Well I guess someone had to say it.  In the chorus of blaming the internet and economic stagnation on what can only be seen as the downfall of modern newspapers, very few in the mainstream have pointed to the quality of the newspapers themselves as being ultimately responsible.  David Sirota has recently done that:

The most preventable tragedy was the deterioration of quality. Downsized local publications were all but forced to rely on more national content, but that content didn’t have to become so vapid.

Beltway scribes didn’t have to miss the Iraq war lies or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren’t compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates’ positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn’t need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren’t obligated to focus on “elevat(ing) the most banal doings” in the White House to “breaking news,” as the New York Times recently noted.

Technorati Tags: corporate media, media, newspapers

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Matt Taibbi, in his as-usual entertaining way, has written an excellent article explaining the roots and causes of the global financial mess we now find ourselves in.  He focuses particularly on the central role AIG played in bringing about this economic apocalypse and, more importantly, how the kleptocratic financial elites at the center of it all are forcing the American taxpayers to pay off their gambling debts to the tune of trillions of dollars.  Privatize profits, socialize losses.  And the theft is taking place mostly in secret with almost no democratic oversight.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

As Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald point out, not only is the public outrage over the AIG bonuses justified, it is long overdue and far too little considering the scope and audacity of the overall theft (not just the bonuses).  We can no longer afford to sit back and allow a sociopathic oligarchy to loot the public treasury without fear of consequence.  I say bring out your pitchforks!

Technorati Tags: A.I.G., Capitalism, Wall Street bailout

The insurance giant A.I.G., which is at the center of the current economic meltdown, is going to pay $165 million in bonuses according to the NY Times.  The company, one of the main purveyors of credit-default swaps, has already received $170 billion in taxpayer money.  So their bailout amounts to nothing more than socialism for the rich, an upward distribution of income from regular Americans to the already wealthy. It’s an old story: those most responsible for economic disaster are rewarded while everyone else suffers.

A.I.G. claims it is legally obligated to make the bonus payments as a result of contract agreements made prior to the company’s demise.  But looking deeper into the Times article you see the bonus plan for the financial products unit (the section of A.I.G. that “sold hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of derivatives, the notorious credit-default swaps that nearly toppled the entire company last fall) was locked into place in early 2008 just as the mortgage crisis was becoming most apparent.  So rather than merely trying “to encourage people to stay” as the article alludes, at least some of the bonuses are because these corporate crooks simply saw the writing on the wall and wanted to get their legally guaranteed loot – probably knowing the American taxpayer would come to their rescue if the worst ultimately happened.

Unsurprisingly, a senior government official claimed under the cloak of anonymity the Obama administration is outraged by the bonuses but, despite American taxpayers owning 80% of A.I.G., they are powerless to stop the theft:

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

But the official said the administration will force A.I.G. to eventually repay the cost of the bonuses to the taxpayers as part of the agreement with the firm, which is being restructured.

If the now government-controlled insurer will have to pay back the bonuses, why even let them make them in the first place?  I say let these A.I.G. executives sue for their fraudulent bonuses; even if they win at least the administration will take a strong stand.  And if the government is upset and it is actually policy that A.I.G. will have to repay taxpayers then why does the official have to speak off-the-record?  The cleptocracy spreads far and wide.

Technorati Tags: A.I.G., Capitalism, economy, Wall Street bailout

Here is yet another classic media critique by The Daily Show, this time they take on Rick Santelli and CNBC:

For a more in depth analysis of the segment see Ryan Chittum’s blog at Columbia Journalism Review.  Chittum admits that the clips used by Stewart are selective, but there is still an important aspect to overall critical assessment of CNBC business reporting:

[W]hat makes this [segment] so interesting is what Stewart does to pierce the CNBC bubble on several different things that make the network so disliked by business journalists generally: Its lack of a line between opinion and reporting (and lack of disclosure about who’s a reporter and who’s not). Its Siamese-twin closeness to Wall Street. Its rah-rah rooting for the stock markets. Its inanity in interviews that too often veers into sycophancy. On the other hand, if there is a discomfort among the business reporters with CNBC, it might be because the network’s bad practices are only extreme manifestations of wider cultural problems in their profession.

Technorati Tags: media, The Daily Show

According to a classified EU report, the Israeli government is engaging in an “illegal annexation” of East Jerusalem, considered to be the capital of any future Palestinian state. The Guardian (UK) quotes the confidential document as stating:

Israeli ‘facts on the ground’ – including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions – increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

Such “facts on the ground” are usually associated with Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank meant to undermine Palestinian demands for a return to the pre-1967, internationally recognized borders.  As is well known much of Israel’s actions in the occupied territory are justified by the state as security measures enacted to protect illegal settlements.  But so often in the mainstream (and alternative) media East Jerusalem is overlooked and rarely seen as subject to similar policies.  That is why The Guardian report should be noted, and while this is important news – and EU criticism, though at the moment not publicly stated, is something to be welcomed – annexation of the city is merely an expansion of long-running policies.

Jerusalem was divided after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, with a small eastern portion coming under Jordanian control.  In 1967 Israel took over East Jerusalem and occupied the West Bank and Gaza.  According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem this act already constituted an illegal annexation. Israel’s original appropriation of East Jerusalem incorporated not only the original 6 sq. km controlled by Jordan, but also an additional 64 sq. km, all in an effort to institute a permanent Jewish majority in the city.  As B’Tselem states:

In order to ensure a significant Jewish majority, the primary consideration [of the 1967 annexation] was to prevent the inclusion of heavily-populated Palestinian areas within Jerusalem. Whereas several Palestinian villages were placed outside the city, some of their lands were included within the city’s new borders, examples being Beit Iksa and Beit Hanina in the north, and detached areas lying in the municipalities of Bethlehem and Beit Sahur in the south. Villages and neighborhoods were, therefore, divided; one part remained in the West Bank, and the other part was annexed by Israel.

East Jerusalem has since remained under Israeli municipal authority.  Israel’s supporters are quick to point out that Arabs living in the city were offered – and largely rejected – Israeli citizenship, but fail to mention that the conditions to doing so made it almost impossible for Palestinians to accept.  In addition to the politically untenable step of swearing allegiance to the state of Israel, Palestinians would also have to display knowledge of Hebrew and prove they are not citizens of any other country.  B’Tselem paints their resulting legal status as follows:

Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right. The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city, and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967.

This brief background is essential to understanding the current actions taken by Israel in East Jerusalem as reported in The Guardian.  As a result of their historically determined legal situation, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are constantly under threat of home demolition and confiscation of their property.  Israel justifies such actions by claiming these homes were built without proper permits.  But according to The Guardian, “Israel issues fewer than 200 permits a year for Palestinian homes and leaves only 12% of East Jerusalem available for Palestinian residential use.”  Since late 2007 Israel has also been expanding its own settlements in East Jerusalem, with 3,000 units out of 5,500 approved so far, bringing the number of Israeli settlers in city to more than 190,000.

To get a further grasp on the increasing degree of home demolitions in East Jerusalem we have to look at the numbers.  B’Tselem’s most recently published figures cover the years 2004-2008:

While startling, these statistics do not include 2009.  According to a report by the Research and Documentation Unit at the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights, January and February 2009 saw more than 200 notifications for demolition, with 30 so far destroyed.  The Palestine News Network, reporting on the study, states “most of the demolitions took place in neighborhoods surrounding the Old City and on the fringes of the ongoing expansion of Jewish settlements near neighborhoods and towns surrounding the city’s holy sites in the eastern border and the north-east.”  They estimate that about 20,000 Palestinian homes are under threat while settlements continue to strangle the Arab population.

Israel’s policy in East Jerusalem is straight-forward, and as we have seen consistent with its policies in the occupied territories: establish “facts on the ground” while making life unbearable for Palestinians.  This is part of what has become known in international relations as the “peace process,” used in an effort to undermine any chance for peace.  Orwell would be proud.

The following video is of a home demolition in East Jerusalem taken in July 2008 and published by B’Tselem: