The Matrix: For Real

2011-09-03T17:16:00.011-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 131, ISSUE 167
THE COLLATZ CONJECTURE
WHEN HATING OBAMA IS THE FINAL SOLUTION
by Malik Isasis

When the Tea Party howls at the moon the corporate media trip over themselves to smell their shit. The Tea Party is new, and shiny, a fresh branding of the Republican Party after 8 years of a Bush economy that sent the United States into a lost decade. Born out of the election of Barack Obama 2.7 years ago, right wing political mercenaries saw an opportunity to rewrite history, and the legacy of bad Republican economic policy by making every government deficit and problem since the founding of the country, Obama’s burden, alone.

THE ID

The Collatz Conjecture is an elementary mathematical equation that has yet to be solved. This is the predicament President Obama finds himself in politically, sandwiched between a rabid right, a milquetoast corporate media industrial complex, a disappointed base, and an unreasonable, almost pathological need to compromise with those who would rather ruin the country than give him any kind of political victory. Obama’s willingness to avoid fighting, to avoid the Angry Black Man label, has embolden the Republican Party, their supporters, and their politically mercenaries (Fox News, Talk Radio, conservative Think Tanks) to show an unprecedented amount of disrespect toward the office of the president daily—an almost personal ad hominem attacks, according to the New York Times.

Here is an example of the level of personal attacks:

The Bush legacy is not only the economic disaster, and a Middle East left on fire, but a Republican Party, which no longer respects rules and traditions of governance. Like George Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, truth no longer matters, only the religious fervor of their talking points. After eight years of watching George W. Bush use the federal government to make the largest transfer of wealth in human history from the public sphere to private sphere with wars, and unaccountable, non-bid contracts to corporations, the privatization of public schools, bank bailouts (which begun under Bush) and the military, his Republican Party adapted Bush’s and Cheney’s lizard brain way of governance, that is to say, to show contempt toward the people they govern and those who disagree with them.

Driven by the id, base emotion, Republicans are like the jealous boyfriend, if he can’t have you, no one can. They only hate the government when they are not in power. For a group that hates the federal government so much, the Republicans spend an average of 18 years in Congress, and of the longest serving Congress members, Republicans averaged 41 years—that’s a lot of time to serve at a job they hate, but go out of their way to have.

The Republican conservative cabal reminds me of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, whose obsession with the ring, drove him mad. Like Gollum, the Republicans’ minds are so consumed with getting the powers of the presidency, that they’ve become cartoonishly evil, histrionic, and abhorrently immature. They have achieved a level of political petulance haven’t seen in a long while.

They’ve spent a better part of Obama’s presidency, obstructing. More Republican obstruction here, and here. Blinded by a sense of entitlement, and unadulterated hate of Obama the Republicans have revealed their governing solution: to do nothing, to let the economy in which they collapsed in the first place, sit and fester and blame the failure on the Democrats, more specifically on Obama.

The modern Republican Party is incompetent and is often star of the Peter Principle, rising to the levels of power, and into positions its members are no longer competent in. For example, Republicans tend to be great political guerrillas, able to create simple dogmatic talking points, and the ability to pend their weaknesses on the Democrats, to win political office, but when they are called upon to govern responsibly, their incompetence is reached.

The philosophy of business first, and capitalism as the Coming of Christ, often results in a crash and burn cycle, however, Republicans are only able to rise from their political deaths like Lazarus without ever having to change their governing philosophy because of the corporate media, who pretends that they have something new to offer—i.e. tax cuts and deregulation, both tried for 8 years under George W. Bush’s watch, but as the Tea Party, a symbol of civil disobedience, they get a second bite at the apple of intransigence.

THE FINAL SOLUTION

Under the veneer of capitalism, debt and deficits, the Republican right wing cabal has found a way to nest their personalized hatred of Obama. The right wing political mercenaries have used the current economic crisis, again the one they’ve created, to destroy Obama using the most powerful arsenal in their toolbox. Race. The fear of a black man. And Obama, fully aware of such a stratagem, has hemmed himself in with his milquetoast compromises, not fully understanding that when you give a bully more, the more the bully takes. Obama’s handling of the historical levels of disrespect from the oppositional party has also caused his deflated base to abandon him because he doesn’t fight; he only compromises, which is his religion. Bi-partisanship is theology in D.C., but only for Democrats, for it is the document Republicans use in their death by a thousand paper cuts tactic, and while Obama bleeds out, they’ll refuse to compromise based on their principles. The corporate media muddy the waters of this political heist as “both sides” to show that they are being fair, but it's a lazy way the media raises itself above the fray, but they are responsible for empowering and allowing the wolves who ate the sheep, now dressed as the sheep, back onto family farm.

The Republican cabal has decided that Obama’s failures are their gain, which creates an easy political solution, do absolutely nothing to fix the economic, and political disparity in this country.

With a corporate media that is more interested in being political insiders than the Fourth Estate, a political party, the Republicans whose petulant intransigence further corrodes the gap between the haves and the have nots, and a president who is so afraid of being called an Angry Black Man, that he is willing to compromise away his integrity in the name of bi-partisanship, the mythical unicorn of D.C. politics, which only one party adheres to, where does this leaves us?

In a world of shit.

2011-04-27T20:09:00.006-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 129, ISSUE 165
THE BLACK TAX
by Malik Isasis

Urban Dictionary defines black tax as:

1. The notion that Black people have to work and perform regular tasks twice as well as White people.

”Let me see your papers, boy.”

America refuses to deal with the 800-pound gorilla that is white supremacy. The white collective not only suffers from selective amnesia but also selective mutism. If progressives don’t talk about it, corporate media won’t bring it up. If corporate media brings it up, they’ll just deny we know anything. This is the approach the corporate media has taken when discussing race in America.

President Obama’s release of his birth certificate won’t change the white supremacists’ mind because for them, race is a ponze scheme to pit white against black, rich against poor, in other words, divide and conquer the citizenry in a distracting and dysfunctional social schema to booster wealth and corporatism. For two and half years corporate media, the Republican Party, and Rightwing political operatives in said institutions have kept the question of Obama’s citizenship in the forefront.

White supremacy in America is a religion where facts have no place, only faith and unsubstantiated beliefs. This makes sense, since racism is non-sensical and irrational. Now that the birther issue has publicly been laid to rest by the president himself, a number of other “Let me see your papers, boy” incidents have risen like Lazarus himself to the fore, mainly Obama’s education:

Barack Obama went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, served as president of the Harvard Review, worked as a community organizer, worked as a civil rights lawyer, served in the Illinois State six terms, taught Constitutional Law at University of Chicago Law and has served three years as a US Senator, yet, it isn’t enough.

Only in a white supremacist society, can someone like Sarah Palin be called more qualified than Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign and have the corporate media go along with it enthusiastically. This is an exceptional example of black taxation. Interestingly enough, some Republicans are still saying he is inexperience2.5 years into his presidency.

Corporate media and rightwing politicos are incessantly trying to castrate, and feminize Obama to humiliate him.

Let me see your papers boy

Scholar and author Neely Fuller, Jr. described the four stages of racism (white supremacy) in his book, The United Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept as follows:

1. Establishment of White Supremacy: The sum of all speech and/or action, by those white persons who seek to dominate those classified as non-white
2. Maintenance of White Supremacy: The sum total of all speech and/or action, by those white persons who seek to continue the practice of racism.
3. Expansion of White Supremacy: The sum total of speech and/or action by those white persons who practice racism in a manner that directly, or indirectly help promote an increase in the number of non-white persons made subject to racism.
4. Refinement of White Supremacy: The sum total of all speech, and or/action, by those white persons who practice racism in a manner that improves the methods that help make the practice of racism more efficient, and/or, more “acceptable” to the victims.

A Complicit Media

Although Fox News and its other corporate media counterparts fulfill all four stages of white supremacy, they tend to maintain and refine racist propaganda by passing it off as news and analysis.

Black Taxation is the idea that no matter how educated or experienced a black person may be, it only takes white doubt to undermine that person’s credibility.

2011-03-01T22:20:00.007-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 129, ISSUE 164
DOWNRISING
a Matrix Report
by Malik Isasis

The nihilistic, paranoid, pathological, collaboration between corporate media and its corporate henchmen and women—the Right Wing cabal and Republican Party have resulted in a carefully stratagem of transferring blame to the cause of the economic collapse of two years ago from Wall Street, to Teachers and unions. Only in despotic regimes, or America could something as absurd as blaming the poor and the working class for creating an economic crisis spawn by Republican wars, and the military industrial complex, banks, and the transfer of trillions from public coffers to private ones by the Federal Reserve, be put completely, and without question on the backs of the working class.

After a generation of economical Republican philosophy of Starving the Beast, that is driving up deficits so high that following Democratic congresses and presidents have no choice but to cut and or eliminate social programs. Republicans are now using the economic crises produced by George W. Bush, and Republicans over the last twelve years as a way of driving their social and economic policies to shape the UNited States for generations. The Republican goal is no secret; they want to destroy the Democratic Party, their groundbreaking social security programs, and have a workforce that is indentured to corporations. It sounds almost hyperbolic, something out of 1984, if it were not true.

Wall Street bankers and their meat puppets who work in the halls of congress are responsible, solely responsible for the economic collapse, and now they are using teachers, women, and unions as obfuscation.

2011-01-11T22:43:00.013-05:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 128, ISSUE 163
RELEASE THE KRACKEN!
by Malik Isasis

"Release the Kracken!" is the line Liam Neeson's Zeus, orders at the behest of his duplicitous brother Hades in the film, Clash of the Titans. The people of Argos have begun to question Zeus as a god, and as a punishment Zeus has allowed his brother Hades free from the underworld to wreck havoc on mankind, so that they return to believing in gods. This is not a review of the film Clash of the Titans but an observation of Fox News' fight to push back on any responsibility in the violent, raging political atmosphere it has created since the election of a black man as president to keep the Southern Strategy alive.

While Fox News' has released the Kracken, mainstream media are running like the citizens of Argos, slipping in a dysfunctional, exploitive and lazy narrative of false equivalency between the right and left, and the American public suffers from the consequences of being under informed.

And this is the dysfunction of the corporate media, pretending to be above the fray by being milquetoast, afraid of the ire from the right. The corporate media would rather say both sides (left and right) are equally responsible for violent rhetoric to avoid the criticism of being unfair to the right, being actual journalists and discerning what is truth and what is spin. The right doesn't have that problem.

It seems when the corporate media has a choice, it always choose the path of least resistance. The corporate media’s main goal is to penetrate our consciousness and sub consciousness every second of every day with its news, images, and products, but not with anything of value, just useless exploitation of tragedies.

Past Behavior is a Predictor of Future Behavior

Back in April of 1994 there was a genocide in Rwanda, Africa. The genocide was the result of a number complex issues such as civil war and strife and neocolonialism by the Europeans. Tutsis and Hutus, genetically the same were divided politically by Europeans (German and Belgian specifically), with the Tutsi the minority tribe being appointed a more superior racial type than Hutus, a numerical majority, thus began the seeds that would blossom into a full blown genocide once the European colonists Germany, and Belgian uprooted

For 100 days, a million people were murdered, shot, raped and hacked to death with machetes. It was called the most efficient and coordinated genocide in human history, but in America there was a perverse obsession with the O.J. Simpson Murder case (for which thousands of hours were dedicated), and during the genocide, the corporate media garnered more sympathy for the silver back gorillas who were being slaughtered in the cross-fire than their human brethren. 10,000 black, African bodies floated down the Nyabarongo River hundreds miles to neighboring countries, and America watched O.J. Simpson.

The reasons the genocide was so efficient was because of the media: world media turning a blind-eye, and the local radio disc jockeys telling the murders where to find people hiding, broadcasting their whereabouts. The radio stations stirred the hatred and fueled the holocaust that was Rwanda, which brings me to Fox News. It is a genocide of intelligence.

Fox News, is not really news, but an arm of a neoconservative cabal designed specifically to destroy the Democratic Party and to project a parallel universe that is filled with American exceptionalism, nationalism, fascism, war and most of all a perversity of jingoism that seems no different than if you were watching a State controlled news program in North Korea. With a network of echo chambers, Fox News and their political operatives in the corporate media have convinced poor white people to rise and rage against their own interests. The absurdity of this would be like slaves rising up against legislation to free them from human bondage.

Universal health care, unions for better pay and job security, privacy, the choice to have an abortion or not to, etc.--all these things to a person who doesn't suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, is just common sense.

We are a nation of idiots because our media teaches us so, but evolution will take care of the United States just as it had other superpowers before it.

Go ahead, release the Kracken!

2011-01-10T02:12:00.006-05:00

THE CULTURAL ISSUE: VOLUME 127, ISSUE 162
COMING HOME TO ROOST
by Malik Isasis

For some two years, Fox News’ 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year of propaganda fueled the anti-government, anti-people of color, and anti-immigrant zeitgeist of the Tea Party. It was bound to happen that someone would be killed due to the incessant, and vile hate that is being produced by the political and corporate right. And now that Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford fights for her life after a assassination attempt, Fox News has been running away from the last two years of their brand of hate. They may receive a reprieve from the corporate media, but they won’t receive one from the truth.

Fox News Pretending

Fox News has a habit of causing bad things to happen and then pretending it had nothing to do with the mess. Arizona has been a tinderbox for anti-immigrant fervor, and Fox News has for two years stoked the flames of bigotry, and since the tragedy of congresswoman Gifford, Fox has been pretending to be a real news outfit, but the obfuscation was short lived, it didn’t take long for its pundits to be hypersensitive and project, and rightly so, they and their radio compatriots bear some blame for the bubbling political violence in American politics, but they can’t run from their broadcasts.

Here is Brave New Films, which has exposed Fox News for what it is:

President Obama should cancel his upcoming interview with Fox News. The corporate media should also call out Fox News for not being a news organization, rather a political machine.
One can only dream, right?

2010-12-09T23:02:00.006-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 126, ISSUE 161
BROTHA, CAN YOU SPARE SOME CHANGE?
by Malik Isasis

For two years the recalcitrant Republicans have said “no” to every single Democratic piece of legislation, and now that the Democrats are fighting President Obama’s capitulation to the Republican leadership over taxes, it is the Democrats, predictably who are receiving the ire of the corporate media. And unsurprisingly, Obama has joined the Republican, and corporate choir, as he had, for the past two years.

When the Democratic Party recently rejected Obama’s one-sided compromise on the Bush-Tax cuts, Obama referred to his progressive members as sanctimonious. Initially, I thought Obama was playing chess, but after being slapped and turning the other cheek one-too-many times, it became alarmingly clear, that he was only playing checkers. Issue after issue: Gays in the Military, prosecuting Bush officials for war crimes, selling out to healthcare companies to get rid of the Public Options, and now supporting a two year extension of the Bush Tax cut. Obama has compromised, or not fought for progressive issues, and the reality that liberals and progressive must come to accept is that Obama is not really a progressive, rather, he’s a corporate Democrat, just as former President Bill Clinton was.

One Too Many Slaps Is Abuse

Even when Republicans get what they want, they still abuse him, and he takes it—actually, absorbing the Republicans’ talking points to sell what is clearly a sellout of his progressive base.

When a Republican called Obama a liar, Obama said nothing. Former Republican House Leader Newt Gingrich called President Obama a socialist, Obama said nothing. Right wing fascists Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and all of Fox News daily, refer to Obama as a communist, socialist and racist, and Obama says nothing. Asked what he thought of Kanye West taking the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Awards, he said, “He’s a jackass”

Obama's displacement, or kicking the dog, is a clear symptom that he doesn't have the fortitude to fight Republicans, but he will be quick to hit back at progressives. It's high time we get out of this abusive relationship.

2010-12-06T01:08:00.006-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 126, ISSUE 160
MAN GONE DOWN
by Malik Isasis

Senator John McCain lost his presidential bid in 2008, and he has not recovered. He is a bitter, petulant old fool who is clearly out to be the thorn in Obama’s ass for the rest of his time above ground. Anything involving progress, the man who calls himself a Maverick, will filibuster. The presidency was his, he’d earned it, until some exotic Negro from Hawaii with a Kenyan father, and a Muslim name, robbed him of his destiny.

Senator John McCain is blocking “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because gays voted in large numbers for the exotic Negro, and it’s his way of getting back at the people who denied him a chance to rule, er, to be president.

McCain is a lot like former President George W. Bush in that, he failed upwards, slipping on every privileged banana peel. His father was an admiral in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War. McCain too, was in the Navy during that time, where he crashed no less than three jet planes. He was reckless, and full of hubris. Things like success was owed, not earned.

The corporate media has built up an image of a hero, a maverick—and over time, a short time, he began reading his own headlines, like an actor believing he’s superman and jumping out of a window because he thinks he can fly. During his build up to the presidential race, McCain appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on April 24, 2007 to try and polish this turd of an occupation in Iraq by regurgitating Bush’s talking points. McCain who has usually received a warm and non confrontational welcome from Stewart seemed unprepared for what was about to happened—even though Stewart came out the gate with: “What do you want to start out with—the bomb Iran song or the walk through the market in Baghdad? What do you want to start with?”

McCain appeared genuinely hurt by Stewart’s criticism of him on some of his shows. When McCain criticized Democratic leader Senator Reid about losing the war, his hurt manifested as a little jab at Stewart:

McCain: “You showed a thing on the program where majority leader of the senate said we lost—then tell me who won? Who won? Al-Qaeda? Sunni militia? Shia militia? Who won this? (Cross talk)

Stewart:”In fairness to Senator Reid and God bless me I don’t believe in fairness but uh—

McCain: --“I found that out recently.”

Right out of the gate Stewart hit McCain with an intellectually right and he was stunned—he was in complete disbelief. McCain looked like a man who had fallen in love with his own propaganda, only to be confronted by reality. Sounding like Bush’s water boy, he continued to spit out the Republican talking points of Democratic defeatism, they'll follow us home if we don't beat them there, etc. only to have the talking points completely deconstructed one by one.

The only strategy left for McCain by the end of the interview was to filibuster (he does this a lot when he is losing an argument) the conversation—a popular strategy with right wingers, which is to keep talking over the other person while he is trying to make a point. McCain was like an out of shape boxer in the tenth round, out of breath and tired. The only thing he could do was to grab Stewart and hold on and let the clock run down, and kudos to Stewart for taking body shots, even as McCain held on.

McCain looked like a fool, deservedly so. This is the lesson of believing your own hype.

It appears the corporate media is helping McCain hold onto whatever dignity he has left, whether it is trying to punish gays by holding out on changing legal discrimination against gays in military, voting against women, or seeing to it that Obama fail.

The truth doesn’t matter anymore; it has about as much value as something floating in the toilet. In the parallel universe the corporate media has created, maybe he is an American hero.

2010-11-07T13:19:00.011-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 126, ISSUE 159
IT IS WRITTEN
by Malik Isasis

The corporate media for two years have carefully cultivated a one-sided narrative, one that excluded the crimes and government malfeasance of former president George W. Bush, and his Republican congress, which nearly bankrupted the country, sending the US economy into a Lost Decade like that of Japan’s.
The corporate media industrial complex has always preferred Republicans for their drive to deregulate and privatize, it is how the media industrial complex came to be, although former President Bill Clinton helped a great deal with the signing of the Telecommunication Act of 1996.

The corporate media creates self-fulfilling prophecies around Democrats losing or being out of touch as a way of putting Republicans back into presidential or, congressional power, and undeservingly so. It happened to Vice President Al Gore who with Clinton left the country a surplus; yet, somehow, Governor George W. Bush became President George W. Bush.

We’ve seen this before, when the Republicans are voted out of office in droves, the corporate media like Dr. Frankenstein resurrect them by white washing their history. Four years ago in 2006 just before the Democrats took both houses, I blogged :

The Republican implosion is not new. Throughout the 20th century, there are examples of Republicans reaching the pinnacle of power and then collapsing from the weight of their incompetence and lack of compassion. It’s the Peter Principle, which theorizes that a person will be promoted to the highest level of his/or her competence and eventually advance to a level of incompetence. The modern Republican Party implodes every other generation under its own ineptitude and rises like the Phoenix, only to repeat the same mistakes.

Only two years ago, a Republican president put the country on the blink of a collapse, and yet the Republicans have risen from the political ashes of ignorance to repeat the same crimes. Republicans are like the children who never learn their lesson because their parents refuse to let them by covering their mistakes. It will be a matter of time before the Peter Principle kicks in once again to show the Americans who voted for this bunch that they are incapable of governance.

CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES

Once more the American people have shown the world how incredibly unenlightened we are as a voting populace. Democratic voters stayed home, and Republican voters voted against their own interests. The corporate media will never hold the American people accountable for their political immaturity.

We don’t expect much from the people we elect, and they in turn don’t expect much from us. It is not a decay of leadership. Our leadership is a symptom of our failure, our lack of critical thinking, our ability to be easily frightened, easily manipulated and managed by superficial distractions, and easily misinformed. Or maybe it is us who are selfish. We are who we elect, right?

In that same blog of four years ago, Tipping Windmills, I stated:

It may not be this election cycle, but the Republicans will fall spectacularly, they always do, it's in their political DNA. When they again rise from the ashes, they will have no synaptic connections to why they failed; they will only see it as their destiny.

Thanks to a corporate media. It is written.

2010-10-26T01:01:00.010-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 126, ISSUE 158
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GEORGE W. BUSH
by Malik Isasis

It would seem the American people and the corporate media have given President Barack Obama just barely 24 months to fix the economic collapse, and clean up two wars/occupations left behind by his predecessor former President George W. Bush, which took some eight years to create. The corporate media always looking forward, immediately began casting for the role of the Republican who would rise out of the ashes to become a 2012 presidential candidate--moments after Obama's inauguration. In their star search came a plethora of right wing corporate ideologues.

ATTACK OF THE CLONES

The corporate media and its political punditry like school yard bullies on the playground forced the likes of former half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin down our throats. Palin who seemed the natural Manchurian Candidate, an empty vessel is the epitome of know nothingness. If anything, the investment class, recognized in Sarah what they had discovered in its former Manchurian Candidate, Bush--that the government's only function was to be the investment class’ largess, or slush fund for private wars and tax policies, and bank bailouts.

Former Republican Representative, and right wing Dick Amry and billionaire Koch Brothers are part of the brain trust that created the right wing zeitgeist known as the Tea Party, a faux grassroots political movement whose manufactured outrage on healthcare was designed to disrupt Obama’s healthcare bill, and consequently, every bill the Democratic Party introduced in Congress. The Tea Party’s subterfuge was lifted as it became increasing clear that it was a re-branding of the Republican Party.

Tea Party chapters began sprouting up all over the country to challenge and protest against Obama and the Democratic Party’s legislation, which gave the Republicans cover to just say no on every piece of legislation.

The Republicans have spent 24 months with their arms crossed, and refusing to participate in the two-party system. Complete obstruction by the Republican Party has ensured that the stimulus bill, healthcare bill, Wall Street regulation reform wouldn’t be as effective, so come the midterms the Republicans can point back to say how broken the government is, and how ineffective the Democratic Party was.

For two years we’ve had one party, the Democratic Party, governing, while the other, the Republican Party’s stratagem was to undermine any Obama legislation. The corporate media has provided aid and comfort for this stratagem by pinning the tail on the wrong donkey, and disappearing George W. Bush, and the Republican Party’s legacy of America’s Lost Decade.

The Manchurian Project

The investment class behind the Tea Party has discovered that instead of creating one Manchurian Candidate, they can produce dozens of them to infiltrate the government to enact draconian economic and social policies.

This constructed disconnect from reality is why President Obama and the Democrats can be blamed for an unemployment rate, fiscal disaster, and an oil pipe leak in the Gulf due to unregulated drilling.

Since President Bush’s legacy has been disappeared by the media, the Democratic Party shoulders all the economic fallout, and systemic corporate malfeasance from Bush’s laissez-faire governance. The corporate media provides political cover for the Republican Party as they discuss politics like a sports event. The Republicans will win because they didn’t participate in governance for 24 months, crippling it, increasing the atmosphere of hate and intolerance, all under the watchful eyes of a corporate media who wants the country to be a confederate of dunces who will vote against their own interests if they believe that it will hurt others, and sadly, they are being much obliged.

2010-09-23T22:07:00.006-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 126, ISSUE 157
IDIOTOCRACY
THE DUMBASSNESS OF AMERICAN POLITICS AND MEDIA
by Malik Isasis

The young and progressive voters appear to be sitting on their hands come this election cycle, possibly giving the Tea Party a crack at putting the capstone in America's spectacular fall from grace by sweeping in the Tea Party, a right-wing, xenophobic, despotic strain of an already perverse, and nihilistic Republican Party. President George W. Bush, and his Republican True Believers ushered in a lost decade, and the working class of American people who are stuck in some sort of abusive loop, and Stockholm Syndrome, with Republican/Conservatism policy and are willing to go all in once more, in spite of the Republicans promising to make their lives The Grapes of Wrath.

The Republican Party just rolled out its Pledge to America, which would most likely extend Bush policies of the lost decade. The 21-page shit paper, exposes the common magical thinking and hypocrisy by Republicans who want to cut the deficit by maintaining a budget-busting $700 billion dollar Bush tax cut for the richest two percent of the population. The corporate media will no doubt take their cues from Fox News who pulled out the pom-poms to cheer on the Republicans' pledge to screw Americans.

The Pledge

The Republicans for two-years have not governed, instead they sabotaged the Democratic Party by voting "no" on every single piece of legislation from healthcare to finance legislation, even when they agreed in principle. So, for two years we've had a cripple government, with one-party governance because the Republicans Party calculated that they would allow the economy to tank, and people's health and well being suffer to get back into office. It has worked, because the corporate media has allowed the Republicans to get away with governance, and no articulation of their policies--but most disturbingly of all, to allow the Republicans to get away, without blame for putting the country in the economy position in the first place with $700 billion dollar tax cuts and unfunded and unnecessary wars and occupations.

Observation from Afar
by Jacksdump

Here is a comment from a reader Jacksdump, of Gawker who had a keen take on American politics:

You Yanks are so fucking ignorant and spoiled. Boo-hoo franks and beans, boo-hoo exhausted by defending you Mr President, I so much wanted instant gratification when you got into the White House, put on your janitors hat and set about cleaning to up all that frat house crap the "Neo-Con War Criminals" left behind.

"Those that do not know their history are destined to repeat it". Google 1929, Mrs boo-hoo, discover that it was the Second World War that pulled you out of deep economic depression, then lend some thought to how those Conservative sirens have kept you fighting pointless, stupid, bloody wars ever since.

When you have put those two pieces in the jigsaw, you may like to think about the country you would have now, if all that "blood money" had been spent on education, infrastructure, job creation and yes I’m going to say it "Universal Health Care"

But Mrs Boo-hoo I will repeat my opening statement "You Yanks are so fucking ignorant and spoiled" you lose your faith in doing what you know is right every few years, you give in to the fear created by the "Murdock Fear Machine". You vote against your own self interests and put a so called "Conservative" back in the driving seat.

You can’t stop loving the stroke of the whip and the party that lays it on your back, can you? Strong leadership, fiscal conservatism and a xenophobic myopic view of the rest of this dying planet that is stunningly self lionizing and ignorant to the rest of us, who, unfortunately have to share it with you.

Have more faith Mrs Boo-hoo , President Obama never said it was going to be easy, bloody hell! the guy had a Two and a half Trillion bill left by the previous tenants to pay, a broken World economy, Three Wars still running and unpaid for, a crisis in health care, latent racism and intransigence from the Right and a list of other crap too long to mention, all before he could get on with making your life even more pleasant than it obviously is.

Hold to the core values of decency and fairness for all Mrs Boo-hoo ,and if you ever need reminding of how good you Yanks all have it, dig out the short report on India’s homeless and poverty stricken living under bridges and even being evicted from those, it was shown on the BBC last night.

Watch it carefully Yanks, then try putting yourself in those poor bastards places, and if your still bleating about fanks and beans then I am afraid you’re only going to get what you deserve, and the rest of us don’t. Mrs President Palin and Vice President Rom Paul!

Man that’s gonna suck, again!

Amen, Jack.

2010-09-15T23:35:00.003-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 125, ISSUE 156
America's Decoupling from Reality
by Robert Parry, Consortium News

As Election Day 2010 approaches – as the United States wallows in the swamps of war, recession and environmental degradation – the consequences of the nation’s three-decade-old decoupling from reality are becoming painfully obvious.

Yet, despite the danger, the nation can’t seem to move in a positive direction, as if the suctioning effect of endless spin, half-truths and lies holds the populace in place, a force that grows ever more powerful like quicksand sucking the country deeper into the muck – to waist deep, then neck deep.

Trapped in the mud, millions of Americans are complaining about their loss of economic status, their sense of powerlessness, their nation’s decline. But instead of examining how the country stumbled into this morass, many still choose not to face reality.

Instead of seeking paths to the firmer ground of a reality-based world, people from different parts of the political spectrum have decided to embrace unreality even more, either cynically as a way to delegitimize a political opponent or because they’ve simply become addicted to the crazy.

The latest manifestation of the wackiness can be found in the rise of the Tea Party, a movement of supposedly grassroots, mad-as-hell regular Americans that is subsidized by wealthy corporate donors (such as the billionaire Koch brothers) seeking to ensure deregulation of their industries and to consolidate their elite control over the political process.

The Tea Party madness is aided and abetted by a now fully formed right-wing media apparatus that can popularize any false narrative (like Islam planning to conquer Christian America as represented by the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero).

The Right sees an advantage in spreading even the nuttiest of smears against President Barack Obama. So you have right-wing author Dinesh D’Souza and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich concocting a toxic brew of racist nonsense about Obama somehow channeling the anti-colonialism of his late Kenyan father.

“Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s,” D’Souza wrote in Forbes. “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

Incredibly, indeed.

The “factual” basis of this “analysis” apparently is that Obama entitled his touching story about his youth, Dreams of My Father, which was a book that focused on the absence of his father from his life.

In a less crazy time, one might have expected D’Souza’s claptrap to be denounced by politicians across the political spectrum, but that is not the time we live in.

Instead, Gingrich, a leading figure in the Republican Party and a potential candidate for president in 2012, praised D’Souza’s racist psycho-babble as the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama,” adding that D’Souza unlocked the mystery of who Obama is by addressing his “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”

Gingrich also pretended that he and D’Souza were the truth-tellers here, not just propagandists spreading a smear. Gingrich said they simply were unmasking Obama who has “played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”

How It Happened

But how did the United States of America get here? How could the most powerful nation on earth with a sophisticated media that is constitutionally protected from government censorship have stumbled into today’s dreary place filled with such up-is-down commentary?

As a journalist in Washington since 1977, I have had a front-row seat to this sad devolution of American reason. As the process advanced, I have at times felt like a Cassandra trying to warn others about the risks of abandoning fact and rationality in favor of propaganda of whatever stripe.

I also have watched Newt Gingrich since he was a freshman congressman in 1979, when I was a congressional correspondent for the Associated Press. Though I have met many politicians in my career and know they can be an egotistical bunch, Gingrich’s burning ambition – his readiness to do whatever was necessary – stood out even then.

Unlike many other congressional Republicans of the time, Gingrich cared little for constructive governance but a great deal for political gamesmanship. He was already plotting his route to national power and was ready to use whatever tactics would advance his personal and ideological cause.

However, America’s decoupling from reality – and its disappearance into the swamp of unreality – began in earnest with the rise of actor and ad pitchman Ronald Reagan, who crafted a host of get-something-for-nothing policies that appealed to a nation that was struggling to adjust to a more complex world.

Reagan promised that tax cuts tilted to the rich would generate more revenue and eliminate the federal debt; that this money also could finance a massive military buildup which would frighten America’s enemies and restore national prestige; that freeing corporations from government regulations and from powerful unions would herald a new day of prosperity; that the country could turn its back on alternative energy and simply drill for more oil; that whites no longer had to feel guilty about the plight of blacks; that traditional “values” – i.e. rejection of the “counter-culture” – would bring back the good old days when men were men and women were women.

Despite the appeal of Reagan’s message to many Americans, it was essentially an invitation to repudiate reality. Before joining Reagan’s ticket as his vice presidential nominee, George H.W. Bush had famously denounced the tax-cut plan as “voodoo economics.” Early in Reagan’s presidency, his budget director David Stockman acknowledged that the tax cuts would flood the government in red ink.

But tax policy wasn’t Reagan’s only ignore-the-future policy. While rejecting President Jimmy Carter’s warnings about the need for renewable energy sources, Reagan removed Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof and left the nation dependent on oil. Reagan also led campaigns to break unions and to free corporations from many government regulations.

Scaring the Public

In foreign policy – although the Soviet Union was in rapid decline – Reagan put ideological blinders on the CIA’s analysts to make sure they exaggerated the Soviet menace and justified his military buildup.

Reagan achieved this “politicization” of the CIA by placing in charge his campaign chief William Casey, who, in turn, picked a young CIA careerist named Robert Gates to purge the analytical division of its long tradition of objectivity. Gates arranged the scariest intelligence estimates possible.

Reagan also credentialed a group of young intellectuals who became known as the neoconservatives – the likes of Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Robert Kagan – who emerged from an elitist tradition (advocated by philosopher Leo Strauss) that it was their proper role to manipulate the less-educated masses and guide them in certain directions.

After Reagan gave the neocons oversight of his Central American policies, the neocons worked with seasoned CIA propagandists, like Walter Raymond Jr. who was moved over to the National Security Council, to develop what they called “perception management” strategies for controlling how the American people would see and understand things.

The neocons used fear, exaggeration and outright lying to get the American people behind Reagan’s support for brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala and the contra rebels seeking to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. Truth was subordinated to policy.

Perception management operatives targeted honest journalists, human rights activists and congressional investigators who dug up unwanted facts that challenged Reagan’s propaganda. To discredit truthful messages, the neocons “controversialized” the messengers.

These techniques proved very successful, in large part, because many senior executives at leading news outlets – from the AP where general manager Keith Fuller was a Reagan enthusiast to the New York Times where executive editor Abe Rosenthal was himself a neocon – sided with the propagandists against their own journalists. [For details on “perception management,” see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

Meanwhile, the American Right began building its own media infrastructure with wealthy foundations footing the bills for a host of political magazines. Far-right religious cult leader Sun Myung Moon poured billions of mysterious dollars into the Washington Times and other media operations. [See Secrecy & Privilege.]

By contrast, the American Left mostly under-funded or even de-funded its scattered media outlets. Some, like Ramparts, were shuttered, while other formerly left-of-center publications, such as The New Republic and The Atlantic, changed hands to neocon and conservative owners. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Left’s Media Miscalculation.”]

Whatever the long-term costs, Reagan made many Americans feel good in the short run. They liked the idea of not having to pay for government services (by simply putting the bill on the government’s credit card) and many bought into Reagan’s notion that “government is the problem.”

So, in 1984, Reagan’s gauzy “Morning in America” vision won big over Walter Mondale’s appeal for fiscal responsibility.

The Iran-Contra Window

Perhaps the last best hope to reassert reality came with the Iran-Contra scandal, which played out from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostages deals with Iran had the potential to unravel an interconnected series of national security cover-ups and scandals, including cocaine smuggling by Reagan’s contras and creation of the “perception management” operation itself.

However, again, truth about these complex scandals was not considered that important, either in Congress or within the Washington news media. The governing Democrats, the likes of Rep. Lee Hamilton and later President Bill Clinton, chose to sweep the scandals under the rug in the hope that the Republicans would reciprocate through a renewed bipartisanship. [See Secrecy & Privilege.]

Not only were those hopes unrequited, the Republicans actually grew more emboldened and more partisan. The GOP and its allies ramped up personal attacks on Clinton by turning loose its powerful new media infrastructure, which by the 1990s featured the Right’s domination of AM talk radio.

A typical example of the Right’s propaganda was to distribute lists of “mysterious deaths” of people somehow connected to President Clinton. Though there was no evidence that Clinton was implicated in any of the deaths, the sophistry of the argument rested simply on the number of cases.

When I checked out some of the cases and relayed my findings of Clinton’s innocence to one right-wing source, he told me that maybe I could show that Clinton wasn’t responsible for some of the deaths but I couldn’t account for all and that it would be “a big story” if the President was responsible for even a few deaths.

I responded that it would be a “big story” if the President were responsible for even one, but the problem was that there was no evidence of that, just the insidious impression created by a long list of vague suspicions.

What the Right learned was that it could achieve political gain by circulating an endless supply of baseless or wildly exaggerated allegations. Many Americans would believe them just because of the repetition over right-wing talk radio, especially by the most prominent talker Rush Limbaugh.

On Election Night 1994, Democrats were stunned by how effective the tactic of using bogus and hyped anti-Clinton charges proved to be. Between the smearing of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the voters desire to punish Democrats for raising taxes to close the Reagan-Bush-41-era deficits, the Republicans swept to control of the House and Senate.

Newt Gingrich achieved his long-held goal of becoming House Speaker, and Rush Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the Republican congressional caucus.

In the years that have followed – especially with the emergence of Fox News in the mid-to-late 1990s – the dominance of right-wing propaganda over non-ideological reality moved to the center of the American political process.

As in the 1980s, much of the blame should fall on the mainstream news media. Rather than push for difficult truths, many journalists in the corporate media protected their careers by going with the flow or turned their attention to trivial and tabloid stories.

The Bush-43 Era

During Campaign 2000, journalists from publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post ganged up on Al Gore. They even made up quotations to put in his mouth so they could haze him as if they were the cool kids on campus and he was the goofy nerd.

By contrast, journalists knew to fawn all over the ultimate big man on campus, George W. Bush, as he made them feel important by giving them nicknames. [For details, see Neck Deep.]

When Gore still narrowly defeated Bush in Election 2000, the major news media stood aside as Bush and the Republicans stole the White House.

After Bush’s allies on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the counting of votes in Florida to give him the “victory,” some executives at major publications felt that pointing out the fact that Gore actually won – if all votes legal under Florida law had been counted – would undermine Bush’s “legitimacy” and thus it was better not to let the public know. In other words, ignorance had become bliss.

Some columnists, like the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, went so far as to hail the overturning of the popular will under the theory that Bush would be a uniter, while Gore would be a divisive figure.

The see-no-evil attitude hardened after the 9/11 attacks when mainstream outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, consciously misreported their own findings of a Gore victory in Florida, based on an unofficial media recount. Instead of leading with that remarkable fact, they buried the lede and highlighted that Bush would still have won some partial, hypothetical recounts. [See Neck Deep.]

The media mood after 9/11 – a combination of misguided patriotism and fear of right-wing retaliation – caused the mainstream press to retreat further into self-censorship and even collaboration. Key journalists, such as the Times’ reporter Judy Miller and the Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, became handmaidens to Bush’s propaganda about Iraq.

With only a few exceptions, the U.S. news media let itself become silly putty in the hands of the neocons, who had returned to power under Bush-43 with a much broader foreign policy portfolio than Reagan had ever given them. Whereas Reagan confined them mostly to Central America, Bush-43 gave them the strategically vital Middle East.

Not surprisingly, the neocons reprised their old strategy of perception management, stoking excessive fears of Iraq’s mythical WMD programs and stomping out any counter embers of doubt. For millions of Americans, the WMD lies became truth as they were repeated everywhere, from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Aping the Right

After watching the success of the Bush administration’s propaganda, some on the Left decided that their only hope was to give the neocons a taste of their own disinformation medicine.

Though the 9/11 evidence pointed to Bush’s incompetence in ignoring warnings and failing to stop al-Qaeda’s terrorist operation, some American leftists felt that it wasn’t enough to convince the people that Bush was simply a bonehead. The feeling was that Bush had so bamboozled the people that they needed to be shocked out of their trances by something bigger.

So, this small group brushed aside the evidence-backed narrative of Bush’s incompetence and even a competing interpretation of that factual framework, claiming that Bush had “let 9/11 happen.” Instead, this group insisted that the only way to wake up America was to make a case that Bush “made it happen,” that he was behind the 9/11 attacks.

To accomplish this feat, these activists, who became known as “9/11 truthers,” threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they indeed had done it. The "truthers" then cherry-picked a few supposed “anomalies” to build an “inside-job” story line.

The “truthers” even recycled many of the Right’s sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence. These sleight-of-hand techniques obscured the glaring fact that not a single witness has emerged to describe the alleged “inside job,” either the supposed “controlled demolition” of the Twin Towers or the alleged “missile” attack on the Pentagon.

Some supporters of the “inside-job” theory may have simply been destabilized by all the years of right-wing disinformation. Reality and real evidence may have lost all currency, replaced by a deep and understandable distrust of the nation's leaders and the news media.

Other "truthers" whom I’ve talked with view their anti-Bush propaganda campaign as a success because it injected some doubts among the American people about Bush. One told me that this was the only attack line against Bush that had gained any “traction.”

However, after President Obama’s election in 2008, the Right again demonstrated its mastery of the disinformation techniques. Unlike the Left, the Right could roll out the heavy artillery of a multi-layered media apparatus that pounded the public with barrage after barrage of conspiracy theories.

Falsehoods took on the color of truth simply by their endless retelling. For instance, the canard that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii as his birth certificate shows, has gained credibility with large numbers of Americans including about half of Republicans, some polls show. Similarly, the Right has convinced tens of millions that Obama is a Muslim, though he is Christian.

The Right’s media power has enabled the Republicans to portray Obama as some un-American “other,” while the GOP has little fear that its spreading of racist-tinged conspiracy theories will hurt the party’s election chances.

The latest example is Dinesh D’Souza’s bizarre theorizing about Obama’s channeling his late father’s opposition to British colonialism in Kenya, a reincarnated dream which somehow has morphed into Obama's "socialist" agenda which is "alien" to American values.

Instead of roundly condemning D’Souza for this strange and racist article, Gingrich – one of the supposed intellectuals of the Republican Party – went out of his way to praise the nonsense as “profound.”

As former Bush-43 speechwriter David Frum noted in a blog post, “With the Forbes story and now the Gingrich endorsement, the argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner – and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien – has been absorbed almost to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010.”

Despite some internal GOP critics like Frum, the Republican Party clearly feels that it has a winning formula, using such psychological warfare to exploit a confused and embittered electorate. That confidence will be tested on Nov. 2, although if most prognosticators are correct, the Republicans have good reason to feel confident.

Whatever happens on Election Day, the longer-term challenge will be to rebuild an old-fashioned commitment to fact and reason within both American journalism and the broader political system.

Though lying is not foreign to U.S. politics and media, telling the truth has always been a fundamental American value, one that is vital to democracy.

The great task of restoring the Republic must include honest efforts to dig out recent history's ground truth, which can then be used to build a path out of the disinformation swamp and onto the dry land of rational political discourse.

2010-09-09T01:26:00.005-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 125, ISSUE 155
IDIOTOCRACY
THE DUMBASSNESS OF AMERICAN CITIZENRY

When Stupid People don’t Know that They are Stupid: Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally and the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
by Chauncey DeVega, AltNet

The masses are asses. We know this. But the level of ignorance displayed by the attendees at the “Restoring Honor” rally is shocking even by contemporary standards.

It is quite clear that Glenn Beck is a master propagandist with a chilling and Svengali-like power over the lemmings of the New Right. Beck-watching is compelling (to me at least) because his popularity is a barometer of the toxins in our political atmosphere. Moreover, I wonder if Beck’s followers would be so slavish as to follow him off a cliff, and to what extremes would the tea party brigands go in their devotion to his cult of personality.

To point, here is a little armchair sociology to help put Beck and the New Right’s devotees into a broader context.

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

The Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Similar notions have been expressed–albeit less scientifically–for some time. Dunning and Kruger themselves quote Charles Darwin (”Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”) and Bertrand Russell (”One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

The Dunning–Kruger effect is not, however, concerned narrowly with high-order cognitive skills (much less their application in the political realm during a particular era, which is what Russell was talking about.Nor is it specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, which is what Darwin was saying. Indeed, Dunning et al. cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as “above average” (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt. Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf or driving a car.

The hypothesized phenomenon was tested in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

2010-09-03T01:38:00.003-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 125, ISSUE 154
The Debacle Surrounding Obama's Religion
by Joy Henry, Guest Blogger, My Dog Ate My Blog

By now, you've probably heard about the recent Pew Research Center Poll reporting that 43% of the American public is unsure of President Obama's religion. For the record, Obama is a Christian, and no major news outlet has reported otherwise since the beginning of his campaign in 2007. So why are so many Americans confused about his religion--so much so that 18% say he is a Muslim? And why does it matter?

Obama's detractors are the most "confused" about his religion.

When you analyze the results of the poll, there are some interesting correlations between what those polled thought of Obama and how they described his religion. When the Pew Research Center breaks down the votes, you can see that fully 34% of conservative Republicans said that Obama is Muslim, as well as 30% of people who disapprove of the job he's doing as president.

One theory has it that those opposed to Obama's political stance take to calling him Muslim because it's an easy way to distance Obama from the bulk of the American people, who are overwhelmingly Christian. "Muslim" functions as an easy label to convey the sense that Obama is un-American, or at least not as American as he could be.

Conservative pundit Glenn Beck's response to the Obama religion poll sums it up: even though Beck knows and admits that Obama is Christian, he's quick to say that it's a different type of Christian than himself. "People aren't recognizing his version of Christianity," Beck said. Beck painted the religion discussion in a different light, saying that the President "is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim." According to Beck, Obama doesn't recognize how individuality is important to Christianity, and ultimately, the American way.

Obama's lesser emphasis on religion and focus on multiculturalism is a new approach.

As the percentage of Americans who identify Obama as Muslim has increased in the past year, the percentage of those who correctly label him Christian has decreased 14 points, to 34%. Likewise, those who say they don't know his religion has increased from 34 to 43%. Even among Democrats, the number that say Obama is Christian has significantly dropped.

One possible reason for this is that Obama, when compared to President Bush, puts much less emphasis on religion in his presidency and approach to governing. After Bush, who openly stated that he relied on faith and prayer in his decision-making, Obama is less vocal. Although he attends church and consults religious leaders, Obama's Christianity is much more private than Bush's.

Obama has turned from a Christian focus, to one of multiculturalism. His recent response to the Ground Zero mosque controversy has been to emphasize Constitutional rights over religion. “If you can build a synagogue on that site or a Hindu temple on that site," Obama said, "then we can’t treat people of the Islamic faith differently."

Obama's personal attention to the issue of the white Boston cop who mistakenly arrested a black Harvard professor also showed his commitment to addressing multiracial issues in America. Multiculturalism, rather than Christianity, has been his way to frame the tough issues.

Does it matter?

Some might say that the public's confusion about Obama's religion doesn't matter, whether it's because they believe religion has no place in politics or that it has no bearing on how well one can govern.

However, one thing the public's confusion does show is that Obama has missed a chance to connect to the American people. Over 70% say that religion is "important" or "somewhat important" in their lives. Obama's downplaying of his Christianity has left people wondering if they can empathize with the president. Whereas President Bush was widely considered a religious man and Clinton connected with people through his "I feel your pain", man-of-the-people persona, Obama hasn't yet quite found his way to identify with the American public.

Joy Henry is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on online schools for Guide to Online Schools.

2010-08-31T12:06:00.003-04:00

A FILM REVIEW
DOGTOOTH
by Malik Isasis

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, writer/director of Dogtooth has brought back the Greek Tragedy. Lanthimos’ film takes a disturbing look at a family’s narrative of isolation, and the troubling redrawing of family boundaries. The father whose Rube Goldberg approach to parenting has taught his three adult children that the word “pussy” in fact means, “lamp”. Can you imagine hearing Can you turn on the pussy?

Many everyday words have been switched around to mean something completely different. The matriarch of this upside down world, reinforces lessons of obedience and one-upmanship through childish games where the winner, gets a prize and some affection. The only way to receive affection from both parents is obedience and winning whatever game the parents has constructed.

The children (one boy, two girls) who chronologically are very young adults, have been emotionally stunted into perpetual prepubescent adolescents, and taught to fear the outside world. The cognitive dissonance between the undeniable adultness of the children and their emotional maturity is sometimes moving, but always unsettling.

The only outsider to penetrate the family’s world, is a female security guard who is blind folded on the ride to the patriarch’s home, and then shown a room where the son awaits. The is a frequent routine as there is no dialogue between the two, they both respond to one another like a lab rat pulling levers; they strip naked and have sex without intimacy, just clinical precision . This arrangement is terminated when the father finds out that the woman has given one of his daughters illegal contraband, a Hollywood film in which, she recites lines. The father incidently looks over the developing sexuality between his two daughters, spurred on by the security guard coxing the eldest daughter to perform oral sex.

After a violent confrontation with the security guard, the father and mother arrange for one of the daughters to fulfill the role of a sexual partner for the son. He chooses the eldest daughter via closed eyes. The sex is clinical, and into all enjoyable for the eldest daughter, who is not pleased with the new arrangement.

The title dogtooth comes from the father saying that the children will be ready to leave the home when they develop their dogtooth. The eldest daughter who wants to help the process of her dogtooth come along takes matters into her own hands.

Dogtooth is a difficult film, it is a beautiful film, it is an allegory of familial dysfunctions. We are all subject to our family’s dysfunctions, and going out and spreading the into the world as we create our own families.

Grade: A

2010-08-26T23:03:00.010-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 124, ISSUE 153
SUCKER PUNCH
THE DISSAPPEARANCE OF GEORGE W. BUSH
by Malik Isasis

The great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges discussed the notion of the “Inversion of Time” in his short story (An Examination of The Work of Herbert Quain). The Inversion Time as defined by Borges is, a state in which we remember the future, and know nothing, or barely feel a presentiment, of the past. The Inversion of Time is a fictional concept, but it feels incredibly real in the parallel universe the corporate media has constructed, whereby the legacy of President George W. Bush and his Republican Congress has been disappeared, and all the chaos they left behind—such as the economic collapse, two failed occupations, unemployment rates, and immigration only began on November 2, 2008, with the election of President Barack Obama.

When the corporate media is not carrying the water for the rightwing echo chamber, they relay the narrative that the midterm election will be a massacre for the Democrats by the Republicans, which is typical.

The deregulation of the media has resulted in the same results as the deregulation of energy (think Enron), deregulation of big pharma (think healthcare), the deregulation of banking (think Goldman Sachs), and the deregulation of big oil (think British Petroleum) which is to say, corporate media has become an industry that has laid down every yellow brick along this path of mass delusion and perpetual war that began in earnest with the Reagan Administration, but the collapse of the fourth estate is a symptom of a much greater sickness in American democracy.

The corporate media didn’t challenge President Bush when he was in office, instead they spoke around him as if he had nothing to do with sleeping at the switch when September 11th happened, and sending troops to Iraq without proper intelligence, training, protective equipment, most importantly, a plan for the occupation of two sovereign countries, yet it was the Democratic Party who received the brunt of the criticism for the war President Bush had begotten. Although the corporate media failed— or were they successful? They tried linking the Democrats to the failures in Iraq, whenever they spoke out about the war. If America failed in Iraq, constructed the Republicans and their political operatives in the corporate media posing as anchors, it would be the fault of the Democrats who were unsupportive, therefore un-American, as seen in this clip from “The Most Trusted Name in News” CNN, even with the loss of Republican Congressional power, the media continued to treat the Democratic Party as a nuisance for challenging Bush's destructive foreign policy.

THE DYSFUNCTIONAL MEDIA

In the world of politics, perception is everything and the corporate media is in the business of perception, to move products, and minds. It is why they poll-test everything, all the time—everyday, President Obama’s and his counterparts’ sliding approval ratings are paraded about like fresh kill—not to provide insight mind you, but to build the perception of incompetence.

The Republicans have spent 19 months with their arms crossed, and refusing to participate in the two-party governance. Complete obstruction by the Republican Party has ensured that the stimulus bill, healthcare bill, Wall Street regulation reform wouldn’t be as effective, then during campaigning they point back to say how broken the government is, and how ineffective the Democratic Party was.

In 2005, when Democrats were in the minority, the corporate media went out of its way to portray Democrats as obstructionists. Here is a partial transcript from a Katie Couric interview with Bill Clinton:

COURIC: Let me ask you one political question, if I could, President Clinton. As you know, Howard Dean is now head of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. Right now it seems the most effective thing that Democrats are doing on Capitol Hill is blocking various nominations, at least from their perspective. Like, you know, John Bolton, or -- U.S. ambassador to the U.N. -- or head of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], or the head of the FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. How can the Democratic Party retool itself so they're not simply seen as obstructionist in terms of the president's agenda?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I don't think that's fair. I don't think Mr. [John] Negroponte [nominee for national intelligence director] will be blocked. I'm not sure Mr. Bolton will be blocked. There are policy reasons on the environment and food safety for debates on the others. And on judges, that's just a hoax. I mean, the Democrats blocked 10 out of over 200 judges. The Republicans wouldn't even give a vote to 40 of my Court of Appeals judges -- four times as many, just on the Court of Appeals, never mind all the others that they wouldn't have voted. So, this image that, I'm sad to say, you know, you just perpetrated it, it's ridiculous. The Democratic Senate has been nowhere near as obstructionist to President Bush on judges as the Republican Senate was to me. Not even close.

Here is the truth on obstruction:

The Bush Administration had based its whole administration on deceiving the public by pretending to be doing something, like fighting the so-called War on Terror, but in reality the wars were diversions, a Ponzi-scheme to money-launder government funds into private accounts with no-bid contracts with companies the Vice President had stocks in, such as Halliburton and all of its subsidiaries. Even the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina was used as an opportunity to privatize and line the pockets of the administrations’ friends.

Now that Bush has faded into the background, it’s like his presidency never existed. “Death precedes birth, the scar the wound, and the wound the blow,” Borges wrote in his short story. Bush left the country in a financial mess, only 19 months ago, and yet, amazingly, the corporate media has pinned the tail on the wrong donkey. The media talks about the unemployment rates, Iraq, and the economy without mentioning a word about the Bush legacy.

This constructed disconnect from reality is why President Obama and the Democrats can be blamed for an unemployment rate, fiscal disaster, and an oil pipe leak in the Gulf due to unregulated drilling.

Since President Bush’s legacy has been disappeared by the media, the Democratic Party shoulders all the economic fallout, and corporate malfeasance from Bush’s laissez-faire governance. The corporate media provides political cover for the Republican Party as they discuss politics like a sports event. The Republicans will win because they didn’t participate in governance for 19 months, crippling it, and they increased the atmosphere of hate and intolerance, and we’ve been sucker punched by a corporate media who is out to turn this country into an Oligarchy.

2010-08-25T18:03:00.004-04:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 123, ISSUE 152
WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME
Stoking White Fear as a Policy Strategy
by Malik Isasis

With the advent of technology such as the internet, Youtube, search engines, social media networking, cell phones, video/audio, etc., facts are handedly available, yet, the Republican Party--and rightwing hitmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and organizations such as Fox News are still able to get away with spreading lies and fear. It seems the more accessible information is, the more uninformed the American populace has become.

During the Bush years we saw eight years of mass delusion, an irrational fear of terrorism that lead us into two illegal occupations and the lizard brain hatred we now see toward Islam, Muslims and Arabs. When the rightwing, and the Republican Party stoke fear, especially white fear, they know exactly what they are doing. They prey on economic vulnerable white people whose egos have been broken down by their situation. Rightwing jesters such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck then rebuild white folks' egos and esteem by blaming equally economic vulnerable groups such as African-Americans, Muslims, Arabs, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans. This is why for the past 18 months Republicans haven't offered any new policies, just fear, because they have only a singular goal in governance, the maintenance of wealth for the investor class. Republicans have nothing new to offer, they've only offered wars and tax cuts for a generation.

Fox News, the Republican Party, rightwing hitmen, and corporate media malfeasance have cultured ignorance even in the Age of Information, but The Age of Information means nothing when opinion has become a religion and the corporate media weighs facts and opinions equally, giving us a cottage industry of rightwing attack media, thriving like algae.

Here is Jon Stewart making sense of an upside down America.

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2010-08-19T20:29:00.007-04:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 123, ISSUE 152
MUSLIMS, BLACKS AND MEXICANS, OH MY
by Malik Isasis

Muslim, blacks, and Mexicans, oh my--Muslim, Blacks and Mexicans, oh my. The corporate media are following the right wing, white supremacists down the yellow brick road, Fox News, especially are counting down to the midterm elections like a child waiting on Christmas, for the expected Republicans gains.

Republicans can never win on merit or ideas, they have to start wars, lie and raise the xenophobia level to get any kind of political attention. Groups like Blacks, Muslims and Mexicans have been the go to political strategy over the last 18 months-- not policy that addresses the shit they've left on the front lawn, but pure unadulterated hate. A post on one of my favorite blogs Altnet got it right about the Republican Party, referring to them as a sociopathic ex-boyfriend. Everytime the Republican Party has lost in the modern era, they have had If we can't have the country, no one can attitude.

18 months ago when Obama was elected his approval ratings where in the 60s, and the Republicans' ratings where in the low-to-mid 20s. Today, Obama's approval ratings are in the low-to mid 40s, while the Republicans' approval ratings are still in the low-to mid 20s. For Republicans to have any chance of gaining seats in the Congress they had to do something to bring down the president's ratings. How does a party with no ideas, awareness, or political interests in the working class, get itself back into power?

With two steps: bring down the confidence in government by complete obstruction, and leaving one party, the Democratic Party to governed the country on its own, and when Democrats attempted to address the economy, jobs, and health care, the Republicans were able to water down the most effective parts of Democratic Party's proposals and blame them for its lack of effectiveness e.g. the stimulus bill, which in the end was too small, and at the time of passage Republican opposed it for being too large. The Republicans understanding the psychology of the Democrats, knew that if they'd obstructed enough, the Democrats would absorb the Republicans framing of every issue and began obstructing themselves. It worked. Obama and the Democrats (especially in the Senate, gave away the store on every big political policy debate).

While paralyzing and bogging down the government in political minutia, the second step back into power was to tear down President Obama and his credibility by tapping into the darkest corners of America's consciousness, its xenophobia--using people of color to frighten poor and working class white people.

The Republicans have said as much about their strategy and the corporate media has allowed the Republicans to get away with both strategies, this is why in the upside down world known as American politics, a large portion of Americans surveyed still believe that Obama is a Muslim, as if being a Muslim is a bad thing. The level of obtuseness in the American populace is astounding, and nothing short of remarkable. It is remarkable that white supremacists, and corporatists have been thoroughly effective at turning every political thought into almost a religious belief, so that when confronted with facts, it doesn't matter e.g. Obama's citizenship. The corporate media's talking heads treat such uninformed people like they would when discussing religious beliefs--making facts and belief weigh the same. There are truths, and then there are beliefs, they are no equivalent.

Corporate media knowing we have a significant uninformed, or what pundits called low-information citizenry, use the skewed information in daily/weekly polls to drive opinion--or rather, reinforce opinions of Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, taxes, women, gays, the poor, the rich, and on and on. Corporate media gets the results it wants because they are the ones feeding the misinformation. To complete its campaign, the media polls the same misinformed people for their opinion.

MASS DELUSION

The corporate media is tracking the upcoming midterm elections like sports, and it's useful for the media to tap into sport-like commentary of our political infrastructure, it turns politics into over simplification of complex issues, rather than a thoughtful and articulate discussion, issues of the day become about political seats won or lost. Americans can relate to watching sports, so the simple sports-like way the corporate media frames politics plays to the narrative of emotions, pure emotions, so the American people aren't asking Republicans about their solutions, they are exercised by manufactured outrage around the building of an Islamic Community Center two blocks from Ground Zero, pushed into the public square by corporate media.

You keep us distracted, you keep us asleep. The Republicans and their corporate handlers are very effective anesthesiologists.

2010-08-17T10:44:00.001-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 122, ISSUE 151
America's Propensity for Paranoia

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

2010-08-14T15:02:00.000-04:00

2010-08-13T02:15:00.007-04:00

THE RACE ISSUE: VOLUME 121, ISSUE 150
NIGGER, WHY SO SERIOUS?
by Malik Isasis

Yet another rightwinger stoked the hate, vomiting racial bile into the toxic political discourse over public airwaves. Dr. Laura Schlessinger, a homophobic, self-righteous pop-radio-psychologist, who has no mental health background (she got her PH.D in physiology), began berating a caller after the caller stated she believed she was a victim of racism by her husband's family and friends. The caller is a black female, her husband is white.

Dr. Laura, knowing that she exercised poor judgment, later editing out the segment you just heard.

There you have it...a white supremacist blaming a black woman for being hypersensitive about being called a nigger--oh, and it's fine because rappers do it---oh, and black comedians on HBO do it, too. Rightwingers shit and throw bombs and blame others for the damage, and have absolutely no shame in promoting themselves as the antidote to the petulance they leave behind.

One last thing: using the word Nigger outside of educational purposes is never okay, even for the colonized mind of the African American rapper or comedian.

2010-08-09T14:19:00.012-04:00

THE RACE ISSUE: VOLUME 121, ISSUE 150
COLOR CORRECTION
by Malik Isasis

To go along with its theme of colored people ruining the lives of white people, the corporate media has targeted black Democratic Congressman Charlie Rangel, representing Harlem, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters, representing Watts. With power comes corruption, and no ethnic group is beyond corruption, but what makes this a targeting is the veracity, and certainty of guilt in the media's conjecture. Writer Earl Ofrai Hutchinson explains it this way:

The names of Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel and California Congresswoman Maxine Waters are now firmly imprinted in the media and public mind as the poster duo for congressional corruption. They're black, high profile, are ranking Democrats, and they're outspoken. That instantly made them inviting and even dispensable targets. The media crucifixion of Waters and Rangel absolves Congress of taking any real action against its worst offenders. Since the Rangel and Waters imbroglio broke, there's been much wild and loose talk, speculation, rumor and innuendo that Waters and Rangel will take your pick: resign, cut a deal, receive a reprimand, or a censure, or the most absurd of all, be expelled.

A media which has disappeared the failings of George Bush and the Republicans' torture policy, illegal wiretap, embezzlement of federal funds, Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, and many other inhumane offenses, have chosen to make Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangle the face of corruption of 2010, inspite of there being several Republicans like David Vitter who sought out prostitutions, and is still in the senate, advocating rightwing policies. How about Republican Senator John Ensign, who had an affair with his staffer's wife, and then bribed the staffer with his parents' money; of course he is still in the seante carrying on with rightwing advocacy.

MAN BITES DOG

Waters and Rangel fit into the narrative the media creates to deflect, more accurately to sustain the political amnesia, which is apt to put Republicans back in power. Misinformation plays to the ongoing white paranoia brought on by economic distress, where white folks are having to reconstruct their egos, and what better way of reconstructing your ego than to blame others for the lack of employment and opportunities? Last I checked, corporations aren't owned by Black folks. Hitler proved to be a genius in this regard, blaming German's loss of World War I and its economic depression on German and Austria's Jewry. Blaming so that he can consolidate power.

White supremacists in America are doing this tried and true formula, using the economic downturn to racialize every aspect of American life, pitting poor whites against poor blacks, immigrants, and other people of color. It's what white supremacists do, they need the constant distraction of race wars to steal, and consolidate power and influence.

TOO BIG TO FAIL, TOO BLACK TO PROGRESS

2010-08-08T12:15:00.001-04:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 120, ISSUE 149
KEEPING IT REAL WITH RACHEL MADDOW
How FOX NEWS SCARES WHITE PEOPLE

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2010-08-05T23:09:00.009-04:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 120, ISSUE 149
UNDER SIEGE
FOX NEWS RACE BAITS, CORPORATE MEDIA SPECTATES
by Malik Isasis

Like a bored monkey in a zoo, the Republicans and their right wing cabal Fox News can’t help flinging their poo at people of color through the bars of their paranoid white supremacist ideological cage. As the mid term-elections near, Fox News has ramped up its race baiting on all fronts: African-Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans, Arabs and Muslim Americans in its mission to create a race war, scaring uninformed white voters who are susceptible to such lizard-brain emotions. Meanwhile, mainstream media stands by and reports on the fallout as if Fox News racial carpet-bombing is legitimate, holding the victims more accountable than the miscreants at Fox who plant and hype stories of killing white babies.

For its malfeasants in journalism and basic indecency, Fox News was gifted a front row seat in the White House Briefing Room by The White House Correspondents Association, further legitimizing Fox’s style of propaganda and infotainment. On its choice, The White House Briefing Room, stated, "It was a very difficult decision" In the contention for the seat was NPR and Bloomberg News. This is nothing new, earlier this year, ABC News’ meat puppet, er, reporter, Jack Tapper, defended Fox News’ when the Obama Administration declared Fox News a non-journalist organization. Here is a transcript of that exchange between White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and meat puppet, er, reporter, Jack Tapper:

Tapper: It's escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations "not a news organization" and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it's appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one –
Crosstalk)

Gibbs: Jake, we render, we render an opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness that, the fairness of that coverage.

Tapper: But that's a pretty sweeping declaration that they are "not a news organization." How are they any different from, say -

Gibbs: ABC -

Tapper: ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?

Gibbs: You and I should watch sometime around 9 o'clock tonight. Or 5 o'clock this afternoon.

Tapper: I'm not talking about their opinion programming or issues you have with certain reports. I'm talking about saying thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a "news organization" -- why is that appropriate for the White House to say?

Gibbs: That's our opinion.

"Hundreds of journalists come to work each day at FOX News all deeply committed to their craft," Fox News' Senior Vice President of News, Michael Clemente, said in response to Gibbs' comments. "It's disappointing that the White House would be so dismissive of their fine work and continue their vengeful war against a news organization."

In the small world of Washington, D.C. reporting, journalists, and political hitmen and women fraternize and become enmeshed in the small, but powerful sphere of influence and what becomes clear is that they prefer to defend political connects above anything, including real advocacy for a functioning government. Jack Tapper is a perfect example of the corruption of American journalism.

THE NARRATIVE

Colored folks are on the attack, according to Fox News. Here is a sample of the right wing paranoia to scare white people:

AFRICAN AMERICANS:

MEXICANS AND MEXICAN AMERICANS:

ARAB AND MUSLIM AMERICANS

Fox News is contemptuous toward Arabs, and Muslims, Mexican, and African American people and propagates it hate for these groups daily. In addition, when they throw shit against the wall to see what sticks, mainstream media covers it with a sense of disconnectedness, an intellectual dissonance, which undermines our democracy. I don’t know, maybe it’s part of the plan, to incite such cynicism, and hate that nobody votes, and when nobody votes we get the democracy we deserve.

Eight years of Republican governance has caused the economic meltdown under George W. Bush, but the Republicans have blamed their malfeasance on Obama, and the Democratic Party, and the corporate media has colluded in scripting a Lazarus rise of the Republicans to save the country from their 12 years of governance that collapsed the economy in the first place.

Republicans really don’t have to do much governing. In fact, corporate media rarely engages them on substance--like, what will they do differntly than Bush? No, Republicans have to do is to keep throwing shit at passerbyers, and the corporate media will put them back in power, and presto, the wealthy will get more tax cuts, more policies that maintain their wealth, power and privilege.

The rest of us will get an Oligarchy.

2010-07-30T02:24:00.002-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 119, ISSUE 148
THE WAY OF WAR
The End of (Military) History? The US, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
by Andrew Bacevich, Tom Dispatch

"In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history." This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.

Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the “end of history” was at hand. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” he wrote in 1989, “is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”

Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.
For Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his famous essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive conclusion.

Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition’s course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were the weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles, poison gas, and atomic bombs -- the list is a long one. In their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrine and organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans.

All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.

Grand Illusions

That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars of the last century, told a decidedly different story. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new heights of lethality and destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggering material, psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly exceeded gain. In that regard, the war of 1914-1918 became emblematic: even the winners ended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not to celebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned his essay, faith in war’s problem-solving capacity had begun to erode. As early as 1945, among several great powers -- thanks to war, now great in name only -- that faith disappeared altogether.

Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted this trend. One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge from the Second World War stronger, richer, and more confident. The second was Israel, created as a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm. By the 1950s, both countries subscribed to this common conviction: national security (and, arguably, national survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority. In the lexicon of American and Israeli politics, “peace” was a codeword. The essential prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or potential, to accept a condition of permanent inferiority. In this regard, the two nations -- not yet intimate allies -- stood apart from the rest of the Western world.

So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and military elites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw no contradiction between rhetoric and reality.

Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. “Peace through strength” easily enough becomes “peace through war.” Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam, Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war.

A quarter-century later, U.S. forces seemingly caught up. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated -- even eclipsed -- the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin. Vietnam faded into irrelevance.

For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive. Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991 decided little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than real. Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation.

On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponents of a Greater Israel -- disregarding Washington’s objections -- set out to assert permanent control over territory that Israel had seized. Yet “facts on the ground” created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhance Israeli security. They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor assimilate.

In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991 likewise turned out to be ephemeral. Saddam Hussein survived and became in the eyes of successive American administrations an imminent threat to regional stability. This perception prompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical reorientation of strategy in Washington. No longer content to prevent an unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington now sought to dominate the entire Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the aim. Yet the United States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its writ.

During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became its own variant of a settlement policy. Yet U.S. bases dotting the Islamic world and U.S. forces operating in the region proved hardly more welcome than the Israeli settlements dotting the occupied territories and the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect them. In both cases, presence provoked (or provided a pretext for) resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger at the Zionists in their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they regarded as neo-colonial infidels.

Stuck

No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyed unquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel’s near abroad, its tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So, too, did American tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.

So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. No matter how badly battered and beaten, the “terrorists” (a catch-all term applied to anyone resisting Israeli or American authority) weren’t intimidated, remained unrepentant, and kept coming back for more.

Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for Galilee, its 1982 intervention in Lebanon. U.S. forces encountered it a decade later during Operation Restore Hope, the West’s gloriously titled foray into Somalia. Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all. Rather than producing peace or restoring hope, however, both operations ended in frustration, embarrassment, and failure.

And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come. By the 1980s, the IDF’s glory days were past. Rather than lightning strikes deep into the enemy rear, the narrative of Israeli military history became a cheerless recital of dirty wars -- unconventional conflicts against irregular forces yielding problematic results. The First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada (2000-2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead, the notorious 2008-2009 incursion into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.

Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birth rates emerged as a looming threat -- a “demographic bomb,” Benjamin Netanyahu called it. Here were new facts on the ground that military forces, unless employed pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress. Even as the IDF tried repeatedly and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into submission, demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories would be Arab.

Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military nonetheless succeeded in duplicating the IDF’s experience. Moments of glory remained, but they would prove fleeting indeed. After 9/11, Washington’s efforts to transform (or “liberate”) the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear. In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror began impressively enough, as U.S. forces operated with a speed and élan that had once been an Israeli trademark. Thanks to “shock and awe,” Kabul fell, followed less than a year and a half later by Baghdad. As one senior Army general explained to Congress in 2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:

“We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing unprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased information availability, and an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout the breadth and depth of the battlespace… Combined, these capabilities of the future networked force will leverage information dominance, speed and precision, and result in decision superiority.”

The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that occurred twice: “decision superiority.” At that moment, the officer corps, like the Bush administration, was still convinced that it knew how to win.

Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature. Campaigns advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years, while American troops struggled with their own intifadas. When it came to achieving decisions that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.

Winless

If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it’s this: victory is a chimera. Counting on today’s enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated their equivalent of Israel’s “demographic bomb” -- a “fiscal bomb.” Ingrained habits of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on endless wars exacerbated that threat.

By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted. High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning -- at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term. They sought instead to not lose. In Washington as in U.S. military command posts, the avoidance of outright defeat emerged as the new gold standard of success.

As a consequence, U.S. troops today sally forth from their base camps not to defeat the enemy, but to “protect the people,” consistent with the latest doctrinal fashion. Meanwhile, tea-sipping U.S. commanders cut deals with warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down their arms.

A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated soldier of this American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed, “military solutions” do not exist. As Petraeus himself has emphasized, “we can’t kill our way out of" the fix we’re in. In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy on the Western conception of warfare of the last two centuries.

The Unasked Question

What then are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military history?

In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end of ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and harmony. Peoples and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to squabble about.

With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies. Politically motivated violence will persist and may in specific instances even retain marginal utility. Yet the prospect of Big Wars solving Big Problems is probably gone for good. Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world. To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine.

It remains to be seen whether Israel and the United States can come to terms with the end of military history. Other nations have long since done so, accommodating themselves to the changing rhythms of international politics. That they do so is evidence not of virtue, but of shrewdness. China, for example, shows little eagerness to disarm. Yet as Beijing expands its reach and influence, it emphasizes trade, investment, and development assistance. Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army stays home. China has stolen a page from an old American playbook, having become today the preeminent practitioner of “dollar diplomacy.”

The collapse of the Western military tradition confronts Israel with limited choices, none of them attractive. Given the history of Judaism and the history of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to entrust their safety and security to the good will of their neighbors or the warm regards of the international community is understandable. In a mere six decades, the Zionist project has produced a vibrant, flourishing state. Why put all that at risk? Although the demographic bomb may be ticking, no one really knows how much time remains on the clock. If Israelis are inclined to continue putting their trust in (American-supplied) Israeli arms while hoping for the best, who can blame them?

In theory, the United States, sharing none of Israel’s demographic or geographic constraints and, far more richly endowed, should enjoy far greater freedom of action. Unfortunately, Washington has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads. For the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be pursued.

And always there is a chattering claque of militarists, calling for jihad and insisting on ever greater exertions, while remaining alert to any hint of backsliding. In Washington, members of this militarist camp, by no means coincidentally including many of the voices that most insistently defend Israeli bellicosity, tacitly collaborate in excluding or marginalizing views that they deem heretical. As a consequence, what passes for debate on matters relating to national security is a sham. Thus are we invited to believe, for example, that General Petraeus’s appointment as the umpteenth U.S. commander in Afghanistan constitutes a milestone on the way to ultimate success.

Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know: “What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?” Today, an altogether different question deserves our attention: What’s the point of constantly using our superb military if doing so doesn’t actually work?

Washington’s refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption and dishonesty permeating our politics.

2010-07-26T00:16:00.012-04:00

THE RACE ISSUE: VOLUME 118, ISSUE 147
NEGROPHOBIA
by Malik Isasis

Main Entry: ne·gro·phobe
Pronunciation: \ˈnē-grə-ˌfōb\
Function: noun
Usage: often capitalized
Date: 1900

: one who strongly dislikes or fears black people

In the film, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio's character Dom Cobb goes into the dreamscapes of his victims and extract information for a rival corporation. In order to get back to the United States, where he is charged with the murder of his wife, he takes a job that involves an inception, to plant an idea, rather than to steal one. In exchange, his name will be cleared.

Eighteen months ago with the election of President Barack Obama, Fox News turned its ire on black people and begun its own inception program by turning up the paranoid delusions of the Republican base, tapping into the lizard brain of racism amongst its audience.

Day after day, week after week, Fox News' plants manufactured stories that have a a way of making it into the mainstream--Mexicans are over running the country, Muslims in Iran are moments away from making a bomb, and Black folks are going to kill their white babies. No doubt, Fox is trying to start a race war, by inciting white fear. There is nothing more dangerous than white fear, since white folks hold the institutions of power: government, banks, etc. and those in the media portend to equate so called black racism with that of white racism, which is synonymous with institutions of power is utterly ridiculous.

Negrophobia is really a projection; projection, defined in the realm of psychology, as responses that are assumed to reveal inner feelings, motives, and conflicts. If negrophobia is a projection, I'd like to discuss what those projections are. A person suffering from negrophobia is a racist, and holds the belief that if a black person (or any person of color) get into a position of power, that person will exact revenge on past racial oppression because it's what they would do. Whatever a negrophobe says about racism, is the inverse of what they mean. Take a look (or listen) at this clip.

Whatever Rush said, just flip it, and you'll get the rightwing agenda. They hide in plain sight. Here is another:

Just flip what Michael Savage said, and you'll get his true agenda.

Negrophobes have been on a mission, to completely nullify the word "racist" and by calling every black person in power, a "racist" it takes the meaning out of it so it means nothing. They want the word racist to be like the car alarm in the neighborhood that we all ignore now, because it means nothing. White noise.

Fox News and other rightwing media are trying an inception, to create a race war that will turn white against any persons of color. The only people who stand to benefit are the negrophobes who steal from the government's coffers and maintain their power as we all fight for the scrapes.

2010-07-20T19:29:00.005-04:00

THE RACE ISSUE: VOLUME 118, ISSUE 146
WHITE LIES, BLACK CONSEQUENCES
by Malik Isasis

When it comes to discussing anything about racial matters this country becomes completely paralyzed. There is a Pavlovian reaction amongst the white supremacists who truly believe that being called a racist, is actually more worse than actually being one. Fox News for the past several weeks have been race baiting, pulling Obama into the fray of racial politics with trumped up stories on the New Black Panther Party, the building of a Mosque near Ground Zero, Arizona Immigration Law and now, Shirley Sherrod.

Ms Shirley Sherrod, an African American woman, was fired from her federal job at the United States Department of Agriculture after a cleverly edited video tape of a speech she'd given at an NAACP back in March 2008, made her seem as if she was a "racist" as she was telling a parable about her experience, but the way the tape was edited, it made her seem she denied a white farmer help in keeping his farm. The tape was put out by political hitman, Andrew Breitbart, at Big Government.com, a rightwing cesspool of misinformation.

Fox News smelled blood in the water and began promoting "Reverse Racism" on every show, linking Obama to a conspiracy to oppress white people. Fox News understands that Obama cowers from anything having to do with race, and so they get a free hand at discrediting him.

Fox News was so hungry to destroy Obama, and black people, that they didn't bother researching the tape. Here is Fox News, salivating at an opportunity to re-shine the turd that is the Tea Party:

Here is the truth:

Surprisingly, most of corporate media have not been going along with Fox's agenda to defend the Tea Party by any means necessary. Just like the ACORN story Fox manufactured, the Shirley Sherrod story is also fiction, to race bait, poor angry whites.

Obama being the coward he is, still supports his Agriculture Secretary Bill Vilsack's decision to fire her. Obama threw Ms Shirley Sherrod under the bus, where she still lay, unemployed. Rightwing, wins again, and Obama slowly, and painfully revealing that he has no interest in being anything other than weak, and lame in the face of adversity.

2010-07-19T00:53:00.005-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 118, ISSUE 146
BLOOD FOR BLOOD
The Dehumanization of Occupation

2010-07-12T16:33:00.014-04:00

THE RACE ISSUE: VOLUME 117, ISSUE 145
THE RISE OF THE RAGE JUNKIES:
How Fox News Madly Stokes Racial Division and the Rest of Mainstream Media Goes Along
by Malik Isasis

White Supremacy is the belief that members of the Caucasian race are superior in all ways to other groups or races in the world. In the history of the United States, white supremacy has existed as a means of justifying and preserving the nation as a white Christian country. The history of white supremacy is closely tied to the presence of slavery and the emergence, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the theories and categorizations of groups and nations into races. In the United States the presence of slavery and its continuance and growth in the South served as a strong foundation for white supremacy. Also important was immigration, first of the Irish and later of eastern and Mediterranean Europeans, which heightened the belief in the superiority of whiteness, defined as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

It must be political season, because the Republicans and its political operatives are hitting every low-hanging racial piñata from—illegal immigration: Mexicans, War & Terrorism: Arabs and Muslims, and a separatist movement: a la The New Black Panther Party, and America’s favorite whipping boy, and old stand by, Blacks. There’s nothing like, politically beating up on black folks. As if four centuries of rape, pillage, American apartheid, genocide, and countless other crimes against humanity against African Americans just wasn’t enough.

White supremacists keep coming back to the well to fill up their false sense of superiority. People of color are violent, lazy, petulant, racist, overly sexed, and a White Man’s burden; there is just no other message you can take away from media coverage of people of color in this country.

White supremacists in the past used code words in disseminating racist thought, e.g. urban, low-income, uppity, American values, but since the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the dog whistle of etiquette has been thrown out of the window. The corporate media and the white supremacists they employ, like in the days of yore, gloriously flaunt their hatred of people of color over the public airwaves.

Back in April of 1994 there was a genocide in Rwanda, Africa. The genocide was the result of a number complex issues such as civil war and strife and neocolonialism by the Europeans. Tutsis and Hutus, genetically the same were divided politically by Europeans (German and Belgian specifically), with the Tutsi the minority tribe being appointed a more superior racial type than Hutus, a numerical majority, thus began the seeds that would blossom into a full blown genocide once the European colonists Germany, and Belgian uprooted.

For 100 days, a million people were murdered, shot, raped and hacked to death with machetes. It was called the most efficient and coordinated genocide in human history, but in America there was a perverse obsession with the O.J. Simpson Murder case (for which thousands of hours were dedicated), and during the genocide, the corporate media garnered more sympathy for the silver back gorillas who were being slaughtered in the cross-fire than their human brethren. 10,000 black, African bodies floated down the Nyabarongo River hundreds miles to neighboring countries, as America watched O.J. Simpson.

The reasons the genocide was so efficient was the media: world media turning a blind-eye, and the local radio disc jockeys telling the murders where to find people hiding, broadcasting their whereabouts. The radio stations stirred the hatred and fueled the holocaust that was Rwanda, which brings me back to Fox News and its war on intelligence. The huge social digression of American culture is unsettling, and what’s more disturbing is how Fox News gets away with their divisive discourse.

Scholar and author Neely Fuller, Jr. described the four stages of racism (white supremacy) in his book, The United Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept as follows:

1. Establishment of White Supremacy: The sum of all speech and/or action, by those white persons who seek to dominate those classified as non-white
2. Maintenance of White Supremacy: The sum total of all speech and/or action, by those white persons who seek to continue the practice of racism.
3. Expansion of White Supremacy: The sum total of speech and/or action by those white persons who practice racism in a manner that directly, or indirectly help promote an increase in the number of non-white persons made subject to racism.
4. Refinement of White Supremacy: The sum total of all speech, and or/action, by those white persons who practice racism in a manner that improves the methods that help make the practice of racism more efficient, and/or, more “acceptable” to the victims.

A Complicit Media

Although Fox News and its other corporate media counterparts fulfill all four stages of white supremacy, they tend to maintain and refine racist propaganda by passing it off as news and analysis. Let’s take the Tea Party coverage for example. For the past year and half during the healthcare debate, Tea Baggers from the Tea Party marched in the streets with racist imagery of President Obama, carried guns to his speeches, called him a Nazi, socialist, communist, racist, voodoo witch doctor, Kenyan, Muslim, and many other variations.

Tea Baggers stormed townhall meetings and demanded their country back from a democratically elected president and party. The corporate media protected the Tea Baggers by overstating that Tea Baggers were not racist, just angry about a government takeover (code word) of healthcare.

Check out how CNN NEWS “The Most Trusted Name In News” covered the Tea Party:

Here is some footage major news chose not to show on television:

Now here’s Fox News jumping headlong into the fray (unabashedly, with an inarticulate house negro who seems straight out of central casting):

The house negro in the footage is obviously a plant. He had no idea what the hell he was talking about, noticed how his handler jumped in to save him?

FOX NEWS AND THE POLITICAL SEASON

Logic would follow, that if the Tea Party=white supremacy, and Republicans are the Tea Party, then Fox News’ support of both parties renders it a white supremacist corporation.

Fox News was constructed as Rachel Maddow once put it, to destroy the Democratic Party. I would add to that by saying Fox News was also constructed to maintain the equilibrium of white supremacy, to subjugate people of color and completely obliterate their credibility on any issue. Fox News does this by having, outliers on Black, Latino, or Muslim issues debating their hosts. The outlier is usually someone or some organization on the fringe, which Fox uses to set up its straw man arguments.

If one black person represents the race, goes white supremacy theory, that person if discredited, will naturally discredit Black thought, ergo discredit a movement. This strategy was/is used in all social movements from the Civil Rights’ movement, Women’s liberation movement, to Gay Rights movement. Discredit the so-called leaders, and the movement is discredited.

The most recent example of this is the weeklong New Black Panther Party intimidation case, which got hours and hours of airtime on all of Fox’s shows. Look at this interview closely:

Tea Party members are outliers too, but get no such treatment from corporate media. Fox News manufactures issues out of whole cloth and then it finds its way into mainstream media, transforming the absurd, and fringe into the normal. Here is more background on the so-called New Black Panther Movement story.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have purposefully devalued the word racist by over using it, and using it inappropriately. If they charge Obama with being racist every day, then when they are charged with it, it has no meaning. They no longer need code words, they just say exactly what they mean, daring anyone to speak out about it.
No matter how educated or well heeled a black person; it only takes white doubt to undermine black credibility. This happened with a black Harvard professor, Henry Lois Gates, Jr, when he found himself locked out of his house and was arrested by a white cop--this happened notoriously after Hurricane Katrina, when a poll (which interviewed 848 whites and 262 blacks) found that 56% of blacks felt the government response was slow because of race, while 51% of whites felt the government response was due to ‘bureaucratic inefficiency’. So the story played out as scripted in the media, minimizing the racism that was indeed part of the government's response to the manmade disaster.

Post Rational Society

I understand why corporate media and wealthy Republicans support Republicans, but why does the average, poor and down-trotted? The answer is as simple as the question, posed. Back in the 60s the Republicans, specifically Richard Nixon, seized upon disaffected white voters who began leaving the party in droves when the Democratic Party began supporting a host of social movements, but mainly the Civil Rights Movement.

The Southern Strategy was designed by Nixon and the Republicans to comfort the bigotry, sexism and prejudices of Southern white men who felt disenfranchised by the Democratic Party’s tacit support of minorities’ and women’s challenge to the white male paradigm. The Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights and civil liberties in the 60s during the empowerment movements caused a mass exodus of disenfranchised Southern white men.

The Nixon Doctrine was not adopted to address the misperceptions or heal the grievances of these so-called disenfranchised but to build a voting block of white men by pitting their interests against those of people of color and women. Although all of the disenfranchised shared more, in common than not, the Southern Strategy was a euphemism for divide and conquer. This tried and true strategy worked because it fractured communities by individualizing them, if people are fighting rather than discussing their shared grief, a collective revolution is less likely. Politicians and dictators the world over understand this concept.

No matter how horrible Bush was for the country and the world, his support in the polls never faltered below 30%- 33% because Nixon laid down the foundation. The poorest of the poor of Republicans are the most dogmatic about wedge issues such as race, gay marriage, abortion, and Mexicans. The so-called wedge issues keeps the Republicans’ poor wrapped up in their xenophobia. These folks have been convinced that they are the moral center of the country. They have also been convinced that being educated is elitism, staying in and living in squalor is noble, and working two or three jobs to make ends meet is American pie.

We live in a society, an American society were politicians lie outright, and despite Youtube, get away with being a Maverick®., or Reformer®., or a Maverick-Reformer®.. This bullshit works because Americans are jackasses, and was trained to be so.

Rationality has nothing to do with voting Republican because voting Republican has been transformed into a belief system similar to that of religion, where evidence is not necessary to believe in the convictions, because it’s all based in emotions and irrationality. For example, when a major conglomerate ships its company overseas for cheaper labor, the Republicans can convinced their base that it is the Mexicans who are stealing their jobs, contrary to reality. After nearly 40 years of indoctrination, Republican and media tested words like Elitist®, Value Voters®., San Francisco Liberal®., The Most-Liberal Democrat®., American Values®., Tax-Cuts®., HardWork®., and many others, trigger a response in the reptilian brain of the Republican voter that keeps them from accepting reality, which is why Republicans have dominated national politics for 30 years with help from their greatest ally, the corporate media.

So now when you hear these dumb asses shouting, "USA! USA! USA!" to their own demise, you know why.

2010-07-09T03:03:00.007-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 116, ISSUE 144
SARAH WHISPERS, AND THE MEDIA SCREAMS
by Malik Isasis

BREAKING NEWS: Sarah Palin has tweeted—no-no, she wrote something on Facebook, correction, Sarah Palin has just released a video on Youtube, so let’s over analyze every single word. The corporate media get themselves in a tizzy whenever Sister Sarah vomits her political commentary somewhere into the Social Networking sphere. Sarah Palin, the former, half-governor (she quit after two years to make some guap (that’s money for you uncool kids)) and Senator John McCain’s Vice Presidential running mate has done it again, convinced the corporate meat puppets in making a mountain out of a molehill. The media has convinced Sarah Palin that she is more important than she really is.

Sarah Palin is an empty vessel, a wooden horse of Troy for the financial class, and like her comrade President George W. Bush, she is not curious—lacks education on the things in which she discusses, instead, she speaks in generalities, circular logic and filibusters critics with a rash of run-on sentences. She should have been discredited after the 2008 presidential election for her lack of knowledge on governance—basically being a fraud, but the corporate media protects her by giving her Tweets, Facebook notes, and Youtube videos more authority than that of elected officials (see Death Panels), often using it as fodder to discredit President Obama or the Democratic Party.

It’s clear to anyone who has eyes, and ears with a little common sense that Sister Sarah is mining her fame for guap, and she like other Republicans are corporate whores, ready to be rented out by pretending she is one of the people with her roadside show of awe-shucks, you’re darn toodin’ bullshit. Sarah Palin is an anti-intellectual corporate investment, just as President Bush had been before her. President Bush paid out big dividends during his eight years in office with his privatization of the federal government schemes, which I like to call the wealth re-distribution ponzi scheme—e.g. no bid contracts, etc.

Like other Rightwing whores Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin’s sole purpose is to line her own pockets with dumb-down, anti-intellectual political screeds, which spreads paranoia and irrational fears to under educated white folks who will vote against their own interests if they think it will hurt blacks, or Mexicans, or Arabs, or poor people.

Mom awakening? Mama Grizzly Bears? WTF?

“For a political figure used to an off-the-cuff style, Palin's video has a professional and polished feel that could strengthen and broaden her emotional appeal among female voters.” -Washington Post

Palin's polished new video encapsulates the brand of independent, feminist yet traditional, brand of conservatism Palin stands for and is pushing through 2010 candidates like Heil and South Carolina's Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley. -CBS NEWS

The former Republican vice presidential nominee has remained firmly in the national spotlight since resigning her post as governor one year ago, thanks to television appearances, a national book tour, speaking engagements, and social media outlets. -CNN

Sounding teary, Palin discusses the need to "turn things around" for "kids and grandkids." One video segment shows an elderly woman in a wheelchair attending a Tea Party rally with a sign reading, "Don't Tread on Me" attached to her chair. -FOX News

Why hasn’t Sarah Palin been outed as a political fraud with absolutely nothing to say besides recycled slogans? Palin mentions nothing about what she is for, what exactly is this video about besides mixed-metaphors? I understand Republicans masturbating to her image, but why does the corporate media protect this imbecile?

Oh, right. Empty Vessel. Corporate Trojan Horse.

2010-07-07T00:38:00.028-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 115, ISSUE 143
MICHAEL STEELE:
The House Negro who is being sent to the field
by Malik Isasis

Michael Steele, head of the Republican National Committee is now learning that the “R” that signifies his allegiance to the Republican Party is no antidote for the white supremacist lashings he is receiving about the back for his comments on the Afghan war and occupation; and the corporate media, left, right and center are piling on like children at a playground.

Steel said, "This was a war of Obama's choosing…This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." Steele is an intelligent man, it is clear that he was playing to the lizard brain Republican supporters at a fundraiser (these quotes were taken from a video recording at a fund raising event), just as other Republicans do at these events--say anything no matter how outrageous or untrue--remember Senator George Allen, Republican who at a fund raiser, called a man of East Indian heritage, Macaca? Macaca is French for macaque, a monkey. Steele was just following protocol. He knows that Bush and the Republicans begot the Afghan war and occupation in 2001 with President Obama and Democrats now sustaining it. So, why is the corporate media lemmings rushing to topple him?

Other Republicans have said much more offensive things—take for instance Republican Joe Wilson who shouted during President Obama’s national speech on health care, “You Lie!” He initially apologized, but found out he was a hero amongst the Right, so went on to use his "You Lie!" as a fund raising opportunity, stating that he will
not be muzzled.

What about Sarah Palin? who claimed during that same time period, that the elderly would be put in front of Death Panels? The corporate media legitimized both these Republicans, but especially Palin’s nonsensical claim of Death Panels, which helped fuel anti-healthcare rage among the Rightwing populace. Check out these Republicans slamming first black Supreme Court Justice and Civil Rights Leader, Thurgood Marshall during the Kagan Hearings:

It is unbelievable--actually, it is very believable that Republicans were allowed to get away with their racist trite; the ugly face of white supremacy rears its ugly head, nearly everyday in the corporate media on matters of immigration and terrorism. Here is Thurgood Marshall’s real biography.

Let me be clear, I hate Republicans, and I especially don’t like black Republicans, it is intellectual dissonance--oxymoronic, to be an African American and support a party that fundamentally despises you for your heritage.

Michael Steele is being victimized by the white supremacists, who shrewdly put him into the position to capitalize on President Obama’s popularity and to be seen as a diverse party. The Republicans’ House Negro is disposable, unlike the truly ignorant and uninformed Sarah Palin. Now, Steele is feeling alone, being punished for dumbing himself down, and saying nonsensical things to attract money into the party. This script has played out before, when the House Negro is of no more use to his master, he is thrown out into the hot blazing sun with the rest of the Field Negroes he’d help oppress.

Welcome to the field, Michael Steele.

2010-06-01T12:08:00.004-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 114, ISSUE 142
Obama's Timidity and Deaths at Sea
by Ray McGovern, Consortium News

A chief lesson to learn from President Barack Obama’s recent unwillingness to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Lobby is that such timidity can get people killed.

Casualty figures are still arriving in the wake of Israel’s Sunday night-Monday morning commando attack on an unarmed flotilla trying to bring relief supplies to the 1.5 million Palestinians crowded into Gaza. Already, at least nine civilian passengers aboard the ships are reported killed, and dozens wounded.

Yet, seldom has an act of aggression been so well advertised in advance. Israel had made clear that it would use force to prevent the ships from reaching Gaza and heard no stern protest from President Obama, who apparently could not overcome his fear of Israel’s legendary political clout.

Earlier this year, Obama did criticize Israel’s continued settlement of Palestinian areas and Netanyahu’s resistance to hold meaningful peace talks, but the President has failed to back up his words with firm action or resolve.

For that reason, Netanyahu was left convinced that Israel could do what it wished, including dropping commandos by helicopters onto crowded ships and after an apparent clash with civilians on one of the ships, ordering the use of lethal force.

Then, Netanyahu could expect that America’s Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) – with leading figures like Wolf Blitzer who built his journalistic career by working for the Jerusalem Post – would finesse the murderous assault into something reasonable and possibly even tilted sympathetically toward the Israeli troops.

Early on, CNN began repeating the Israeli “explanation” for its attack on the high seas, parroting the Jerusalem Post which reported that “militants were killed” after they set upon Israeli naval commandos who boarded one of the six ships Monday morning at two o’clock.

The commandos “were met with strong resistance from men armed with bladed weapons and the situation degenerated into a massacre when one of them grabbed the weapon of a soldier and opened fire,” said the Jerusalem Post, quoting Israeli military sources.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that the relief convoy organizers had a “radical Islamic anti-Western orientation,” and that Israeli “naval forces were attacked with metal clubs and knives, as well as live fire,” though there were no reports of Israeli deaths. The IDF statement continued:

“The demonstrators had clearly prepared their weapons in advance for this specific purpose,” adding that the Navy then used riot dispersal methods, which include live fire, according to JTA, the global news service of the Jewish people.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak blamed the organizers of the convoy for the violent outcome, and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told a news conference why that was so: “The organizers’ intent was violent, their method was violent, and unfortunately, the results were violent.”

So, you see, the Israeli military resorted to violence only in self-defense. Right.

Quiet Conversation

On Monday, President Obama spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone about the incident. Afterwards, the White House said Obama had expressed “deep regret” over the deaths, but declined further comment, citing “the importance of learning all the facts and circumstances” as quickly as possible.

However, don’t count on the timid Obama or his Likud-leaning advisers — much less the FCM — to question the Israeli version.

We are likely to get an “explanation” worthy of the late Alexander Haig as to why the slaughter may well have been “justified.” Haig’s death in February brought to mind comments he made about a brutal incident on the night of Dec. 2, 1980, shortly after Ronald Reagan’s election victory.

In rightist-ruled El Salvador, government security forces stopped four American churchwomen in their mini-van and were ordered to kill them. The soldiers first raped the women and then executed them with high-powered rifles.

Reagan’s foreign policy team decided to treat the rape-murder as a public relations problem, best handled by shifting blame onto the victims. And so, the women were deemed not nuns, but “political activists.”

After becoming Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Haig told Congress that “the nuns may have run through a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire.”

In just a few weeks, the American women had gone from being innocent victims to “political activists” to armed insurgents – although knowledgeable U.S. government officials conceded there was no evidence to support Haig’s shoot-out speculation. As an intelligence analyst at the time, I knew of Haig’s inclination to make up stuff.

Watch for the same thing to happen to the international “activists” who were killed and wounded in the incident off Gaza. I don’t watch the FCM anymore (it’s just too much for my Irish temper), but I’m told that Israel-friendly pundits are already spinning faster than the famous centrifuges in Iran.

Uncle Remus’s Wisdom

“He Don’t Say Nothin’,” as Uncle Remus put it, with improper grammar but with an accurate understanding that by not saying anything you can often convey a powerful or dangerous message.

As a presidential candidate, Obama was careful to say nothing about the brutal Israeli blockade against the 1.5 million people in Gaza, about to enter its fourth year. As president-elect he stayed mum as the Israelis attacked densely populated Gaza, killing some 1,400 Gazans.

As President, he has backed down at every significant moment when Netanyahu thumbed his nose at Obama or at Vice President Joe Biden.

Obama knew about the “Freedom Flotilla” and its plan to bring supplies to Gaza. And he had to be aware of Israel’s threats to attack the relief ships. But, like Uncle Remus’s B’rer Fox, Obama “don’t say nothin.’”

Quite the contrary, Obama’s pro-Zionist White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who recently vacationed in Israel and met with Netanyahu last Wednesday, extended an invitation for a working visit at the White House. Netanyahu was to visit Obama on Tuesday after a four-day visit to Canada.

On Monday morning, Netanyahu canceled out of a gala dinner to be held in his honor in Ottawa and nixed the visit to Washington. He said he hoped that both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Obama “understand that Israel has a great security problem.”

However, according to Craig Murray, a former British ambassador and Foreign Office specialist on maritime law, the commando raid in international waters was more than just a security problem; it was a violation of international law and the Law of the Sea.

"Possibility one," Murray wrote, "is that the Israeli commandoes were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists in international waters. The applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred," in this case Turkey.

"In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory. So ... Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the attack by Israeli commandos falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime," Murray continued.

"Possibility two is that, if the killings were not military actions authorized by Israel, they were then acts of murder and fall under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.

"It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel would be obliged by law to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution."

Getting Away With Murder

But the fatal incident off the Gaza coast was not the first time Israel had used lethal force against a nearly defenseless ship at sea. The attack on the “Freedom Flotilla” was reminiscent of the attack on the USS Liberty during Israel’s Six-Day War against three of its Arab neighbors.

The war started on June 5, 1967, when Israel carried out an unprovoked Blitzkrieg attack. What is my source for “unprovoked?” Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who 15 years later admitted publicly:

“In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

Three days into the war, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats turned their firepower on the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty in international waters after the Israelis had identified it as a U.S. Navy ship.

The Israelis later insisted they had lost track of the ship and that the strafing was an accident in the fog of war. However, U.S. intelligence intercepted Israeli conversations at the time, indicating that the Israeli mission was to sink the ship and leave no survivors.

Israeli commandos clad in black were about to land from helicopters and finish off what remained of the Liberty crew when Seaman Terry Halbardier (later awarded the Silver Star) slid over the Liberty’s napalm-laden deck to jury-rig an antenna and get an SOS off to the Sixth Fleet.

Israeli forces intercepted the SOS and quickly broke off the attack. But 34 of the Liberty crew were killed and over 170 wounded.

To avoid exacerbating bilateral tensions, the U.S. Navy was ordered to cover up the deliberate nature of the attack, and the surviving crew was threatened with imprisonment, if they so much as told their wives. When some of the crew later called for an independent investigation, they were hit with charges of anti-Semitism.

One of the surviving crew of the USS Liberty, decorated Navy veteran Joe Meadors, was with the “Freedom Flotilla” when it was attacked. Meadors is past president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association.

The State Department tells us that Joe Meadors survived this latest Israeli attack. At last word, he sits in an Israeli jail.

Rachel Corrie

Another incident occurred on March 16, 2003, when 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, an American volunteer serving in Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer after a prolonged face-off in full view of several of her volunteer colleagues.

Rachel was trying to prevent the bulldozing of a Palestinian home where she had been staying.

The apparent message the Israelis wanted to convey in killing Rachel Corrie was that international volunteers would no longer be exempt from the brutal treatment accorded young Israeli volunteers who tried to stand up, as Rachel did, for decent treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.

The FCM’s excitement over President George W. Bush’s eagerly anticipated “shock-and-awe” bombing of Iraq three days later pushed what limited coverage there was about Rachel’s murder to the back pages. The Israelis claimed the killing was an inadvertent mistake, like the shoot-up of the Liberty.

The courageous Rachel was very much with the Freedom Flotilla in spirit. One of the ships in the convoy bore the name “Rachel Corrie.”

Israel cannot hide behind “inadvertence” this time, although its spin-masters are already doing their best to smear the civilians on the ships with buzzwords, calling them “terrorists” who “ambushed” and tried to “lynch” the Israeli commandos.

These P.R. tactics may work with the American FCM and neocons in Washington – and by extension the TV-watchers in the United States – but patience with Israel in the international community is wearing paper-thin.

Much of this has to do with Gaza, including the Israeli attack from Dec. 17, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009, as well as the three-year blockade that began when Hamas won Palestinian elections and became the governing party in Gaza.

Israel and the U.S. government deem Hamas to be a terrorist organization, though some other countries regard it more as a resistance movement fighting against Israeli occupation.

Yet, regardless of how one feels about Hamas, Israel’s harsh blockade of Gaza and last year’s military assault are widely seen as inflicting a humanitarian disaster on the Palestinian people.

Has Netanyahu Gone Too Far?

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reacted strongly to the Israeli attack on the relief ships, the largest of which sailed from Turkey. According to one report, Turkey has served warning that Turkish Navy ships will escort future relief convoys to Gaza.

Erdogan has had it with Israeli mistreatment of Muslims in his eastern Mediterranean neighborhood. On Jan. 29, 2009, at the economic summit in Davos, he leveled harsh criticism to Israeli President Shimon Peres’s face, labeling Gaza “an open-air prison.”

Erdogan angrily cited “the sixth commandment — Thou Shalt Not Kill,” adding, “We are talking about killing” in Gaza. Erdogan’s one-and-a-half-minute tirade was captured on camera by the BBC.

Five days before Erdogan’s outburst, the Brazilian government also condemned Israel’s bombing of Gaza and its effect on the civilian population as a “disproportionate response.”

It seems to have been the atrocity in Gaza that galvanized the successful joint effort by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to defy Israel by getting Iran to agree to transfer fully half of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey for further processing, rendering it unusable for a nuclear weapon.

Defy Israel? you ask. If Israel believes that low-enriched uranium is an essential part of an “existential threat” to Israel from eventual nuclear weapons in Iran, would the Israelis not be delighted at Iran’s agreement to send half to Turkey? Good question.

If the truth be told, Israel cares a lot less about Iran’s uranium that it does about forcing “regime change” in Tehran. Netanyahu does not want any agreement with Iran; he wants sanctions against Iran, and eventually a military conflict.

And this twin wish is shared by American neocons who remain influential in the Obama administration and in the FCM.

The pro-Israeli hardliners appear to be the ones running U.S. policy on the Middle East, not Obama, who seems only nominally in charge. Unusually clear proof of this came when the Brazilians released a letter revealing that Obama had personally encouraged the Brazilian and Turkish leaders to pursue the kind of deal they were able to work out with the Iranians.

Thus, the leaders of Brazil and Turkey were surprised when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other administration spokespeople trashed the tripartite Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal and pressed ahead with a new round of sanctions.

And the President? Did he step up and acknowledge encouraging Brazil and Turkey to seek the uranium deal? Well, he don’t say nothin’.

Israeli Influence

While Americans continue to be starved of real information from the FCM, people around the world are able to view with disdain the degree to which Washington dogs are wagged by Israeli tails.

When I suggested five years ago before a Capitol Hill hearing chaired by Rep. John Conyers that Israel was right up there, together with oil and military bases, as comprising the real rationale for war on Iraq, I, too, was called anti-Semitic. But the evidence has always been as clear as it is abundant.

An inadvertent remark by former British Prime Minister Blair has provided insight — straight from the horse’s ass, I mean, mouth.

In early February 2010, the British press revealed that Blair, testifying to the Iraq war commission in the U.K., offered the following account of his discussions with Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. That’s when Bush said war was the only way to deal with Saddam Hussein, and Blair acquiesced.

But Blair’s remarks revealed that Israeli concerns were a major part of the equation and that Israeli officials were involved in the discussions. Thus, Blair:

“As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."

It is a safe bet that Hillary Clinton’s Likud-friendly lieutenants and their new junior partners in London are busy conferring with Tel Aviv right now about how to handle the PR challenge caused by the upstart leaders of Turkey and Brazil with the temerity to work out a deal with Tehran. (Never mind that Obama personally asked them to do it.)

How does one make into a bad thing Iran’s agreement to ship half its uranium out of the country, even if additional steps might still be needed to assure the world that Iran is telling the truth when it says it isn’t building a nuclear bomb?

More and more people around the globe are seeing Obama as subservient to the Likud Lobby, perhaps not as enthusiastically as Bush was, but still unwilling to put action behind his occasional words of dissatisfaction.

Important players in the Middle East, as well as increasingly assertive countries like Turkey and Brazil, conclude that the policies and behavior of Tel Aviv and Washington are virtually identical.

And then there is the $3 billion or so that the United States gives Israel each year that enables the Israelis to arm themselves to the teeth. It is understandable, then, that many will blame Washington for what happened in the dark of night, on the eve of Memorial Day, on the high seas.

Hard Lessons

The likely results are three-fold:

--On Memorial Day next year, there may well be hundreds more “fallen heroes” to honor, killed by Muslim and other “militants” who make no distinction between what the U.S. had done in Iraq and Afghanistan and what Israel does in Gaza and the occupied West Bank — and add Lebanon and Syria, for good measure.

As Gen. David Petraeus pointed out earlier this year, the unresolved Arab-Israeli “conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel” and thus puts U.S. troops at greater risk.

“Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world,” Petraeus said. “Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support."

--The linking of U.S. support with Israeli actions enhances the incentive of terrorists to ply their dark arts in the United States.

While it is difficult to find a measure of objectivity in official U.S. government documents on this topic, every so often there is a slip between cup and lip. There was such a slip on Sept. 23, 2004, for example, when the Pentagon-sponsored U.S. Defense Science Board issued a formal report concluding:

“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights.”

You will not be surprised to find out that the board’s report was generally suppressed in the FCM, as were the following, more specific, examples:

“By his own account, KSM’s [9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s] animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” [9/11 Commission Report, July 22, 2004, page 147]

And what motivated Dr. Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian physician of Palestinian origin, who on Dec. 30, 2009, detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA site in eastern Afghanistan, killing seven American CIA operatives? According to his brother, al-Balawi “changed” during the three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed some 1,400 Gazans.

When al-Balawi volunteered to treat injured Palestinians in Gaza, he was arrested by Jordanian authorities, his brother said. It was after that arrest that al-Balawi allowed himself to be “recruited” to spy on al-Qaeda for the CIA.

Quickly, it became payback time for Americans and Jordanians whom he associated with Israel.

Christmas underpants bomber Abdulmuttallab also is reported to have been particularly outraged by Israel’s slaughter of the 1,400 Gazans at the turn of 2008-09 and Washington’s defense of Israel’s action.

That Israeli actions in Gaza acted as catalysts to al-Balawi’s and Abdulmuttallab’s determination to exact revenge on the U.S. is hardly surprising — the more so in view of Washington’s efforts to suppress the findings of the UN-commissioned Gaza investigation by Justice Richard Goldstone. His report concluded that:

“The blockade policies implemented by Israel against the Gaza Strip, in particular the closure of or restrictions imposed on border crossings in the immediate period before the military operations, subjected the local population to extreme hardship and deprivations that amounted to a violation of Israel’s obligations as an Occupying Power under the Fourth Geneva Convention. …

“Israel has essentially violated its obligation to allow free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital objects, food, and clothing that were needed to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the civilian population …

“The Mission concludes that the conditions resulting from deliberate actions of the Israeli forces and the declared policies of the Government with regard to the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the military operation cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip.

“The Mission, therefore, finds a violation of the provisions of Articles 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

--Attacking Iran?

It is no secret that this goal enjoys high priority on Netanyahu’s agenda. It could be stopped in its tracks by a public warning from President Obama — but all signs point to his bending to neocon advice to shy away from a showdown.

The fact that world leaders consider Netanyahu a clear and present danger to peace in the region is showed by the way the leaders of Turkey and Brazil moved at an accelerated pace to draw the Iranians into the kind of deal that Obama personally had advocated, before being overruled by Clinton and Democratic neocons.

The urgency of the Turkey-Brazil initiative came through in the words of Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who could hardly have been more explicit:

“We can't allow to happen in Iran what happened in Iraq. Before any sanctions, we must undertake all possible efforts to try and build peace in the Middle East."

A Green Light

Netanyahu listens only to Washington, when he listens at all. Following the bloody attack on the Freedom Flotilla, I imagine he will now get at most a mealy-mouthed “please-don’t-do-this-again” from the White House, together with an Al-Haig made-up excuse about an “exchange” of fire.

If that proves to be the case, Netanyahu is altogether likely to consider that Israel has a green light to provoke hostilities with Iran, with the full expectation that the United States will jump right in to help the non-ally ally finish the job.

Non-ally ally? Sorry, despite what you hear from Obama, Congress and the whole Washington Establishment, Israel is not an ally of the United States. Webster’s (and international law) define ally as “a state associated with another by treaty.”

There is no mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and Israel. (Washington has broached the idea to Israel from time to time, but Israel has said no thanks. Treaties, you see, require internationally recognized borders, and Israeli leaders avoid that subject like the plague.)

NATO member Turkey, on the other hand, is a U.S. ally. This could make things very awkward if Turkey sends its warships to accompany the next convoy trying to lift the siege of Gaza. It is possible that Washington may have to choose between a real ally and a synthetic one, if shots are fired.

2010-05-20T13:26:00.002-04:00

THE POST RACIAL ISSUE: VOLUME 113, ISSUE 141
WHEN BIG LIPS DON'T WORK

2010-05-10T01:29:00.002-04:00

THE POWER ISSUE: VOLUME 112, ISSUE 140
What If BP Were A Human Being?
by Bruce A. Dixon, The Black Agenda Report

What if BP, the principal corporate entity responsible for the monstrous oil well rupture a mile beneath Gulf of Mexico were a human being, a flesh and blood person instead of a faceless transnational corporation? It's a fair and simple question, and the answers tell us a lot more about the world we live in.

The third largest oil company in the world, BP was born in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and was partly owned by the British government. Its headquarters offices are in the UK.. So if it were a flesh and blood person, it would be far and away the wealthiest person on earth, and a nominal British subject. Assuming that our imaginary human BP got into the oil business at the youthful age of say, 20, and stayed at it for just over a century, BP the human being would be closing in on his 121st birthday. Damned few of us will see triple digits, and none of us that reach even our 60s and 70s retain the level of energy, or often of interest that we possessed only a couple decades before. A normal 120 year-old human will have more than a few ailments and bodily systems on the brink of failure. But not our human BP. If BP were a person, it would be immensely, almost inconceivably wealthy AND perhaps immortal.

In the 1930s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company became the Ango-Iranian Oil Company. In the 1970s it swallowed Standard Oil of Ohio, in the 1980s it merged with Amoco, formerly Standard Oil of Indiana, and in the 21st century it bought Arco and other oil companies. Along the way, BP has utilized all these and other brands, like Conoco, at its convenience. Most recently, BP the corporation has rebranded itself, declaring that BP now stood for “Beyond Petroleum.”

Among flesh and blood humans, there are no precise analogs to what corporations do when they buy and sell each other. The acts of matrimony and cannibalism perhaps comes closest, with consenting or non-consenting spouses and/or victims, along with assumption of the spouse and/or victim's assets. Among humans, marriage is a reason to change one's name, too. Another reason to change one's name is simply to escape one's old record and reputation. Among humans, that's called assuming an alias. So our immortal, immensely wealthy human BP may have been married several times, perhaps several times at once, could be a cannibal, albeit with sometimes willing victims, and operates under several aliases.

You don't have to look too long and hard to understand why a flesh and blood BP would need aliases. The objective of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was to monopolize the rich oil resources of what is now Iran. Among the many illegal acts it committed toward that end was a £5,000 bribe to future British PM Winston Churchill back in 1923 to lobby for its interests. A secular nationalist and democratically elected Iranian government kicked BP out in the early 1950s. BP turned its lobbying to Washington DC, and in 1953, helped persuade the US to overthrow the Democratic Iranian government and installed its puppet, the Shah, popularly known as the Crowned Cannibal. The Shah, in the course of killing millions and stealing billions, invited BP back, and it stayed until 1979, when the Shah was overthrown.

In a century of doing business, BP has been implicated in bribery of public officials, grand theft, fomenting unjust wars, of murder, torture, fraud, stock swindling, plunder, environmental destruction, and money laundering in and between scores of countries on every continent except Antarctica. If BP were a person it would be a career criminal, a pathological liar and an international serial killer with a rap sheet several times the size of the Chicago Yellow Pages.

Given his (we're reasonably sure a human BP would not be a woman) global reach and proclivity to corrupt public officials around the world, and past record, BP the human being would be a flight risk. He would be indicted for murder, or at least negligent homicide in the deaths of the last eleven oil workers to die when its rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. US law doesn't have death penalties for corporations, but the federal government, and most or all of the first wave of Gulf Coast states where the oil slick wil wash all have capital punishment for people. We're talking Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

The assets of corporations are protected against lawsuits of all kinds. BP and other oil industry giants long ago paid for the insertion of provisions into the US federal code that limit their liability in the case of oil spills to a mere $75 million dollars. But there are no limits on the liability that individually held wealth can incur. A human BP, even though 120 years old and immensely wealthy, could see all his assets around the world frozen, would be imprisoned without bail, and might be on trial for his life.

But of course the real BP is a corporation, and death penalties, like laws in general are for humans, not corporations.

In the single instance of the blown rig at Deepwater Horizon, BP had a deal with the US federal government that excused it from safety inspections and payment of any royalties, and subcontracted the building and operation of the rig to Halliburton, Cameron and other corporations. If they too were human beings like our hypothetical human BP, we could add “conspiracy to commit” and “conspiracy to conceal” in front of all the previously mentioned offenses, and the lot of them along with many of their accessories and co-conspirators in governments here and abroad could be rounded up. And all this is for only the latest series of crimes connected to a single industrial disaster.

When it suits their purposes, employees and mouthpieces of various transnational firms hasten to assure us that “corporations are people, too.” In a sense this is certainly true. Despite what some bible thumping fundamentalists will tell you, corporations were not ordained by the Almighty. Corporations are legal fictions. They are artificial shields under which we agree to allow a handful of extremely wealthy people to rule over the rest us, and plunder the planet and its people at will, just as centuries ago most of the humans who mattered agreed that kings, queens and nobly born, the “people of quality” had the god given right to ride roughshod over humanity.

Ultimately, people woke up, rose up, and revoked those privileges. How long will it be before we revoke the lawless privileges of corporations, before we limit their immunity, curtail their immortality, and rein in their immorality?. How long can we, and the planet on which we depend for life itself, wait? Is there ever a line that cannot be crossed? Where is it? What will it take?

2010-04-27T03:02:00.002-04:00

POST RACIAL EDITION: VOLUME 111, ISSUE 139
POST RACIAL AMERICA

2010-04-14T19:07:00.004-04:00

THE CORPORATE ISSUE: VOLUME 110, ISSUE 138
LOGORAMA
by Francois Alaux, Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain

Logorama won the Oscar for the best short in 2010. This short animates corporatism that has so beholden our culture.

2010-03-28T22:51:00.010-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 109, ISSUE 137
THE WORLD WATCHES IN SILENCE
by Malik Isasis

Israeli settlements continue to plague the peace process. It is clear that the Israeli government and its largess, the United States with its billions in aid, and military support, are choosing to digest all of Palestine into Israel so there will never be a two-state solution, just one. And if that is the course, Israel and the United States should stop pretending that it wants peace, rather than land. If there is to be a one-state solution, declare it, but also declare that the Palestinians will be full Israeli citizens with equal rights, or continue to be second class citizens in its own territories under the current apartheid system.

2010-03-21T23:54:00.003-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 109, ISSUE 136
ISRAEL IS BOSS
by Margaret Kimberley, The Black Agenda Report

Corporate media pretend U.S.-Israeli relations are in “crisis,” just as they have many times in the past. It’s all a charade, a play for national and international audiences. In real crises, relationships are called into question. But there has never been any question about who is in charge of this “partnership”: Israel. And don’t you dare forget it.

The United States may invade and occupy Iraq, undermine elected presidents in Haiti and throw its weight around in numerous ways in numerous parts of the world. Yet there is one country it does not dare to confront. Of course, the nation in question is Israel.

Israel and its allies in the United States make certain that no president, no political party, no congressional leader nor any citizen who wishes to be in any way influential, will dare to step outside the lines of proscribed behavior and discourse. The American public, either because they are aware of the pro-Israel grip on power, or because they have swallowed the propaganda whole, remain cowed and silent.

Israel can do whatever it wants not only with the United States, but with other western nations as well. Mossad agents succeeded in murdering Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabouh in Dubai last month by using doctored British, Irish, French, Australian and German passports and credit cards issued to an Israeli-run bank located in South Dakota. None of the nations involved has uttered more than the slightest peep after having their sovereignty violated in such an obvious manner.

ust in case there was any doubt about who is in charge, Israel insulted Vice President Joseph Biden and the United States government when Biden made a recent visit to Jerusalem. Biden made the pro forma journey to go through the motions of requesting that the peace process continue. The Israelis could have nudged, winked and gone through the pretense of moving forward on a just peace process. Instead they announced that more Jewish housing will be constructed on Palestinian land, embarrassing the Vice President and his boss, who wanted to pretend to be even handed when they and the rest of American political leadership are anything but. The Obama administration, like every other presidential administration in the last sixty years, does what Israel wants it to do. There shouldn’t be any reason for Israel to yank the Americans’ chain so hard and so publicly, but why follow the rules of diplomatic niceties when doing otherwise has been so successful?

The only thing worse than the obvious slap in the face, is the phony outrage surrounding it. No one gets anywhere near a presidential nomination without first swearing obedience to the Zionists and their lobby. If Obama and Biden and Hillary Clinton were truly upset with the Israelis, it is only because they were so blatant in making them all look like chumps.

Just a few weeks before Obama was sworn into office, George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice were the victims of an Israeli public beat down. Bush was literally pulled off a stage where he was about to give a speech and forced to take a phone call from then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. Rice had worked on a Security Council resolution which merely called for a cease fire in Israel’s massacre of thousands of people in Gaza. Olmert bragged in a press conference, “I said, ‘I don’t care; I have to talk to him.’” Not content to tell the world that he ordered the American president to follow his orders, he took a swipe at Rice too. “He gave an order to the secretary of state, and she did not vote in favor of it — a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and maneuvered for. She was left pretty shamed, and abstained on a resolution she arranged.” It isn’t surprising that Israel would repeat the humiliation just a year later with a different president.

It doesn’t matter if David Axelrod goes on the Sunday morning news shows and fakes outrage about Israel’s settlements. It matters that Israel continues to steal Palestinian land and it matters that only those willing to go along with the crime are allowed to entertain any idea of having a role in United States foreign policy decisions.

Far from being angry at Israel, the United States government is actually becoming more and more like that nation. The Obama administration claims the right to carry out extra judicial assassinations just like their Middle East partner in crime. The temporary embarrassment and damage control pronouncements are not worthy of anyone’s attention.

The only lesson to learn from this sorry episode is that nothing new has taken place between the United States and Israel. All Americans are still made complicit in the joint criminality and earn the enmity of most of the world as a result. So don’t believe the hype. There is nothing to see here, just move along.

2010-03-14T22:12:00.002-04:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 109, ISSUE 135
Palestinians Should Now Declare Their Independence
by Johann Hari, The Independent

Could the Israeli government make it any more obvious they have no intention of sharing the Over-Promised Land with its other inhabitants?

This week the Obama administration - who give Israel $3bn a year, more than they dole out to any other nation on earth - made a meek and craven request for Israelis to simply have a pause in seizing even more land, and to sit down with the Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded with a big concrete slap: the announcement of 1,600 more homes to be built on occupied Palestinian land from which Arabs will be forcibly kept out. He has made it plain he will not loosen his grip by an inch, announcing: "Even if [Palestinian President] Abu Mazen comes along and says he's ready to sign a peace deal on the spot, we will restore settlement construction to its previous levels." No compromise. Never.

How does this look to the Palestinians? Their story is so rarely explained without disinformation that it still seems startling when it is stated plainly. Until 1948, the Palestinians were living in their own homes, on their own land - until they were suddenly driven out in a war to make way for a new state for people fleeing a monstrous European genocide. They lived huddled and dazed in the 20 per cent of their land they were allowed to keep. They hardly fought back: they wept and dreamed of return. Then in the 1967 war, even these small strips were conquered with tanks and platoons.

Day by day since then, the remaining Palestinian land has been taken and given to fundamentalist settlers who claim it was given to them by God. They watched while Israeli Prime Ministers said they didn't exist - "there are no Palestinians", announced Golda Meir - or described them as animals: Menachem Begin called them "beasts walking on two legs", while Yitzhak Shamir said they should be "crushed like grasshoppers... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." They tried peacefully resisting, launching a programme of sit-downs and civil disobedience. Yitzhak Rabin responded by ordering the occupying Israeli army to "break their bones." After decades of this treatment, they fought back with violence - some of it targeted horribly and unacceptably at Israeli civilians.

And so today - with the active support of the governments of the Western world - the Palestinians live in a permanent military headlock. They are split in two. The Gaza Strip is blockaded on all sides, its population of 1.5 million imprisoned in a cramped, collapsing concrete maze the size of the Isle of Wight. For nearly three years, the essentials of life have been slowly choked off, in a process one Israeli official described with a chuckle as "putting the Palestinians on a diet". The items blocked from coming in include pasta and children's exercise books. The UN has shown that 70 per cent of Gazans are living on less than $1 a day, and 60 per cent have no daily access to clean water. Every time I go there, I think it can't be worse, yet it is. They used to use cars. Now it's donkeys.

On the West Bank, the land-theft continues. To protect the settlers and their programme of taking Palestinian land, there is a huge military infrastructure, made up of check-points and random searches and settler-only roads. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer offers one story he witnessed that typifies and distils life on the West Bank: "One school headmaster, a dignified elder man, who passed the same checkpoint on his way to school every morning, was made to undress - not once but often - and stand naked while his students passed by. This was richly humorous [to the occupying soldiers]."

There is a solution. Everyone knows it: divide the land. There are two peoples - the Palestinians and the Israelis. Let them live in two states, with 1967 borders, with full compensation for the victims of 1948. Although it is painful to accept swathes of your own dispossession, the Palestinian leadership has supported this programme since 1978, and even Hamas - the ugly fundamentalist group - tacitly accepts it. Yet it has not been offered to the Palestinians. Every time they have sat down to negotiate, even more has been stolen from them: settler numbers doubled during the Oslo "peace process". It culminated in an offer of a series of broken Batustans controlled forever by Israel - one no Palestinian leader could accept.

And now there is an endless ratchet. Swathes of East Jerusalem are being turned into biblical heritage theme parks and settler-belts that cut the city off from the West Bank. In 2008, 4,600 Palestinians lost their residency papers and so were expelled from the city, 20 times more than the year before.

For a long time, I believed that the Israeli people - with their own history of unimaginable suffering - would change their behaviour on their own. They would surely reject life as eternal jailer, after the jail cells they have end-ured. They would surely see that this process of slow strangulation would only make Palestinians more determined to fight back. If nothing else, they would surely see that the Palestinians would - because of their higher birth-rate - soon be a majority between the Jordan river and the sea, and there was no future for Israel as a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian majority like some 1980s Afrikaaner tribute band.

While there are some heroic Israelis who argue back - Gideon Levy, David Grossman, Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom, my military refusenik friends - they are disappointingly few. It may be that surviving the most horrific atrocities doesn't make you compassionate, but more often makes you hard, and paranoid. It may make you see the ghost of your murderer even in your victims: Adolf Hitler in a Gazan child. I think of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide I have known, who promptly charged off to pillage Congo, killing millions.

There is very little the Palestinians can do to change their situation alone. They are virtually disarmed, with a few rockets and some stone-throwing kids, against the fourth most powerful army on earth. But international pressure - applied intelligently, without hyperbole - can strengthen their hand, and the Palestinians are considering a move that would catalyse it. They are considering a unilateral declaration of independence, and an appeal for the world to recognise them as a state. It wouldn't cause the occupation to vanish - but it would make the situation plain for all to see. They are a people; they deserve a state, as much as the British or the Israelis. Netanyahu talks about the dangers of Israel being wiped from the map, yet Palestine is being wiped from the map every day by his tanks and his guns. Why should they have to "earn" their right to their own land by proving obedience to an abusive foreign power?

Western governments support this erasure of Palestine: the EU with diplomacy and arms sales and by providing Israel with its largest markets, and the US with hard cash. A declaration of Palestinian independence would force them to either defend that position to (mostly appalled) electorates, or change it. Already, France's Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, has hinted that he would feel obliged to support a declaration. Would Obama veto the creation of a Palestinian state at the UN Security Council?

Netanyahu is clearly panicked. The negotiators would meet as one head of state to another - rather than as a broken supplicant appealing to his master. He has angrily declared that the Palestinians will face "consequences" if they choose this path, including the annexation of settlement blocks. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saed Erekat replied: "The purpose of such a move is to keep hope alive... We're fed up with your time-wasting. We don't believe you really want a two-state solution."

The Palestinians want the same freedom that the Jews pined for - a safe home of their own. They should declare independence. Then it is up to us - the watching billions - to pressure our governments to make it real, rather than a howl in the dark.

2010-03-09T20:59:00.011-05:00

THE BROKEN MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 108, ISSUE 134
MASS EFFECT
by Malik Isasis

The problem with throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks is that, shit actually sticks. For twenty-five years the corporate media’s Jackson Pollack strategy of perpetuating Republican fear, folklore, and paranoia has painted the American political canvas with piles of poo, and the stench is something awful.

It is fashionable for newsreaders and pundits across cable news to over use the phrase Broken Government, while the government is broken, it is the corporate media who are the saboteurs, keeping American citizens schizophrenically uninformed.

When the Democratic Party was in the minority for over six years (four years under President Bush) the corporate media helped the neocons to portray the Democratic Party as obstructionists? Remember that? Of course not, because when Democrats were filibustering President Bush’s Supreme Court nominees, the media bashed the Democrats over the head with the obstructionist title. Here’s Katie Couric for example in April 2005, interviewing President Clinton:

COURIC: Let me ask you one political question, if I could, President Clinton. As you know, Howard Dean is now head of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. Right now it seems the most effective thing that Democrats are doing on Capitol Hill is blocking various nominations, at least from their perspective. Like, you know, John Bolton, or -- U.S. ambassador to the U.N. -- or head of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], or the head of the FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. How can the Democratic Party retool itself so they're not simply seen as obstructionist in terms of the president's agenda?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I don't think that's fair. I don't think Mr. [John] Negroponte [nominee for national intelligence director] will be blocked. I'm not sure Mr. Bolton will be blocked. There are policy reasons on the environment and food safety for debates on the others. And on judges, that's just a hoax. I mean, the Democrats blocked 10 out of over 200 judges. The Republicans wouldn't even give a vote to 40 of my Court of Appeals judges -- four times as many, just on the Court of Appeals, never mind all the others that they wouldn't have voted. So, this image that, I'm sad to say, you know, you just perpetrated it, it's ridiculous. The Democratic Senate has been nowhere near as obstructionist to President Bush on judges as the Republican Senate was to me. Not even close.

Since the Democratic Party retook the majority in the Congress in the November 2006 mid-term elections, the partisan label of obstructionists, has not been used once to describe the Republican Party who’ve since the Democratic Party has taken over, held their breaths, crossed their arms and stumped their feet like two year olds at every opportunity.

The corporate media is in cahoots with the right-wing hate machine to create mass delusion among the American population. Back in 2007, even with the loss of Republican Congressional power, the media continued to treat the Democratic Party as a nuisance for challenging Bush's destructive foreign policy.

The corporate media didn’t challenge Bush when he was in office, instead they spoke around him as if he had nothing to do with sending troops to Iraq without proper intelligence, training, protective equipment, most importantly, a plan for the occupation of a sovereign country, yet it is the Democratic Party who received the brunt of the criticism. Although the corporate media failed, they tried linking the Democrats to the failures in Iraq, per right-wing guidance. In the world of politics, perception is everything; the Bush Administration had based its whole administration on deceiving the public by pretending to be doing something, without really doing anything. The corporate media took the nothing and spun it into gold on his War on Terror.

Now that Bush has faded into the background, it’s like his presidency never existed. He has left the country in a financial mess, and yet, amazingly, the corporate media has pinned the tail on the wrong donkey. The media talks about the unemployment rates, Iraq, and the economy without mentioning a word about the Bush legacy. It is amazing.

The collusion between the politicians and the corporate media to short change us of ideas, imagination, and creativity has resulted in elected officials who lack ideas, imagination, and creativity.

The corporate whores who sponsor our politicians have trained them to see us as consumers, and if we are seen as consumers then we are seen as fools. Take’em to the woodshed Rachel:

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2010-03-02T23:43:00.017-05:00

THE BROKEN MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 108, ISSUE 133
THE CORPORATE MEDIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS
by Malik Isasis

Way back on October 18, 2006 President Bush had both the House and the Senate and from 2001-2006, he and the Republican Party reeked havoc on the economy with its “Starving the Beast” policies, jump started two wars and subs sequent occupations, and thoroughly collapsed the US economy into near bankruptcy, which proved the conservative economic policy of “Starving the Beast”, (creating such deficits through tax cuts that social programs die a seemingly natural death through attrition), worked quite well.

Having already imposed deep program cuts, governors in almost every state will have to make even more excruciating choices before July 1st, the beginning of their next fiscal year. In Massachusetts, officials are considering eliminating funding for a program providing housing vouchers to homeless families. California is facing $1.5 billion in reductions to kindergarten through 12th grade education and community college funding, while New York State may have to reduce payments to health-care providers by $400 million.

The Phoenix

October 18, 2006 was just weeks before the Democratic Party was to take control of the US Senate, which it hadn’t control since President Clinton lost it back in 1994. As political scandal after political scandal marred the Republicans, the Democrats were presented with opportunities to win seats in the unlikeliest districts. On October 18, 2006, I blogged this:The Republican implosion is not new. Throughout the 20th century, there are examples of Republicans reaching the pinnacle of power and then collapsing from the weight of their incompetence and lack of compassion. It’s the Peter Principle, which theorizes that a person will be promoted to the highest level of his/or her competence and eventually advance to a level of incompetence. The modern Republican Party implodes every other generation under its own ineptitude and rises like the Phoenix, only to repeat the same mistakes.

The Republicans understand that they really don’t have to change they just have to wait. I won’t blame the Republicans for their nature of petulance and incompetence just as I won’t blame a pile of shit for smelling. It’s useless. I can, however, dress-down the corporate media for its nihilism, and festering cynicism that threatens democracy.

Even in the age of Youtube and other neat recording devices, the corporate media divorce the Republican Party and its operatives from its long and disastrous history and give their failed voices authority.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Republicans are exceptional at branding things, just as they have branded themselves the party of moral values, in spite of the opposite; the corporate media has played along. Here is a long list of Republican hypocrisy on moral values.

THE CROOKED REF

The Fourth Estate, formerly known as the media, had/has the role of being a government watch dog, making sure that we had an educated citizenry. Of course now, the corporate media makes sure that keep kicking up dust, to muddle every single issue, even when it’s easy. The corporate media put the same value on a talking point as it does a fact, therefore when Republicans are spewing lies, they weigh it as equally as the fact, cleverly framing debates with Republican talking points by pretending to play Devil’s Advocate. So when people have been misinformed deliberately by the media’s own doing with help from the political operatives of the Republican Party, the corporate media reports the lack of support for health care as if its reporting had nothing to do with the results.

Blogger Alex Thurston at Firedoglake laid out the five biggest Republican folklores that the corporate media allow the Republican Party to get away with.
Republicans are Fiscal Conservatives
Republicans are Strong on National Security
Republicans Defend Individual Rights
Republicans Represent Family Values
Republicans Just Want Everyone to Have the Same Opportunities

The corporate media feeds images of violence in its most rawest forms without political context, or historical subtext. They report on symptoms of international strife like, blood, guts, tears, and American victimology rather than on the disease, or causes of said conflicts, like neo-colonial capitalism. It is a dumb-down, anti-intellectual formula that makes consumers of their reporting more susceptible to paranoia and irrational fears. For the corporate media is not in the business of advocacy anymore, rather it is in the business of turning citizens into consumers, blind, uncritically-thinking consumers who will respond to such comic-book concepts as War on Terror. They have succeeded in making the consumers of their products vote against their own best interests. The corporate media is broken and should come with a warning label like cigarettes.

Warning: if you consume this product you are at risk for intellectual cancer.

2010-02-25T20:39:00.010-05:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 108, ISSUE 132
The Death and Life of American Journalism Pt.1
by Real News Network

ADDENDUM

Where's the corporate media calling out the Republicans on their obstruction of providing and extention for unemplyment insurance for those who lost their jobs. We not only have a broken government, but a broken media.

2010-02-12T13:05:00.004-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 107, ISSUE 131
OCCUPATION: THE TRILOGY
by Malik Isasis

There was Afghanistan, then came Iraq and now looks like the United States has found another opportunity in which to occupy a country under the guise of helping it. Haiti, reeling from the earthquake, which toppled its fragile government, and its ability to provide security for its citizens, has found itself once again, under the watchful eyes of the United States' military. The US occupied Haiti (and the Dominican Republic) for over thrity years in the early 20th century and has been responsible for flipping governements with violent coup d'état, and assasinations. The island of Haiti has only been cursed in a sense that its neighbor, the United States and the International Monetary Fund has been responsible for most of its political and humanitarian misery because Africans had the audacity to free themselves from slavery.

The earthquake proved to be just the thing for those in the State Department and Pentagon to tie up some loose ends in the small nation state.

Background Info on Haiti

More Pain for Devastated Haiti: Under the Pretense of Disaster Relief, U.S. Running a Military Occupation
by Arun Gupta

The rapid mobilization of U.S troops in Haiti was not primarily done for humanitarian reasons; we're likely to see a neoliberal economic plan imposed, at gunpoint if necessary.

Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide "security and stability" to bring in aid, according to nearly all independent observers in the field, violence was never an issue. Continue.

2010-02-01T00:28:00.003-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 107, ISSUE 130
How Obama Lost His Way
by Robert Parry, Consortium News

President Barack Obama spent his first year in office trying to reassure the Washington/New York establishments that he was not going to upset their apple carts too much, that they shouldn’t panic, that he would – despite all the speeches – be more about continuity than change.

And he succeeded. The big banks were pulled back from the brink; the auto industry survived; the stock markets rebounded; a new Great Depression was averted; the national security elites praised Obama’s more nuanced rhetoric as he continued many of George W. Bush’s war policies; even the Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial page editor Fred Hiatt gave Obama mostly high marks for his first year.

“I’d like to interrupt the anniversary-bash-Obama-fest with a simple proposition: Obama has done a good job so far,” Hiatt wrote in a Jan. 19 column entitled “Obama’s first-year success.”

Yet the first major political judgment on Obama’s “responsible” behavior came later that same day in Massachusetts when a little-known right-wing Republican state senator, Scott Brown, defeated Attorney General Martha Coakley by five percentage points to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

It turned out that what Obama had accomplished politically in his first year was to associate himself and the Democratic Party with the widely despised national establishments.

For instance, Obama staffed his economic team with Wall Street friendlies, like Timothy Geithner who got promoted from head of the New York Federal Reserve to Treasury Secretary despite failing to have stopped the reckless bank gambles that caused the 2008 financial collapse. Geithner’s appointment calendar showed that his time as the chief regulator of Wall Street banks had included cozy lunches with bank CEOs at New York's swanky Four Seasons.

And, whether the huge bank bailouts were necessary or not, Geithner annoyed the public because he seemed to view the crisis through the eyes of the bankers. He opposed any harsh medicine, like temporarily nationalizing some of the banks or at least demanding that they accept tough new rules on their behavior before they were nursed back to health with trillions of dollars in public monies.

So, by selecting Geithner along with a number of ex-Wall Streeters who had gotten rich giving advice to banks and hedge funds, Obama positioned himself as the protector-in-chief of a corrupt financial elite – albeit with a few finger-wagging lectures tossed in. And, despite Obama’s explanation about Wall Street being saved so it could help out Main Street, the struggling American people saw little in the bank bailouts for themselves.

Simply put, Obama failed to persuade the American people that he would deploy a reenergized federal government to fight their battles against well-entrenched financial interests. Instead, he was viewed as helping the elites shore up their comfortable trenches.

Similarly, on foreign policy, Obama moved quickly to quiet the fears of the national security establishment. He pleased neocon and mainstream opinion leaders by keeping on one of their favorites, Republican Robert Gates, as Defense Secretary. The move was hailed as a wise gesture of bipartisanship.

Obama did make some cosmetic changes, such as dumping the phrase “war on terror” and vowing not to waterboard prisoners, but he embraced Bush’s gradual withdrawal from Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan.

Obama also rebuffed demands that he hold the Bush administration accountable for its approval of torture and other war crimes. That won him plaudits from Washington pundits but it antagonized his own “base.”

Tactical Errors

Obama made a number of tactical errors, too, particularly around his top domestic priority: health-care reform. He needed to move the legislation quickly through Congress, as he initially understood when he set an August 2009 deadline for the two houses to pass legislation.

Even though he knew that the Republicans were determined to defeat any significant reform – early on Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina had explained that stopping the health-care bill would be the political “Waterloo” that would “break” Obama – the President still allowed the process to bog down.

Pursuing the phantom of bipartisanship, Obama let Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus enter into desultory negotiations with three Republicans – including Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Iowa’s Chuck Grassley – who slow-walked the bill past the August deadline and into the fall.

Ultimately, the Baucus negotiations and the many one-on-one conversations between Obama and Snowe earned the support of not a single Senate Republican, but the delay bought the GOP precious time to organize opposition and focus attention on the messy legislative process.

"As I look back, it was a waste of time dealing with” Snowe, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the New York Times, "because she had no intention of ever working anything out."

Although many of her demands were met – such as dropping the “public option” from the initial “insurance exchange” – Snowe ultimately justified her support for the Republican filibuster against health-care reform by saying she wanted to continue talking.

The unified GOP opposition to the bill put Democrats at the mercy of their most conservative members – as well as Connecticut’s Independent Joe Lieberman, a neocon who opposed Obama’s election and seemed to delight in bedeviling the Senate leadership.

As Reid labored to craft a compromise bill – which was tailored to please Lieberman by replacing the “public option” with an earlier Lieberman-backed plan to expand Medicare coverage to people 55 to 64 – Lieberman then went on the Sunday talk shows to announce that he would join a Republican filibuster if his own Medicare expansion plan weren’t dropped, too.

After watching Lieberman on TV, Reid reportedly told aides “he double-crossed me.” However, desperate for a Senate bill, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel informed Reid that he had no choice but to abandon his compromise and accede to Lieberman’s new position.

As the health-care reform was reshaped in ways increasingly favorable to the insurance industry, Obama got the worst of both worlds. His supporters were demoralized and angry, while his opponents got to portray the legislation as an overly complicated “government takeover” of health care.

The Populist Banner

Citing the Wall Street bailouts and the convoluted health-reform bill, Republicans and their Tea Party allies swooped in to claim the banner of populism, with the help of right-wing demagogues like Fox News’ Glenn Beck and radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Meanwhile, the American Left remained the marginal force that it has been for decades, heaping blame on Obama but doing little to build a media/think tank infrastructure that could make a sustained case to the American people or come close to competing with the well-oiled right-wing machine.

So, what can Obama do now to salvage his presidency? Here are some of the hard facts and his hard choices ahead:

Losing the Massachusetts Senate seat means that Obama’s notion of some “responsible” governing coalition is dead. Obama’s dream of ushering in a post-partisan era that could reach across party lines to address the pressing needs of the United States was always naïve at best.

The GOP knows that its political fortunes rest on the destruction of Obama and his presidency. As was obvious a year ago, the Republicans simply dusted off the strategy they used against Bill Clinton in 1993-94, obstructing what they could and relying on the powerful right-wing media to demonize the new President and rally their “base.”

In 1994, the GOP’s scorched-earth strategy led to a Republican takeover of Congress. And the GOP victory in Massachusetts confirms the efficacy of this approach, again.

Whether he likes it or not, Barack Obama is in a political war – and he is losing.

Though the time is late, the President must toughen his rhetoric if he hopes to recover. He will have to convince average Americans that he is on their side and that the Republicans are the ones on the side of the rich and powerful, that they are the real defenders of the elites.

Obama also will have to demand discipline within his own party, instilling a sense of urgency that clearly wasn’t there in the early stages of the health-care debate. He will have to make clear that endless Republican obstructionism in the Senate will be met with more aggressive tactics that employ majority-rule “reconciliation,” which Bush used to pass his tax cuts.

Most importantly, if Obama is to turn the current mess around, he must shift from the cerebral college professor who can appreciate all points of view to a fierce advocate for the American people. He also must challenge the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who espoused the idea that “government is the problem.”

The core fallacy of the Tea Party populists is that they embrace the Reagan fiction that the American people can take back control of their lives by hamstringing the federal government, by getting government out of the way, when all that would do is give big corporations and the rich unchallenged control of U.S. society.

If Reaganism in its ultimate form ever prevails, average Americans would be left alone to face job losses, down-sized pay, no health care, a degraded environment, bad schools, and endless fees and penalties on everything from credit cards to mortgages to cable TV service.

Tea Party populism does nothing to address these assaults on the middle class and working people because the Tea Partiers want to hobble the only force powerful enough to counter corporate abuses, an energized and democratized federal government.

A Turnaround?

What Obama must do, if he wishes to change the dynamic, is to convince Americans that Reagan was wrong, that government – when it is the expression of the public will – is not the problem, but a key part of any solution.

Obama must make the case that higher taxes on the wealthy are a must, that he was right during the campaign when he told “Joe the Plumber” that the economy works best when money is not concentrated at the top but rather when the benefits of technology and productivity are spread around in a more equitable way.

In the wake of the health-care disaster, Obama also needs to take stock of who his friends are and who they’re not. When Joe Lieberman sinks a health-care compromise and damages the administration, Obama should make clear that such political betrayals have consequences.

The Republicans understand this principle. When three Republican senators – Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins – broke ranks to support Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP essentially drummed Specter out of the party. That harsh response was enough to scare Snowe and Collins back into line on health care and set the stage for the Massachusetts victory.

Yet, beyond what Obama must do, there is what American progressives must do. They must disabuse themselves of their long-standing role as bystanders. Already, some left-wing critics are churning out opinion pieces that argue that Obama’s big mistake was not taking a purely leftist approach to all problems, as if most Americans are closet Marxists waiting for a call to the barricades.

If the Left wants politicians to act with more courage on behalf of popular reforms, then progressives must get serious about building media and other institutions to make the case to the American people. It’s not enough to demand that Obama do all this heavy lifting.

In many ways, Obama’s current predicament was predictable – and indeed it was predicted. But the problem is not just Obama and his accommodationist strategies. It is that he and others must present a strong argument to the American people for real change – and then must fight for it, hard.

2010-01-21T20:37:00.004-05:00

THE STUPID ISSUE: VOLUME 106, ISSUE 129
Massachusetts' Message of Stupid
by Robert Parry, Consortium News

Having grown up in Massachusetts, I never bought into the idea that the state was that much more liberal than most others. The dominant media there is not the center-left Boston Globe but the right and far-right talk radio shows that pervade the Bay State as they do the rest of the country.

Beyond the usual right-wing standard-bearers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, there are home-grown shock jocks like Howie Carr, who delights his audiences with slurs about Hispanic immigrants and jokes about African-American rappers.

The two idiots who baited Hillary Clinton before the 2008 New Hampshire primary with the chant “iron my shirts” were affiliated with Boston’s WBCN, which once was a leading progressive anti-war station (the original home of Danny Schecter “the news dissector”) before it was sold off and evolved into just another source of loud and obnoxious talk.

So, why should it be such a surprise that a guy like Scott Brown, who played to that jock-like mentality, would catch the fancy of many Bay Staters? Especially given the inchoate anger of people who are suffering from a wretched economy and who can take some perverse pleasure in punishing someone like Martha Coakley, who slipped up on where Curt Schilling stood on the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry.

Still, ever since Tuesday night – the latest Massachusetts “shot heard round the world” – politicians and pundits have been analyzing what the voters’ message was. According to the dominant analysis, the voters of Massachusetts were “sending a message” to Washington about bipartisanship.

That’s what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid heard. ”The American people want us to work together,” he said. And he was not alone in hearing a call for greater cooperation on the tough issues facing the United States.

However, if that was the intended message from Massachusetts voters, it was a message of stupid.

The last thing that the election of Scott Brown will do is to get the Republicans to be more cooperative with President Barack Obama and the Democrats. Indeed, now that the Republicans have tasted blood – realizing that their strategy of obstruction is paying off – there is absolutely no political reason why they should make any meaningful compromises.

In other words, the logical result of the Brown election will be more Washington gridlock, which GOP leaders think will give them a powerful campaign theme about Democratic ineptness and failure. That, in turn, will likely mean a major Republican sweep in November’s congressional elections and thus more gridlock as the Republicans seek to ensure that Obama is a one-termer.

And, if the Republicans do regain total control of the U.S. government in 2013 – maybe with Sarah Palin as President – the nation can expect a reprise of George W. Bush: more tax cuts tilted to the rich, more swaggering foreign policy, more unrestrained corporate power, more right-wing religious fervor, more neglect of global warming and environmental dangers, and more deficits.

A Future Look

Is that the future the Massachusetts voters wanted to presage with Scott Brown’s election to fill the Senate seat formerly held by John F. Kennedy and his brother Ted? Perhaps, it is.

Perhaps the people of Massachusetts want to be in the vanguard of a really stupid America, one that continues to ignore real challenges and continues to drift toward a unique combination of Big Power military and Third World debt.

In his post-election comments – when he wasn’t pimping out his daughters as “available” – Sen.-elect Brown was explaining that a key secondary selling point in clinching his victory was his opposition to Obama’s plan to try some terrorism suspects in civilian courts, rather than military tribunals, a favorite topic of right-wing talk radio.

Most voters, Brown noted, don’t think that accused terrorists deserve the constitutional protections of the American legal system. “In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them," he said in his victory speech.

And recent polls seem to back Brown up. Many voters apparently have no historical appreciation for the reasoning behind the habeas corpus principle of English law or the thinking of the American Founders, who understood the need to protect individuals from abuses of government tyranny.

Instead, the “Dirty Harry” tough-guy-ism of ignoring the law and just shooting the “bad guys” has deeply infected the American psyche.

For the past three decades, vigilante-ism also has been skillfully exploited by politicians from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Indeed, any politician who dares suggest that legal principles are important can expect to be hooted down as an ACLU-card-carrying wimp. Remember Michael Dukakis in 1988.

This message from the Brown victory should be particularly chilling to civil libertarians who have argued that Obama should go even further in rejecting Bush-style kangaroo courts. Lacking any media infrastructure that compares to the vast right-wing echo chamber, progressives and other advocates for the rule of law must recognize that they are losing this debate.

‘Have a Beer With’

Massachusetts voters also were sending another message on Tuesday, that politics should be a fun diversion, like some reality TV show where the cool guy wins out over the serious gal.

The United States has seen this trivial pursuit of politics before, especially in Election 2000 when the refrain was that George W. Bush was someone you’d “like to have a beer with” while Al Gore was a tedious know-it-all.

In the Massachusetts Senate race, Brown drove a truck and hung out with ex-Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, Massachusetts football star Doug Flutie, and one of the actors from the TV show “Cheers,” which was set in a fictional Boston bar.

By comparison, state Attorney General Martha Coakley thought Schilling was a Yankees fan. Plus, she looked so uptight, so straight, so b-o-r-i-n-g.

In other words, despite the experience of Bush’s disastrous presidency, the American voters are still enthralled with how they “feel” about a candidate, not those tiresome questions about experience, judgment and policy prescriptions.

Brown, a former nude male model, began embarrassing the state soon after the votes were tallied, when he took the national stage to accept his victory. To groans even from his supporters, Brown declared that his two daughters were “available,” presumably for guys looking for dates.

Brown’s comment about his daughters shocked even the Right’s madcap oracle Glenn Beck, who is known for his own off-the-wall remarks. Still, Beck thought Brown – in inviting men to make moves on his own daughters – was demonstrating the creepy behavior of a sexual predator.

“I want a chastity belt on this man,” Beck said. “I want his every move watched in Washington. I don’t trust this guy. … This one could end with a dead intern. … I’m just saying: Congratulations, now let’s monitor him. Let’s put an ankle bracelet on him. Let’s just know where he is at all times.”

Massachusetts voters may have thought they were sending some kind of message to the nation with their choice of Scott Brown. And surely they have thrown a wrench into the legislative process, whether on health care or on regulating Wall Street or on curbing global warming.

But whatever Massachusetts thought it was saying, it comes across as a message of stupid.

2010-01-19T09:23:00.004-05:00

THE RACE ISSUE: VOLUME 107, ISSUE 128
Haiti and America's Historic Debt
by Robert Parry, Consortium News

Announcing emergency help for Haiti after a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake, President Barack Obama noted America’s historic ties to the impoverished Caribbean nation, but few Americans understand how important Haiti’s contribution to U.S. history was.

In modern times, when Haiti does intrude on U.S. consciousness, it’s usually because of some natural disaster or a violent political upheaval, and the U.S. response is often paternalistic, if not tinged with a racist disdain for the country’s predominantly black population and its seemingly endless failure to escape cycles of crushing poverty.

However, more than two centuries ago, Haiti represented one of the most important neighbors of the new American Republic and played a central role in enabling the United States to expand westward. If not for Haiti, the course of U.S. history could have been very different, with the United States possibly never expanding much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

In the 1700s, then-called St. Domingue and covering the western third of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti was a French colony that rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere. Relying on a ruthless exploitation of African slaves, French plantations there produced nearly one-half the world’s coffee and sugar.

Many of the great cities of France owe their grandeur to the wealth that was extracted from Haiti and its slaves. But the human price was unspeakably high. The French had devised a fiendishly cruel slave system that imported enslaved Africans for work in the fields with accounting procedures for their amortization. They were literally worked to death.

The American colonists may have rebelled against Great Britain over issues such as representation in Parliament and arbitrary actions by King George III. But black Haitians confronted a brutal system of slavery. An infamous French method of executing a troublesome slave was to insert a gunpowder charge into his rectum and then detonate the explosive.

So, as the American colonies fought for their freedom in the 1770s and as that inspiration against tyranny spread to France in the 1780s, the repercussions would eventually reach Haiti, where the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity” resonated with special force. Slaves demanded that the concepts of freedom be applied universally.

When the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed. Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.

Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels – known as the “Black Jacobins” – gained the sympathy of the American Federalist Party and particularly Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean himself. Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution for the new nation.

Conspiracies

But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s new freedom.

Despite Hamilton’s sympathies, some Founders, including Thomas Jefferson who owned 180 slaves and owed his political strength to agrarian interests, looked nervously at the slave rebellion in St. Domingue. Jefferson feared that slave uprisings might spread northward.

“If something is not done, and soon done,” Jefferson wrote in 1797, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.

In 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States – and his interests at least temporarily aligned with those of Napoleon. The French dictator was determined to restore French control of St. Domingue and Jefferson was eager to see the slave rebellion crushed.

Through secret diplomatic channels, Napoleon asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that “nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to starvation.”

But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn’t share with Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his rebel force, Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River.

In May 1801, Jefferson picked up the first inklings of Napoleon’s other agenda. Alarmed at the prospect of a major European power controlling New Orleans and thus the mouth of the strategic Mississippi River, Jefferson backpedaled on his commitment to Napoleon, retreating to a posture of neutrality.

Still – terrified at the prospect of a successful republic organized by freed African slaves – Jefferson took no action to block Napoleon’s thrust into the New World.

In 1802, a French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure.

L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned himself in.

Napoleon, however, broke his word. Jealous of L’Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.

Foiled Plans

Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army – already decimated by disease – was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery.

Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign.

The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.

By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon – denied his foothold in the New World – agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson. Ironically, the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement, had been made possible despite Jefferson’s misguided collaboration with Napoleon.

“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery.

But, Miller observed, “the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters … went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration.”

The loss of L’Ouverture’s leadership dealt a severe blow to Haiti’s prospects, according to Jefferson scholar Paul Finkelman of Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

“Had Toussaint lived, it’s very likely that he would have remained in power long enough to put the nation on a firm footing, to establish an order of succession,” Finkelman told me in an interview. “The entire subsequent history of Haiti might have been different.”

Instead, the island nation continued a downward spiral.

In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French and a counterrevolution, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island.

Though the Haitian resistance had blunted Napoleon’s planned penetration of the North American mainland, Jefferson reacted to the shocking bloodshed in Haiti by imposing a stiff economic embargo on the island nation. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.

Jefferson’s Blemish

For some scholars, Jefferson’s vengeful policy toward Haiti – like his personal ownership of slaves – represented an ugly blemish on his legacy as a historic advocate of freedom. Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to the issue of American slavery.

In the 1820s, the former President proposed a scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view, Haiti would be all black and the United States white.

Jefferson’s deportation scheme never was taken very seriously and American slavery would continue for another four decades until it was ended by the Civil War. The official hostility of the United States toward Haiti extended almost as long, ending in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln finally granted diplomatic recognition.

By then, however, Haiti’s destructive patterns of political violence and economic chaos had been long established – continuing up to the present time. Personal and political connections between Haiti’s light-skinned elite and power centers of Washington also have lasted through today.

Recent Republican administrations have been particularly hostile to the popular will of the impoverished Haitian masses. When leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was twice elected by overwhelming margins, he was ousted both times – first during the presidency of George H.W. Bush and again under President George W. Bush.

Washington’s conventional wisdom on Haiti holds that the country is a hopeless basket case that would best be governed by business-oriented technocrats who would take their marching orders from the United States.

However, the Haitian people have a different perspective. Unlike most Americans who have no idea about their historic debt to Haiti, many Haitians know this history quite well. The bitter memories of Jefferson and Napoleon still feed the distrust that Haitians of all classes feel toward the outside world.

“In Haiti, we became the first black independent country,” Aristide once told me in an interview. “We understand, as we still understand, it wasn’t easy for them – American, French and others – to accept our independence.”

2010-01-03T21:56:00.004-05:00

A FILM REVIEW
FOUR-FIFTHS OF THE WORLD
by Malik Isasis

People of color comprise four-fifths of the world’s population making use of the term minority, spurious. The term minority was created for people of color as a political tool in the big toolbox of white supremacy to reinforce the colonization in the New and Western world. The people of color or humanoids rather, known as the Na’vi, on the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar, comprised of one hundred percent of the humanoid population--just as the Indigenous populations had throughout North and South America before the arrival of European ships.

James Cameron’s Avatar is interesting on many levels because we are trained as consumers of science fiction that alien invasion involves space crafts floating down from space and hovering ominously above cities with technology light years ahead of our own. Often these visitors are hostile with plans of taking earth’s resources, which sometimes include putting humans on the dinner menu. In Avatar, we are the invading aliens from outer space, floating down with mechanized horror with the intention of settlements and the taking of Pandora’s rich resources. Our technology is light years ahead of the people on planet Pandora, which is eagerly, put to use in dominating the Indigenous population. In using their vast technological advantage over the Na’vi, Cameron illustrates the corporate and government collusion in creating the seeds of genocide, and the neo methods of colonization.

Corporate henchman, Parker Selfridge, played by Giovanni Ribisi often uses derogatory adjectives as Blue Monkeys, or Savages to describe the Na’vi. Of course dehumanizing a race of people makes killing them go down a little easier. With flashes of humanity, corporate henchman, Parker, attempts to educate, or “reeducate” as it were, offer medicines and schools, to the Na’vi in exchange for relocating them—more like forced-relocation off their ancestral land, but Parker’s flash of humanity is spoiled in the first place, for he assumes that the Na’vi are less evolved than humans, nothing more than blue primates, this assumption is of course, wrong. Parker is unable to overcome his greed, even when he witnesses the horror show unleashed by an overzealous Colonel Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, whose one-track mind is bent on either destroying, or completely domesticating the Na’vi into submission.

One can’t help but think of current occupations of places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine while watching the film.

Many reviews I’ve read on the film unimaginatively compare the film to Dances with Wolves, a film where Kevin Costner’s character, an American Civil-War era military lieutenant integrates himself into the Sioux nation, an Indigenous tribe in South Dakota, while it is true that the films share common themes, the comparison seems only to criticize Cameron’s writing skills. It’s a cheap shot really; the criticism of the story itself tries to marginalize the film’s message itself. Every story has been told. We can reinvent new ways of telling the same stories, but we will always retell the same story. Cameron shouldn’t be faulted for reimagining colonization of an Indigenous population, which is done in this film to great effect.

Back during the Red Scare between 1917-1920 and again between 1947-1957, at the height of United States hysteria about communism, the government initiated a CO-INTEL program where FBI agents or informants went deep cover as communists’ organizers or members to subvert groups that were thought to be communists, or supporting communists’ activities. By the mid fifties, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been so effective at infiltrating so-called communist groups that there were more FBI agents posing as communists than actual communists. Hoover went on to use it in other movements like the Civil Rights Movement.

The corporate/military entity that has invaded Pandora has itself created a CO-INTEL program called Avatar, whereby humans are genetically match to drive Na’vi bodies. The goal of the Avatar is to integrate into the Na’vi society to gain intelligence and to sabotage.

The Na’vi are people of color, literally, they are a rich electric blue with huge gold eyes, like those of cats. They stand ten feet tall, yet their plight is an allegorical one. The film Avatar is about humanity's relationship with nature (or lack there of), corporate greed, and colonization. All indigenous cultures have been colonized, relocated, killed off by greed of a State and its corporate interests. It is why we currently occupy two countries.

Cameron shows a great deal of respect for the Na'vi people, and it is no accident that Cameron’s ode to African and other indigenous cultures’ from around the world are on display, from rituals, dress, to hairstyles, because it is their story he is telling. Aliens from another planet is just the packaging to make the medicine go down.

I’ve seen the film three times, thus far, and I believe it to be one of the best films of 2009.

Grade: A+

2009-12-21T01:20:00.004-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 106, ISSUE 127
MAKES YOU WANNA HOLLER
by Malik Isasis

It appears the Democratic Party has learned one thing in particular from eight years of President Bush’s foot on their throats: make failure appear like winning. After having started negotiating the health care debate at a disadvantage (taking Medicare-for-all off the table), to a watered down, Public Option, to expanded Medicare for some, to nothing, President Obama and his Administration, along with the Democratic Party are selling their cowardice and lack of vision on health care as a once-in-a-generation accomplishment—for what seems like a political gimmick to check off an empty campaign promise. One thing is for sure, it seems we are back where we started from, hundreds of billions for two wars, and occupations, and cowardly Democrats, and thuggish Republicans putting war and corporate interests before the people’s.

The speed in which the Democrats turned on their backs to corporate interests is the very ingredient that will see the Democrats lose it all again, and maybe earn their rightful place in politics, under the fat belly of the Republicans who seem to fuck them whether they are in power, or not.

Republicans are the corporate players, with corporate conglomerates calling plays like a coach on the sideline. The beaten-wife syndrome Democrats have evolved to react to political slurs the Republican use to pass or stop progressive policies. There are even a few outliers of corporate Democrats, who called themselves conservative, but there is nothing conservative about them, nor their Republican brethren. Republicans and Democrats, two sides of the same coin, a mutual dysfunction that has brought a systemic breakdown in governance because the only thing that matters in the lizard-brain of an American politician is the maintenance of power.

TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK

I have noticed a disturbing trend with President Obama over the months. Republicans and their political operatives have called him everything from a socialist, to a voodoo witch doctor; a Republican Congressman even called him a liar before the country and the world during his Presidential Address. He turned his cheek, and said nothing, only that his critics motives were not based in racism. When asked about Kanye West’s antics at the MTV Awards, he referred to West as a “jackass”. The Republicans since his inauguration have been trying to smother his presidency in its crib, yet he continues to reach out.

When the Black Caucus speaks out, liberal groups and former governor of Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, his Administration slap back, and hard—what could only be to curry favor with the corporate media and the Right wing.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is the type of reactionary response that is needed when Republicans Attack, however, it seems President Obama is only willing to slap back liberals, because he understands they have no corporate influence.

Back to the Health Care

Malcolm X once said that if you stab a man in the back with a nine-inch knife, and pull it out two inches, you can’t call that progress. Calling what is likely to pass the Congress, reform, is absurd since most of us will have no other choice if we are being hosed by our current health care provider. They pulled the knife out a couple of inches and expect us to jump up and down, when the act of stabbing us in the back was the cause of the wound.

In 2003 I attended a lecture by Princeton Professor, Cornell West. West said something profound. He said that we no longer have leaders who would die for us. Leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa who would not only die for their cause but would die for their people. These people are an example of leaders who were able to transcend to the next level of consciousness, the enlighten state of consciousness. Today our leaders lack sacrifice, they much prefer that others sacrifice for their political gain. It is personal gain over political responsibility.

We don’t expect much from the people we elect, and they in turn don’t expect much from us. It is not a decay of leadership. Our leadership is a symptom of our failure, our lack of critical thinking, our ability to be easily frightened, easily manipulated and managed by superficial distractions, and easily misinformed. Our politicians seem stuck in a Sisyphean loop of destruction, moral corruption, and narcissism, with no end in sight, assured by our being entertained to death by the ongoing saga of Tiger Woods and his many paramours.

2009-12-11T00:30:00.002-05:00

DOPENESS
There is dopeness, and there is wackness. This is dopeness.

2009-12-06T22:07:00.003-05:00

MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ISSUE: VOLUME 105, ISSUE 126
Obama's Af-Pak is as Whack as Bush's Iraq
by Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

President Obama has reached a watershed in his presidency: he has devolved to the intellectual level of George Bush, while retaining his world class powers of speech. History may remember Obama as just another vapid but predatory imperialist president who happens to be…superficially eloquent. Unfortunately, the clarity of Obama’s diction is not matched by coherence of policy. Af-Pak is at least as whack as Bush’s Iraq.

Barack Obama’s oratorical skills have turned on him, revealing, as George Bush’s low-grade delivery never could, the perfect incoherence of the current American imperial project in South Asia. Bush’s verbal eccentricities served to muddy his entire message, leaving the observer wondering what was more ridiculous, the speechmaker or the speech. There is no such confusion when Obama is on the mic. His flawless delivery of superbly structured sentences provides no distractions, requiring the brain to examine the content – the policy in question – on its actual merits. The conclusion comes quickly: the U.S. imperial enterprise in Afghanistan and Pakistan is doomed, as well as evil.

The president’s speech to West Point cadets was a stream of non sequiturs so devoid of logic as to cast doubt on the sanity of the authors. “[T]hese additional American and international troops,” said the president, “will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

Obama claims that, the faster an additional 30,000 Americans pour into Afghanistan, the quicker will come the time when they will leave. More occupation means less occupation, you see? This breakneck intensification of the U.S. occupation is necessary, Obama explains, because “We have no interest in occupying your country.”
“The U.S. imperial enterprise in Afghanistan and Pakistan is doomed, as well as evil.”
If the Americans were truly interested in occupying Afghanistan, the logic goes, they would slow down and stretch out the process over many years, rather than mount an 18-month surge of Taliban-hunting. The Afghans are advised to hold still – the pulsating surge will be over before they know it.

At present, of course, the Americans have assumed all “responsibility” for Afghanistan – so much so that President Hamid Karzai only learned about Obama’s plans earlier on Tuesday during a one-hour tele-briefing. This is consistent with Obama’s detailed plans for Afghan liberation, under U.S. tutelage. The president is as wedded to high stakes testing of occupied peoples as he is for American public school children. “This effort must be based on performance. The days of providing a blank check are over,” said the Occupier-in-Chief. He continued:

“And going forward, we will be clear about what we expect from those who receive our assistance. We will support Afghan Ministries, Governors, and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people. We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable.”

Such rigorous oversight of their country’s affairs should keep Afghan minds off the fact that they have been fighting to remain independent of foreign rule for centuries, if not millennia. If Obama is right, Afghans might also be distracted from dwelling on the question of who their “Ministries, Governors, and local leaders” are answerable to – the Afghan people or the Americans?

“Obama advises Afghans to be patient and trusting regarding their sovereignty.”
Although President Obama is anxious to bring U.S. troop levels above 100,000 as quickly as possible, he advises Afghans to be patient and trusting regarding their sovereignty. “It will be clear to the Afghan government, and, more importantly, to the Afghan people, that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country." That is, it will become clear in the fullness of time, but hopefully no later than 18 months after the planned surge begins. If all goes well, the Taliban will be dead or nearly so, and the non-Taliban Afghans will be prepared to begin assuming “responsibility for their own country.” If not, then the Americans will be forced to continue as occupiers – reluctantly, of course, since, as the whole world and the more intelligent class of Afghans know, the Americans “have no interest in occupying your country” – unless they have to.

Should the Afghans become confused about American intentions, they might consult with their Pakistani neighbors, for whom President Obama also has plans.
“[We] have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear,” the president declared. “America is also providing substantial resources to support Pakistan's democracy and development. We are the largest international supporter for those Pakistanis displaced by the fighting.”

Obama did not mention that it was the Americans that coerced and bribed the Pakistani military into launching the attacks that displaced over a million people in the Swat region and hundreds of thousands more in border areas. How nice of them to join in humanitarian assistance to the homeless.

The Pakistanis, like the Afghans, were assured the Americans will not abandon them to their own, independent devices. Said Obama: “And going forward, the Pakistani people must know: America will remain a strong supporter of Pakistan's security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent, so that the great potential of its people can be unleashed.”

Some Pakistanis might consider that a threat. According to polling by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, only 16 percent of Pakistanis held a favorable view of the United States in 2009. Actually, that’s a point or two higher than U.S. popularity in Occupied Palestine (15 percent) and Turkey (14 percent), the only other Muslim countries on the Pew list.

Not to worry. Obama knows things that escape the rest of us. For example, the fact that “we have forged a new beginning between America and the Muslim World - one that recognizes our mutual interest in breaking a cycle of conflict, and that promises a future in which those who kill innocents are isolated by those who stand up for peace and prosperity and human dignity.”

Which means, we can expect those polling numbers to start going up, soon.
“Only 16 percent of Pakistanis held a favorable view of the United States in 2009.”
When Obama isn’t launching bold initiatives and “new beginnings,” he’s busy taking care of U.S. imperial business as usual. Obama is most proud that the U.S. spends more on its military than all the rest of the nations of the planet, combined.
“[T]he United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades,” he told the cadets, “a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, markets open, billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress, and advancing frontiers of human liberty.” Others might not view the rise of U.S. hegemony in such a positive light. But they are wrong, said the president. “For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation's resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.”

In Obama’s worldview, it’s the thought that counts. Americans don’t seek world domination; it just comes to them. “We do not seek to occupy other nations,” they leave us no choice. If it were not for American concern for the welfare of all the world’s people, the U.S. would not maintain 780 military bases in other people's countries.

Obama has certainly matured as an American-style statesman in his nine and a half months in office. As a TV Native American might say, “Black man in white house speak like forked tongued white man.” Only better.

2009-11-24T21:03:00.016-05:00

A BOOK REVIEW
ZATAAR DAYS, HENNA NIGHTS
by Malik Isasis

Eight years ago, just after September 11, 2001 a friend Farah Nousheen, a Muslim, felt moved to make a documentary, Nazrah: A Muslim Woman’s Perspective. Farah wanted to contextualize Muslim women’s experiences, since most Americans began an abrupt and often miseducation of Muslims and Arabs after the September 11th attacks. I came on board as a producer, cinematographer and editor to help guide Farah through her first foray into independent filmmaking, and it was during filming that I met a petite, introverted, and articulate young woman named Maliha Masood, born in Pakistan, and raised in Seattle. She was an interviewee, whose segment in the documentary dealt with her travels across the Middle East, just a year before September 11th.

Inspired by the doldrums of the hamster-wheel existence in which many of us live, Maliha dropped everything—a well-paying job, and a long-term relationship and bought a one-way ticket to the Middle East, escaping the angst of the rat race in America for a more ethereal angst of finding one’s self in a foreign land.

On the set of the documentary Maliha told me that she was a writer and was writing a memoir of her experience, traveling as a single woman across Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and a few other places in between, but after the documentary, she disappeared—I would later learn to Boston for graduate school.

Two weeks before I was to leave for New York City (2007) I randomly bumped into Maliha at a small arts event after several years of a communication blackout. She promptly handed me a post card with graphics of her freshly published book, Zataar Days, Henna Nights and asked me to attend her book reading. I recall not being able to attend, but arranging to meet for coffee.

It was during the coffee date she handed me a copy of the book, as a going away gift. After getting her to sign the book, I put it away in my backpack where it stayed for months. It wasn’t until several of my female friends encouraged me to read Eat, Pray, Love (a runaway blockbuster travelogue) that I decided out of respect, to dig into my packed boxes to find Maliha Masood’s travelogue, Zataar Days, Henna Nights and read. I cracked it opened and read her lovely scribbles:

“To my friend Malik. It’s all about the process. Keep on traveling. Love Maliha. 3/16/07”

ADVENTURES, DREAMS, and DESTINATIONS

I’ve only read two travelogues, or memoirs—Eat, Pray, Love and Zataar Days, Henna Nights, and both share a basic premise or setup, a personal crisis of some sort, sending the protagonist reeling into self-doubt and in search of self, thus beginning a personal pilgrimage across foreign lands in search of an antidote for whatever emotional ailments. What is starkly different in my mind is that Elizabeth Gilbert's (Eat, Prey, Love) voice is mostly internal, constantly giving the score on her emotions at nearly every turn, whereas Maliha Masood’s voice is external, keeping her secrets and feelings closely guarded even when she finds herself in the most absurd of situations.

The first chapter, A Leap in the Dark, where we find our protagonist sitting in the backseat of a car while her parents drive her to the airport is one of the few times the reader gets a peak behind Ms Masood’s emotional curtains, as she describes a quiet panic of doubt, questioning her decision to uproot her life. The comfort, and encouragement she receives in the airport before departing from her parents reveals the deep connection she has with them, and conjures up the childhood feelings of being left behind by your parents on your first day of kindergarten.

Masood’s prose style is surgical, not giving any more details than necessary, for which there are advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that she mostly avoids the self-indulgence of writing a memoir, that is, the heighten self-involvement that seems absurd when juxtaposed with people lives in an under developed country. The disadvantage is having the author’s voice be at times detached, and having to read between the lines of what she is feeling. There were a couple of young Arab men in Zataar Days with whom Ms Masood bonded. They were her Sherpa, helping her navigate through the cultural terrain of local customs and traditions. She clearly developed emotional attachments throughout her journey, but both platonic romances seemed to build up, only to end abruptly and without closure. You'll have to read between the lines, or triangulate the behavior of a free spirit Australian, who joins her early in her trek.

Masood’s spirit and writing comes alive as she recounts the meeting and traveling with an adventurous, Australian named Bea, whom she met while in Europe. Bea joined her on a significant leg of her journey across the Middle East. Bea is at the opposite end of the spectrum, gregarious and sexually expressive, and she seems to be the one who gets the two women in the most bizarre of situations. Through Masood’s eyes, there are hints of admiration as she watches Bea hypnotize men with her looks and wit. Masood tastefully sizes herself up to Bea, but allows Bea’s actions to speak for itself.

Masood’s non-judgmental writing style feels like a documentary, allowing the Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese people she came across to speak for themselves, without romanticizing their poverty, politics or overly nobelizing the natives as Westerners tend to do. Zataar Days, Henna Nights is a well-written personable tome, involving, and at times, moving.

It is clear to the author as well as the reader by the end of her journey that traveling was only the beginning of dealing with the aches and pains of life, and that running off to Egypt, or Syria was only cosmetic, and that real growth occurs from within, no passports needed.

2009-11-17T23:52:00.004-05:00

THE HEALTHCARE ISSUE: VOLUME 104, ISSUE 125
Played, Betrayed, Health Care Delayed: House Passes Bailout For Private Insurance Companies
by Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report

Now we know what the Obama administration means by “health care reform”. They mean guaranteeing the rights of insurance and drug companies to their profits. They mean making health insurance like car insurance, with everyone compelled by law to purchase it from a private vendor, except for the very poorest among us, who will be offered a “public option” so limited and expensive as to discredit the word “public” when used in association with health care at all.

There's no polite way to put it. If you're one of millions who voted Democrats into Congress and the White House last year to enact universal health care, you've been played and betrayed.

The legislation squeezed out by the House on Saturday was a giant step away from ensuring the kind of quality, affordable, everybody in, nobody out health care that polling shows most Americans favor. Apologists for the White House and its party of course insist that while imperfect, it's a giant step forward, providing health insurance coverage to millions who didn't have it before, and that in any case it was the best they could do under the political circumstances. It's hard to see how anyone can believe this.

Instead of recognizing a human right to health care, the White House and congressional Democrats have enshrined into law a corporate right to profit on the delivery or the non-delivery of health care. Health insurance will be mandatory, like car insurance, and government subsidies will enable everyone to purchase the shoddy, deceptive and defective products of the private insurance industry, which already rakes off fully one out of every three health care dollars in tolls for nothing more than standing between patients and their health care.

Many of the millions of new customers the insurance companies will get due to the individual mandate, as it's called, are the young and healthy who pay premiums and seldom need much in the way of care --- the very most profitable customers of private insurers.

Drug companies will be shielded against competition from generics in the fastest growing categories of drugs, the so-called biologics, which include just about all vaccines.

The public option which progressives insisted all summer would be the line in the sand beyond which they would not retreat, had been gutted by early spring. Members of congress knew it, but fed us hype all summer and fall about its imaginary wonders, how it would keep costs down, provide choice and effectively compete with private insurers. Even Howard Dean told us the public option was “best thought of as Medicare.” He lied, and so did many Democrats.

And the ban on pre-existing conditions is undercut by provisions in the law that encourage insurance companies to institute “wellness” incentives, a backdoor means of achieving the same kind of segmentation that discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions served.

Insurance companies are not only prohibited to offer abortion services in any policy paid for in part with government funds, they are not even required to offer pelvic examinations or family planning services of any kinds. Doubtless then, some will not.

Medicare will be slashed, depending on which version you prefer, from $300 to $500 billion and the medical benefits of those who have them now taxed to fund the “public option” and low-end private insurance offerings, enabling racist Republicans a peg to tell their constituencies that their hard working tax dollars are paying for the meds of undeserving, lazy black people and so-called “illegals.”

And although millions more will receive some kind of health insurance, just about all those who do so between now and 2013 will do so through the expansion of Medicaid, rather than the private insurance exchanges, which are not scheduled to be fully operational till 2013 at the earliest.

Why President Obama's attempt to reform health care should take 3 or more years when Medicare back in the 1960s was fully operational in under a year is a question almost never asked.

2013 is a long way off. It's two election cycles down, past the 2010 mid-terms and beyond the 2012 presidential contest. Hope is a heady drug, but it's hard to imagine how the crack pipe can be kept hot that long. Between now and the time the illusion of Obamacare, if we can call it that, unravels, thousands more will die because they cannot get medical care, and hundreds of thousands will go bankrupt. The differences between the promises and the facts are multiplying, and could cost the Democrats control of Congress as soon as next year.

But real change rarely if ever comes from above. Real change comes from below. The wave of sit-ins and civil actions in favor of single payer health care, the only plausible solution to the crisis, shows no signs of stopping. Like the housing and general economic crises, which the administrations and media tell us every day have turned around, the health care crisis will drag on for the foreseeable future.

2009-11-12T22:59:00.002-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 103, ISSUE 124
How Catholic Bishops Threw the Health Care Debate into Turmoil with Anti-Abortion Maneuver
by Adele M. Stan, Alter.net

It took a virulently anti-choice measure to pass the House's health care reform legislation. Progressives are strategizing how to keep it from the final bill.

It was a bold power play -- one that caught progressive members of the Democratic caucus off-guard, and one that has sown distrust and dissension among House Democrats.

With a major assist from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, two members of Congress -- both members, as well, of a secretive, right-wing religious group -- made it impossible for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to pass an historic health care reform bill without the attachment of anti-abortion amendment that, if signed into law, could set women's rights back decades.

While few think the amendment's draconian language will find its way into a final bill, its passage last weekend as part of the Affordable Health Care For Americans Act set the stage for a battle that could determine whether health care reform legislation ever makes it to the Senate floor for a vote.

The amendment, spearheaded by Bart Stupak, D-Mich., goes far beyond the standard prohibition on the use of federal dollars for abortion services known as the Hyde Amendment; Stupak's would prohibit the purchase, through the health insurance exchange the bill would create, of even private health insurance plans that cover abortion -- even for women who were not eligible for government-subsidized premiums.

The cumulative effect of the Stupak amendment is it would likely kill abortion coverage in nearly all health insurance plans, whether purchased through the exchanges or not, since the exchanges will come to constitute the bulk of the market for policies purchased by individuals.

It would also affect the coverage offered employees of the federal government -- one of the nation's largest employers -- who already choose from among a range of insurance packages offered in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan.

"This is a very serious development here," said Kate Michelman, the former president of NARAL. "Women across the country -- Democratic women in particular -- but women, I would argue, all across the country, as they are learning about this, are really, really upset. And this isn't only the result of the bishops; this is the party, as well, not really standing up for women and allowing a group of conservative Democrats, who they recruited and helped elect, rule the day in the House." (Michelman has an essay on this topic, co-authored with Frances Kissling, on the op-ed page of today's New York Times.)

Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., the co-sponsor of his amendment, are members of The Family, the stealthy religious group exposed by journalist Jeff Sharlet in his book of the same name. In both houses of Congress, members of The Family have been working for months to defeat health care reform. Although the anti-choice views of both men are said to be rooted in their religion, it's hard not to suspect their amendment of being a poison pill intended to kill health care reform entirely. After all, the bill already contained language restricting the use of federal money for abortion.

How Stupak Happened

As members prepared last weekend for the vote on landmark health care reform legislation, House leaders thought they had forged a compromise, after days of negotiation with anti-choice members of Congress, that would assure conservaDems that no public monies would be disbursed through the federally administered health insurance program the bill would create.

Then, at the 11th hour, the compromise fell apart. The Catholic bishops weren't buying in, and that was enough to scuttle the deal. Stupak said he wouldn't vote for the health care bill unless his amendment saw a vote, and Pelosi needed his vote and the votes of members he claimed to represent.

But in order for Stupak to get a vote for his amendment, Pelosi would need Republican votes for the rule that would allow the amendment to move to the floor. That's when the language of the amendment turned ugly, according to Politico.

Members from heavily Catholic districts wouldn't sign on until the bishops gave their blessing on the language, Republicans wouldn't vote for the rule until the National Right to Life Committee signed off. Pelosi assessed her risk, apparently calculating that the Stupak language would be stripped out of the bill that is eventually sent to the president's desk.

Few were more dismayed by the Stupak amendment than Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a key member of the "whip team" that Pelosi put together as a kind, arm-twisting, cajoling, Dem-whispering corps charged with bringing in the votes of any reluctant colleagues.

At first, DeLauro explained, House leaders thought they might have won a compromise weeks ago with a change to the bill's language offered in the Energy and Commerce Committee by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., that made it more explicit how public monies would be separated from private dollars used to purchase health coverage through the exchange. >>CONTINUE>>

2009-11-09T19:29:00.002-05:00

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 102, ISSUE 124
Blaming the 'Dithering' Obama
by Robert Parry, Consortium News

Despite House passage of the health-care overhaul bill on Saturday night, the word “dithering” is getting attached to President Barack Obama, much as “hubris” was tagged to George W. Bush and “undisciplined” applied to Bill Clinton.

But is that fair? After all, Obama has been in office less than 10 months and had to confront a multitude of disasters left behind by Bush. Those included the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a yawning budget deficit, tattered international relations and two open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Plus, some of those complaining most about Obama’s failure to act decisively, the Republicans and the neoconservatives, were party to many of Bush’s policy decisions that have proved so destructive. And Obama has taken on some very tough issues, most notably health-care reform, which has bedeviled presidents for nearly a century.

That said, however, there does appear to be some merit to the “dithering” accusation. Or put differently, Obama has shown a tendency to let himself be diddled.

On health care, for instance, Obama let deadlines slip as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, led months of fruitless negotiations with three Republicans. Finally, Baucus was forced to produce his own bill, whose key features – like health co-ops to replace a public option – have since been jettisoned by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The surviving health legislation itself is a faded image of what Obama promised during the presidential campaign. Though the “public option” survives in the current House and Senate versions, it is anything but “robust,” now just a pale shadow of the cost-saving notion that liberals had expected.

Though the health insurance industry now opposes the legislation, private insurers earlier won concession after concession from the Democrats and no longer fear that 119 million Americans might shift from the industry’s plans to the public option, as one industry-backed group warned last spring.

The surviving House-Senate versions of the public option would be off limits for big companies, whose employee policies make up the largest and most lucrative part of the market, and the public option wouldn’t have rates linked to Medicare, a major cost-saving provision.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that only six million Americans would sign up for the House version of the public option and – since they are likely to include a high percentage of sick people – the rates for the public option might even be higher than rates offered by private industry.

One of the few progressive features left in the two surviving pieces of legislation is the House provision to extract more than half of the new health care costs from a surtax on the rich (individuals earning $500,000 and couples making $1 million), raising about $558 million over the next decade.

That provision at least would put the richest Americans who have benefited disproportionately from Bush’s tax cuts in position to subsidize a national health insurance program. But the Senate version contains no such surtax and its prospects remain doubtful.

So, the American people have watched the messy health-care debate play out this year with Obama seeming to have little control over the process and with even members of his own party rebelling. Thirty-nine House Democrats joined with all but one Republican to vote against the health bill that won by the narrow margin, 220-215.

Health-Care Fallout

This drawn-out health care battle also has undermined Obama’s ability to show decisiveness in other areas.

Because he has struggled to keep his top legislative priority (health care) on track for so long – and must worry about losing any Democratic votes in the Senate – he has not been able to confront other problems very aggressively.

For instance, Obama’s goal of a Middle East peace breakthrough as the central element in resetting U.S. relations with the Muslim world has been sidetracked, in part, by recognition that any ramped-up pressure on Israel to make concessions could anger powerful neoconservatives, both in Congress and the Washington press corps.

Already, neocon Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut has warned that he will support a Republican filibuster to kill health-care reform if any public option survives, and the Washington Post’s neocon editorial page has lashed out at important features of the House bill, such as the surtax on the rich.

In the convoluted politics of Washington, even seemingly disconnected issues – like health care and Middle East peace – can be joined by a desire to weaken a political foe. The neocons well understand that if Obama can be broken on health care, he would lack the political clout to pressure Israel into making significant peace concessions.

At minimum, by hobbling Obama politically, the neocons would guarantee continuation of the status quo in the Middle East, with Israel continuing to consolidate its settlements in the West Bank and keeping alive prospects for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program.

A weakened Obama also could open the way for restoration of neocon control of U.S. foreign policy if the Republicans can retake Congress and the White House over the next three years. That, in turn, could revive neocon dreams of having the United States wage war against Israel’s enemies in the region, most notably Iran and Syria.

While some of this neocon dreaming may seem farfetched today, it should not be forgotten that just a few years ago, this agenda of “regime change” was at the heart of U.S. government policy and had the staunch support of powerful institutions, like the Washington Post. Plus, despite the Bush disasters, the neocons retain extraordinary influence in key Washington power centers.

The neocons, after all, got their first real taste of Washington power under Ronald Reagan after working to undermine President Jimmy Carter’s policies, both domestic and foreign, when Carter was pressuring Israel to achieve peace with the Palestinians. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Slipping Away

As Obama struggles with health care and is unable to focus on Middle East peace, he is watching other opportunities for change slip away. Angered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to halt expansion of settlements on the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has declared that he will not stand for reelection in January.

That could open the door to either a unified Palestinian leadership under the more radical Hamas or a power vacuum. Either way, negotiations could be off for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, the Muslim world increasingly is viewing Obama’s outreach, such as his much-acclaimed Cairo speech, as all talk, no action.

The Israeli-Palestinian stalemate has other consequences. By failing to reverse the anti-American hostility that surged across the Muslim world during Bush’s presidency, Obama confronts diminished prospects for winding down the Iraq War in a way favorable to U.S. interests and tamping down violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Those international problems then reverberate back to the U.S. political scene by creating more concerns about troop levels in the war zones and prospects for future terrorism.

Already, Obama has delayed a decision on Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan, on top of the 68,000 Americans already there. While Obama says he wants a thorough policy review, he has come under criticism, on one side, from Republicans for “dithering” and, on the other, from the Democratic base eager to end an eight-year-old war that many analysts doubt can be won at this late stage.

If Obama opts for some middle ground – like sending a lesser number of new troops – he is sure to anger both sides.

Similar halfway measures on the economy – backing away from nationalizing some too-big-too-fail banks last winter and agreeing to a scaled-down $787 billion economic stimulus plan rather than an amount over one trillion dollars that some economists said was necessary – have left Obama in another fix, getting hammered by Republicans for both spending profligacy and ineffectiveness on the jobs front.

Though the Obama administration says its emergency steps pulled the country back from the brink of a depression and saved jobs, the current 10.2 percent unemployment rate is being blamed on Obama and the Democrats, further eroding their political strength.

Challenges Ahead

So what can Obama do?

The President might want to learn something from a scene in the movie “Bull Durham” when the minor-league manager shakes up his “lollygagging” baseball team by confronting the players in the shower and hurling bats at their feet.

Obama must grasp that more lollygagging on health-care reform won’t help. He has little choice but to pressure the Senate to take up the health bill right away. In doing so, he would need to show some anger and engage in serious arm-twisting. Inspirational speeches only get you so far with Congress.

If Senate Majority Leader Reid can’t muster the 60 votes to stop a Republican filibuster, then Reid must turn to alternatives, like passing as much of the bill as he can under the majority-rules provisions of “reconciliation.”

Clearing away the long and dragged-out health-care battle would open the legislative calendar to deal with other pressing concerns, such as financial regulation and unemployment, as well as the environment and global warming.

In all these matters, Obama must find a far more assertive – and more populist – voice than he has shown to date. So far, he appears to have made a calculation that his only hope is to finesse the jaded and right-leaning Washington Establishment, rather than to confront it.

Yet the problem is not just Obama or even the Democrats.

While many on the Left decry Obama for his wimpy behavior and denounce congressional Democrats as sell-outs, the American progressives also must look in the mirror. The truth is that the political/media crisis facing the United States is systemic, and progressives share in the blame.

Over the past three decades, the American progressives have largely forsaken the need to build national media institutions and think tanks, ceding that strategic ground to the neocons and the Right. That misjudgment, in turn, has left national politicians (and mainstream journalists) vulnerable to pressure from well-funded right-wing attack groups.

The Left’s response usually is to sit in the stands and shout complaints -- or to veer off into unrealistic strategies, like supporting third parties “to teach the Democrats a lesson,” as happened in 2000 when supporters of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader claimed they couldn’t detect “a dime’s worth of difference” between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

The Left’s institutional weaknesses in this “war of ideas” have left many progressives pinning their hopes on some knight-in-shining-armor politician who rides off to slay all the dragons. However, this unrealistic concept invariably disappoints. When the knight-politician falls short or cuts deals, the progressives are left muttering about betrayal.

The other way to go would be for progressives to commit serious resources, time and talent to build media institutions and think tanks (especially near the front lines of Washington, rather than on the West Coast).

These institutions would engage in a daily conversation with the American people about what the facts are and what can be done, while also creating defensive shields for national politicians and journalists when they actually do the right thing.

Arguably, the biggest problem with the health-care debate has been the Left’s lack of a reliable message machine to counter the Right’s predictable denunciations of “big government.” That “government is the problem” theme has worked since the days of Ronald Reagan in large part because the American people haven’t heard a consistent counter-argument.

Not only has that “big government” attack line excluded a serious debate about a single-payer health-insurance system but it has devastated congressional support for a “robust” public option. Politicians, especially in states dominated by right-wing talk radio and pro-Republican newspapers, are terrified to argue that government sometimes can offer the best answer.

If the American Left is to serve any role other than as grumbling critics in the stands, it must go beyond excoriating politicians and the mainstream media. It must get into the game – and stop “dithering.”

2009-11-01T22:52:00.003-05:00

THE MAKING WAR ISSUE: VOLUME 101, ISSUE 123
McChrystal Doesn’t Get It—Does Obama?
by Scott Ritter, Truth Dig

There is a curious phenomenon taking place in the American media at the moment: the lionization of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan. Although he has taken a few lumps for playing politics with the White House, McChrystal has generally been sold to the American public as a “Zen warrior,” a counterinsurgency genius who, if simply left to his own devices, will be able to radically transform the ongoing debacle that is Afghanistan into a noble victory that will rank as one of the greatest political and military triumphs of modern history. McChrystal’s resume and persona (a former commander of America’s special operations forces, a tireless athlete and a scholar) have been breathlessly celebrated in several interviews and articles. Reporters depict him as an ascetic soldier who spouts words of wisdom to rival Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Gen. McChrystal to “fix” the war in Afghanistan in the way that his boss, that earlier military prophet Gen. David Petraeus, “fixed” Iraq. Whether by accident or design, McChrystal’s mission became a cause célèbre of sorts for an American media starved for good news, even if entirely fabricated, coming out of Afghanistan. One must remember that the general has accomplished little of note during his short tenure to date as the military commander in Afghanistan. His entire reputation is built around the potential to turn things around in Afghanistan. And to do this, McChrystal has said he needs time, and 40,000-plus additional American troops. There are currently around 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s request would raise that number to around 110,000 troops – the same number as the Soviets had deployed in Afghanistan at the height of their failed military adventure some 20 years ago.

McChrystal, or more accurately, his staff, has authored a not-so-secret report that outlines the reasoning behind this massive increase in American military involvement in Afghanistan. Rightly noting that the American-led effort is currently failing, McChrystal argues that only a massive infusion of U.S. troops, and a corresponding “surge” of American civilians, can achieve the stability necessary to transform Afghanistan from the failed state it is today. A viable nation capable of self-government, the new Afghanistan could maintain internal security so that terrorist organizations like al-Qaida will not be able to take root, flourish and once again threaten American security from the sanctuary of a lawless land. This concept certainly looks good on paper and plays well in the editorial section. And why shouldn’t it? It touches on all the romantic notions of America as liberator and defender of the oppressed. The problem is that the assumptions made in the McChrystal report are so far removed from reality as to be ludicrous.

McChrystal operates under the illusion that American military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation. The Soviets tried and failed. They deployed 110,000 troops, operating on less restrictive lines of communication and logistical supply than the United States. They built an Afghan army of some 45,000 troops. They operated without the constraints of American rules of engagement. They slaughtered around a million Afghans. And they lost, for the simple reason that the people of Afghanistan did not want them, or their Afghan proxies.

Some pundits and observers make note of the fact that the Afghan people were able to prevail over the Soviets only because of billions of dollars of U.S. aid, which together with similar funding from Saudi Arabia and the logistical support of Pakistan, allowed the Afghan resistance to coalesce, grow and ultimately defeat the Soviets and their Afghan allies. They note that there is no equivalent source of empowerment for the Taliban in Afghanistan today. But they are wrong. The Taliban receive millions of dollars from sympathetic sources in the Middle East, in particular from Saudi Arabia, and they operate not only from within Afghanistan, but also out of safe havens inside Pakistan.

Indeed, one of the unique aspects of the Afghan conflict is the degree to which it has expanded into Pakistan, making any military solution in one theater contingent on military victory in the other. But the reality is that the more one employs military force in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, the more one strengthens the cause and resources of the Islamic insurgents in both places. Pashtunistan, once a fanciful notion built around the concept of a united Pashtun people (the population in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan are primarily drawn from Pashtun tribes), has become a de facto reality. The decision by the British in 1897 to separate the Pashtun through the artificial device of the so-called Durand Line (which today constitutes the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan) has been exposed today as a futile effort to undermine tribal links. No amount of military force can reverse this.

Thus the solution itself becomes the problem, thereby creating a never-ending circular conflict which has the United States expending more and more resources to resolve a situation that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, and everything to do with crafting a politically viable salve for what is in essence a massive self-inflicted wound. It is the proverbial dog chasing after its own tail, a frustrating experience made even more so by the fact that any massive commitment of troops brings with it the fatal attachment of national pride, individual hubris and, worst of all, the scourge of domestic American politics, so that by the time this dog bites its tail, it will be so blinded by artificialities that rather than recognize its mistake, it will instead proceed to consume itself. In the case of Afghanistan, our consumption will be measured in the lives of American servicemen and women, national treasure, national honor, and, of course the lives of countless Afghan dead and wounded. >> CONTINTUE<<

2009-10-27T20:41:00.011-04:00

THE HEALTH CARE ISSUE: VOLUME 100, ISSUE 122
PUBLIC OPTION
by Malik Isasis

Due to being in production on a documentary film, I haven't been writing as frequently, but I was moved when I discovered a friend of mine from Seattle had a brain tumor, and recently had an operation to have it removed.

Naomi Ishisaka is a journalist, and editor for Colors Magazine. I met Naomi at a film festival four years ago, for which Colors, her magazine, sponsored. In a strange twist, I discovered that her father was one of my favorite professors in my undergraduate studies at the University of Washington.

In Naomi's blog, Naomi's Noggin she writes eloquently about her emotional journey and recovery from the pheno-orbital meningioma (brain tumor) operation, from September 2009--not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills.

Who have we become? What kind of people are we in America?

Corporatism and right-wing politics has transformed the American citizenry into full-time consumers, born into debt. In one generation, corporate operatives have nearly killed off unions, giving us Debt Bondage by credit card companies and banks, whereby the masses are working, only to pay back a Sisyphean loop of debt, with impossible interest rates that will never be paid off. Where I'm from this is called slavery.

So scared are the masses that they won't protest anything that threatens their financial security for fear of losing their jobs. But there is no such thing as security, and as Helen Keller once stated, security does not exist in nature nor do children of men experience it.

The Media Industrial Complex has insured the lack of critical thinking with infotainment programming (think Fox News) to keep us in a slumber. Meanwhile, the Healthcare Industrial Complex lets us die, and those with the means, have the means to live, and those who do not, die.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Political Sickness of those who Call themselves Democrats

Now Senator Joseph Lieberman, former Democrat, now "Independent-Democrat" from Connecticut has decided to step into the healthcare debate and make it all about him (again). Three ears ago in 2006 Lieberman lost the primary race to Democratic contender Ned Lamont, unable to accept defeat, and encouraged by Republicans, he ran as an Independent and won his seat. During the 2008 Presidential Campaign, he supported Republican John McCain, and even spoke badly about Candidate Obama saying something to the effect of Obama not being safe for America.

He was still allowed in the Democratic Caucus and even given a leadership position in January of this year. Now he has come out against the Public Option in the healthcare bill, threatening to support the Republican goal of stopping a vote on the bill by filibustering.

With his straw-man-argument in tow, he stated on October 27, 2009:

"I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free. It's not," Lieberman said. "It's going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it doesn't, it's going to add terribly to our national debt."

Yet, Lieberman supports a never-ending war, which costs billions a month to fight, and to illegally occupy two countries--surely at a cost, which adds to the National Debt. Its all a rouse.

Lieberman like many political leaders are cowards. Lieberman make political gains in the media by marketing himself as a moderate, just like John McCain markets himself as a Maverick—all sugar, no nutritional value.

Senator Joseph Lieberman is part of the sickness of our political system, where incumbent politicians feel a sense of entitlement to their office and to power. Lieberman waxes eloquently about values, and integrity but he’s a political whore, willing to sell off his services to the highest bidder (healthcare companies). Lieberman has made losing about him, rather than about the people he represents. When it becomes about the politicians, it’s not about the constituents. It is personal gain over political responsibility.

His political DNA reads neocon, and the Republican Party is where he should be. Hey Joe, on the way out, don't let the door hit 'ya where the good Lord split 'ya.

2009-10-25T22:38:00.003-04:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 99, ISSUE 121
8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization
by Adele Stan, Altnet

PR for the GOP? Yes. Platform for right-wing hatemongers? Definitely. But a news organization? Definitely not.

Even before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Rupert Murdoch had declared war on him via the personalities of Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch's media conglomerate, News Corp.

Since Obama's election, the cable channel's hosts and paid analysts have launched a full frontal assault on the president, smearing his nominees, calling him a racist and suggesting that his administration was trying to persuade disabled veterans to off themselves.

Now the fearmongers at Fox are crying foul since the president and his aides declared Fox not to be a news organization. Earlier this month, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox an "arm" of the Republican Party. Obama went even further, suggesting this week that Fox "is operating basically as a talk-radio format," and we know what that means: A format in which the most provocative opinions dominate the discourse and facts are optional.

et that's just the tip of the iceberg. Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda -- who operates his News Channel as a propaganda machine for his anti-government cause.

He even has his own community organizer, a fellow named Glenn Beck, who can turn out a mob on a dime at your local town-hall meeting. His big ratings-getter, Bill O'Reilly, is a professional bully, handsomely paid to physically intimidate progressive commentators -- on video -- and to vilify others.

Murdoch's agenda is simple: He's against regulation of any kind. Famous for smashing the unions at his U.K. properties, Murdoch also has a pronounced disdain for labor.

In essence, Murdoch's agenda tracks closely with that of the current GOP, that far-right rump of a party that once claimed to embrace a range of views under the canvas of a big tent. So he uses the Fox airwaves to raise funds for Republican political action committees.

We've seen the Fox News-branded hosts and pundits -- such as Michelle Malkin and John Stossel -- sent out gin up the fearful folk gathered by astroturfing groups funded by corporations that seek to derail government intervention of any kind, whether in the nation's dysfunctional health care system or in its increasingly compromised environment.

Murdoch saves money by farming out the investigative-journalism functions of his alleged news enterprise to Republican Party entities, whose error-laden press releases are passed off as original Fox News research.

When you watch Fox News Channel, what you see is the advancement of that agenda through a media organ that seeks to turn regular people against their own interests -- the better to enrich the coffers of Murdoch and his heirs -- and that actively organizes those whose paranoia it has fed with lurid and untrue tales.

How else would you turn their fear of a bitter economy and an unstable world into rage against a president who ran for office on an economic platform geared toward the needs of everyday people?

Here we list a few of the reasons why Fox News Channel is anything but a news operation in the hope of shedding light on what it actually is: a massive media campaign for the consolidation of wealth through unfettered markets.

Why Fox News is not a news operation:

1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer -- No other news operation in memory has ever hired its own community organizer, at least not one tasked with the mission of organizing paranoid people to march through the streets of the nation's capital with signs depicting the president of the United States as a mass murderer.

Through his 9-12 Project, which he promotes on his Fox News Channel program, that's exactly what Beck did, organizing with other right-wing organizations the 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington -- AlterNet reported marchers sported signs comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

Beck was also instrumental in turning out angry mobs to disrupt this summer's town hall meetings, where members of Congress attempted to discuss health care reform with their constituents. After participants in a scuffle at a Tampa, Fla., town hall named their local 9-12 Project site as their inspiration, the national 9-12 Project site stopped accepting comments.

Despite the loss of some 80 advertisers from The Glenn Beck Show, thanks to a campaign by Color of Change, which targeted the show's sponsors after Beck claimed the president had "a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture," Beck remains on the air at Fox. Could that be because he's more valuable to his boss-daddy as an organizer than as a conduit for advertising dollars?

CONTINUE

2009-10-19T21:07:00.003-04:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 98, ISSUE 121
Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh Are Crazy -- Yet Corporate Media Legitimize Them
by Jamison Foser, Media Matters

When Limbaugh, Beck and Fox news are treated like legitimate players, it causes the rest of the media to run to the right.

It's no coincidence that when members of the media talk about the media these days, they tend to talk about two things: the supposed importance of right-wing media like Fox News, and claims that the rest of the media lean to the left. The two concepts are fundamentally intertwined and mutually reinforcing -- and deeply flawed.

It may seem odd that much of the news media would simultaneously pronounce itself guilty of liberal bias and spend the year after a presidential election won convincingly by the more progressive candidate talking about the importance and influence of a conservative cable channel whose viewership consists of about 1 percent of the nation. But both of those somewhat inconsistent media memes can be explained by journalists' frequent inability to see where the center of the country really is. That inability makes journalists think they are further left of center than they actually are (even assuming they are at all to the left of center). And it makes them inflate the importance of right-wing operatives masquerading as media figures -- people who would have far less influence if actual reporters stopped buying their nonsense.

Their hateful views and adversarial relationship with the truth place the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the far-right fringe of a party and movement that have lost the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections and that holds only 40 percent of the seats in Congress. They are on the far-right edge of a party that is far to the right of the rest of the country.

And, it must be said, they do not tell the truth. They lie about things large and small. They lie to smear their adversaries, and they lie for no real reason at all. Their lies should disqualify them from ever being taken seriously. But instead, the media have decided that if anything they say turns out to contain a sliver of truth, everything they say must be paid immediate attention.

That's what happened when, after years of making absurd claims about ACORN -- remember the lie that ACORN was going to get billions of stimulus dollars? -- some conservative activists induced a statistically insignificant number of the organization's low-level employees to behave badly. The rest of the media rushed to cover the "scandal" -- and to beat themselves up for not having taken their cues from Beck & Co. sooner. The ombudsmen for the The Washington Post and The New York Times, for example, scolded their papers for being too slow to report on Beck-generated controversies and gave credence to conservative claims that the delay was the result of liberal bias.

What few journalists seem to understand is that once you accept someone like Glenn Beck as a legitimate media figure, it skews your view of the rest of the media. This is not a new phenomenon -- not by any means. More than two years ago, I argued that once you accept Ann Coulter, who calls John Edwards a "faggot," as a legitimate guest on shows like NBC's Today, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- who merely calls Edwards a "girl" -- seems positively reasonable. Thus the entire media discourse is shoved in the direction of its least legitimate participants.

That's how reporters -- and not just those on Rupert Murdoch's payroll -- come to see the non-Beck, non-Hannity "reporters" at Fox News as fair and balanced. The "news" division at Fox spreads falsehoods and right-wing nonsense round the clock, but many journalists have bought into the idea that while Fox's "opinion" hosts may be conservatives, the rest of the channel plays it down the middle. After all, compared to a crazy liar like Glenn Beck, Fox's "news" programs seem perfectly legitimate and impartial. But judged by any
reasonable standard, they are nothing of the kind.

And, of course, if you believe that the rest of Fox News is, as Washington Post reporter Ed O'Keefe put it this week, "straight news shows," that affects how you view other news organizations. Just as America's Newsroom on Fox appears to play things down the middle in comparison to a dishonest demagogue like Glenn Beck, other news organizations appear liberal in comparison with America's Newsroom.

And that's how MSNBC -- which gives three hours of airtime each day to conservative former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough and another hour to Clinton-hating, liberal-bashing misogynist Chris Matthews, employs Pat Buchanan, whose very name has been synonymous with bigotry for decades, and regularly traffics in conservative misinformation and right-wing framing -- comes to be described as "liberal": simply because it also employs the only overtly left-of-center hosts in all of television news.

And that's how you end up with the perverse situation in which newspapers like The Washington Post are described by reporters at the Post and elsewhere as "liberal" despite hounding the Clintons for years over a phony real estate "scandal," harassing Al Gore for lies he didn't tell, handing the 2000 election to George W. Bush on a platter, and trading in their press passes for pom-poms during Bush's march to war with a nation that didn't attack us.

And that's how you end up with the perverse situation in which newspapers like The Washington Post are described by reporters at the Post and elsewhere as "liberal" despite hounding the Clintons for years over a phony real estate "scandal," harassing Al Gore for lies he didn't tell, handing the 2000 election to George W. Bush on a platter, and trading in their press passes for pom-poms during Bush's march to war with a nation that didn't attack us.

And so we have a poisonous media environment in which the "conservative media" consist of lying conspiracy theorists who are out to destroy President Obama and any other liberal they come across, and the "mainstream press" is considered "liberal" even as it "leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right."

That's some range, isn't it? From right-wing liars who purposefully traffic in conservative misinformation all the way across the spectrum to frightened liberals who accidentally traffic in conservative misinformation.

That's the real problem with Glenn Beck and Fox News. It isn't that they misinform the 1 percent of Americans who watch their nonsense (the vast majority of whom already agree with them). It's that the rest of the media run to the right in response to Fox -- even while becoming more and more convinced that they are guilty of liberal bias.

2009-10-12T00:07:00.003-04:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 97, ISSUE 121
Why Conservatives Are Really Afraid of a Black President
by Jonathan L. Walton, Religion Dispatches

The president reminds Glenn Beck, and those who identify with his white neo-nationalism, of the lie of their own professed superiority.

... in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on," and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white. Newsweek magazine told us this. We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives. -- Rush Limbaugh,
Sept. 15, 2009

Ever the statesman, and often candid to a political fault, former President Jimmy Carter said recently that much of the animosity directed toward President Barack Obama is "based on the fact that he is a black man."

A lifelong Southerner, Carter acknowledged that the inclination of racism still exists, and that "it has bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country."

Though courageous, the former president's pronouncement will surely be considered controversial to many Republicans and Democrats alike. Some will view Carter's comments as politically inexpedient.

The topic of race in general, and charges of racism in particular, is political dynamite that typically explodes in the hands of the accuser -- just ask [Harvard] Professor Skip Gates, [New York] Gov. David Paterson, or Obama (whom I will return to momentarily).

Unless someone is wearing a Klan hood while yelling, "Nigger, Go Back to Africa," the charge of racism seems to offend the accused these days more than the actual victims.

This is true, in part, due to the most prevalent view of the problem of race and racism in this country. In the eyes of many, the responsibility of moving beyond racial conflict in America is placed at the feet of minority communities of color, as opposed to the dominant society.

We've all heard it. America will move beyond race to a colorblind society only when minority groups cease dwelling on difference. Such a view permeates the melting pot ideal of American folklore, the myth of meritocracy and even the "post-racial" dimension of electoral politics.

Thus, for Carter to call out this segment of the white community, he is disrupting the conspiracy of silence concerning racial injustice that demands the allegiance of politicians on the national scene.

Think about it. Is this not the racial bargain that Obama accepted to become the nation's first African American president? Matters pertaining to race have been avoided unless absolutely necessary (cough, cough, the Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright).

And in terms of policy, obstacles faced by any particular group, like disproportionate unemployment among communities of color, for example, are obfuscated by anemic and ineffectual broad-based prescriptions. Rising tides lift all boats, right?

Yet Obama's enormous success in life, whether as a highly educated community organizer or as America's commander in chief, exposes the paradox this sort of faux post-racialism presents.

It's a one-sided deal for people of color; as "post-racial" in effect means post-black, post-brown, post-red and post-yellow, while leaving the normative racial framework of whiteness intact. Race is the challenge people of color must confront and, dare I say, "get over."

But a post-racial America does not demand the same of those who identify with, and claim the social construction of, whiteness and perceived privileges and cultural superiority therein.

This is why, it would seem, Obama's body standing behind the American presidential seal has a critical segment of America losing its hold on reality -- a reality, I would argue, few have ever been forced to acknowledge up to this point.

Whether it's the birthers, tea-baggers, deathers, indoctrinators, or "You lie!"-ers, they have neither veiled their racial animus nor cloaked their white nationalism. The prevalence of racist images of Obama brandished by protesters juxtaposed with calls of "taking our country back" are reminiscent of D.W. Griffith's fictional America as depicted in the film Birth of a Nation.

And the pride with which this segment of society has rallied the troops around its shared sense of whiteness reveals that their skin color is the one true object of pledged allegiance and determinant of professed patriotism. [See "Unregulated Capitalism and Christian Fervor: Report from the 9/12 Rally at the Capitol" from Sept. 17.]

Herein lies Carter's perceptive point. Obama can't win with these folks, because they are blinded not just by his race but also by an uncritical devotion to their own. His pigmentation rather than his policies cut against the grain of what these persons wrongly consider "natural" or "American."

More specifically, his very being is a haunting rejoinder to such white Americans of what they are not -- indeed what they have never been. This African American man with an Arabic name has dared to usurp all of the cultural and cognitive tropes that white supremacy has historically claimed for itself. He is calm in the face of their unrestrained emotion. The more illogical they act, the more rational he comes across. And, of course, the more eloquent and erudite he presents himself, the more he provokes the Joe Wilsons of the world to mindlessly blurt out, "You lie!"

In the process, Obama has transformed such opponents into the racial other, an uneducated and uncultured blob of white (and largely Southern) backwardness that is beyond the pale of social redemption or acculturation. Wilson and the remaining Sons of Confederate Veterans have, in effect, become this "black man's burden."

Maybe this helps explain Glenn Beck's ridiculous yet probably heartfelt assertion that the president has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."

The president reminds Beck, along with those who identify with Beck's form of white neo-nationalism, of the lie of their own professed superiority -- a place of comfort and privilege in America that was neither deserved nor ever attained, yet still claimed based on the pinkness of their skin and straightness of hair. Obama's apparent success only further dismantles this lie and pours salt in socially insecure wounds.

Similar can be said of those who need the president to be Adolf Hitler. If Obama is Hitler, that means protestors can liken themselves unto the Jews; only this time it's a victimized-yet-devout group of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who want nothing more than to restore a nation that God, or more appropriately, Jefferson Davis, decreed as divinely their own.

The ability to make such ludicrous claims on conservative radio, Fox News, and on Capitol Hill, however, represents the kind of power that they unduly still possess. As tasteless as Wilson's heckling of the president was, it still takes an immense level of privilege to be a jerk on the floor of Congress.

My point here is simply that the problem of race in America has never been solely or predominantly a minority issue. It is first and foremost, as Carter said, a problem of whiteness.

Just as racial segregation in Wilson's fond memories of idyllic South Carolina was less about black people but a matter of white phobia, the lie of whiteness projects its fears upon minority bodies like the president's in hopes of maintaining its own unhealthy and unrealistic sense of being in charge.

This is why James Baldwin rightly suggested years ago that "the vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the 'Negro problem' is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white."

I believe this applies to our current president and his most vocal critics. If he is framed as the foreigner, incarnate evil and indoctrinating Nazi, many won't have to acknowledge that he may just be smart, sophisticated and a devout patriot. God forbid.

And if he is, what does that make them?

2009-10-05T01:25:00.003-04:00

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 97, ISSUE 120
Iran, Israel, and the Muzzled US Press
by Faramarz Farbod, Common Dreams

"Iran must comply with United Nations resolutions," declared President Obama. Iran is "as defiant as ever" says a chorus of corporate employees otherwise known as mainstream journalists. Really! Is Iran defiant for testing missiles for its military? What military in the world fails to test missiles? Is Iran defiant for reporting the construction of a "secret underground" uranium enrichment plant at least a year in advance of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) obligations require it to?

Speaking of "defiance" in the neighborhood where Iran resides and failing to mention Israel requires levels of disingenuousness and obedience to state propaganda that baffle the mind. And all this at a time when arguably the most significant news item to come our way this month was the UN Human Rights Council's damning report (Goldstone Report) on Israeli crimes in the winter assault on Gaza. (Here is the Executive Summary of the report Can you imagine the deafening corporate media ruckus had the UN issued a 452-page report condemning Iran of war crimes and even possible crimes against humanity on a massive scale? Instead, what we get is near silence on the Goldstone Report and all the other facts on the ground, such as:

* Iran has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) but Israel, Pakistan, and India have not;
* Israel just rejected the call by IAEA to join the NPT and open up its atomic sites to international inspection: the IAEA motion on September 18 expressing concern about "Israeli nuclear capabilities" was adopted by 49 votes to 45, with 16 abstentions; the US and the EU initially tried to block the vote, and then voted against it while Israel said it "will not co-operate in any matter with this resolution";
* Israel has had nuclear weapons for three decades, and not only refuses to sign the NPT, rejects international inspections, but also does not even acknowledge the existence of these weapons, and even has gone so far as to jail a nuclear scientist for years for exposing the fact;
* Israel in defiance of international law continues to threaten Iran with military attack;
* Israel stands in violation of international law on several other accounts regarding waging of brutal wars of aggression and invasions of Lebanon and Gaza and continuing its brutal policies of occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the hapless Palestinians.

Is it even imaginable that the corporate media should do the right thing and tell the obvious truth that such actions and threats against any people constitute violation of international laws -- let alone suggest that it is Israel that needs to be sanctioned by the international community?

Meanwhile Washington denounced Goldstone's Gaza Report for its "grossly disproportionate attention" to Israel and reportedly "gave Israel a document defining the Obama administration's own red lines on the report. . . . These include keeping the report from leaving the Human Rights Council, nixing any measures that would undermine Israel's right to defend itself against terrorism, and letting Israel's own law enforcement system conduct any criminal probes necessitated by the Gaza war." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, criticized the report for giving "total legitimacy to terrorists shooting at civilians." The report, he added, "will strike a fatal blow against the peace process, because Israel will not be able to take additional steps and take risks for the sake of peace if denied its right to self-defense" -- Orwellian Newspeak at its very finest. What "peace process?" Israel refuses to even freeze its colonizing ("settlement building") activities let alone end its brutal occupation. It has just announced that it won't accept a return to the 1967 borders. A few days ago, even Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni said: "For me, there is no right of return, not symbolic and not partial. I would not even accept the entrance to Israel of a single refugee, and the Palestinians and the Arab world know this." Israel has shown no indication that it is interested in resolving any of the core issues concerning Jerusalem, borders, settlements, refugees, and I would add her liberal use of state violence and terrorism. Too, what "right of self-defense?" In the West Bank territories Israel has zero right to self-defense. An occupying power does not have or cannot in good faith invoke such a right. To do so is absurd. I can't come into your home by force, take it for myself, use extreme violence to suppress your resistance to my takeover plan, and call it self-defense! True, Israel is no longer "occupying" Gaza (it unilaterally pulled out in 2005 though without relinquishing control), but Israel cannot invoke the right of self-defense for its winter assault on Gaza either because there existed a peaceful option to resolve differences.

The Goldstone Report recommends that both Israel and Hamas be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution unless they carry out adequate internal investigations within six months. The US and Israel oppose referral of the matter to the General Assembly, the Security Council, or the ICC. In fact, as reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israel engaged in economic blackmail against the Palestinian Authority (PA) by insisting that the PA drops war crimes suit on the basis of the Goldstone Report at the ICC or Israel won't let a 2nd cellular phone provider operate in the West Bank. Some $300 million has been invested in licensing and infrastructure, and, if not approved by October 15, the PA must pay a $300 million penalty. Israel has warned that referral to the ICC would mean a fatal blow to the peace process and to democratic states' ability to fight terror. In fact, as I write these words, Haaretz is reporting that the PA has "decided to drop its draft resolution condemning Israel's conduct during the Gaza Strip offensive, in effect deferring its adoption of the Goldstone's Commission report," thanks to "pressure from the Obama administration." Now this is one more sign to those progressives who personalized politics of hope and change and reduced it to a single man at the helm of the ship of state; we must always struggle for the change we believe in.

The corporate media reached a feverish pitch playing up and pontificating on the recent UN appearances by Iran's Ahmadinejad, Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, President Obama's speech, and Israel's Netanyahu's spirited defense of the historicity of the holocaust, but failed predictably to even bring up the most significant UN news item, namely the subject of Israel's defiance of the UN and violation of international law as documented and condemned by the UN itself in the Goldstone report -- the failure that, of course, visibly delighted the Israelis.

Meanwhile, the Israeli media, unlike their counterpart in the US, tell of life and facts on the ground. Here is Haaretz reporting on Israel refusing to let up to a third of Gazans keep their medical appointments outside of Gaza this year:

Issa Hamdan, 58, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in March. Since then, surgery to remove the growth has been scheduled for seven different occasions, from April 27 to today, at an East Jerusalem hospital.

The April 27 surgery date was canceled due to a one-month suspension of trips by Gazans for medical care due to tension between the Ramallah and Gaza City Palestinian governments. The operation was postponed until June 28, but the Israeli authorities did not respond to Hamdan's request. Hamdan was given an August 1 surgery date, but was called in for a Shin Bet interview only on August 2. Hamdan's wife, Fadya, who is 50, says she brought him for the interview from their home in Rafah to Erez, where she had to push his wheelchair with difficulty before submitting their identity cards for inspection.
Then, apparently when the Israeli officials realized that Hamdan was too sick to be interviewed, they were told to leave.

The operation has been rescheduled three more times since then -- for August 3, September 13 and today -- but each time no permit has been forthcoming.

And the indefatigable Amira Hass in Haaretz discussing Israel's brutality during the three-week winter assault on Gaza and the morally indefensible and bankrupt official protestations in denial of the truth of the Goldstone report:

Israel struck a civilian population that remains under its control; it didn't fulfill its obligation to distinguish between civilians and militants and used military force disproportionate with the tangible threat to its own civilians. Air Force drones and helicopters fired deadly missiles at civilians, many of them children; the Tank Corps and Navy shelled civilian neighborhoods with weapons not designed for precision strikes; soldiers received orders to fire on rescue crews; others fired on civilians carrying white flags; and others killed people in or near their homes. Troops used Gazans as human shields, soldiers detained civilians in abusive conditions, the army used white phosphorus shells in dense civilian areas and, on the eve of withdrawing, destroyed wide residential, industrial and agricultural areas.

There is only one thing worse than denial -- the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described [by the Goldstone report], but that these actions are both normal and appropriate.

Can we ever look to a day when the US Amira Hasses can write truthfully and daringly about events of such crucial significance in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post?