Media Infidel

Glenn Greenwald has yet another excellent post that I have to share with anyone who hasn’t read it.  Here he focuses on the views of Cass Sunstein, Obama’s top official in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is tasked with — according to its website — “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs” among other things.

Greenwald begins by noting a paper Sunstein co-wrote in 2008 detailing how government should “employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-’independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate‘ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the Government.”

Sunstein’s strategy of using propaganda reflects long-standing liberal ideas in American political culture.  In the early- to mid-20th century, liberal theorists like Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann praised the use of propaganda as a means of controlling public opinion, and Sunstein is simply carrying on this tradition.

But Greenwald is most forceful in pointing to the hypocrisy of liberals who are now defending the Obama Administration for committing the very same acts they were so outraged about when done under Bush — particularly the paying of conservatives Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher to promote Bush Administration programs as implicit “independent” experts.  But now Obama’s Administration has been outed doing the same with Jonathan Gruber’s advocacy of the health care reform proposals.

Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”

I recommend reading the Greenwald article in its entirety.  Don’t miss it:

Greenwald: Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal

Technorati Tags: Liberals, Obama, propaganda

Here’s a great concert from Tom Waits at Atlanta’s Fox Theater in July 2008.  The streaming broadcast is from NPR’s All Things Considered.

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Download here

Technorati Tags: music, NPR, Tom Waits

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald were recently on GRITtv with Laura Flanders to discuss the failures of US corporate media to hold political leaders to account.  They expose the corrupt mindset of beltway journalists that proclaims it their job to simply report what the powerful say, with little challenge, in order to maintain insider access.

Watch the full discussion below:

Technorati Tags: Blogging, corporate media, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, new media

Yesterday I received an email on the topic of the 2008 election that was strangely familiar.  And there was a reason for the familiarity: I had seen it four years before, forwarded to my email box by the same person.  The reality is that this message is a complete hoax, and the fact that it is regurgitated after multiple elections (first being the 2000 election) and forwarded throughout the internet shows that gullible people are easily fooled because it comports with their established ideology.

First of all, here’s the email:

THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD & BREAK YOUR HEART

Interesting  Statistic
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of  Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out facts of 2008  Presidential election:

Number  of States won by:
Democrats:  19
Republicans:   29

Square  miles of land won by:
Democrats:  580,000
Republicans:   2,427,000

Population of counties  won by:
Democrats:  127 million
Republicans:  143 million

Murder rate  per 100,000 residents in counties won  by:
Democrats:  13.2
Republicans:   2.1

Professor Olson  adds:
“In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won by Republicans was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.

Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare.

Professor Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at  stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom

Anyone not blinded by ideology would quickly see these so-called “facts of [the] 2008 Presidential election” are suspicious, starting with the number of states and square miles of land won.  Has it really been that long since the election that people actually think McCain won 10 more states than Obama?  Talk about short-term memory.

It only took me 2 seconds — literally — to search Google to find out that this email is a long-discredited hoax.  FactCheck.org completely dismantles the widely forwarded message in its current 2008 manifestation.  Starting by pointing out that Professor Olson has denied being the source of these “facts” since 2000, FactCheck then addresses the stats:

• President-elect Barack Obama actually carried 28 states (and the District of Columbia), not 20 as claimed in the message. Sen. John McCain carried only 22 states, not 30.The murder rate for counties carried by Obama was 6.56 per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half the rate claimed in the message. The rate for counties carried by McCain was 3.60 per 100,000, much higher than claimed in the message.
• The total area of states won by Obama is actually 1,483,702 square miles, significantly more than the 580,000 stated by the e-mail. McCain’s states have an area of 2,310,315 square miles, not the 2,427,000 claimed.
• The population of counties carried by Obama is just under 183 million, not the 127 million claimed. McCain carried counties with a total population of just under 119 million, far fewer than claimed in this message.
• The murder rate for counties carried by Obama was 6.56 per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half the rate claimed in the message. The rate for counties carried by McCain was 3.60 per 100,000, much higher than [the 2.1] claimed in the message.

As you can see, the stats are not just slightly wrong, they’re way off.  But I doubt this will stop dishonest people from using it again, because in the world of right wing America ideology trumps reality every time.

Technorati Tags: Election 2008, politics, politics of fear, propaganda, Republicans

From outrage about ACORN to the recent so-called controversy over school children singing songs about President Obama, right wing media (and politicians) in America are certainly the most hypocritical, dishonest and hyperbolic people in the country.  And rather than seeing this truism expressed and exposed on mainstream news networks, we instead see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart doing the real work of journalism.  Watch the clip:

Technorati Tags: Fox News Channel, media, The Daily Show

Echoing my earlier post, Rachel Maddow has pointed to the hypocrisy of the US Congress in defunding ACORN while continuing to support military contractors involved in fraudulent, unethical and illegal activities.  She also shows that the Defund ACORN Act is most certainly unconstitutional if applied only to the community organizing group.  The Constitution bans legislation that targets a single individual or group.  In short, the Defund ACORN Act must apply to all groups and organizations receiving federal funds.

The important part of the legislation reads as follows:

Covered Organization- In this section, the term ‘covered organization’ means any of the following:CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(1) Any organization that has been indicted for a violation under any Federal or State law governing the financing of a campaign for election for public office or any law governing the administration of an election for public office, including a law relating to voter registration.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(2) Any organization that had its State corporate charter terminated due to its failure to comply with Federal or State lobbying disclosure requirements.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(3) Any organization that has filed a fraudulent form with any Federal or State regulatory agency.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(4) Any organization that–CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(A) employs any applicable individual, in a permanent or temporary capacity;CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(B) has under contract or retains any applicable individual; orCommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(C) has any applicable individual acting on the organization’s behalf or with the express or apparent authority of the organization.

The Act then goes on to — unconstitutionally — name ACORN as its target; but if the Republicans and Democrats who supported this bill want it to maintain its legality, then its enforcement cannot discriminate.  As an example of the dilemma this poses, Maddow shows how Lockheed Martin has been fined $68,500,000 for eleven government contracting fraud cases and Northrop Grunman $501,400,000 for nine such cases.  So we will have to defund them as well (but don’t hold your breath on that).

She then goes on to highlight military contractors such as Blackwater operating in Iraq and Afghanistan and discloses how some are not only guilty of or being investigated for fraud, but much worse crimes like murder and prostitution.  Her guest on the show was journalist and war contractor critic Jeremy Scahill.  Watch the segment below:

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) brought up this issue almost immediately and began compiling a list of organizations covered by the legislation.  The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) also has a list of contractors guilty of misconduct, showing that out of the top 100 richest groups and corporations receiving federal funds there is a total of 678 instances of misconduct.

Glenn Greenwald interviewed Rep. Grayson and asked him to put ACORN’s federal funding into perspective, to which he replied: “The amount of money that ACORN has received in the past 20 years altogether is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Halliburton each day during the war in Iraq.”

Writing on his blog, Jeremy Scahill also puts the entire episode into context.

What’s more, the Republicans—and, unfortunately their friends on the other side of the aisle—are advocating punishing ACORN for the—as yet legally unresolved—allegations against a small number of ACORN employees or affiliates. What is painfully ironic about this is that this standard should actually be applied to senior Bush administration officials who authorized, tried to legalize, and oversaw torture and war crimes. It should have applied to the commanders at Abu Ghraib. It should apply to Blackwater’s Erik Prince. They had actual knowledge and complicity at the highest levels. But all of their crimes have been covered up by the tired “bad apple” narrative over and over again. It is never the system that is the problem in the eyes of its powerful beneficiaries. In the case of ACORN, if you really care about facts, then you know that—at best—we are talking about the misconduct of a few people (who were fired) and not some top-down criminal enterprise, which is precisely what the Bush administration was and massive war contractors are.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, Jeremy Scahill, Rachel Maddow, war contractors

This is from Terrence Malick’s masterpiece The Thin Red Line (1998).  In my opinion, it’s easily the best war film ever  made.  The film recounts the US marines’ February 9, 1943 attack on Guadalcanal against the Japanese.  If you haven’t seen it, check it out now.

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It’s been over a year since Wall Street sent the US — and the world — to the precipice of complete economic meltdown.  Yet we may be right to ask a simple question: Why haven’t we seen any of the Wall Street fat cats — whose greed-driven and fraudulent activities brought about the crisis — shackled and sent off to prison, where many no doubt belong?  Well, Kevin Hall at McClatchy has recently asked the same question.

There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren’t among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.

“A lot of people who are responsible (for the crisis) seem to have gotten awfully rich in the process,” said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

The absence of what many would call justice stands out all the more because past financial crises always had their villains. The depression-era had electricity and railroad magnate Samuel Insull, who partly inspired the movie “Citizen Kane.” The savings and loan crisis of the 1980’s had banker Charles Keating. Energy giant Enron Corp.’s spectacular collapse offered the late CEO Kenneth Lay, a Texas crony of President George W. Bush.

Hall goes on to note that there are some potential convictions coming.

The FBI has more than 580 large-scale corporate fraud investigations under way. At least 40 of them are scrutinizing players in sub-prime mortgage lending, which was the first domino to fall and triggered a global financial crisis.

“The investigations are very complex; it’s not something that’s going to turn overnight,” said Bill Carter, a spokesman at FBI headquarters. “They are labor intensive. They involve a review of records.”

To date, the closest thing to a prosecution of a major actor in the financial meltdown is a civil fraud case that the Securities and Exchange Commission brought on June 4 against Angelo Mozilo, the perma-tanned CEO of mortgage-lending giant Countrywide.

Yet thus far all we have are a few successful civil cases that amount to little more than a slap on the wrist of these economic titans.  US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently addressed the Senate on this issue and makes a compelling case for the need for justice now and, in the process, puts the lie to the “too big to fail” nonsense about these financial institutions:

Technorati Tags: Bernie Sanders, Capitalism, Wall Street bailout

Project Censored has released its latest top 25 stories of 2008-09 that you won’t find in mainstream media.  Project Censored is a media research group affiliated with Sonoma State University’s Sociology of Media and Sociology of Censorship classes and other independent groups.  According to its website:

Project Censored’s principle objective is training of SSU students in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States.  Project Censored has trained over 1,500 students in investigative research in the past three decades.
Through a partnership of faculty, students, and the community, Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media. Each year, Project Censored publishes a ranking of the top 25 most censored nationally important news stories in the yearbook, Censored: Media Democracy in Action, which is released in September. Recent Censored books have been published in Spanish, Italian and Arabic.

[....]

In our view, the only valid justification for declining a news story is that in a medium limited by time and space, another news story was simply more important to the people of the community, whether local, national or international. While admittedly a subjective process, it is nonetheless, a process to be undertaken by the news people themselves (the investigative journalists and editors), NOT by the managers and CEOs of their “parent company.” No professional journalist or researcher should ever have to face the destruction of his or her career (or life) simply because they wanted to tell the truth. While no two people will always agree on what story is more important than another, a system where the working reporters and editors run the newsroom would at least provide a fertile environment for debate, dissent and critical thinking.

The growth of independent media and journalism in recent years shows that people throughout the world yearn to hold not only their leaders accountable, but their media sources as well. For that reason, the Project Censored research program continues, in its small way, to support and highlight those who tell the truth about the powerful (no matter the consequences) and are relentless in their quest to hold Big Media accountable for their decisions.

If you care about these issues, then Project Censored is certainly an organization that deserves our support.

Here’s a list of the top 25 stories of 2008-09 not mentioned by the mainstream media:

• 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
• 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
• 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
• 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
• 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
• 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
• 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
• 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
• 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
• 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
• 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
• 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
• 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
• 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
• 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
• 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
• 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
• 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
• 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
• 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
• 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
• 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
• 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
• 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
• 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Technorati Tags: censorship, media, Project Censored

It’s funny how certain sections of the American public, with the help of mainstream media of course, are now so outraged by the actions of a handful of ACORN employees that Congress is now bravely cutting off all funding for this already underfunded, inconsequential organization.  Yet the recent — nearly invisible — actions in Kabul by morons working for the private  military contractor ArmorGroup, being paid far greater sums of American taxpayer dollars than anything dreamed  of by ACORN, have been dismissed by the same media as little more than the exploits of silly boys letting off a little steam.  Sure a few will be fired, but have a look for yourself:

Let’s put the whole issue into perspective.  ACORN, a non-profit, grass-roots organization that represents poor Americans has received a  mere $53 million in federal funds since 1994, while these douchbag contractors from ArmorGroup are the recipients of a $189 million 5-year contract to defend the US embassy in Kabul.  That comes to $3.5 million a year for ACORN as opposed to nearly $38 million per year for ArmorGroup.  Where’s the outrage?  Barely a peep is heard.

One of the more obvious problems stemming from the government’s need for contractors like ArmorGroup — a relatively minor player in the realm of private military contractors — is that, given the US government’s commitment to the military occupation of Afghanistan and  Iraq, the Pentagon must rely on these sorts of  for-profit corporations to fulfil the work and procedures once handled by the US  military.

It’s so bad  that actions like those pictured above must go un-addressed.  There’s little the Pentagon can do, even though they have had multiple problems with ArmorGroup.  The New York Times recently discussed this issue:

The troubles with the ArmorGroup contract, and the State Department’s frustrated dealings with the company over two years and through two administrations, illustrate how the government has become dependent on the private security companies that work in war zones, and has struggled to manage companies that themselves are sometimes loosely run and do not always play by the government’s rules.

With a stretched military, the government relies on the security companies themselves to vet, train, and discipline the guards, all at the lowest cost.

“It’s expensive for the State Department to withdraw a contract from one company, rebid the project and award it to a new one,” said Janet Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who represents one of the ArmorGroup whistleblowers. “So businesses know that once they get a contract, State may ding them around a little bit, but it’s not going to fire them.”

The perils of this reliance were most graphically illustrated in Iraq in 2007, when security guards from another contractor, Blackwater, were involved in shootings that left 17 civilians dead on a Baghdad street. But interviews and documents show that the ArmorGroup affair, in its mundane, unsavory details, offers perhaps a more representative look inside the troubled relationship between contractors and the government in war zones.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, ArmorGroup, media, media reform, military contractors