Painting a False Reality

Here is an excellent example of how the right wing media in the US (especially Fox "News") uses its power to rant and lie to plant false ideas to manipulate the population into holding views that allow right wing politicians to mobilize the public to control elections:



If you watch the video you can see Bill O'Reilly frustrated by being caught in his lies and says in exasperation that he doesn't care what the facts are, he just "knows" that it is bad there and that this evil is coming to get America. In short, despite the facts, he continues to sell his right wing scare story. He isn't a "news" reporter. He is a propagandist selling a story to prop up a political viewpoint.

How Media Misleads

Even public media like NPR misleads the consumer of its "news". Here is an excellent example by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog:

NPR Editorializes Against Growth In Europe

A Morning Edition segment on the recent European Union summit was headlined, "Most EU Nations to Sign Pact to Stop Overspending." This is both flat-out wrong and misleading.

It is flat-out wrong because the pact restricts deficits, not spending. It is misleading because it implies that the current crisis was caused by overspending. It wasn't. Most of the crisis countries had declining debt to GDP ratios before the downturn and two, Spain and Ireland, were actually running budget surpluses. The problem was caused by housing bubbles and the inept management of the economy by the European Central Bank.

If the media lies, then a representative government is impossible. And that makes the constitutional requirement for a free press a waste of effort. At least a significant majority of the press must be honest enough to tell the truth. A free press can be honest or sold out. The hope of the writers of the US Constitution was that the media was so fragmented and numerous that it would be impossible to manipulate the press as a whole. But the writers of the US Constitution lived in a simpler time when the US press was more like the bloggers of today: numerous and cheap to set up. They didn't envision "big media" with wall-to-wall coverage and a practical monopoly on the public's attention.

The coming of radio made possible the horrible dictators of the 1930s. The monopolization of the media in the late 20th century made possible the overweening power of right wing politics today. It took WWII to break the power of the dictators and give back popular democracies. What will it take to break the present day monopoly of big media and the rampant right wing politics that have created?

Why the Media is Useless

Here is a post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog:

The Post devoted a business section article to Newt Gingrich's supply side economics. It would have been useful to note the findings of the research on this topic, for example this Congressional Budget Office study. It found that even in a best case scenario the additional growth sparked by a tax cut could replace less than a third of the lost tax revenue. Even this effect would be temporary, with slower growth in later years implying larger deficits.

The Post should not just throw Gingrich's assertions out to readers as though they might be true. There is extensive research on this topic which the Post's business reporters should be familiar, its readers almost certainly are not.

A democracy works only if it has an informed electorate. The reason why "the press" was acknowledged and highlighted in the First Amendment to the Constitution. A free press is important. But a commercial press that prints only what corporations and the rich elite want the people to hear is not a truly "free" press. The Constitution called for "freedom of the press". Only with a free press that prints facts, truths, revelations, analysis, criticism will the electorate be empowered to vote responsibly.

Sadly, Dean Baker is pointing out that the US now fails the test of democracy. The US is rapidly becoming a banana republic.

Oakland Police at Beating Up People... Again

I'm pissed at the small group of idiots who broke off from the Occupy Oakland demonstration and trashed an area of downtown Oakland, but that doesn't justify the police going beserk, yet again, and severely injuring another military vet.

From Reuters:

A former U.S. Army Ranger and Occupy Oakland protester was in intensive care on Friday after a veterans group said he was beaten by police during clashes with demonstrators this week.

The veteran, identified as Kayvan Sabeghi, was the second former American serviceman during the past two weeks to be badly hurt in confrontations between anti-Wall Street protesters and police in Oakland.

The group Iraq Veterans Against the War said Sabeghi was detained during disturbances that erupted late on Wednesday in downtown Oakland and was charged with resisting arrest and remaining present at the place of a riot.

Highland General Hospital confirmed that Sabeghi was a patient in the intensive care unit there.

Brian Kelly, who co-owns a brew pub with Sabeghi, said his business partner served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Sabeghi told him he was arrested and beaten by a group of policemen as he was leaving the protest to go home.

"He told me he was in the hospital with a lacerated spleen and that the cops had jumped him," Kelly said. "They put him in jail, and he told them he was injured, and they denied him medical treatment for about 18 hours."

The Oakland Police Department did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Sabeghi's name was listed by the Alameda County Sheriff's Office as one of more than 100 people arrested that night.

The veterans group said in a statement that police struck Sabeghi with nightsticks on his hands, shoulders, ribs and back, and that in addition to a lacerated spleen he suffered from internal bleeding.

Clashes between police and demonstrators broke out in the early morning hours of Thursday in downtown Oakland following a day of mostly peaceful rallies and marches citywide against economic inequality and police brutality.

The Port of Oakland was forced to shut down during those demonstrations, sparked in part by the severe injury of another former serviceman, ex-Marine Scott Olsen, during a confrontation with police last week.

Olsen's injury became a rallying cry for the anti-Wall Street protest movement nationwide.

When crazies start to trash things, all honest protesters should immediately leave the scene and desist from protesting to give police free rein to go after the violent idiots who are intent on trashing things and not on legitimate protest. But police have got to stop illegally attacking honest protesters and beating them to within an inch of death. Those police officers need to be identified and charged with attempted murder.

Social change is ugly. The only truly successful technique requires determination and patience. You have to push for change and not be tempted by violence of idiotic "press coverage". The media will distort the message and tempt you into short-cutting the process of education and legitimate social change. The media wants to see the "protest" as a product. They have no interest in real change. So honest and dedicated demonstrators have to ignore the lure of the press and "instant fame". Real change is anonymous and done one-by-one. The glory hounds and the self-appointed "leaders" are mostly sociopaths interested in manipulating things for their benefit. You have to avoid them. You have to find like-minded friends who will join in for the long haul.

An Interesting Example of a Double Standard

This is just too precious. David Brooks writes for the NY Times and castigates the victims of sexual harassment by Herman Cain. But "Angry Black Lady" at the Balloon Juice blog takes to task for his double standard:

Why the New York Times continues to allow David Brooks to crap all over the opinion page, I will never understand.

...

Moving on:

Now we turn to ethical issues. My first question, and this is a genuine question, concerns the victims. Let’s detach ourselves from the specifics of the Cain case and consider a general question: If you are the victim of sexual harassment, and you agree to remain silent in exchange for a five-figure payoff, should any moral taint attach to you? In the old days, somebody who allowed a predator to continue his hunting in exchange for money would certainly be considered a sinner. I’m reluctant to judge people in these circumstances, but I’m inclined to agree. Am I missing something?

First of all, Brooks is never again allowed to use the word taint. Just don’t.

Second of all, everything Brooks said is victim-blaming bullshit. It’s the same argument that the uninformed and unenlightened make when they claim that rape victims have a duty to report their rapist lest they be held morally responsible should the rapist strike again. It’s a callous, anti-feminist, bullshit argument that has no place in public discourse, much less splattered on the New York Times by a person who could have simply googled it, and read one of a hundred blog posts written by feminists on the subject of victim-blaming in the context of sexual assault and harassment.

But here’s the kicker—David Brooks need not have even spent the fifteen minutes it would have taken him to discern that his “ethically responsible women don’t settle” argument is a load of horseshit because David Brooks himself has been the victim of unwanted advances.

In 2009, Brooks appeared on MSNBC with Lawrence O’Donnell to talk about a Republican Senator (whom he refused to name) making an unwanted advance on Brooks. He stated that during a dinner, a Republican Senator had “his hand hand on my inner thigh the whole time” and it made Brooks uncomfortable.

From Think Progress:

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

Brooks said that he has “spoken to a lot of young women who are Senate staffers and they’ll have these middle age guys who are sort of in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Emotionally needy, they don’t know how to do it and sort of like these St. Bernards drooling everywhere.”

You would think that a high profile person like David Brooks would be so shamed by being "outed" for such an egregious example of a double standard. But he won't. He gets paid lots of bucks to sit in judgement of others. A little fact like the fact that he is a hypocrite isn't going to stop him. But readers should stop reading him. I did. Several years ago. I can only take a certain amount of sleazy reporting and moral unaccountability before I decide I won't waste any more time reading somebody who commits to print his moral failings and feels no shame.

Positive News on the Political Front

From a post by Robert Reich on his blog:

A combination of police crackdowns and bad weather are testing the young Occupy movement. But rumors of its demise are premature, to say the least. Although numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests the movement is growing.

As importantly, the movement has already changed the public debate in America.

Consider, for example, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on widening disparities of income in America. It was hardly news – it’s already well known that the top 1 percent now gets 20 percent of the nation’s income, up from 9 percent in the late 1970s.

But it’s the first time such news made the front page of the nation’s major newspapers.

Why? Because for the first time in more than half a century, a broad cross-section of the American public is talking about the concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.

Score a big one for the Occupiers.

Even more startling is the change in public opinion. Not since the 1930s has a majority of Americans called for redistribution of income or wealth. But according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an astounding 66 percent of Americans said the nation’s wealth should be more evenly distributed.

A similar majority believes the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, even a majority of people who describe themselves as Republicans believe taxes should be increased on the rich.

I remember the days when even raising the subject of inequality made you a “class warrior.” Now, it seems, most Americans have become class warriors.

And they blame Republicans for stacking the deck in favor of the rich. In that New York Times/CBS News poll, 69 percent of respondents said Republican policies favor the rich (28 percent said the same of Obama’s policies).

I sure hope this signifies a sea change in American politics. The pendulum has swung too long and too far to the side of the elites and against the "ordinary people". It is time to redress the inequality and injustice.

The old view was also that great wealth trickled downward – that the rich made investments in jobs and growth that benefitted all of us. So even if we doubted we’d be wealthy, we still gained from the fortunes made by a few.

But that view, too, has lost its sheen. Nothing has trickled down. The rich have become far richer over the last three decades but the rest of us haven’t. In fact, median incomes are dropping.

Wall Street moguls are doing better than ever – after having been bailed out by the rest of us. But the rest of us are doing worse. CEOs are hauling in more than 300 times the pay of average workers (up from 40 times the pay only three decades ago), as average workers lose jobs, wages, and benefits.

Instead of investing in jobs and growth, the super rich are putting their money into gold or Treasury bills, or investing it in Brazil or South Asia or anywhere else it can reap the highest return.

Meanwhile, it’s dawning on Americans that in the real economy (as opposed to the financial one) our spending is vital. And without enough jobs or wages, that spending is drying up.

The economy is in trouble because so much income and wealth have been going to the top that the rest us no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services we would produce at or near full employment.

Hopefully the new view is that "it takes a village to raise a child" so there will be more emphasis on education and job training, on fair wages and a minimum wage, and on social services for those who are falling behind through no fault of their own. The bottom 99% need to be re-booted so they can compete and get their fair share of the wealth of the society. The funny thing is: if you do this everybody prospers! But showering special deals and tax breaks on the rich impoverishes the bottom 99% and destroys the broader society.

Bashing the Media

Here is a good tongue lashing in Slate for the idiotic mass media which claims it can't "understand the message" of the OWS movement:

I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? And as last week’s inane “What Do They Want?” meme morphs into this week’s craven “They Want Your Stuff” meme, I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn’t want. It doesn’t want you.

What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you.

I don’t purport to speak for anyone but myself here, although I spent time this weekend at Occupy Wall Street and my husband spent much of last week adding his voice to the protesters there. I saw an incredible array of people that defy any simple demographic characterization and a broad range of signs that made—imagine!—more than a single point. But if I may hazard an opinion, it would be this: One of the most fatuous themes of mainstream OWS coverage is the endless loop of media bafflement at this movement that doesn’t have a message. Here’s CNN’s Erin Burnett in a classic put-down of the OWS’ refusal to tailor its message to her. It takes a walloping amount of willful cluelessness to look at a mass of people holding up signs and claim that they have no message.

...

Think, for just a moment, about the irony. We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country, on Facebook and at protests, people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs. And why is that? Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value.

For the past several years, while the mainstream media was dutifully reporting on all things Kardashian or (more recently) a wholly manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, ordinary people were losing their health care, their homes, their jobs, and their savings. Those people have taken that narrative to Facebook and Twitter—just as citizens took to those alternative forms of media throughout the Middle East as part of the Arab Spring. And just to be clear: They aren’t holding up signs that say “I want Bill O’Reilly’s stuff.” They aren’t holding up signs that say “I am animated by toxic levels of envy and entitlement.” They are holding up signs that are perfectly and intrinsically clear: They want accountability for the banks that took their money, they want to end corporate control of government. They want their jobs back. They would like to feed their children. They want—wait, no, we want—to be heard by a media that has devoted four mind-numbing years to channeling and interpreting every word uttered by a member of the Palin family while ignoring the voices of everyone else.

...

Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences. While the mainstream media expresses puzzlement and fear at these incomprehensible “protesters” with their oddly well-worded “signs,” the rest of us see our own concerns reflected back at us and understand perfectly. Turning off mindless programming might be the best thing that ever happens to this polity.

Go read the whole article and get the embedded links.

I'm 100% behind the above interpretation of media misleading the 99%.

The Orwellian Media

George Orwell did a great service to humanity with his book 1984, a parody of the Soviet state and Orwell's fears that the West would go down the same path into totalitarianism.

We live in a society where the elites, especially the media, seem intent on achieving a 1984 reality. Here is a post by Paul Krugman on the zombie-like "truths" that the media foist on their readership:

Legends Of The Rentiers

I feel Dean Baker’s pain. Dean is exercised over an NPR report which says that Argentina is suffering from its 2001 default — a claim that is totally at odds with the evidence. Argentina actually did very well by thumbing its nose at creditors.

This isn’t the only case where news organizations consistently report as truth something that didn’t happen, while failing to report what did. Another one that comes to mind is the California electricity crisis of 2001-2002. As some readers may recall, that crisis was caused by market manipulation — and that’s not a hypothesis, Enron traders were caught on tape telling plants to shut down to create artificial shortages. Yet “news analyses” published after the whole thing was revealed would often tell readers that excessive environmental regulation and Nimbyism caused the crisis, with nary a mention of the deliberate creation of shortages.

And as you’ll notice, in both cases the imaginary history just happened to be one more comfortable to status quo interests.

I don’t want to go all Chomsky here, but this sort of thing really can radicalize you.

What makes this particularly disgusting is that the media are paid to ferret out "the truth" and to spend time distilling the truth through "journalistic analysis". But, instead, they repeat the mantras of our 1% overlords. For this they expect to get paid?

No wonder there are tens of thousands marching day after day in the Occupy XYZ movement. Enough with the lies! Enough with the manipulation by the 1% elites. Enough with buying and selling politicians and the corruption of money in democracy.

Media Manipulation

You can't believe what you read. Even the "newspaper of record" in the US, the NY Times, manipulates "the news" to present something other than the facts.

Here is a post by Yves Smith in her Naked Capitalism blog:

Curious Omissions from a New York Times Story on a Foreclosure Auction Protest

As readers may know, we’ve reported from time to time on efforts by community members to block specific foreclosure auctions, since this is a sign of how citizens place much less stock in the credibility of banks and legal procedures than they once did.

So we took interest in a report in the New York Times on an effort to block a foreclosure auction in Brooklyn that resulted in 9 arrests. The article made much of the fact that the protestors sang to disrupt the auction. Key extracts:

It was just after 3 p.m. Thursday in a second-floor courtroom in Brooklyn when an auctioneer announced to a crowd of about 60 people that she would begin selling foreclosed properties…..

The interruption in business as usual at the State Supreme Court building on Adams Street was staged by Organizing for Occupation, a coalition of housing advocacy groups that recently helped halt the eviction of an 82-year-old woman in Bedford-Stuyvesant in a foreclosure proceeding that the woman and her supporters said resulted unjustly from a subprime loan…

Just before 3:30, court officers announced that anyone who did not clear the courtroom would be arrested. Most of the crowd got up and departed, but about 10 singers remained. A moment later, they emerged from the courtroom into a corridor, cuffed, escorted by court officers and still singing…

Inside, spectators and would-be bidders sat on wooden benches in a hallway as they waited for the auction to resume. Among them was Michael Nicholas, 50, from Ridgewood, Queens, who said that he had been attending foreclosure auctions in Brooklyn for a decade but had never before witnessed a choir take over the courtroom.

“I was expecting the auction to begin,” he said. “Then instead I got the chorus line.”

So the protest is made to seem entertaining, harmless (if annoying to people who wanted to conduct business), and quixotic. After all, the protestors were arrested and nothing got done, right?

If you read the more colorfully written account of the same incident at the Village Voice, you’ll see the Times made some crucial omissions. The first is that the foreclosure was under dispute and may have been proceeding improperly:

Morales said that, though negotiations are reportedly on-going between Ward, the man who bought her house, the bank who sold it to him, and the state Attorney General’s office, Ms. Ward is still facing eviction. Last Tuesday, the day before a planned meeting of these parties, the current “alleged” landlord served Ms. Ward with another eviction notice, breaking the lock on her front door to get in and post it. Morales called for a renewed effort towards Ms. Ward’s “eviction patrol.”

The Voice also reports that the protest did succeed in preventing the foreclosure on Thursday. It ins’t clear whether it will be rescheduled to tomorrow, delayed further, or whether the court will decide to seek another resolution. But the effort in the courtroom did achieve a measure of success, while the Times account would lead you to believe otherwise. It’s sort of sad to see that the need to watch out for the interests of the Masters of the Universe has reached the New York Times metro desk.

When the news media is more loyal to corporate interests than they are to the truth, then they are useless and it is time for newspapers to disappear. I find it funny that newspapers all across America complain that they are losing readership. They need to look at how they have sold their readership to their advertisers and then went one step further, they sold truth down the river. They have shown themselves willing to report propaganda and pretend that it is "the news". They deserve to go belly up.

Mark Thoma Objects to Press Coverage

Here is a post by U of Oregon economist Mark Thoma on his blog Economist's View:

"Stop Dehumanizing the Protestors"

Andrew Samwick:

A note to Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash of The New York Times. If you are going to put this in your article, put it in quotes and attribute it properly or keep it out of the news section of the paper:

Without a coherent message, the crowds will ultimately thin out, Wall Street types insist — especially when the weather turns colder. They see the protesters as an entertaining sideshow, little more than flash mobs of slackers, seeking to lock arms with Kanye West or get a whiff of the antiestablishment politics that defined their parents’ generation.

I don't think it is incumbent on #OWS to have a coherent message. They are people who feel that their freedoms are being constricted due to the corruptness of others. They are joining together to push back against that feeling. They win just by showing up and eschewing violence. If the NYPD and branch managers at Citibank can't figure that out and stop dehumanizing the protestors, then #OWS will win even more. ...

The use of the term "slackers" is telling. You see, there's plenty of work for the industrious, our unemployment problem is due to laziness. There are plenty of jobs -- pay no attention to the fact that the number of unemployed is far, far greater than the number of jobs -- people don't really want to work. It has nothing to do with the crash of Wall Street destroying the economy, and the bounce back and present good fortune on Wall Street has nothing to do with the government bailing them out -- it was their hard work that fixed the problems. For the little people to expect the government to treat them similarly -- to bail them out during tough times -- is just plain anti-capitalist. If you are wealthy, a government handout that preserves your wealth is necessary, but to expect the government to provide jobs -- not Wall Street type handouts but the opportunity to work -- is "antiestablishment" and a threat to our way of life.

There is more on how the police and the banks are treating legitimate bank customers attempting to close their accounts at this post.

How Big Corporate Media Utterly Fails the Public

Newspapers originated as partisan broadsheets full of pointed political views. They advocated. But by the 20th century newspapers fell into the hands of big corporations that were selling fish wrap (i.e. the paper was the medium of advertisers and they didn't want to upset readers, so toned down vague-and-fuzzy reporting replaced any serious opinion and investigative journalism). Papers stopped being intellectually challenging and because useful onto fish vendors to wrap the fish they sold or for homeowners to line the bottom of their bird cages to catch bird droppings.

Here is a post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog making this point for the umpteenth time:

Post Does the Old He Said/She Said on Perry Energy Plan

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced an energy program yesterday that involved drilling everywhere in sight. According to the Post article on the plan, Perry claimed that his plan would create 1 million jobs. In classic he said/she said style the Post told readers:

"Perry predicted his energy plan would create more than 1 million new jobs. Weiss [a researcher at the Center for American Progress] sharply disagrees."

This is utterly useless information for readers. A Washington Post reporter should have the time to talk to some experts on this issue and/or read some of the key articles. Post readers do not have the time. Simply reporting opposing claims that readers have no ability to access is a pointless exercise. Trees died for nothing.

(Perry's claim is nonsense -- it is unlikely that it would in the long-run lead to even 100,000 additional jobs [0.07 percent of total employment]. The short-run effect would be considerably less.)

Is there any surprise in the fact that newspaper readership is plummeting and newspapers will go extinct? Why pay for pablum like this?

And... is there any surprise that major political parties have quietly fallen into the hands of big corporate lobbyists? With no "press" to challenge the politicians, most Americans have no idea that their government has been stolen from them. They have no idea that the traditional electoral exercise is a farce. The decisions of what laws will be passed -- indeed, even the writing of the bills -- has passed into the hands of big corporations.

The whole world of "American politics" is a kabuki dance of smoke-and-mirrors with lots of pretended outrage and threats when in fact all the deals have been quietly done behind locked doors as money passes hands to fund politicians and their "campaigns" (think John Edwards with his million dollar slush fund to hide Rielle Hunter and his illegitimate "love child", this was a "campaign donation" from billionaire heiress "Bunny" Mellon).

Business News Looks at Occupy Wall Street

Here is Aaron Task of the Yahoo! financial news program The Daily Ticker giving one of the best, most honest, overviews of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations:

It is sometimes surprising that financial reporting is less biased and more honest that traditional media. I guess that is because real business people need facts to work from. The kind of propaganda in the traditional mass media may be useful for swaying opinion and mobilizing the political movement. But if you are in a profit-making industry you can't afford illusions. You need facts. So the "business news" is usually more honest than traditional media.

The Political Program of the Bottom 99%

Here is an excellent statement from a disenchanged 2008 Obama supporter who has given up on Obama and joined the Occupy Wall Street movement:

In October 2008, my wife and I loaded our 6-month-old baby into her car seat and drove six hours to Reno. As 40-something new parents, a weekend road trip to walk precincts for a presidential candidate was not convenient or easy. But when we arrived at the staging ground for volunteers, we were rewarded by an inspiring sight: The line to sign in snaked through a parking lot the length of two football fields. Barack Obama's candidacy had inspired a lot of people to participate in their democracy.

What I most liked about Obama was the independence and intelligence reflected in his position, taken five years earlier when it was not politically expedient, to oppose the Iraq invasion plans well before they had been put into motion. In 2008, as a terrifying financial crisis was unfolding, Obama seemed to have the combination of sound judgment and courage that our country needed in the White House. It seemed reasonable to hope that he might become an FDR-for-our-time who would hold people accountable and get us back on a path toward shared prosperity.

But three years later, not one executive from a major firm involved in the 2008 disaster has been prosecuted. On the contrary, Obama hailed the CEO of the firm that most personified the abuses -- Goldman Sachs -- as a "savvy businessman." But the rest of us continue to be punished for their crimes. We are losing homes, watching our retirements vaporize and struggling with long-term unemployment.

And those least responsible, the young, will ultimately pay the most.

To lead us forward, Obama also needed to explain to the country how wealth and power had become more and more concentrated over several decades and how that trend had reached a critical point at which it was cannibalizing our economy and corrupting our democracy. He needed to put forth a vision for how we would take our country back from the 1 percent that has only continued to amass wealth and power. But such leadership never materialized.

So a few weeks ago, my wife, daughter and I set out on another civic journey. This time the little one was riding her trike as we walked to a park in our neighborhood where about 80 people came together to form Occupy San Jose, a local affiliate of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

There is more. Read the whole article.

The mass media claims that these protesters have "no program" and just a bunch disorganized ex-hippies and college students. False. That is media, owned and operated by the top 1%, making sure that their readers get a distortion instead of the truth, a distortion that will turn them off and insulate them from any meaningful participation in a democratic movement to regain control by the bottom 99%.

Media Analysis of the Occupy Wall Street Protests

Here is a bit from an excellent article by Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

It's unsurprising that establishment media outlets have been condescending, dismissive and scornful of the ongoing protests on Wall Street. Any entity that declares itself an adversary of prevailing institutional power is going to be viewed with hostility by establishment-serving institutions and their loyalists. That's just the nature of protests that take place outside approved channels, an inevitable by-product of disruptive dissent: those who are most vested in safeguarding and legitimizing establishment prerogatives (which, by definition, includes establishment media outlets) are going to be hostile to those challenges. As the virtually universal disdain in these same circles for WikiLeaks (and, before that, for the Iraq War protests) demonstrated: the more effectively adversarial it is, the more establishment hostility it's going to provoke.

Nor is it surprising that much of the most vocal criticisms of the Wall Street protests has come from some self-identified progressives, who one might think would be instinctively sympathetic to the substantive message of the protesters. In an excellent analysis entitled "Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street," Kevin Gosztola chronicles how many of the most scornful criticisms have come from Democratic partisans who -- like the politicians to whom they devote their fealty -- feign populist opposition to Wall Street for political gain.

Some of this anti-protest posturing is just the all-too-familiar New-Republic-ish eagerness to prove one's own Seriousness by castigating anyone to the left of, say, Dianne Feinstein or John Kerry; for such individuals, multi-term, pro-Iraq-War Democratic Senator-plutocrats define the outermost left-wing limit of respectability. Also at play is the jingoistic notion that street protests are valid in Those Bad Countries but not in free, democratic America.

A siginificant aspect of this progressive disdain is grounded in the belief that the only valid form of political activism is support for Democratic Party candidates, and a corresponding desire to undermine anything that distracts from that goal. Indeed, the loyalists of both parties have an interest in marginalizing anything that might serve as a vehicle for activism outside of fealty to one of the two parties (Fox News' firing of Glenn Beck was almost certainly motivated by his frequent deviation from the GOP party-line orthodoxy which Fox exists to foster).

The very idea that one can effectively battle Wall Street's corruption and control by working for the Democratic Party is absurd on its face: Wall Street's favorite candidate in 2008 was Barack Obama, whose administration -- led by a Wall Street White House Chief of Staff and Wall-Street-subservient Treasury Secretary and filled to the brim with Goldman Sachs officials -- is now working hard to protect bankers from meaningful accountability (and though he's behind Wall Street's own Mitt Romney in the Wall Street cash sweepstakes this year, Obama is still doing well); one of Wall Street's most faithful servants is Chuck Schumer, the money man of the Democratic Party; and the second-ranking Senate Democrat acknowledged -- when Democrats controlled the Congress -- that the owners of Congress are bankers. There are individuals who impressively rail against the crony capitalism and corporatism that sustains Wall Street's power, but they're no match for the party apparatus that remains fully owned and controlled by it.

There is much more good material. Go read the whole article by Glenn Greenwald.

Given the costs and risks one incurs from participating in protests like this -- to say nothing of the widespread mockery one receives -- it's natural that most of the participants will be young and not yet desperate to cling to institutional stability. It's also natural that this cohort won't be well-versed (or even interested) in the high arts of media messaging and leadership structures. Democratic Party precinct captains, MBA students in management theory and corporate communications, and campaign media strategists aren't the ones who will fuel protests like this; it takes a mindset of passionate dissent and a willingness to remove oneself from the safe confines of institutional respectability.

So, yes, the people willing to engage in protests like these at the start may lack (or reject the need for) media strategies, organizational hierarchies, and messaging theories. But they're among the very few people trying to channel widespread anger into activism rather than resignation, and thus deserve support and encouragement -- and help -- from anyone claiming to be sympathetic to their underlying message.

The media is an institution that lies in the hands of the elite, so they will always echo the prejudices of the top 1% and distort the reality of the bottom 99%. That is the nature of political power. How else can thuggish dictators or corrupted political parties cling to power? Look at the extent that Gaddafi has gone to hang on to power. Those on top won't cede power willingly.

The Voice Not Being Heard

There are all kinds of articles and interview, videos and radio reports about the economy and how Obama is a socialist Kenyan Marxist determined to destroy America in one last mau-mau jihad.

There are precious few items in the media that honestly assess what is going on. I enjoy reading Dean Baker's articles on his blog Beat the Press over at the CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive economic policy think-tank based in Washington, DC, founded in 1999):

Robert Samuelson's Con Job

Robert Samuelson devoted his column today to decrying the lack of confidence in the U.S. economy. While confidence is indeed low, this largely reflects the prolonged downturn. Contrary to what Samuelson suggests, there is nothing surprising about the lack of confidence given the most prolonged period of high unemployment since the Great Depression.

In fact, given the weakness of demand, consumption and investment are both surprisingly high. The saving rate is hovering near 5.0 percent, well below the pre-bubble average of more than 8.0 percent, suggesting that consumers are more willing to spend relative to their income than was the case in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. The share of GDP devoted to investment in equipment and software is almost back to its pre-recession level.

The obvious problem in the economy, including the low rate of start-ups that is troubling Samuelson, is a lack of demand. This is best met by government stimulus, since government spending puts money in people's pockets and, contrary to what many politicians assert, people do work for the government, which means that the government can create jobs. If the government created enough demand in the economy, as it did during World War II, there is no reason to believe that firms would not invest more and that more start-ups would come into existence.

Measuring public "confidence" is a backward looking indicator. When times are good, confidence is high. When times are bad it is low. A low confidence isn't telling you something about the future. It is telling you about the past. And the wonderful thing about the American media is that the 2001-2008 Republican government under Bush has magically disappeared. He crashed the economy but you would never guess it. Instead, the media is busy selling the idea that the alien imposter with horns growing out of his head, the Kenyan, crashed the economy as part of his socialist jihad against red-blooded Americans.

By the way... have you noticed that Obama has been killing leaders of al Qaeda right, left and centre and getting precious little positive press for it. But when the blowheart Bush did his gunslinger routine of "get him dead or alive" the press fell over itself telling Americans what a swell leader they had. Nuts! Bush wasn't a "leader". He was a fool who created some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in America's history and topped that off with business and regulatory decisions that destroyed $11 trillion worth of wealth.

I personally think Obama falls short as a leader, but he is head and shoulders above Bush. I can disagree with Obama but at least feel he is trying to do the right thing. Bush was a phony. He lied. He destroyed. He ran the military into the ground. He wrecked the economy. But Bush gets a pass from the media while they gang up on Obama.

Were is the voice of reason, or policy debate, in the American media? It has been quashed by right wing fanatics who spew propaganda and lies. Even the "mainstream" media is so far right that if it were taken back fifty years people would find it outrageously partisan.

Matt Taibbi on "Occupy Wall Street"

Here is a journalist with his finger on the pulse of Wall Street corruption, Matt Taibbi, who has now turned his attention to the demonstrators. He is interviewed by Keith Olbermann:



Both Taibbi and Olbermann note the very suspicious "lack of coverage" for this movement given the extensive coverage of the "Tea Party" where a group of 20 would get national coverage. Here are demonstrations that have lasted for over 20 days with thousands attending, a large number of unions voting support, and 700 arrested on Saturday and some 30 arrested last week. And almost no coverage in the press. Extremely strange... unless you realize that the media is bought and sold -- like the politicians -- to sell the message of the ultra-rich, the message of more tax cuts, or a "tax burden", of a need to remove services and entitlements from the bottom 90%, the incessant demand that government be shrunk to the point where it can be "strangled in a bath tub".

How the Media Makes up "Facts"

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the NY city The Village Voice newspaper. It highlights how the NY Times newspaper in a matter of minutes "changes" the news from one of demonstrators being allowed onto a bridge then cut off and arrested to a much more hostile account where the demonstrators confront the police and force them into arresting a disorderly crowd.

Click to Enlarge
From The Village Voice:

The above photo of juxtaposed screenshots from the New York Times website has been making the rounds on Facebook, and it shows two very different takes for the same story on yesterday's Brooklyn Bridge arrests. The screenshot on the left, from 6:59 p.m., appears to reflect what many protesters are saying: The police tricked them into marching on the bridge. At 7:19 p.m., any mention of the police allowing demonstrators onto the bridge was removed from the lede. Why did they make this change?

We asked City Room Bureau Chief Andy Newman, and he said the following:

At every point yesterday as the story unfolded, we offered the most complete account we could of a large and chaotic scene that could not be grasped by any one person. The earlier version had almost no input from the police. The later version reflected the accounts of the police, protesters and of course our reporters at the scene. The later version, read in its entirety (not just the one highlighted sentence in that photo), reflected the various perspectives much more thoroughly. The final version of the piece was more thorough still.

It's worth noting that one of their reporters at the scene, freelancer Natasha Lennard, was among the over 700 arrested. The original City Room report that Lennard contributed to says that police did in fact allow protesters onto the bridge:

After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15 p.m. Saturday.

That paragraph is now nowhere in the story. Currently, the only mentions in the piece of police telling protesters they were allowed onto the bridge are in the words of the protesters themselves.

The wonderful thing about those with money and power: they get to define reality. The bottom 90% have to patch together bits and pieces to uncover what has been covered up. We live in lies all our life struggling to know what is really going on. It is those at the top who manipulate and deceive in order to protect their power. The media is owned by the ultra-rich. In the final analysis, the ultra-rich get to decide what is "news" that is fit for the rest of us to see. And of course, the ultra-rich help "guide" the police in "doing their duty".

In a "strange coincidence" the Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase has decided now is the right time to "donate" to the NY Police:

A coincidence, I'm sure, but it sure is poetic. Just as the Occupy Wall Street movement was picking up speed, JPMorgan Chase donated what the financial organization itself described as "an unprecedented" $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, part of which will be used to boost surveillance systems. Well isn't that special.

The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center.

Wow! What a remarkable "coincidence".

That Insignificant, Ignored Protest in NY

The major media has studiously ignored Occupy Wall Street. If they write anything about it, they report it to be crazies and diehards, a hundred at most, who persist in hanging out in the Wall Street area, aimless, pointless.

Funny... that "less than 100" resulted in over 700 being arrested while thousands stormed the Brooklyn Bridge. At least the UK's Guardian newspaper is reporting what is happening in the US:

More than 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening during a march by anti-Wall Street protesters who have been occupying a downtown Manhattan square for two weeks.

The group, called Occupy Wall Street, has been protesting against the finance industry and other perceived social ills by camping out in Zuccotti park in New York.

During the afternoon a long line of protesters numbering several thousand snaked through the streets towards the landmark bridge across the East River with the aim of ending at a Brooklyn park.

However, during the march across the bridge groups of protesters sat down or strayed into the road from the pedestrian pathway. They were then arrested in large numbers by officers who were part of a heavy police presence shepherding the march along its path.

Will the major media in the US recognize this event? Will they continue to report it as a handful of odd mentally unstable youth with no political agenda? Will it take tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands mobilized and seizing major urban centres before the US media acknowledges that there is a public movement afoot in the US that is neither right nor left, but a mobilized citizenry who is fed up with the lies of the media and the fact that Wall Street has bought the politicians and control the news and police and the politicians?

By the way... this protest seems to have been carefully manipulated by the police so that it could arrest in bulk the whole crowd. Yet again, proof that the police and the politicians are conspiring to suppress the democratic impulse by prevent popular demonstrations:

But others said the sit-down protest appeared to happen only after the protesters were deliberately blocked off by police after actually being allowed onto the roadway. "They met the police line and ended up being arrested one by one," said Damon Eris, another protester.

The march ended in chaotic scenes with police buses driving up the bridge to be filled with arrested marchers. The packed buses then drove off to central booking. Meanwhile, other marchers waited at the bottom of the bridge's Manhattan side and cheered as some released protesters, or those who had escaped being blocked off, came back down. "Let them go! Let them go!" was a frequent chant.

From an Associated Press report:

More than 700 protesters demonstrating against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality, among other grievances, were arrested Saturday after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.

...

Some of the protesters said they were lured onto the roadway by police, or they didn't hear the calls from authorities to head to the pedestrian walkway. Police said no one was tricked into being arrested, and those in the back of the group who couldn't hear were allowed to leave.

...

Elsewhere in the U.S. on Saturday, protesters assembled in Albuquerque, N.M., Boston and Los Angeles to express their solidarity with the movement in New York, though their demands remain unclear. Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have been camped in Zuccotti Park and have clashed with police on earlier occasions. Mostly, the protests have been peaceful, and the movement has shown no signs of losing steam. Celebrities including Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon made recent stops to encourage the group.

This is going to blow up into a major social movement because the heavy-handedness of "the authorities". The police and the politicians are showing themselves to be puppets of Wall Street and the big money that for too long has controlled everything.

This is the Arab Spring come to America.

How the Whole Truth Never Makes it into what the Press Publishes

Journalism specializes in printing part of the news. The part that the elites want you to hear so they can shape your actions to what they want. Here is a post from Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that lays out how truth is doled out in dollops:

If Millennials Do Worse Than Their Parents, It Will Be Because Bill Gates' Kids Have All the Money

The Washington Post had a column by a millennial columnist complaining about the lack of opportunity. It is striking that the column never once mentioned income inequality.

There is no doubt that millennials will on average be far wealthier than their parents. Output per hour has roughly doubled over the last three decades, meaning that the real wage could be almost twice as high today as it was in 1980. Insofar as the typical millennial is not seeing the benefits of this productivity growth it is due to the fact that so much income has been redistributed upwards, not the result of any generational dynamics.

Here's a bit from Alexandra Petri's Washington Post opinion piece:

Youth unemployment is 18 percent — double the overall rate. The polls teetered, then tilted. Will your standard of living be better than your parents’? Probably not. Is the American Dream still in reach? Define dream.

What’s worse is that no one seems to realize that we’ve noticed.

“The kids are all right,” they say. “Let’s tweet them a bone. They love it when you tweet.”

It’s enough to give a self-respecting millennial a headache.

Right now, there are at least 100 people Occupying Wall Street. It’s a protest movement. We are the 99 percent who will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent, they say.

They have a nice Web site. They want to find some sort of solution as a group. They also don’t have jobs — or a real plan.

That’s basically millennials in a nutshell.

What bugs me is that she puts down the Occupy Wall Street protest as "a hundred kids". Here's a picture of what "a hundred kids" looks like when reported by a UK newspaper, The Daily Mail with the title "Thousands of protesters descend on Manhattan as police gear up for a weekend of mayhem... but is this the start of a middle class uprising?":


Only the mainstream press in the US continues to "report" this as a handful of disorganized malcontents who have "no message" and aren't worthy of any media attention.

Here is the only thing close to

• a proper mainstream press appraisal of what is going on with this demonstration by Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC
and
• this follow-up interview by O'Donnell with Michael Moore.

Stories Fumbled and Lost by US Media

Here is Keith Olbermann investigating the strange fact that US media seems to not have noticed the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations: