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

I don't recall if I have posted about it here, but I have ascerbically commented elsewhere upon the ethnocentrism associated with the belief that American radical pacifist Gene Sharp played a promiment inspirational role in regard to the Egyptian protests that brought down Mubarak, as reported in the New York Times in February:

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably From Dictatorship to Democracy, a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around crazy ideas about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to protest disrobing to disclosing identities of secret agents.

Well, you know, those ignorant Arabs, they would have never thought of engaging in civil disobedience unless Sharp and activists associated with his work told them about it. Because, after all, as devout readers of the Times, know, Arabs and Muslims are reflexively violent in their response to anything they find objectionable. They could have only embraced civil disobedience with the assistance of purportedly more urbane, sophisticated American activists. Until Sharp, Egyptians never engaged in hunger strikes and never disclosed the identities of people involved in the security services.

Of course, the ignorance associated with this pop culture interpretation of events surrounding the Egyptian protests is breathtaking. For example, Egyptians have engaged in hunger strikes or threatened them on a number of occasions in the last decade alone, such as here and here and here and here. While one should not discount the possibility that Sharp and his acolytes may have indirectly influenced the more recent ones, the more likely possibility is that Egyptians learned from, among others, the example of Palestinians nearby. Incarcerated Palestinians have frequently engaged in hunger strikes over the years to protest the occupation and their conditions of confinement, and continue to do so, as anyone who conducts a cursory search on the Internet will readily discover. Meanwhile, the notion that Egyptians never considered publicly exposing the identities of people in the security services as a method of resistance until coming into contact with speakers from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict is absurd on its face.

But this narrative, no matter how implausible, does serve a political purpose outside of Egypt. For educated Americans, Zionist ones, in particular, it is a reasssuring one, an Arab revolutionary movement significantly influenced by secular, American theories of non-violent direct action. Or, alternatively, it can be described as a reassuring narrative centered around the belief that Arabs can only rebel in a way that conforms to Eurocentric values of social and cultural superiority. From this perspective, given that North Africa and the Middle East are characterized as backward societies, they can only undergo radical political transformation by reference to modern, Eurocentric approaches to protest and rebellion. An indirect expression of this ethnocentrism can be found, again, in the pages of Times, where, as As'ad Abukhalil often observes, the reporters rely excessively upon Arabs and Muslims living the US to provide insight into events in their countries of origin thousands of miles away. Because, as we all know, an Arab or Muslim living in the US, having benefitted from the social, cultural and educational advantages of our society, is a more knowledgeable source than an indigenous one.

In regard to Egypt specifically, the reverence for Sharp is especially misguided. First of all, contrary to the desperate need for American elites to describe them as non-violent, the Egyptian protests were, in fact, quite violent, and they were as violent as required to overcome the repression of the Mubarak security forces, as explained by Hossam el-Hamalawy:

Suez was dubbed as Egypt’s Sidi Bouzid during the 18 day uprising. The city witnessed some of the bloodiest crackdowns by the police, and also some of the fiercest resistance by the protesters. In the video above, shot on the Friday of Anger, January 28, the revolutionaries in Suez after storming the police stations and confiscating the rifles, are using them to fight back the police.

One of the biggest myths invented by the media, tied to this whole Gene Sharp business: the Egyptian revolution was peaceful. I’m afraid it wasn’t. The revolution (like any other revolution) witnessed violence by the security forces that led to the killing of at least 846 protesters.

But the people did not sit silent and take this violence with smiles and flowers. We fought back. We fought back the police and Mubarak’s thugs with rocks, Molotov cocktails, sticks, swords and knives. The police stations which were stormed almost in every single neighborhood on the Friday of Anger–that was not the work of criminals as the regime and some middle class activists are trying to propagate. Protesters, ordinary citizens, did that.

Egyptians understand well what a police station is for. Every family has a member who got abused, tortured or humiliated by the local police force in his/her neighborhood. And I’m not even talking here about the State Security Police torture factories. I’m talking about the ordinary police.

Other symbols of power and corruption were attacked by the protesters and torched down during the uprising. Revolutionary violence is never random. Those buildings torched down or looted largely belonged to Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.

In a number of provinces like in N Sinai and Suez, arms were seized by protesters who used them back against the police to defend themselves. State Security Police office in Rafah and Arish, for example, were blown up using RPGs, hand grenades and automatic rifles, while gas pipelines heading to Jordan and Israel were attacked.

Amazingly, there is a revisionist, pro-Sharp response to Hamalawy. Eric Stoner of Waging Nonviolence actually condemns the Egyptian protesters for attacking the forces that had subjected them to such repression:

No proponent of nonviolence would ever argue that by using nonviolent action protesters will not face violence from the state. In fact, in most cases, when facing repressive regimes violence should be expected.

Moreover, no one that I know ever claimed that there was absolutely no violence in Egypt. We acknowledged the violence of the protesters on this site and were critical of it.

That said, to argue that it was the rocks, Molotov cocktails, sticks, swords and knives that won the day in Egypt is crazy. Could anyone really think that these crude weapons were any match for Egypt’s military and security apparatus?

Rather than being a key to their eventual victory, the moments when protesters resorted to violence were the closest points during the uprising that they came to losing control. The throwing of rocks was about as useful strategically in Egypt as it is in Palestine. Such desperate acts distract onlookers from the cause they are fighting for and provide a ready excuse for state repression.

The truth is that most people in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt did face violence without responding in kind and their nonviolent discipline was a key to their success. If most people had responded with violence the death toll of the revolution would have been dramatically higher and Mubarak may very well have prevailed.

So speaketh the sanctimonous American pacifist, who pompously proclaims that El-Hamalawy doesn't understand non-violence. If given a choice between a failed non-violent protest movement, or one that resorts to violence and succeeds, Americans like Stoner will choose the latter every time. Even worse, people like Stoner would relegate the peoples of the lesser developed world to imperial subjugation until they can overcome their masters non-violently. If that can't be done, well, too bad, things well get better when they ascend to heaven. No wonder the Times embraced Sharp in the service of its fictional characterization of the Egpytian protests as his insistence upon non-violence transforms a potentially immediate, radical, often violent revolutionary movement against the governments of US client states in North Africa and the Middle East into a long term, evolutionary one that is likely to preserve the prerogatives of capital, if it succeeds at all.

Clearly, the emphasis upon non-violent protest methods disseminated in Egypt by the International Center, as with the comical exaggeration about the importance of social media, is also about obscuring the class aspect of the Egyptian protests. There has been growing labor unrest in Egypt over the last decade as the clientelist policies of the regime began to be supplanted by neoliberal ones. While it would, of course, be an exaggeration to ascribe the success of the protests to the emerging labor movement in Egypt, it did, undoubtedly play a significant role, as explained by here and here by Joel Beinin. Labor protests in 2007 and 2008 against employers supported by Mubarak foreshadowed much more massive ones against the regime this year. By exaggerating the role of Sharp and social networking media, the Times, and other news agencies that did so as well, sought to persuade the American public that the protests were classless. Had Mubarak prevailed, it is likely that they would have been described in different, more ominous terms.

But I have digressed badly. I started this post with the intention of showing how Egyptians have responded to the claims of Sharp's importance to their protest movement. Here is a sample of some of their comments:

@3arabawy: I was happy all my life under Mubarak, but suddenly #genesharptaughtme I must rebel.

@Zjen1: #GeneSharpTaughtMe how to grow and eat garlic and breath in my enemies faces so they will faint.

@M_Alhalaby: #GeneSharpTaughtMe that washing eyes with Pepsi lessens the effects of tear gas.

@CVirus: #GeneSharpTaughtMe how to dodge bullets.

اي اتظاهر تضامنا مع قانون منع التظاهر@moneloky: #GeneSharpTaughtMe How to protest in support of the law that bans protesting

@prof_mostafa: #GeneSharpTaughtMe how to make a Facebook group

@alaa: #GeneSharpTaughtMe how to throw rocks at thugs, baricade myself behind burned out car hulks, dodge petrol bombs

Personally, I like these three best:

@deetaha: #GeneSharpTaughtMe that social networks is the only method to communicate, even when the Internet is down.

@nermin79: #GeneSharpTaughtMe that the west always wants to be sure that white men get credit for all the great things that happen

@ArabUprising: #GeneSharpTaughtMe that backward brown & black people need the permission of the white man to #revolt against his puppets

Apparently, the Egyptians have learned a lot from Gene Sharp, and fortunately, it is different than what the Times would have us believe.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Egypt, Eurocentrism, Neoliberalism, New York Times, Palestine

Good news in Yemen:

Defense Ministry Mohammad Nasser Aliis just gave a brief statement saying the army would defend Saleh against any coup against democracy.

There have been dozens of major defections today, including the most powerful military officer, who controls 60 percent of the army.

France's foreign ministry has said that Saleh's departure is is unavoidable, according to Al Jazeera. Washington is still sticking with its ally.

Meanwhile, in Bahrain, Secretary of State Clinton announces US support for the Saudi troops that have entered the country:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirmed here Saturday the US commitment to protect the security of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, accusing Iran of being a factor of instability in the region.

Iran pursues a private agenda to destabilize neighboring countries and undermine peace and stability in the Gulf region, Clinton said.

She made the remarks in a press conference at the Elysee Palace after a summit of world leaders on the international military action against the regime of Libyan leader Col Muammar Qaddafi.

It’s a priority for the US administration to work with partners in the Gulf region against the concern over the behavior of Iran, she said.

Commenting on the deployment of troops from the Peninsula Shield Force in the Kingdom of Bahrain in the wake of violent protests, Clinton said it was a sovereign right for Bahrain to seek help from GCC member states under the joint defense treaty they had signed.

Has no one told Clinton that she sounds eerily like the Soviet apparatchiks who justified the 1968 invasion of Czechoslavakia on the ground that the people there needed to be protected against a bourgeois counterrevolution? I am starting to worry that, while the Iranian nuclear research program has not ignited a conflict between the US and Iran, turmoil in Bahrain just might.

And, right on cue, Ethan Bronner of The New York Times writes an article empathizing with the plight of the Sunni elite:

When Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement began its demonstrations in Pearl Square last month, Atif Abdulmalik was supportive. An American-educated investment banker and a member of the Sunni Muslim elite, he favored a constitutional monarchy and increasing opportunities and support for the poorer Shiite majority.Atif Abdulmalik, an investment banker, was initially supportive of the protests, but then feared they would harm the economy.

But in the past week or two, the nature of the protest shifted — and so did any hope that demands for change would cross sectarian lines and unite Bahrainis in a cohesive democracy movement. The mainly Shiite demonstrators moved beyond Pearl Square, taking over areas leading to the financial and diplomatic districts of the capital. They closed off streets with makeshift roadblocks and shouted slogans calling for the death of the royal family.

Twenty-five percent of Bahrain’s G.D.P. comes from banks, Mr. Abdulmalik said as he sat in the soft Persian Gulf sunshine. I sympathize with many of the demands of the demonstrators. But no country would allow the takeover of its financial district. The economic future of the country was at stake. What happened this week, as sad as it is, is good.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that the Times considers the perspective of an American educated investment banker critical to understanding events in Bahrain. After all, it is physically located in Manhattan. Here we have an illustration of what As'ad Abukhalil stated in relation to Egypt, that the movement would, over time, become more and more class conscious with the passage of time.

While the US and Saudi Arabia act to polarize the political struggle along sectarian lines so as to make the Iranians the fall guy, the situation on the ground is one of increasing class conflict, with the the predominately Shia poor focusing their anger on the obscene wealth and power of the al-Khalida family. Clearly, there is a synergy between the sectarianism of the US and the Gulf States, and the emerging class consciousness on the streets. It is a sign of the desperation of the US and Saudi Arabia that they have no choice but to adopt a strategy for containing the protests that has the alarming consequence of bringing the class struggle to the fore.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Bahrain, Gulf States, Hillary Clinton, New York Times, Shia

UPDATE 3: Egyptian Chronicles is back up, with numerous new posts from Zeinobia. Meanwhile, Max Ajl has an excellent article about the origins of the protests at Jewbonics, and, as you might have guessed, they predate the use of social media. Here's an excerpt:

The January 25 protests that began the current stage of social revolt were organized by several groups, including the April 6 movement, a wide-based group with overwhelmingly young leadership that emerged to mobilize support for the April 2008 strikes at Mahalla al-Kubra, a textile manufacturing center in the Nile Delta. In Mahalla, 25,000 workers went on strike amidst deteriorating standards of living as the prices of basic foodstuffs careened upwards. The workers won their demands - their strike was the crest of a massive wave of labor unrest that has hit Egypt hard since 1998. Between 1998 and 2008, two million Egyptian workers participated in over 2,600 factory occupations. In the first five months of 2009, over 200 industrial actions took place, a trend that continued through 2010. Stanford historian Joel Beinin calls it the largest and most sustained social movement in Egypt since the campaign to oust the British occupiers following the end of World War II.

The success of this campaign catalyzed other independent labor activity, spurring the formation of Egypt's first independent union in over a half century - the Independent General Union of Real Estate Tax Authority Workers. Beinin adds that the labor movements, alongside those organizing opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, inculcated a culture of protest in Egypt. This has contributed to the formation of a consciousness of citizenship and rights in a far more profound manner than anything that has happened in the arenas of party politics or nongovernmental organization work.

UPDATE 2: Journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy has posted some striking photographs of the last couple of days of protests at 3arabawy. Hopefully, he won't be upset that I posted one of them here to induce you to go over to his blog to look at them:

Some are in black and white and others are in color. I selected this one because of the feeling of immediacy and the bond with previous generations of protest created by the absence of color. A similar dynamism permeates all of his photographs, a sensation of movement that radiates throughout the frame. At the risk of offending him, I suspect that many of his images will become iconic.

UPDATE 1: Robert Fisk does have a tendency to embellish, but I thought that I would pass along what he says that he experienced last Friday in Tahrir Square:

The key that I’ve seen over the last few days has been the way in which the army on Friday was told by Mubarak to clear the square, and the individual tank officers refused. I actually saw them tearing off their tank helmets, where they were receiving orders on their own military net, and using their mobile phones. And in many cases, they were phoning home, because they come from military families. They wanted to know from their fathers what they should do. And, of course, they were told, You must not shoot on your fellow citizens. And that, I think, was the actual moment when the Mubarak regime broke. Or if we look back historically, that’s what we’ll believe. So I think it is broken, it’s finished, whatever Mr. Mubarak may dream about in his pantomime world. And I think that was a very critical moment.

So, as one of my old gambling friends used to say years ago, use your own best judgment as to whether you consider it credible.

INITIAL POST: Work and family obligations impaired my ability to post today as I have done in previous days, and, in any event, Rojo has filled in admirably. It appears, however, that Mubarak has failed to present himself credibly enough to remain as the public face of the orderly transition for Egypt sought by the Obama adminstration. Interviewed by Christiane Amanpour, he insisted that Egypt would descend into chaos if he resigned, but even the most inattentive American knows that the violence in Cairo has been instigated by his police and security services.

For, in this instance, it was necessary for Mubarak to persuade Americans, not Egyptians, that he can legitimately administer the reform of the country's political system. He needed to conduct himself in such a way so as to facilitate the Obama administration's deceptive presentation of counter-revolution as a liberatory transformation of Egyptian social life. State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley sought to preserve Mubarak's viability when he finally begrudgingly conceded today that supporters of Mubarak were responsible for the violence but that it was unclear how far up the chain it went. Reminiscent of the Bush administration's initial efforts to insulate Deng Xiaoping from the attack upon Tianamen Square in 1989, until he appeared on Chinese television and embraced it, Crowley was seeking to protect not only Mubarak, but his possible successor as well, our Pinochet in waiting, Vice President Omar Suleiman.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played a supporting role in this farce when she requested that Suleiman conduct an investigation of those responsible for the violence. And, Vice President Joe Biden, exiled to the golf course for several days after pronouncing that Mubarak is not a dictator, entered stage right briefly to call Suleiman to discuss the implementation of reform measures. Apparently, if one is to believe the press release, he did so with a rhetorical polish that one rarely encounters when Biden speaks in real life, as he purportedly urged that credible inclusive negotiations begin immediately in order for Egypt to transition to a democratic government that addresses the aspirations of the Egyptian people. Perhaps, someone wrote it out for him to read over the phone as he talked to Suleiman.

Of course, the more serious point is that, even as the administration has strove mightily to characterize Mubarak as something he clearly isn't, someone responsible enough to continue to govern Egypt, it has already lined up an alternative in Suleiman, and worked to legitimize him through reports of public communications with Clinton and Biden. So, we should not be shocked to discover, as already posted by Rojo, that the Obama administration may have finally decided to cut the cord with Mubarak in light of his mediocre performance with Amanpour:

The Obama administration is discussing with Egyptian officials a proposal for President Hosni Mubarak to resign immediately, turning over power to a transitional government headed by Vice President Omar Suleiman with the support of the Egyptian military, administration officials and Arab diplomats said Thursday.

Even though Mr. Mubarak has balked, so far, at leaving now, officials from both governments are continuing talks about a plan in which Mr. Suleiman, backed by Lt. Gen. Sami Enan, chief of the Egyptian armed forces, and Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the defense minister, would immediately begin a process of constitutional reform.

Yes, yes, I know, the story could be the sort of disinformation for which the New York Times is notorious. But it does have a surface plausibility. The groundwork has been laid for the succession, and the Times has been kindly enough to identify the participants in the junta that will rule Egypt after Mubarak's departure. Apparently, the Times believes, as Marx said of the peasantry during the French revolution of the 1848, that the Egyptian people cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Naturally, the US will decide those who will be allowed to do so.

Labels: American Empire, Egypt, Neoliberalism, New York Times

Oh, you say that it doesn't exist? That I have become so paranoid that I see imperialist demons everywhere? Well, consider this review of the recently released film, Outside the Law, by Stephen Holden in the New York Times:

Some might describe Outside the Law as a historical revenge film.

The 138-minute movie begins with an emotional sledgehammer: an inflammatory prologue set in 1925 in which the French Code de l’Indigénat is applied to a poor Algerian family, summarily evicted from its ancestral home to make room for French colonists. This land was my father’s! I was born here! cries the patriarch (Ahmed Benaissa), who can produce no documents to prove that the land is his.

The story leaps ahead 20 years for an even more infuriating scene. As France is celebrating V-E Day and the surrender of Nazi Germany, Algerian nationalist marchers in Sétif are massacred by French soldiers stationed on balconies and rooftops, who open fire without warning. These scenes of French colonial oppression are portrayed without any background or shading.

Now, I haven't seen the film, so I have no idea whether it is worth seeing or not, but isn't it rather odd that Holden is infuriated by the visual representation of an event, the massacre of nationalist Algerians in 1945, that no one questions? Isn't it even more peculiar that Holden is infuriated by it because the filmmakers show it without background or shading? I mean, what would that entail? How does one provide background or shading to a massacre?

Of course, we have a pretty good idea what Holden really means. He is implying that the French troops may well have had good reason to fire indiscriminately upon a group of marchers, because, after all, as we all know, they had probably been fired upon, like the Pentagon has asserted, without any evidence, about the US troops who fired upon Iraqi protesters in Fallujah in late April 2003. It is essential to understand that Europeans, Americans, and Israelis are justified in responding to any act of violence by Muslims, or merely the fear of it, with excessive force against the populace, assuming one believes that there was any such violence, which is a huge, frequently unwarranted assumption. Any film that fails to acknowledge the legitimacy of this perspective, at least by having it related sympathetically through some of its characters, as part of a range of subjective experiences, is artistically and ideologically suspect.

In effect, Holden has culturally internalized the values of the war on terror and begun to retrospectively apply them to past episodes of imperialism. One wonders what he would say about Spielberg's film Amistad if he watched it today. Would he now say that the slaves' attack upon the crew of the ship transporting them to a US plantation is deficient because it has been insufficiently contextualized? Beyond that, there is Holden's covert sympathy for the Israeli settlement project in Palestine, as related in his description of the eviction of a poor Algerian family in 1925 as inflammatory. It is doubtful that Holden is suggesting that there was no French policy of property and land seizures. He can't be that ill-informed.

Instead, Holden objects to the exposure of the human consequences of the eviction, because it may cause the audience to question the legitimacy of French colonialism in Algeria, and analogize it to Israeli seizures of land in Palestine. His lack of any empathy with the victims is remarkable, but, then, they are Muslims. Such ruthlessness is better left concealed away from the general public, contained within the antiseptic debates of academics. Note his emphasis upon the father's failure to produce any documents to establish proof of ownership of the home. Here, we have a powerful echo of the notion that if indigenous people don't have any legally recorded private property interest in their land and home, it is perfectly legitimate for others to seize them and establish title, which must thereafter be respected. Combined with the belief that indigenous peoples are grossly economically inefficient, it justifies both the French seizure of the home as dramatized in the film, and Jewish seizures of Palestinian land. Not surprisingly, he characterizes the father's response as hysterical, bringing to mind a recent report in the occupied territories wherein the Israelis claimed that a young child's distraught response to being separated from his father was staged. Such human emotions are solely within the province of the colonizers, apparently.

Indeed, if one is compelled to attempt to summarize Holden's objection to Outside the Law, it is the insistence of the filmmakers upon melodramatically humanizing the lives of the people who resisted the French colonization of Algeria. He finds it aggravating, the cinematic equivalent of someone dragging their nails across a chalkboard. Post 9/11, I have had a sense that there has been a degradation of US culture and cultural criticism as it relates to things like art, literature and film. The free ranging curiosity that was such a prominent feature of the neoliberal 1990s is no longer so much in evidence. Instead, there has been a move towards only accepting works that criticize the US relationship with the world within limited boundaries, and maligning those that do not, as Michiko Kakutani did in her hatchet job on John Le Carre's 2004 novel, Absolute Friends. In the first sentence of the review, she described it as ham handed and didactic. I guess that's what happens if you write a novel, as Le Carre did, that finds redeeming qualities in the Berlin New Left of the 1960s and presents a US intelligence operation centered around a manufactured terrorist incident as plausible. Serving in the role of cultural gatekeepers, people like Holden and Kakutani try to bury works that insist upon being so impolite as to hold a mirror to the war on terror with the condescension of those who purport to appreciate the arts: inflammatory, infuriating, ham handed, didactic. But we know better.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Culture, American Empire, Israel, New York Times, Palestine

UPDATE: It is all a matter of priorities: The Pentagon said it was conducting an investigation into whether information in the logs placed coalition forces or their informants in danger.

INITIAL POST: Click on the link for a useful interactive feature that the Guardian has provided to enable readers to found some of the more interesting reports, such as, for example, this one. Others can be found in an article summarizing civilian casualties inflicted by CIA forces that the US refuses to acknowledge to this day. Some of these incidents, such as the one contained in this article, were already known to many, including readers of this blog, but the release of the sanitized report itself illustrates how many casualties have been concealed. The primary benefit of the release of these reports by wikileaks is that it will tend to confirm what many critics have said about the war in Afghanistan.

Curiously, the release of bureaucratic reports seems to instill a credibililty in terms of the description of past events that didn't previously exist. It is also very damaging to the Obama administration, as it proceeded to order the escalation of the war with full knowledge of what was contained in them. One suspects that the most immediate consequence of the release will be increased pressure within Germany to remove troops from Afghanistan, as the deployment has been very contentious there.

Not surprisingly, the Guardian has covered the extent of civilian casualties extensively, while another recipient of the reports, the New York Times, has emphasized national security concerns, such as the possible association of the Inter-Services Intelligence with Taliban resistance, an article highlighted at the top of its webpage dedicated to the logs. Afghan civilians don't count for much in relation to the Times perspective on the conflict, only becoming a problem when they undermine support for the occupation.

Labels: "Support the Troops", Afghanistan, American Empire, Death Squads, Germany, New York Times

As advocated by David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

Democrats have more of a strategy — raising taxes on the rich and using health reform to reduce the growth of Medicare spending — but it is not nearly sufficient.

What would be? A plan that included a little bit of everything, and then some: say, raising the retirement age; reducing the huge deductions for mortgage interest and health insurance; closing corporate tax loopholes; cutting pensions of some public workers, as Republican governors favor; scrapping wasteful military and space projects; doing more to hold down Medicare spending growth.

Much of this may be unpleasant. But by no means will it doom us to reduced living standards or even slow economic growth. We can still afford to spend more on Medicare — even more per person — than we do today, and more on education, the military and other areas, too. We just can’t afford the unrealistic promises that the government has made. We need to make choices.

But, there is something missing here, what is it? Something has been, as they are now saying in the UK about the National Health Service, ring-fenced, meaning that it will relieved from the necessity of budget cuts. Let's look carefully, ah, yes, here's a clue: scrapping wasteful military and space projects.

Figured it out yet? Yes, you've got it. The purported war on terror, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond. Trillions more for that, with only wasteful projects cut, while trillions are taken away from public sector workers, Medicare, middle income homeowners and pensioners. In the UK, a Tory-Liberal Democrat government ring-fences health care, whereas in the US, we ring-fence the military-industrial complex.

After all, someone has to pay for those drone strikes, and it can't be the people who profit most from them. For Leonhardt, unlike the effort to assist in the provision of the necessities of daily living, US militarism is not one of the unrealistic promises that government has made. Left unanswered is the extent to which consumer demand can survive such austerity and prevent a even greater decline in economic activity and government revenue.

Labels: "War on Terror", Neoliberalism, New York Times, Second Reagan Revolution, Sub-Proletarianization of America

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

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

I perused the Internet sites of the The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian today. None of them had any new articles related to the coup in Honduras and the effort of the deposed President, Manuel Zelaya, to return to the country to serve out his term. After meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week, and then attending a brief, purported mediation conducted by former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, Zelaya is now encountering American indifference.

Some of us anticipated these developments. From the beginning, the US reaction to the coup has been one of wanting to appear as if it supported the return of Zelaya, the elected President, while doing as little as possible to make it possible. Confirmation of this strategy emerged last Friday, when, as noted here, The New York Times, in a headline for an article about the failed mediation effort, described Zelaya, along with the person installed as President by coup, Robert Micheletti, as rivals:

Prospects for a quick resolution of the political crisis in Honduras were thrown into doubt Thursday, as the two men claiming their nation’s presidency left negotiations only hours after they had begun and showed no signs of budging from the positions that have divided the country.

At the risk of coming across as a conspiracy theorist, the erasure of the coup from public consciousness by the Times was telegraphed by the State Department a couple of days before:

While Secretary Clinton reiterated the United States’ condemnation of Mr. Zelaya’s ouster, she stopped short of calling for his reinstatement, a departure from statements by President Obama earlier Tuesday and from the position taken by much of the international community.

When asked whether the United States viewed Mr. Zelaya’s return as central to the restoration of democratic order, she said that she did not want to “prejudge” the talks before they began.

“There are many different issues that will have to be discussed and resolved,” Mrs. Clinton said. “But I think it’s fair to let the parties themselves, with President Arias’s assistance, sort out all of these issues.”

Perhaps, because they perceive no alternative, some supporters of Zelaya, and the social movements associated with him, continue to hope that the Obama administration will take action to bring about his return. On Friday, I had the opportunity to interview Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program for the Center for International Policy, about the situation in Honduras. She, quite correctly, insisted that the condemnations of the coup by the Obama administration were a departure from previous Bush administration practice, and held out the hope that the US would follow through with cuts in military and economic assistance.

There is no question that Carlsen is far more knowledgeable about the people and institutions of the Americas than myself, and I recommend her blog highly, but, even so, I am not optimistic. Indeed, she revealed why the US is so ambivalent about the return of Zelaya later during the course of the interview. She observed that the social movements of Honduras, composed of peasants, indigenous people and labor activists, are insistent that the return of Zelaya must take place without preconditions, especially as it relates to efforts to amend the Honduran constitution. In their view, the constitution, implemented by the military in 1982, is far too favorable to the oligarchy.

As explained by Carlos Reyes, a Honduran labor leader and National Coordinator of the Popular Resistance:

When the current Constitution was drafted in 1981, both the country and the region were under a low intensity war sponsored by the United States and its ambassador to Honduras, John Dimitri Negroponte.

Honduras was officially governed by civilians, but it was the military that effectively ruled the country, under the command of General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, a murderer who ordered the death of countless civilians. In that context, the business sector, following instructions from the United States embassy, set out to achieve two goals: the sale of Honduras, and the reduction of the State with the purported aim of eliminating poverty. These two principles permeated the Constitution, with the ensuing effect of advancing a neoliberal agenda and everything that such a model entails.

In 2005, the country reached its most critical moment with the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA), which unleashed an intense wave of protests led by our social movements. The DR-CAFTA delivered a final blow to the Constitution, and we saw that it was time to form a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the Constitution and recover our sovereignty.

Carlsen is no doubt correct, and it is precisely for this reason that the US will obstruct the return of Zelaya as anything other than a figurehead to serve out the remaining months of his term. If Zelaya resists, the US is willing to give the coup leaders all the time they need to shatter the power of the social movements that so threaten its economic interests there. Expect any future aid cutoffs to be carefully calibrated so as to enable the dictatorship to stay in power until elections that the US can then embrace.

As Keegan Keegan observed last Friday:

The ball is back in the court of Zelaya and the social movements. Do they wait for the next opportunity to discuss the situation or for the international community to take more concrete measures or do they reject dialogue as a strategy of the oligarchy to maintain power for long enough to shift public and international opinion?

My opinion is that the need for concrete actions is immediate and that every day which passes under this dictatorship is a day lost by the Honduran people. The advances of the ALBA (Allianza Bolivariana Para Los Pueblos de America Latina, Bolivarian Alliance for the peoples of America) and its many programs have been stolen from the Honduran people. President Zelaya decided to join the ALBA after the oligarchy refused to support his plans to create a more just Honduras. Today it was announced that in the face of the aggressions of the coup government around 80 of the 120 Cuban staff providing services to the Honduran people have left the country.

Programs which have been delivered over the last year as a result of the ALBA which are no under threat include "Yes I can" (Yo si puedo) the Cuban literacy program which has helped more than 150 000 Honduran's become literate, support for food sovereignty and agricultural development which includes 100 tractors provided by Venezuela, 70 scholarships for Honduran students to go and study in Venezuelan Universities, Mission Miracle (mission Milagro) which has restored the site of around 5000 in Venezuela with the help of Cuban medical staff. Cuba has also supported, the construction and staffing of medical clinics in regions previously denied the right to health services and sports coaches. These are the actions that the Honduran oligarchy is rebelling against. The possibility of an educated population which is guaranteed its basic rights rather than having them determined by their place in the capitalist hierarchy is not acceptable to those who want low wages and a controllable society desperate to buy.

In the next two or three days I think we will know the path of the struggle in Honduras. Either the social movements and Zelaya will take strong action and risk the violence that could be brought upon them by the oligarchy or they will continue with passive actions and the process of a drawn out "dialogue" which will leave the oligarchy in power leading up to the November elections. Neither path is ideal nor do they have definite outcomes but a choice will soon be made.

Yes, the two or three days mentioned by Keegan have just passed, but, generally, he is correct, a decision must be made by the social movements, or one will be forced upon them. . . every day which passes under this dictatorship is a day lost by the Honduran people. Unfortunately, the US, and the Obama administration, knows this better than anyone. Just because the Honduran people find themselves struggling in darkness does not eliminate the possibility of being successful.

UPDATE:

11th Communiqué of the National Front Against the Coup d'etat

The National Front Against the Coup d'etat in Honduras made up of the different organized expressions in the country united in the face of the situation provoked by the coup d'etat, communicates:

1. We energetically condemn the killing of Roger Bados, militant of the Democratic Unity Party and member of the Popular Block. This happened in his house and his house-mate and sister were also wounded. Roger was an active member of the Honduran popular movement and actively participated in the actions against the coup d'etat. We demand punishment for those who thought up and carried out this crime.

2. We reiterate our demand to unconditionally retore the institutional order in the country, at the same time we re-affirm our willingness to continue with a process that leads us to the installation of a National Constitutional Assembly that allows the re-founding of Honduras.

3. With respect to the mediation meetings taking place in San José Costa Rica, we denounce that it has been clearly demonstrated that all of this has been a delay tactic to keep President Zelaya outside of the country. It is not true that the discussions have stayed open, as when the Commission of the Government of President Zelaya asked for this mediation to take place in Honduras they did not respond and the Commission of the coup-makers clearly said that they would not allow this process to take place in our territory.

4. We repudiate the persecution and capture of the reporters from the Telesur Network. Sunday morning they were detained by the national police, taken out of the hotel they were staying at, taken to the embassy of their country, all this under the argument that they don't have anything more to do in. We condemn the repression against the media that tells what is really happening in the country.

5. We make it known amongst the rest of the Honduran population that during the radio programs of the Center for Women's Studies and the Center for Women's Rights transmitted by Radio Cadena Voces, on Saturday July 11th, they cut the signal at the hour they broadcast. In these programs they read news about the actions taking place against the coup d'etat.

6. We communicate that last weekend protests and take-overs against the coup-detat took place all over the country. In San Pedro Sula, Santa Barbará, Sava, Sonaguera, Trujillo, Tocoa, Copan and Tegucigalpa, where on Saturday there was a political cultural act in the place where the Armed Forces killed the young man Isis Obed Murillo. The tribute included protest music from well-known artists, messages from different people, amongst whom were family members of the young man, and there was also a Garífuna ceremony.

7. We put out a call to the whole population for us to continue the struggle and demand the restitution of individual guarantees, for now they have suspended the curfew but they continue violating the rights of the population by keeping our rights suspended. The intimidation of people with militarization of offices, organizations, highways and other places also affects all people.

One can only respect the bravery of the Hondurans and the clarity of their insight, as some American progressives run to catch up with them.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Honduras, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism, New York Times

I usually leave this sort of thing to Eli Stephens over at Left I on the News, but I couldn't resist this one, a New York Times on-line description of an article written by Ginger Thompson:

Honduran RIVALS Leave Negotiations Without Meeting Face to Face
By GINGER THOMPSON

The two men claiming the presidency gathered to begin talks aimed at resolving the political standoff that has divided their country.

Wouldn't want to be too explicit about what actually happened, now, would we? Haven't had time to read the article itself. It will be interesting to see if it surpasses my low expectations.

Labels: American Empire, Honduras, Mainstream Media, New York Times

Here at American Leftist, it is not necessary to restrict film comment to current releases. There is, as we all know, the world of DVD, and almost everything, unless it is too avant garde, obscure or enmeshed in copyright disputes, is readily available, even the works of foreign directors that received limited to non-existent distribution in the US when their films were first released.

So, today, let's examine a great, representative film of one my favorite directors, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In 1971, he, the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, personally met Douglas Sirk. Sirk was the master of Hollywood melodrama in the 1950s, but his mastery was only then being belatedly recognized, years after he had retired to Switzerland.

Some say that Fassbinder discovered the films of Sirk as a result of this meeting, but that is probably an exaggeration. After all, he spent much of his childhood in the movie theatre while his mother worked at home, and he must have seen dubbed versions of Sirk's films. Accordingly, it is probably more accurate to say that Fassbinder remembered movies that he had forgotten, movies that made little impression upon him in his youth, but now reemerged as revelations.

In any event, it was a fortuitous encounter. Sirk's films, as acknowledged by Fassbinder in many public writings and statements, provided him with a cinematic language to address themes about the way people relate to one another while being subjected to societal pressures to conform. Fassbinder remade one of these films, All That Heaven Allows as Fear Eats the Soul.

All That Heaven Allows has been described as a women's weepie in the argot of time, a May-September romance, starring Rock Hudson as a bohemian young landscaper who falls in love with a widowed socialite played by Jane Wyatt. Sirk took a story that he found implausible and transformed it into a withering condemnation of provincial, small town American life. No wonder it took film critics 15 years to appreciate it.

Fassbinder explosively transformed All That Heaven Allows into an intimate, emotional story about a romance between Ali, a young Morrocan guest worker, a Gastarbaiter, and Emmi, a widowed 60 year old German cleaning woman. Both Ali and Emmi are lonely, Ali because he is isolated and ostracized, even from other guest workers, and Emmi because she is no longer considered relevant or important in the economically successful Germany of the 1970s. Her adult children make periodic, perfunctory visits.

Such a simple story opens the door for Fassbinder to interweave many of his enduring themes into a melodramatic story that draws the audience into it. His affection for marginalized and abandoned people in society, the extent to which pressure to conform separates people from happiness, his belief, bordering on anarchism, that people, in the goodness of their hearts, know what is best for themselves and others, but lack the confidence to act upon it, and conversely, the extent to which people are capable of inflicting the most terrible cruelties upon one another in the most subtle ways.

In a Fassbinder film, scenes of violence, infrequent as they are (and, I can't recall any in Fear Eats the Soul, unless you count the smashing of a TV), are moments of rest between these frightening instances of what he called everyday fascism. One heartrending example of such behaviour takes place after Emmi has been replaced as a cleaning woman by a young immigrant gypsy, or, possibly, a Polish woman, and we see this young woman timidly sitting alone to eat her lunch on the steps of a winding staircase, while the older German cleaning women gossip amongst one another farther down. The film's ending is a statement of profound sadness about the ephemerality of love, and how, upon attainment, it can be destroyed by forces beyond our control.

Fassbinder used this film, as he did others, to display his respect for what his contemporaries disparagingly called My Father's Kino, the German film and television productions of the 1950s and early 1960s, an endeavor that struggled in the shadows of the glamour of Hollywood and the excitement of the French New Wave, by casting the popular Brigitte Mira as Emmi. He engaged pop culture; he did not abandon it. Ali is performed with admirable understatement by El Hedi ben Salem, who was his partner at the time.

Fassbinder also updated Sirk's visual approach for contemporary audiences. Despite being very low budget, there is an opulence, a skilled use of color and location set design that frames the emotional states of the characters. He integrated the Sirkean studio visual style into the world outside, as demonstrated by the brief clip from Fear Eats the Soul at the beginning of this entry. Note the staged seating of Ali and Emmi within a sea of empty yellow chairs at the outdoor restaurant, which, along with the reaction of the restaurant staff, underscores themes of ostracism and conformity.

Labels: Anarchism, Film Notes, New York Times, Racism

Apparently, to be a member, you don't have to have an official position with the campaign. Just like you don't need to be a member of the Bush Administration to be a neoconservative. I guess it's too much to expect reporters at the New York Times to accept the limitations of journalism.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Neoconservatives, New York Times

Given the past record of US abroad and the insistence upon preserving global neoliberal economic policies, the latter is the more probable choice in response to growing hunger and unrest:

Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing.

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Indeed, as it roils developing nations, the spike in commodity prices — the biggest since the Nixon administration — has pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies like China’s to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.

Not surprisingly, the reporter, Marc Lacey, avoids interviewing indigenous voices, replacing them with more professional, internationally rspected voices, like Jeffrey Sachs.

If Lacey had done so, he might have discovered that the people in these countries perceive very different reasons for their predicament: the evisceration of public health, education and social services, including subsidies for food, in order to satisfy the demands of finance capital, the inability of their economies to generate employment much beyond the informal sector, or to put it more inelegantly, the street, despite these concessions, the willingness of finance capital and international institutions to permit pliable local elites to amass great fortunes by looting the country's resources, and the willingness of the US, as it has specifically done it Haiti, to promote violent unrest.

But no. As Lacey implies in relation to Haiti, the problem is that these countries haven't become investment friendly enough. Curiously, he doesn't explain what measurs that Haiti, and other countries like it, might undertake to do so. So, again, the question: Feed them or shoot them? The acceleration of events is pressing the question with greater and greater urgency.

Labels: American Empire, Food Crisis, Haiti, Neoliberalism, New York Times, Political Violence

UPDATE: Tightening lending standards and declining credit demand almost all across the board, according to the Federal Reserve's July Senior Loan Officer Survey (Hat tip to Calculated Risk). No need to worry, though, I'm sure that employment, wage growth and investment opportunities are always enhanced by reduced demand and access to credit. Maybe, the Times can reassure us by running an article on this subject tomorrow.

INITIAL POST: Click on this link. Does anyone believe that the substance of the article is remotely plausible? If so, why? I'm willing to be educated.

Labels: Housing Bubble, Mainstream Media, New York Times

. . . . that the Iraqi oil law is about more than what you described as national reconciliation?

The oil law, which would set up a system for managing and developing Iraq’s oil resources and would have a companion revenue-sharing law that would apportion oil income among the various groups, had been considered the most likely to be passed before the September report to Congress. But by the time the Iraqis return to Parliament in September, it is highly unlikely that they could meet the midmonth deadline in the United States.

“The fact is that the political blocs haven’t reached an agreement,” said Ayad al-Samarrai, one of the leaders of Tawafiq, the largest of the Sunni Arab blocs in Parliament. “What the government is doing can be described as dodging — the governmental bodies have not agreed among themselves,” he said, referring to differences within the Iraqi leadership, which includes Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, about aspects of the law.

However, there is a growing sense among a number of Iraqi leaders that all of the measures that constitute reconciliation should be handled as a package so that tradeoffs can be made among the political groups. “The Kurds want to approve a certain group of laws, like a national revenue-sharing law” and other provisions, said Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite member of Parliament.

The Sunni Arabs are also interested in addressing the laws as a package, Mr. Samarrai said. “Today we made a suggestion to invite the political blocs to discuss this with the presidency,” he said. They would discuss several laws as a political package and make a deal on all of them once. They include the oil and revenue sharing measure, a new “de-Baathification” law widening access to government jobs to members of Saddam Hussein’s former ruling party, which was dominated by Sunni Arabs, and a law scheduling provincial elections to choose representative governments so that Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds would be equitably represented.

Rather strangely, your article makes no reference to the fact that the law mandates the denationalization of the industry and the profitable, virtually unregulated, participation of transnationals through production sharing agreements. Nor does the article make mention of the opposition of the unions that represent the people who work within it.

Another rather peculiar omission, don't you think? Neglecting to mention the opinion of the people that actually work in the industry? Do you honestly not know these things, or did the editor back in New York slash it out? After all, Bill can be so prissy about these things.

I also couldn't understand why the Shia, the Sunnis and the Kurds are having such difficulty reaching an agreement if the bill is designed to promote reconciliation. Anyway, as you can tell, I am having a lot of difficulty making sense of out of your story. I know that you have dinner plans with Judith and Michael at eight, so maybe you can call or e-mail after you get home, and provide some much needed insight.

Labels: Judith Miller, Mainstream Media, Neoliberalism, New York Times, Occupation of Iraq

Going through some of the links on the far left side of the page, and discovered an interesting post over at K Marx The Spot. Is there anything more embarassing than when a New York Times columnist speculates about the culture of people residing outside of Manhatten? In this instance, David Brooks believes that, after a courageous foray into the world of pop music, he has discovered a new phenomenon with significant social implications, women singing about failed relationships and no good men. Apparently, Brooks has never heard of The Supremes, Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette, much less Tanya Tucker. Do people really pay extra to access his column through TimesSelect?

Labels: American Culture, Mainstream Media, New York Times

Judith Miller was in court yesterday and she wasn't especially helpful to her old friend Scooter. But you can read about Libby's celebrity trial over at firedoglake where the liberal posters and commenters have spent the better part of almost two years fostering an almost cult-like belief that Fitzgerald's investigation will bring down this administration.

Of course, we shouldn't be that surprised. Liberals have possessed an exaggerated sense of the power of the judiciary ever since the admirable, but aberrant, achievements of the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Realists with a sense of legal history understand that the current acquiescence of the courts to the power of the Executive, along with a disinterest in anything other than administrative efficiency and the protection of corporate interests, is usually the norm.

With the neoconservatives successfully sending more troops to Iraq as the Democrats struggle to pass a non-binding resolution of opposition, the Libby trial has become little more than a sideshow, a tragicomedy about the only man in the entire Bush administration subject to the rule of law, a man facing prison for leaking the name of an intelligence operative, even as those around him enrich their themselves and their friends through war profiteering.

If convicted, one can imagine the classic stereotypical jail scene, as Libby's cellmate hears his story, and incredulously says, You're in here for WHAT? In the film version, Libby would have been played by someone like Ben Stiller, Tony Randall, Jack Lemmon or, perhaps, if pure farce, most appropriately by Don Knotts, with the director being . . . who else but Billy Wilder could have brought out all the necessary shades of black comedy?

Miller performed her obligatory cameo role, but she has made a much more important appearance in print. In this instance, stealth was essential, and, hence, her article appeared under the by-line of New York Times reporters James Glanz and Mark Mazetti. Because, after all, there is yet another war to promote, a need for more yellow journalism to help make it happen, and Miller and the Times, as always, have answered the call, but even they recognize that the Miller brand name isn't too credible anymore.

Typical of a classic Miller article about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction in 2002, the lead paragraphs grab us by the throat, while leaving the door open to subsequent repudiation, if necessary:

Investigators say they believe that attackers who used American-style uniforms and weapons to infiltrate a secure compound and kill five American soldiers in Karbala on Jan. 20 may have been trained and financed by Iranian agents, according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable about the inquiry.

The officials said the sophistication of the attack astonished investigators, who doubt that Iraqis could have carried it out on their own — one reason a connection to Iran is being closely examined. Officials cautioned that no firm conclusions had been drawn and did not reveal any direct evidence of a connection.

This is skilled propaganda, comparable to Miller at her best. For example, note the reference to the lack of any direct evidence, implying that there is indirect evidence.

After whetting our appetite, Miller then directs us through a tedious maze of conjecture, hoping that the accumulation of impressionistic detail will persuade us that there just must be an Iranian connection, with the brilliant insight being, well, of course. we all know that the Iraqis are too stupid to pull off the Karbala killings themselves, without outside assistance (entirely plausible to the reader, whether discerning or not, as Iraqis are also too stupid to govern themselves without the presence of over 140,000 US troops). This is Miller at ease with the medium, effortlessly appealing, quite effectively, to the bias of the reader, while concealing her conformity to the administration line.

Finally, at the end, there is the payoff:

Two American officials in Washington confirmed that American military investigators were looking into the possibility of Iranian involvement in the Karbala attack. One of those officials said the working assumption by the investigators was that the operation had been carried out by a splinter group of the Mahdi Army.

The second official said the operation could be seen as retribution for three recent American raids in which Iranians suspected of carrying out attacks on American and Iraqi forces were detained. On Sunday, the Iranian ambassador to Iraq conceded that two Iranians detained in Baghdad last month were security officials, but said that they were making legitimate contacts with Iraqi government officials.

Indeed, we should not be embarassed to say that, when we have the opportunity to read an article by Judith Miller, we are in the presence of a master, someone who has sharpened their skills over years of painstaking sacrifice in order to discover the essential nuances of their craft. Sadly, it appears that she must now be contented with seeing her articles reach a wider audience by having them attributed to others. Someday, she will again receive the recognition that she rightly deserves.

Labels: firedoglake, Lewis Libby, Mainstream Media, Neoconservatives, New York Times, War with Iran

After all that embarrassment, after all those legal fees, after all that internal turmoil, you'd think that the New York Times would have learned its lesson. You'd think that it finally understood that it would have to repudiate Judith Miller's stenography, her willingness to exploit the prestige of the Times for the benefit of her neo-conservative friends and her abrasive self-righteousness in order to preserve its remaining credibility. And, most importantly, you'd think that the Times recognized that it must never, never again cloak disinformation in the guise of journalism in order to assist our leaders in their efforts to lead the country into war.

All quite reasonable assumptions, and all of them quite wrong. As with the war with Iraq, the Times has reported for duty. On Wednesday, readers stumbled upon a story with the following headline:

Atomic Agency Sees Possible Link of Military to Iran Nuclear Work

Channelling Miller, no doubt in the early morning hours, reporters Elaine Scolino and William J. Broad publish a story rife with sinuendo, but sparse on identifiable, attributable sources. Sinuendo is the technique of encouraging people to believe that something is true in the absence of evidence, while avoiding exposure for defamation, with the most skilled practicioners of the art employed by tabloids. In this instance, Scolino and Broad have the objective of persuading readers, with whatever remains of the Times prestige, that Iran does, in fact, have a program for developing nuclear weapons.

Operative terms common to the use of sinuendo have been highlighted:

The International Atomic Energy Agency says it has evidence that suggests links between Iran's ostensibly peaceful nuclear program and its military work on high explosives and missiles, according to a report from the agency that was released to member countries on Tuesday.

The four-page report, which officials say was based at least in part on intelligence provided by the United States, refers to a secretive Iranian entity called the Green Salt Project, which worked on uranium processing, high explosives and a missile warhead design.

The combination suggests a "military-nuclear dimension," the report said, that if true would undercut Iran's claims that its nuclear program is solely aimed at producing electrical power.

Upon close reading, there isn't much there, is there? ". . . evidence that suggests links . . . combination suggests a "military-nuclear dimension" . . . that if true would undermine Iran's claims . . ." Say, what? It took me about 2 or 3 minutes to stop my head from spinning like Max Headroom after encountering these passages.

And, surprise, surprise, "officials" say that the report was ". . based at least in part on intelligence provided by the United States . . . " But, only "in part", of course, because it was essential that Scolino and Broad imply that the US information, which might raise suspicions among the well-informed in light of the Iraqi WMD debacle and the Niger forgery, be supplemented or corroborated by other, more presumably reliable sources.

Naturally, there's more:

More broadly, the report states that the country has not been fully cooperative on all of the outstanding nuclear issues that the agency has questioned for years, and that formed the basis of a resolution by the agency's board last fall that Iran was not complying with its international obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The Green Salt Project derives its name from uranium tetrafluoride, also known as Green Salt, which is an intermediate product in the conversion of uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride — a toxic gas that can undergo enrichment or purification into fuel for nuclear reactors or bombs.

The report suggests that the fuel project, the high explosives tests and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle "appear to have administrative interconnections."

It would seem to be the first time the agency has publicly suggested that the fuel production — which Iran has said is purely for civilian purposes — was linked to its military programs.

My personal favorite here is the combined use of suggest and appear in the same sentence: ". . The report suggests that the fuel project, the high explosives tests and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle "appear to have administrative interconnections." Can someone explain what this actually means? Indeed, the pervasive invocation of the word "suggest" or "suggests", well, it "suggests" that reporters at the Times are badly in need of a thesaurus.

Beyond close textual analysis, it is also essential to understand the means by which the IAEA report itself provides subconscious credibility to such amorphous information, inducing the reader to leap the numerous high hurdles of "suggest" and "appear" liberally sprinkled throughout the article, so as to believe that Iran must have a nuclear weapons program. Or, at least, legitimize the claims of the Bush administration to this effect:

While the Bush administration has long argued that Iran was using its civilian program to hide ambitions to build a nuclear weapon, the agency has always steered clear of that accusation. With the report, it has for the first time provided evidence directly suggesting that at least some of Iran's activities point to a military project.

Wow! ". . evidence directly suggesting . . " They must teach this vocabulary only in advanced courses in the most highly regarded journalism schools. I will leave it to commenters to excavate other nuggets of sinuendo from the article. One, however, must be addressed. The reference to a document in Iran's possession that describes procedures that can only be used for nuclear weapons has been known by the IAEA since 1987. Strangely enough, Scolino and Broad substitute the vague, antiseptic term ". . in the past . . ", without referencing the date. If, however, you are trying to persuade the public to launch another pre-emptive war, after the first one has been discredited, it pays to be as vague as possible.

Labels: Judith Miller, Mainstream Media, New York Times, War with Iran