End of This Blog

I have just discovered that Google has quietly enabled "per country" censorship of blog posts on this Blogger service. Therefore, I have stopped all blogging. I will not be part of Google's compliance with dictatorships and the suppression of human rights.

From Wired magazine:

Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’

By David Kravets January 31, 2012

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, instead of on an internet-wide basis.

Twitter’s announcement via its blog sparked a huge online backlash. The microblogging service was accused of becoming a censoring agent.

Yet Google’s announcement three weeks ago — buried in a Blogger help page — went unnoticed until it was highlighted by TechDows on Tuesday.

This censorship by Google puts the lie to its supposed corporate code of conduct of "Don't be evil".

In fact Google is just another greedy corporation that blows smoke about social concerns and "putting the customer first" when in reality their only bottom line is corporate greed.

I'm disillusioned. I foolishly believed that ethical corporations can be run with a mandate to service three critical stakeholders: their shareholders, their workers, and the broader community that provides the matrix (the legal infrastructure, the transportation infrastructure, the educational infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, etc.) which makes capitalism possible.

But Google has proved that my idealism is poorly supported by facts on the ground. Instead, greed and evil is endemic in capitalism and Google has shown itself to be just another greedy corrupt and evil corporation.

Goodbye.

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.

2011 as a Turning Point

Here is a bit from an interesting article by Rick Salutin in The Toronto Star:

Time magazine named The Protester its 2011 “Person of the Year” because, for decades till recently, most protests “seemed ineffectual and irrelevant.” That’s just silly. You can always find resistance and, depending on how you judge, it’s often relevant. ...

What may have been unique this past year was something else: a collapse of the conventional fountains of authority and respect. In the Arab world that meant governments. But in the West, it meant big business and finance. The brilliance of Occupy Wall Street was that it didn’t go to Washington. The Tea Party did; it directed its rage toward politicians and so it was eclipsed by the Occupiers, who targetted the bankers and financiers who control governments. That clearly resonated, but it wouldn’t have, 20 or 30 years ago.

Think back to the torrent of bestselling business bios and takeover epics like Iacocca or Barbarians at the Gate that began around 1980. Business was the hero; government was the “problem” because it impeded business’s freedom (even if business icons like Lee Iacocca demanded and relied on public money). Pro-business think-tanks proliferated; they disgorged “educational” series, often on public TV, by advocates like Milton Friedman. This accelerated through the Clinton-Bush years and beyond. Disdain for the über-rich was unthinkable until —

It wasn’t the crash of 2008 that led to their fall from grace, nor exposure of the greed and stupidity that required a massive public rescue. It was their graceless reaction to the bailouts: no apologies, remorse or gratitude — even faked; just more arrogance, bonuses, takeovers, foreclosures. Wall Street begged to be occupied. The Unrepentant Financier could have been Time’s Person.

...

Whose authority has also declined? How about Time magazine? The newsmag style used to sound authoritative and serenely confident. Now it sounds inane. “Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough. . . . They dissented; they demanded —” Everywhere? Like out my window right now? And “it seems”? Seems to who(m)? Who makes these claims? What voice would you need to actually say words so pompous and vacuous? You can see Jon Stewart (if he did print) wincing as he reads it. Where did that invincible authority go?

The power of authority diminishes when you can hear credible, contesting voices. Print tends to be monotonal and univocal, unlike the oral tradition that preceded it. But the Internet, though it often lacks actual speech, is oral in the sense of interactive, like a Socratic dialogue. In oral mode, less is often more because speech is so laden with gesture, tone etc.; even something as short as a tweet can suffice. That too diminishes normal authority, which likes to rumble on.

Go read the whole article. It is very thought-provoking.

I personally like the analysis that says that our culture is moving from hierarchy where the "experts" dictate to a collective where everybody's voice gets a chance to contend for attention and authority. I understand the need for an organizing principle to reduce the cacophony, but I'm also aware that elitism tends to suffocate the voice of the dissenter and prevents the rise of the new. We need diversity. Life is a race and we need change and innovation to help us to get from here with all its problems to there with its promise of a better future.

The Police are Hard of Hearing

Either they are hiring deaf cops in NY City or the Constitutional protection of the "free press" isn't worth the paper it is written on...



I would say it is pretty obvious that option #2 is in effect in America. The press is "free" to report glowing stories about "job creators" and the heroic efforts of Republicans to control deficits. But when it comes to civil society and basic rights, the Constitution is a some relic from the past that nobody is interested in despite all the claims by the political right that they are "guided" by the Constitution.

If you are curious about just how "easy" it is to get a press pass so that you can try to exercise your so-called "rights" in America, here is an article in the New York Observer that lays out some of the details and frustrations of the "process". As she points out, the law "requires":

Applicants also must submit one or more articles, commentaries, books, photographs, videos, films or audios published or broadcast within the twenty–four (24) months immediately preceding the Press Card application, sufficient to show that the applicant covered in person six (6) or more events occurring on separate days.

But to meet that requirement:

According to the last paragraph, you have to demonstrate coverage as an uncredentialed reporter in order to get credentialed. So the only way to comply with the law is to have previously broken the law repeatedly.

Ah... the joys of a bureaucratic mind. You can get a job if you can prove that you are presently employed. Meanwhile, we'll beat you about the ears for being lazy and unwilling to work because you are unemployed. That's the reality for 25 million unemployed in the US. Obviously the same screwy "bureaucratic rules" apply to getting "press credentials". First you need to be credentialed and previously covered 6 news events. This makes the insiders safe, but it create a Kafkaesque nightmare for anybody outside the system.

The Numbed Electorate

Here is a nice insight by Robert Reich into 2012's presidential election. He expects it to be a mind-numblingly dull experience:

... paradoxically the presidential race that officially begins a few months from now is likely to be as passionless as they come.

President Obama will be supported by progressives and the Democratic base, but without enthusiasm. His notorious caves to Republicans and Wall Street — failing to put conditions on the Street’s bailout (such as demanding the Street help stranded home owners), or to resurrect Glass-Steagall, or include a public option in health care, or assert his constitutional responsibility to raise the debt limit, or protect Medicare and Social Security, or push for cap-and-trade, or close Guantanamo, or, in general, confront the regressive Republican nay-sayers and do-nothings with toughness rather than begin negotiations by giving them much of what they want — are not the stuff that stirs a passionate following.

Mitt Romney will surely be the Republican presidential candidate — and Romney inspires as little enthusiasm among Republicans as Obama does among Democrats. The GOP will support Romney because, frankly, he’s the only major Republican primary candidate who does not appear to the broader public to be nuts.

But Republicans don’t like Romney. His glib, self-serving, say-whatever-it-takes-to-win-the primaries approach strikes almost everyone as contrived and cynical. Moreover, Romney is the establishment personified — a pump-and-dump takeover financier, for crying out loud — at the very time the GOP (and much of the rest of the country) are becoming more anti-establishment by the day.

At this point neither the Republican right nor the mainstream media wants to admit the yawn-inducing truth that Mitt will be the GOP’s candidate. The right doesn’t want to admit it because it will be seen as a repudiation of the Tea Party. The media doesn’t want to because they’d prefer to sell newspapers and attract eyeballs.

The media are keeping the story of Rick Perry’s cringe-inducing implosion going for the same reason they’re keeping the story of Herman Cain’s equally painful decline going — because the public is forever fascinated by the gruesome sight of dying candidacies. With Bachmann, Perry, and Cain gone or disintegrating, the right wing-nuts of the GOP have only one hope left: Newt Gingrich. His star will rise briefly before he, too, is pilloried for the bizarre things he’s uttered in the past and for his equally bizarre private life. His fall will be equally sudden (although I don’t think Gingrich is capable of embarrassment).

And so we’ll be left with two presidential candidates who don’t inspire — at the very time in American history when Americans crave inspiration.

Instead of a big debate about the basics (how to truly restore jobs and wages, financial capitalism versus product capitalism, the place and role of America in the world, how to rescue our democracy), we’re likely to have a superficial debate over symbols (the budget deficit, the size of government, whether we need a “businessman” at the helm).

This means political passions are likely to move elsewhere — finding their voices in grass-roots movements, social media, demonstrations, boycotts, and meet-ups — on the Main Streets and in the backwaters, and only episodically in the mainstream media or in normal election-year events.

In some ways this may not be such a bad thing. The regressive right has had thirty years to build itself into a political power. Newly-energized progressives (Occupiers and others) need enough time to develop concrete proposals and strategies. What’s the rush? If polls are to be believed, most of the nation is progressive, not regressive (witness last Tuesday’s results in Wisconsin and elsewhere). So it is, after all, only a matter of time.

Yet viewed another way, a passionless presidential race may be dangerous for America. The nation’s problems may not wait. They require bold action, and soon.

I'm willing to believe the scenario that Reich is laying out. The tragedy of US politics is that all of the politicians, left and right, is corrupt and "owned" by the top 0.01%. What is the point in taking "politics" seriously if there is no connection between what the candidate says and what the candidate does. Right now, the real agenda of the politicians is that one dictated by the ultra-rich. They promise wonderful things as candidate, but don't deliver becaus they are bought-and-sold by the rich who dictate their votes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

Press Coverage of the "Occupy Wall Street" Demonstration

Here are some bits from a good post by Allison Kilkenny in The Nation where she questions the "official media" coverage of this demonstration:

Over the weekend, my inbox exploded with angry messages from people who had just read this New York Times article (though it reads more like an op-ed) about the Occupy Wall Street protest. Ginia Bellafante gives a devastating account of the event’s attendees, depicting them as scatterbrained, sometimes borderline-psychotic transients.

Bellafante, who is not a reporter but a columnist for the Times, offered a representation of the protesters that is as muddled as the amalgam of activists’ motives she presents in the span of the article. She first claims a Joni Mitchell lookalike named Zuni Tikka is a “default ambassador” of the movement. In one of the following paragraphs, she then describes the protest as “leaderless.” Either the people at Zuccotti Park have official leadership or they don’t (they don’t, by the way). So either Tikka is an official spokesperson who warrants first-paragraph favorability, or Bellafante’s own biases persuaded her to put the kooky girl dancing around in her underwear in the spotlight.

The more serious aspect of the protest—the “scores of arrests” that occurred over the weekend including the arrests of more than eighty people, several of whom the police first penned and then maced—is offered as an aside in Bellafante’s article (she doesn’t mention the macing at all). By the way, none of the young women in the following video are in their underwear.

Bellafante goes on to (rightfully) wonder why the response to the widening class divide hasn’t come in the form of a more serious movement. A proposed hypothesis never emerges, even though Bellafante almost stumbles across one when she describes a young man who is stopping by only in “fits and spurts” because his mother fears he’ll be tear-gassed by the police. It sounds as though Bellafante is on the cusp of critiquing the US police state that has completely terrified the activist community into submission, but then she retreats.

The main bone the article wishes to pick is the scattered ideologies of the attendees—a fair point. However, Bellafante never attempts to do the job of real journalism here, which is to use this slice of life to help her readers understand the world around them. Instead, she comes across as a rubbernecker leering at a particularly bloody wreck.

Go read the whole post. There is a lot more detail and points to consider (plus embedded links).

I remember my experience of demonstrations in the 1960s and 70s. Sure enough, there are a good number of kooks in a crowd. Even the idea of "demonstrating" is felt to be somehow wrong in a democracy where supposedly the people's voice is captured in the election. But elections presuppose and informed public which in turn presupposed an open and effective press. But these are rarely in place, so the role of a demonstration is to kick the system in the rump to force the press to pay attention. This in turn gets the wider public thinking about a topic that heretofore was ignored.

Demonstrations are important and effective. But a journalist who holds them up as a laughingstock is working hard to realize the right wing fantasy of shrinking government down to a size where it can be strangled in a bathtub. If you can turn the public into sleepwalkers by making demonstrations a joke, you will get the "government" you deserve, a robbers' haven where self-interested crooks run the show.

Here's the bottom line for Kilkenny:

... Bellafante reaches a far, far larger readership, and the ones who dismiss protesters always do because their corporate overlords love depicting protesters as flower-waving, stoned-out-of-their-gourds hippies. If you think those are the only people on your side, why get off the couch at all?

This rubbernecking style of journalism is particularly dangerous right now because it amounts to criticizing a burning house for the color of its curtains. The curtains might be brash, ostentatious and completely unhelpful in maintaining the overall flow of the home’s ambiance, but it’s perhaps not the most pertinent detail of the moment. Here’s a more pressing question: Why are the people Bellafante described in her article the ones left behind?

The teargas aside starts to tap into something important: how the police state and its domestic weaponry and bureaucratic assist with the needs for permits to do anything in protests have successfully crippled the activism community. Activists are afraid. You can smell it in their midst. They talk about the constant presence of agent provocateurs and undercovers at every protest. They share battle stories of being abused by the police, like being tazed or held so long in makeshift police pens that they had to defecate in their clothing. And these are the brave ones that still show up to the protests.

It’s not mere paranoia. We know for a fact that the FBI monitors activism groups, and this practice reached a frenzied level during the Bush administration years. These intimidation practices continue under President Obama in the form of raids.

So much for democracy in America. So much for America having a future.

There's a reason why the founders of the America Republic made such blunt statements as the need to "water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots". Those who run a society are not interested in protests or demonstrations. They will always paint them as loonies and malcontents. Real democracy unfortunately requires a real struggle. The trick is to work for change without being corrupted by the dark forces that those in power use against you. The real task is to remain hopeful and sane while the powerful paint you as a nihilist and crazy.

What Passes for an "Informed" Press in America

Poor Dean Baker. He is trying to reverse the trend toward stupidity in the US press. It is a hopeless, Sisyphean task. He is trying single-handedly to stop the ocean's tide.

From Baker's Beat the Press blog:

Corporations Do Not Exist to Create Jobs

In an article discussing three trade agreements being debated by Congress, the NYT told readers:

"under the agreements, American service providers would be able to compete in the three countries, ostensibly adding new jobs to the American economy. Because of this, they are widely supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business trade groups."

This is wrong, wrong, and wrong. Corporations do not exist to create jobs, nor do they claim this as a goal. Invariably, corporate CEOs will say that their responsibility is to produce returns for shareholders, as they announce large layoffs. If the Chamber of Commerce is supporting these deals it is because it believes that they will increase profits, end of story.

The piece also bizarrely tells readers that the deals are projected to expand exports by $12 billion without mentioning how much it is expected to increase imports. This is like reporting a baseball score by telling us how many runs the Yankees got and not mentioning how many runs their opponents got.

It is net exports, the difference between exports and imports, that creates jobs. If the GM relocates an assembly plant from Texas to Mexico, the export of car parts from the United States is not adding jobs. Any reporter should know this and never print an export projection without including the corresponding import projection.

The piece also wrongly refers to the deals as "free-trade agreements." This is just a term that proponents use to make them sound more appealing. In fact, the deals will increase many forms of protectionism, most notably by imposing stronger patent and copyright protections on the three countries in these deals. A neutral report would just use refer to the deals as "trade agreements."

It is utterly clear that the media simply ignores Dean Baker. They haven't the slightest interest in improving the quality of their "reporting". They are in fact tools of big corporate interests and are more concerned about spreading pro-corporate progaganda and well-placed lies to mislead the electorate than they are in providing "news" that informs. Tragic.

Here is another example where the NY Times mindlessly misleads readers. Obviously they want to scare them into believing that "Social Security will not be there for you when you retire". This will facilitate dismantling the entitlement:

NYT Is Confused About the Payroll Tax Cut

The NYT told readers that the temporary cut in the payroll tax, "resulted in $67.2 billion of lost revenue for Social Security in 2011 and a total cost of $111.7 billion spread over 10 years." Actually, the cut did not cost the program anything since the lost tax revenue was replaced by general revenue.

Funny... the newspaper industry in the US wonders why it keeps losing readership. Why would people pay for fishwrap? If they reported real news and provided genuine analysis, I suspect people would be willing to support the American press. But why pay for corporate and right wing propaganda?