longer has the absolute power to determine history in Latin American lands while also largely ignoring the struggle from below inside Honduras – a faux pas that most of the Washington-centric leftish analysis has committed – is to dismiss and disrespect the strides already made by organized peoples throughout this hemisphere.

Where to begin? First, there is no Washington-centric leftist analysis, merely one that recognizes the existing power relationships between the coup perpetrators in Honduras and their historic allies in the US government. Second, as already noted, to expose these relationships, something that, rather contradictory, Narco News also does, and urge Americans to confront them, are acts of solidarity with the people of Honduras, not an attempt to push them to the margins.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Honduras, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism

To her credit, Laura Carlsen now recognizes that the US is actively preventing the reinstatement of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya:

The official mediator of the Honduras conflict, President Oscar Arias, further alienated Honduran anti-coup groups by saying he will propose a coalition government and try to disuade elected President Manuel Zelaya from returning to his country. Arias also mentioned offering “amnesties”, although he did not specify for whom or on what terms. With talks scheduled to begin tomorrow, conflicting statements regarding Zelaya’s return, the terms of talks and the positions coup leaders will take make for an uncertain, and unpromising, scenario.

For leaders of the grassroots movements risking their lives to break the coup’s grip on power in their country, the news comes as proof that the mediation holds little prospect of solutions for reinstating the democratically elected president, ousted by the military on June 28.

Meanwhile, the Hondurans are continuing to take things into their own hands, having recognized, as noted here on Tuesday, that the mediation process only serves to legitimize the coup. According to the Honduras Resists blog:

The Central American unions announced that they will block passage at the Honduran borders in protest against the coup.

International Federation of Dock Workers of the Wold has agreed not to unload merchandise coming from Honduras.

The National Front Against the Coup d'Etat has taken the highway between Choloma, San Pedro Sula and Puerto Cortés.

Nine military commands attack protesters is Juticalpa, Olancho. They are detaining cars driving towards Tegucigalpa.

The main institutions of the country are paralyzed. Access to the National Autonomous University of Honduras has been taken over by students.

The European Union has re-affirmed that the only solution to the crisis is the restitution of President Zelaya and has cut off all economic aid.

The coup media is announcing repression and death against the protests taking place around the country.

Two are reported killed by a military command in Catacamas, Olancho. Repression is strongest in rural areas of the country.

In strategic points around the country the national paralization has started. Thousands are in the streets.

Predictably, US media coverage of these events, in marked contrast to the eruption in Iran, is non-existent. But Narco News confirms much of the Honduras Resists report:

Union organizations in Nicaragua and El Salvador have announced that they will close the border routes with Honduras in solidarity with the Honduran blockades.

If you study the map, above, of the few highways in Honduras that connect its commercial centers, the confirmed reports indicate that the popular protests have already shut down the veins and arteries of country's economy. It is highly likely that other roads and highways are also now under blockade, but we are taking great pains to report only those ones upon which we have been able to confirm. Readers unfamiliar with the condition of secondary roads in Honduras may not be aware that once one of these main highways is shut down, there are no alternate routes.

This is the strategy that, from 2003 to 2005, toppled three repressive presidents in the nation of Bolivia, one after the other.

These current blockades in Honduras have been called, initially, for 48 hours, beginning this morning. Check back here for around-the-clock updates.

This is a major news story. It doesn't matter that the rest of the English language international media is slow to report it. Maybe their correspondents are caught in traffic? Honduras under the coup has now ground to a halt.

Evaluated in this context, the Arias proposal for mediation comes across as desperation, an attempt to impose a solution that disempowers Zelaya and the social movements so as to prevent them from organizing a permanent, effective resistance. Especially when you consider that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now making public statements that implicitly oppose the mobilizations against the coup. If the US is going to successfully impose a purported democratic solution from above, then it must act quickly to terminate the risk of a real one from below.

Labels: American Empire, Honduras, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism