Postmodern News Archives 19

2008-01-25T10:59:00.000-08:00

Record Christmas Bonuses on Wall Street

By Naomi Spencer
From World Prout Assembly
2007

As millions of US households struggle with unmanageable mortgage payments, falling home values and foreclosure, Wall Street executives are awarding themselves record year-end bonuses.

Major US banks are reporting billions of dollars in write-offs from bad investments and double-digit losses in stock value. Nevertheless, among the four largest investment firms—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns—bonuses amount to nearly $30 billion.

Year-end payouts on Wall Street are 14 percent higher this year than last, bringing total compensation at the four firms to nearly $50 billion for 2007. Bonuses have increased at double-digit rates year after year on debt speculation and spiking energy and home costs, which have hurt working class families. To put these compensation packages in perspective, the entire budget for New York City, employing a quarter of a million people, is $59 billion in fiscal year 2008.

The Wall Street bonuses alone far surpass the combined funds for the city’s fire and sanitation departments, all of the city’s health, hospital, welfare, homeless, children’s and social services, and the municipal funding of the education department and the university system of New York City. The bonuses are more than the federal government’s discretionary budget for Housing and Urban Development, and more than the combined discretionary budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs—which pulled in profits of $11.6 billion, 22 percent higher than 2006, by positioning itself against other major firms which were entangled in the sub-prime mortgage crisis—is distributing a massive $12.1 billion in bonuses. Including compensation, Goldman Sachs will hand out $20.2 billion for the year, up from $16.5 billion in 2006.

Goldman Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein claimed a record bonus totaling nearly $68 million, including $26.8 million in cash and $41.1 million in stock and options. Blankfein raked in the previous record, $54 million, last year. Goldman co-presidents Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried were each given bonuses worth $40.5 million, up from $26 million apiece in 2006.

Investment firm Lehman Brothers reported total compensation of $9.5 billion, a 9.5 percent increase over last year, and bonuses of $5.7 billion. CEO Richard Fuld Jr. received a $35 million stock bonus. According to Forbes, Fuld’s five-year compensation total, excluding this latest bonus, is nearly $312 million.

The media has made much of the announcements from Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns that their chief executives will not be given bonuses due to their dismal earnings reports and falling share values. Reuters commented December 20 that “even top performers at some firms are getting pinched” by the collapse of the sub-prime and credit markets. “It’s a bloodbath on the credit side,” capital markets analyst John Kim told the news agency. “It’s going to be brutal. The bonus pool is shrinking.” Yet Morgan Stanley, the second largest securities firm, reported a decline in earnings of 60 percent over the year and a $9.4 billion write-down in debt securities holdings for the fourth quarter at the same time as it announced an 18 percent rise in compensation packages, to $16.6 billion.

Securities firm Bear Stearns posted its first-ever quarterly loss and reduced earnings estimates by nearly $2 billion. The company reported reduced compensation packages of $3.4 billion, down from $4.3 billion in 2006. These figures are certainly not making top Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns executives uncomfortable in their featherbeds. While Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack forgoes a bonus this year, last year he was given $40 million in compensation. Forbes puts Mack’s annual compensation, excluding bonuses, at $7.46 million, and his stock ownership at more than $220 million.

Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne is estimated to hold more than $1.3 billion. Last year Cayne was paid $38 million in cash and held $59 million in stock options. As the company reported that two of its hedge funds had collapsed, the Wall Street Journal reported that Caynes spent his days chartering cross-country flights to attend bridge tournaments and play golf.

Even CEOs who resigned or were removed from their positions because of disastrous write-downs continue to reap windfalls. Stanley O’Neal, CEO of Merrill Lynch until being removed in October, is not receiving his bonus this year, but has been awarded more than $161 million in securities and retirement package.

Citigroup CEO Charles Prince resigned in November after forecasting $11 billion in sub-prime mortgage investment losses on top of $6.5 billion already written down. He was handed an exit package of $95 million, including $30 million in stocks and options, and will continue to get a bonus based on Citigroup’s share price.

Noting the enormous growth in award amounts, executive recruiting firm Boyden World Corp. director Jeanne Branthover told Bloomberg news on December 24, “What you’re seeing is historic. It’s going to set a pattern in the future for how people and firms differentiate themselves in extraordinary times.”

Indeed, these are extraordinary times. Such figures epitomize the deepening social divide between the parasitic upper crust and the mass of the US population. Inequality has grown sharply in recent years on tax cuts, speculation and outright fraud, at the expense of general living standards and the productive base of society.

The federal Congressional Budget Office reported earlier this month that between 2003 and 2005, the income of the richest one percent of the population rose more than the combined total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans. The richest 3 million people saw their income increase from $1.3 trillion to $1.8 trillion, equal to the combined total income of the bottom 166 million Americans.

This grotesque concentration of wealth has real consequences for the dynamics of economic life. As Wall Street executives claw up tens of millions, on New York City on any given night thousands of people seek emergency assistance from city shelters. The city’s Department of Homeless Services census count for December 21 put the total shelter occupancy at 35,419, including more than 15,000 children.

Nationwide, millions of working class households contend with exorbitant housing, heating and debt payments, largely the byproduct of investment firm profits. Home foreclosures continue to surge throughout the country as prices decline and sub-prime mortgage interest rates reset. More than 36.5 million people live below the artificially suppressed official poverty line. The rising cost of housing, energy, basic foods and gasoline have pushed the poorest families into desperate situations, strained emergency food banks and charities, and compounded the trend toward recession.

Meanwhile, Elite Traveler magazine reports that households worth at least $10 million are spending 67 percent more on the holidays this year. In addition to the usual jewelry, electronics, cars, yachts, and vacation homes, the super-rich are also splurging on private islands and private charter jet flights.

One of the most popular gift items this year, according to the magazine, is a $40,000 gift card redeemable for ten hours of luxury flying. The Lufthansa private jet service, the magazine says, “offers personal assistants, a cigar lounge, luxury bathrooms and integrated passport control and security checkpoints. Cuisine features a daily assortment of sushi as well as some 43 vintage Armagnac brandies.” From the lounge, “A chauffeured Mercedes S-class or Porsche Cayenne whisks travelers directly to their awaiting jet.”

Canada puts U.S., Israel on Torture Watchlist

By David Ljunggren
From Canada.com
2008

Canada's foreign ministry has put the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured and also classifies some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture, according to a document obtained by Reuters on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch ally of both the United States and Israel.

The document -- part of a training course on torture awareness given to diplomats -- mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held.

The man, Omar Khadr, is the only Canadian in Guantanamo. His defenders said the document made a mockery of Ottawa's claims that Khadr was not being mistreated.

Under "definition of torture" the document lists U.S. interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding prisoners. A spokesman for Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier tried to distance Ottawa from the document. "The training manual is not a policy document and does not reflect the views or policies of this government," he said.

The document was provided to Amnesty International as part of a court case it has launched against Ottawa over the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.

Khadr has been in Guantanamo Bay for five years. He is accused of killing a U.S. soldier during a clash in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Right groups say Khadr should be repatriated to Canada, an idea that Prime Minister Stephen Harper rejects on the grounds that the man faces serious charges.

"At some point in the course of Omar Khadr's detention the Canadian government developed the suspicion he was being tortured and abused," said William Kuebler, Khadr's U.S. lawyer.

"Yet it has not acted to obtain his release from Guantanamo Bay and protect his rights, unlike every other Western country that has had its nationals detained in Guantanamo Bay," he told CTV television.

Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. A spokeswoman at the U.S. embassy said she was looking into the report. No one was immediately available for comment at the Israeli embassy.

The torture awareness course started after Ottawa was strongly criticized for the way it handled the case of Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was deported from the United States to Syria in 2002.

Arar says he was tortured repeatedly during the year he spent in Damascus prisons. An inquiry into the case revealed that Canadian diplomats had not received any formal training into detecting whether detainees had been abused.

© Reuters 2008

Canada Takes U.S., Israel off Torture Watchlist

By David Ljunggren
From Reuters

Canada's foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies, said on Saturday it would remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured.

Both nations expressed unhappiness after it emerged that they had been listed in a document that formed part of a training course manual on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats.

Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier said he regretted the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual, which also classified some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture. "It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten," Bernier said in a statement.

"The manual is neither a policy document nor a statement of policy. As such, it does not convey the government's views or positions."

The document -- made available to Reuters and other media outlets -- embarrassed the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch ally of both the United States and Israel. U.S. ambassador David Wilkins said the listing was absurd while the Israeli envoy said he wanted his country removed.

Asked why the two countries had been put on the list, a spokesman for Bernier said: "The training manual purposely raised public issues to stimulate discussion and debate in the classroom."

The government mistakenly gave the document to Amnesty International Canada as part of a court case the rights organization has launched against Ottawa over the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan. No one from Amnesty was immediately available for comment.

Under "definition of torture" the document lists U.S. interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding prisoners. It also mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where a Canadian man is being held. The man, Omar Khadr, has been in Guantanamo Bay for five years. He is accused of killing a U.S. soldier during a clash in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. The foreign ministry launched the torture awareness course after Ottawa was rapped for the way it handled the case of Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was deported from the United States to Syria in 2002.

Arar says he was tortured repeatedly during the year he spent in Damascus prisons. An official inquiry into the affair showed Canadian diplomats had not been trained to detect whether detainees might have been abused.

Press Release for "Chew on This" (Excerpt)

From Houghton Mifflin Company

When the award-winning journalist Eric Schlosser's groundbreaking book Fast Food Nation was published for adults, many called for his insights and research to be shared with young readers. They are, after all, the fast-food industry's biggest consumers. In Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food, Schlosser, along with co-author Charles Wilson, presents the fast-food industry to preteens, focusing on the aspects that will interest them most — the nonconformist teen entrepreneurs who founded the industry; the mistreatment of animals in slaughterhouses and employees in restaurants; the shocking effects too much fast food can have on growing bodies; and the impact of the industry on schools, communities, and the earth.

Kids love fast food. And the fast-food industry loves kids: it couldn't survive without them. In Chew on This, Schlosser and Wilson share with young readers the fascinating and sometimes frightening truth about what lurks behind those sesame seed buns. The book begins with a historical look at the beginnings of the fast-food industry, illustrating how its growth helped determine the urban and rural landscape of America and paved the way for the chain stores and malls of today. Young readers will get an intriguing bit of business history when they learn how high school dropouts and traveling salesmen started the restaurants they frequent. They'll see how the introduction of chain restaurants both benefits and harms small communities all over the country.

Stomachs will turn and tempers will flare as the authors shine a light on the grisly conditions in a chicken slaughterhouse, explain how market research firms study kids, and learn how those delicious fast-food smells are manufactured off a highway in New Jersey. The disgusting facts in Chew on This — and there are plenty of them — will surprise and scare readers. For example:

• A single fast-food hamburger may contain meat from hundreds, even thousands, of different cattle.
• Each can of soda contains more than ten teaspoons of sugar.
• A single animal infected with E. Coli 0157:H7 can contaminate thirty-two thousand pounds of ground beef.
• Chickens in slaughterhouses are sometimes killed by being thrown against walls or stomped on.
• Leftover waste from a cattle slaughterhouse is sometimes added to chicken feed.
• Leftover waste from a chicken slaughterhouse is sometimes added to chicken feed, turning the doomed birds into cannibals.

"What we eat changes not only how we look on the outside but also how we look on the inside," writes Schlosser. To explain the point, the authors include a "tour" of human body parts with the renowned heart surgeon Mehmet Oz. Dr. Oz illustrates in graphic detail the difference between healthy and diseased body parts and explains what can happen to those who stick to a fast-food diet.

More than just a litany against the fast-food industry, Chew on This is explicit about why kids need to be informed. The authors profile real teens whose lives have been affected by the fast-food industry. They talk to an eighteen-year-old boy who decides to have gastric bypass surgery; a twelve-year-old girl in Alaska who launched a "Stop the Pop" campaign to remove soda machines from her school; a teenage boy who helped unionize the McDonald's franchise where he worked — the first to do so — only to see the restaurant close shortly after; and two sisters living on a traditional ranch.

Chew on This addresses some of the most serious issues affecting our society, and its strong, fact-based narrative style, startling statistics, and eye-opening photographs will keep readers turning the pages. The average American child views forty thousand television commercials per year, almost half of which promote junk food. There are roughly nine million overweight or obese children in America and there's no reason to think that this number is shrinking. Corporations will continue to exploit workers, underpay farmers, and manipulate consumers unless they are forced to stop. Educators, parents, and health professionals have an important role in educating and helping young people make healthy decisions about the food they eat.

Change can only come about when young people themselves decide to think twice before they order a fast-food hamburger, fries, and a soda. Chew on This shows them that they can change the world by changing what they eat.

About the Authors
Eric Schlosser has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He has received a National Magazine Award and a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for reporting. In 1998 Schlosser wrote an investigative piece on the fast food industry for Rolling Stone. What began as a two-part article for the magazine turned into a groundbreaking book: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001). The book helped change the way Americans think about what they eat. Fast Food Nation was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, as well as on bestseller lists in Canada, Great Britain, and Japan. It has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Schlosser's second book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (2003), explored the nation's growing underground economy. It also became a New York Times bestseller. In 2003 Schlosser's first play, Americans, was produced at the Arcola Theatre in London.

Hoping to counter the enormous amount of fast food marketing aimed at children, Schlosser decided to write a book that would help young people understand where their food comes from, how it's made, how it affects society, and how it can harm their health. Written with Charles Wilson, Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food became a New York Times bestseller in the spring of 2006. Later that year, Fox Searchlight Pictures released a major motion picture based on Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater and cowritten by Schlosser. "It's a mirror and a portrait," the New York Times said of the film, "as necessary and nourishing as your next meal." Schlosser is currently at work on a book about America's prison system.

Charles Wilson grew up in West Virginia and has written articles for numerous publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Economist. He has worked at the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. His writing has often explored broader social issues through the lens of personal stories. As a young man, he helped round up beef cattle on horseback at his uncle's ranch. This is his first book.

A Conversation with Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson

Kids love fast food. Why did you write a book for them about its history and harmful consequences?
An editor came up with the idea not long after the 2002 paperback publication of Fast Food Nation [Eric's best-selling exposé of the fast-food industry, written for adults]. We were drawn to the challenge of recasting the material for a younger readership. It seemed that the people who needed this information most didn't have a way to get it directly. We decided to write a book for young people that wouldn't be condescending, preachy, or hectoring. We hope that Chew on This respects the intelligence of its readers and challenges kids to think for themselves.

The fast-food industry spends billions of dollars every year marketing unhealthy food to children. We felt that kids needed to hear the other side of the story. The eating habits that a person develops as a child are difficult to break later. And if a child is obese by the age of thirteen, he or she is likely to remain obese for life. The nutritional education of American children shouldn't be left to the fast food, junk food, and soda companies.

It's easy to take the fast-food industry for granted. It seems like fast-food restaurants are everywhere and have always been with us. The book tries to show that the growth of this industry wasn't inevitable. It was promoted by government subsidies, deceptive marketing, and individual choices. It can be changed through a different set of choices. We want to help kids think critically about the world around them and believe that a better world is still possible. Although Chew on This is full of disturbing and depressing information, it is grounded in a fundamental optimism.

You include a lot of historical information on the industry.
Chew on This traces the rise of the fast-food industry and its effects on how we work, how we eat, and how we live. It's a book both for and about young people. It begins in 1885 with a fifteen-year-old boy at a Wisconsin fair who invents the hamburger — and it winds up at the recent opening of a Burger King in Baghdad. The book traces the careers of the men who created fast food and describes how Walt Disney and Ray Kroc, the founder of the McDonald's Corporation, changed how products were marketed to children. It describes how the fast-food culture has transformed the American landscape, making cities and towns look the same, with the same chain restaurants and stores. It explores how the labor policies of the fast-food chains have affected the lives of teenage workers. It takes readers behind the scenes at a flavor factory, where the taste of fast food is manufactured, at a huge industrial French fry factory, at the poultry and beef slaughterhouses that supply the meat for burgers and chicken nuggets. It describes the efforts of the fast food and soda companies to target children in schools. And it looks at the impact that fast-food consumption has had on the health of America's children, telling the story of a young man in suburban Chicago and his struggles with obesity.

The book also offers grounds for hope. It introduces young people who are resisting the fast-food giants. It suggests that the future will bring a whole new attitude toward the production and distribution of food, encouraging sustainable agriculture and healthier diets. The goal of the book isn't to indoctrinate children with any single point of view. Our aim is to make kids think about what they're eating, where it comes from, and the consequences of every bite.

Did you approach the research for Chew on This in a different way than that for Fast Food Nation?
The research process for Chew on This was much the same: a mix of firsthand reporting and a lot of digging through archival and published sources. The fast-food industry is now global in scope, and we hoped to capture a sense of that in the book. Chew on This required a great deal of original research and investigative trips to Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, West Virginia, Alaska, Great Britain, and Singapore. The only real difference between the books is emphasis. For this book, we focused on how the industry affects the lives of young people. It wasn't hard to find good stories. The real difficulty was deciding which ones to tell. Just about every teen in America has some connection to fast food, for better or worse.

Fast food, in addition to tasting good, is cheap and easily accessible for almost everyone in America. Fresh produce and meats can be expensive and hard to find, making this an economic as well as a health issue. Is it realistically possible for everyone to eat fresh, healthy food?

One of the main points of the book is that fast food isn't cheap at all, once you add up all the social and health costs. Those French fries and shakes may seem inexpensive when you buy them. But if you add the cost of the dialysis when you develop diabetes from eating too much fast food, it's a pretty high price to pay. At the moment, the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the production of unhealthy foods while providing little direct support to ranchers and farmers who are producing the kind of healthy foods we should be eating. The poor are feeling the worst effects of these misguided policies. The food that they can most easily afford, in the long run, will damage their health. We need government policies that support the right kind of foods. And people need to realize that it's worth spending a little more money on what they eat. Americans now spend a smaller proportion of their income on food than any other society in history. There could hardly be a more important purchase, and, as with everything else, you get what you pay for.

Some folks might see the fast-food industry as an example of the success of capitalism.
In many ways the fast-food industry represents a perversion of free market capitalism. The major chains wield extraordinary power not only over the distribution and production of food, but also over the food and labor policy of the U. S. government. That's not what Adam Smith had in mind. The behavior of the industry and its suppliers brings to mind that of the nineteenth-century trusts, which controlled the American economy with an iron fist, setting prices, breaking unions, and ruthlessly eliminating independent businesses.

Are you vegetarians? Do you eat fast food?
Charles is a lifelong vegetarian. But he has tremendous respect for independent ranchers. His uncle used to own a ranch, and whenever Charles visited, he'd help round up the cattle on horseback. Eric still eats meat. His favorite meal is a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake. He won't buy food, however, from any of the major fast-food chains. He simply doesn't want to give them any money. And for the same reason, he won't buy meat produced by the large meatpacking firms.

Fast-food restaurants are opening at a rapid pace around the world. There are protests, but there are also customers. Do you see this trend continuing? Why or why not?

Time will tell if the industry can continue to expand overseas. The major fast-food chains have run out of places to open new restaurants in the United States. The market has been pretty well saturated. And so this massive overseas expansion — which seems like a sign of the industry's strength and popularity — is actually a symptom of some underlying weaknesses. It's much more expensive to enter new countries than to open new restaurants close to home. The industry's growth seems to have run out of steam in Europe. China now offers the best hope of success. McDonald's is aggressively targeting children and teenagers there. But China is beginning to have its own obesity epidemic. It remains to be seen whether China will blindly follow our example when it comes to food, or learn from our mistakes.

Want to make a difference? You can!
Has Chew on This inspired you to make some changes in the food you purchase and eat? Here are some suggestions on where to start!

Start your own "Stop the Pop" campaign to remove soda machines from your school.
• Start a petition to give to your principal.

• Did you know there is the equivalent of ten teaspoons of sugar in a single twelve-ounce can of soda? Research the effects too much sugar can have on your health, both in the short term and the long term. Make posters showing these effects and hang them in the hallways.

• Try to stack twenty-two four-pound bags of sugar on top of one another — that's how much sugar the average American teenage boy consumes from soda every year.

Want fresh vegetables in your cafeteria? • Invite the person in charge of purchasing food for your school to your classroom. Ask questions about what they buy, and why. Ask whether they have the power to buy from local farmers and dairies. Do they have just one supplier? Or many?

• Take a field trip to your own school cafeteria and see how food is made behind the scenes. Talk to the cafeteria workers about their jobs — do they make food from scratch or does much of their work involve reheating frozen foods? Do they decide what to serve? Are they involved when the school gives health classes?

• Grow your own! Talk to your teacher about starting a school garden, or apply for a grant to get you started — visit www.kidsgardening.com to find out how.

Worried you are eating too much junk food?
• Take some cookbooks out of the library and whip up some healthy meals with your parents. Find a recipe that uses a food you've never eaten before.

• Visit a farmers' market. Visit www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/map.htm to find one in your area.

• When you go to fast-food restaurants with friends, order a salad instead of a burger.

• Drink water instead of soda at meals and after school.

• Bring a healthy lunch and snacks to school instead of purchasing food in the cafeteria.

• Compete with your friends! Count the number of foods in your lunch that haven't been processed. Each unprocessed food gets one point.

Upset by how animals and workers are treated at meatpacking plants?
• As a class assignment, write letters to your congressperson or senator explaining what you learned in Chew on This and why you think workers and animals deserve better. Give some suggestions on ways to improve things. They will listen! To find your local representatives' contact information, visit www.congress.org.

Support your locally owned restaurants!• Work with your teacher to invite local restaurant owners and fast-food franchise owners to your class. Ask them where they purchase their ingredients, and ask about their employee salaries and benefits. After they leave, discuss which restaurants you and your classmates feel comfortable supporting.

Publisher Urges Fast Food Giants to Focus on Facts, Kids' Health
Publisher Decries Swift Boat-Style Campaign Against Author Eric Schlosser
Houghton Mifflin Vice President and Editor-in-Chief Eamon Dolan today denounced the fast food industry's efforts to discredit the author Eric Schlosser and his books Fast Food Nation and Chew on This.

"In the five years since we published Fast Food Nation, the facts in the book have never been effectively refuted by the fast food industry," said Dolan. "It has become required reading at universities throughout the United States, routinely assigned by professors in a wide variety of disciplines. Yet now, with the publication of Chew on This, which Eric co-authored with Charles Wilson, the industry has launched a Swift Boat–style campaign against Eric rather than focusing on ways to improve adolescent health. Clearly the industry believes that when you cannot refute the message, it is better to go after the messenger."

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal (April 12, 2006), McDonald's distributed a memo to franchisees in advance of the book's publication, alluding to plans to "discredit the message and the messenger." As also reported in the Wall Street Journal (May 18, 2006), groups including the Heartland Institute, the National Minority Health Month Foundation, the American Council on Science and Health, and the Center for Individual Freedom subsequently launched personal attacks against him. These organizations all have relationships with the conservative Washington lobbying firm the DCI Group, which counts McDonald's and Coca-Cola among its clients.

DCI Group specializes in what the Washington Monthly describes as "corporate-financed grass roots organizing" campaigns. Group principals have a long history of opposing public health initiatives, working on behalf of the tobacco industry, and relying on "front groups" that masquerade as independent and objective organizations. According to the New York Times, Chris LaCivita, a DCI associate, worked for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as a media adviser. Timothy N. Hyde, a DCI founding partner, was the senior director of public issues at R. J. Reynolds from 1988 to 1997. Hyde oversaw all of RJR's PR campaigns. The Associated Press reported in June 2001 that Tom Synhorst, the chairman of DCI, "has been linked to South Carolina push polls in the 2000 Republican primary that attacked candidate John McCain as 'a cheat, a liar and a fraud.'"

The attacks against Schlosser have been similarly personal and designed to harm his reputation. In early May, DCI Group published an attack site against Schlosser that argued he "is a politically motivated activist who plays on people's fears." The Heartland Institute — which has denied the existence of global warming and argues on its Web site that "the public health community's campaign against smoking is based on junk science" — has accused Schlosser and Wilson of engaging in "Nazi" tactics. In an essay on the site, Jay Lehr, the institute's science director, wrote: "In the 1930s Adolph [sic] Hitler recognized that . . . he could indoctrinate Germany's youth in support of his antihuman Nazi movement." He goes on to claim that Schlosser and Wilson, by writing a book that educates children about the health and other implications of fast food, are making the same effort in their "drive to socialize" America. The Heartland Institute's attack on Schlosser and Wilson is linked to Tech Central Station's Health Roundtable Web site, which is sponsored by DCI Group.

Referring to the McDonald's official press release regarding Chew on This, in which it claims to desire "objective and fair discussion" of issues related to fast food, Dolan called on McDonald's to demonstrate its commitment to that principle by halting its funding of DCI Group's Tech Central Station. "We're facing a serious threat to the health of our children, given the twin ills of obesity and diabetes. This is not a political issue, or a personal one. The fast food industry should see this as a challenge to be solved together rather than just another opportunity to engage in smear campaign tactics," said Dolan.

"Chew on This was published to inform kids about what they are eating, not to tell them what to eat," says Eden Edwards, the book's editor. "Schlosser and Wilson reveal what really goes into the food most American children consume by examining the entire supply chain, from the animals to the additives to how the workers are treated. They also explore the effects too much unhealthy food and drink can have on growing bodies."

Fast Food Industry Employs Swift Boat Tactics to Discredit Author
• A group sponsored by fast food companies and related trade groups has launched a campaign to smear the author Eric Schlosser, whose new book, Chew on This, examines the fast food industry's impact on children's health. (Mr. Schlosser is also the author of Fast Food Nation. A film based on the latter will be distributed nationally this fall.) The campaign, according to an internal McDonald's memo sent to franchisees and recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, is intended to "discredit the message and the messenger." McDonald's spokesman Walt Riker has since denied that the memo quoted in the Wall Street Journal exists. The reporter Richard Gibson, when contacted about this denial, stood behind his story.

• The main point of attack has been through third parties, many of which have long connections to the food and tobacco industries. Some of the attacks appear to have been coordinated by Washington lobbyists DCI Group and their Web arm, Tech Central Station (TCS), as well as other special interest groups. James Glassman, the head of Tech Central Station, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Until recently he was a columnist for the Washington Post, which finally ended the relationship after concluding that Glassman's numerous other entanglements conflicted with his role as a journalist purporting to offer expert financial analysis.

• Tech Central Station is sponsored by a variety of corporations that also use DCI for public relations and lobbying initiatives, including McDonald's. Until recently it was reluctant to acknowledge the identity of its real publisher, the DCI Group.

• DCI and its partners have initiated a stealth campaign, similar to the Swift boat tactics employed by the right wing against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race (see below on their connection to the swift boat attacks), that puts forth biased individuals and groups masquerading as "independent" organizations, including: The Heartland Institute (funded by the tobacco industry, among others), the National Minority Health Month Foundation, and the American Council on Science and Health (funded by, among others, Burger King and the National Soft Drink Association).

• Tom Synhorst, the chairman of DCI, according to an Associated Press report in June 2001, "has been linked to South Carolina push polls in the 2000 Republican primary that attacked candidate John McCain as 'a cheat, a liar and a fraud.'" According to the New York Times, (August 25, 2004) Chris LaCivita, another DCI employee, worked for Swift Boats Veterans for Truth as a media adviser. Timothy N. Hyde, a DCI founding partner, was the senior director of public issues at R. J. Reynolds from 1988 to 1997. Hyde oversaw all of RJR's PR campaigns.

• The Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which denies the existence of global warming and has said that "the public health community's campaign against smoking is based on junk science," has accused Schlosser and Wilson of engaging in "Nazi" tactics. In an essay on the site, Jay Lehr, the institute's science director, wrote: "In the 1930s Adolph [sic] Hitler recognized that . . . he could indoctrinate Germany's youth in support of his antihuman Nazi movement." He goes on to claim that Schlosser and Wilson, by writing a book that educates children about the health and other implications of fast food, are making the same effort in their "drive to socialize" America.

• Trade group representatives are posting negative comments about Chew on This on Amazon.com without revealing their affiliations, including Ruth Kava, the director of nutrition at the American Council on Science and Health and a frequent contributor to Tech Central Station.

• The DCI Group and the fast food industry have attempted to stop Mr. Schlosser from speaking at schools. Employees of the McDonald's Corporation visited Glen Ellyn Middle School and asked the principal to reconsider his invitation to Mr. Schlosser. In Chicago, the National Minority Health Month Foundation also opposed Mr. Schlosser's visits to local schools. The executive director, Gary Puckrein, was quoted in a local paper as saying: "He's really a proponent of a number of alternative lifestyles some parents would be uncomfortable with and likely to be the subject of discussion as he's presenting his new work." The National Minority Health Month Foundation issued a press release in March praising McDonald's nutrition labeling initiatives.

Fast Food and Childern
• One in four children and forty percent of all teens eat fast food daily.

• Twenty percent of all public high schools sell "branded fast foods."

• Ninety percent of kids eat at McDonald's at least once a month.

• Children see $3 billion plus worth of fast food advertising every year.

• If a child is obese by the age of thirteen, there's more than a ninety percent chance that he or she will be overweight at thirty-five.

• A ten-year-old child diagnosed with type 2 diabetes can expect to lose seventeen or more years of his or her life.

Copyright © 2008 Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

2008-01-23T16:12:00.000-08:00

Dumbing Down Democracy

Richard Swift fears for a political culture where we are being treated like small children.
From New Internationalist

‘Grow up!’ We have all said it. We’ve all had it said to us. Sometimes it’s just gratuitous, but all too often it’s an accurate description of real behaviour. The psychological tendency to revert to childish impulses and reactions exists in us all.

But what happens when an entire culture and its politics systematically caters to such impulses? Sigmund Freud had a name for this. He called it ‘infantilization’, by which he meant either getting stuck in or reverting back to a childish state, in order to avoid dealing with real-life problems and dilemmas. It can take many forms – narcissism, magical thinking, belief in invisible friends or enemies, desire for the protection of a mythical father (authority) or mother (nurturer) figure. None of these reactions is healthy for a self-governing democracy rooted in the notion that citizens need to come to terms with the issues they face and make collective decisions. But they continue to prove themselves exceptionally useful to the governing political classes, diverting popular alienation away from their use of power and the enjoyment of their prerogatives.

Capitalism has always been associated with different states of mind. In its earliest phases, theorists like the German sociologist Max Weber and the British historian RH Tawney connected capitalism’s rise with the Protestant values of parsimony and salvation through endeavour. The idea was that frugality (save your funds to invest) and hard work shaped a personality fit for success both in heaven and on earth. While impediments to wealth-gathering were discouraged, private acts of philanthropy were lionized.

In our own times things have moved along – late or turbo-capitalism suffers from a crisis of ‘overproduction’: too many goods chasing too little demand. If you discount (as the market does) all those billions who have needs for basic food and shelter but lack the money to constitute legitimate ‘demand’, there is just too much stuff being produced. But it is the health of this production that keeps the economy humming along – creating jobs and profits (and, of course, waste, poverty and pollution).

Easy credit certainly encourages people to buy more stuff, but the crucial element for doing this is the advertising industry. So buy! buy! buy! is the mantra of our particular era. To make that happen, what seems to work best is to treat consumers like spoiled or anxious children. In his voluminous recent book on the subject Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, Benjamin Barber connects turbo-capitalism with a cult of perpetual childishness, which is sweeping the industrial world.1 In English they are called Kidults or Adultescents; the Germans speak of Nesthocker; for Italians they are Mammones; Freeter in Japan; Zippies in India. A culture is emerging based on a prolonged lifetime of buying ever more toys (fancy cameras, jet skis, SUVs, a myriad of electronic paraphernalia) – nicely caught by that Florida bumper sticker: ‘The one who finishes with the most toys wins’.

We don’t need to be told much more about the sorry way in which advertising infantilizes us. The deformations of values and personalities that result are by now the subject of a vast, hand-wringing literature. Entire magazines, such as the clever Vancouver-based Adbusters, are dedicated to combating the deformities.

Less investigated, however, is the way the culture of infantilization is poisoning democratic political life across the industrial world and now beyond. This is not a conspiracy, but an entire industry. Pollsters, spin doctors, think-tanks, consultants, political marketers, makeover artists, writers, researchers, electoral demography experts, psychologists, backroom boys and girls and a host of other specialists cash in on the multi-million dollar business. Whenever election time rolls around, big political machines kick into high gear. God help you if you are in their path. Celebrity consultants, like Lee Atwater, Karl Rove or Dick Morris, have proved masters at pushing the right buttons. In the process they have become the folk heroes (or villains) of US political culture.

Lowest common denominator
Make no mistake – there is serious money on offer. The last US Presidential election was the first to cost over a billion dollars in total. Senate and some House seats can cost millions. The stakes are high and winning has become a finely tuned art. The idea is to ‘position’ a political candidate (watch that body language, control that photo-op) through a combination of saturation advertising and media manipulation. They combine in a pattern of emotive images designed to push the electorate’s buttons.

Forget intelligent discussion of policy options or significant political alternatives; this is about appealing to people’s lowest common denominators; their insecurities, neuroses, resentments and fragile egos. Tactics range from straightforward ‘integrity ads’ (to sell fatherly candidate X) through to negative advertising (besmirching the dubious character of candidate Y). If that doesn’t work, you can always swing a few votes through dirty tricks, such as annoying computer-generated phone calls on election day to leave the impression they were made by your opponent – a little manœuvre the Republicans used in the 2004 Presidential campaign.

The US model of politics based on money and personality is being exported around the world. The sheer number of political consultants is just one indicator. European spin doctors, like Alistair Campbell in Britain, Dominique Ambiel in France and Bodo Hombach in Germany, now dot the political landscape. There is even an International Association of Political Consultants, holding annual conventions (this year in Bali) to discuss what works and what doesn’t. The issue is not so much the ideological orientation of the politics as the way democracy is managed and manipulated from above by a group of experts willing to use whatever works to get the job done.

The model is being exported beyond the industrialized world. The GSC Group has done the same kind of job in Bolivia; Campaigns and Grey in the Philippines; the Penn, Schoen and Berland polling company in Venezuela. Here the model tends to get grafted on to existing political cultures: machismo in Latin America, ‘big man’ politics in Africa and parts of the Pacific, a sort of pseudo-piousness in the Islamic world.

The costs for democracy are beginning to be measured in the hard statistics of apathy. Abysmal US turnout rates at elections are legendary – not much more than a third of voters bother to turn up for congressional (non-Presidential) elections. Now the rot is spreading across the industrial world. Three-quarters of the worst turnouts in European elections in the past half-century happened after 1990. Since the 1980s, membership of political parties has dropped dramatically in almost every industrial country – by as much as 50 per cent in some cases.2 Youth voting is down: in Britain it’s 39 per cent below the average; in Canada 20 per cent.3 One response to an infantilized politics appears to be just to walk away.

Of course it can be argued that infantilization is nothing new. In his piece in this issue Ashis Nandy traces it back as far as colonialism and slavery. Certainly, whipping up the mob by a demagogue is at least as old as Ancient Rome. The notion some people have that they are more worthy than their fellows is a very old one indeed. Until the advent of the universal franchise, consent was only useful (particularly in times of war and crisis), not absolutely necessary. Infantilization might occur as a function of economic and social privilege, but the systematic colonization of the mind has only been honed over the last 150 years or so.

We have now reached what are arguably the right conditions for a ‘perfect storm’ of infantilization. The technologies of mass persuasion are in place – most prominently TV and the internet. Our democracy is sometimes referred to as facing a ‘crisis in governability’ – by which the establishment means that the system needs a firm hand on the tiller. Globalization and its enthusiasts have dislodged many of the work and community identities (to say nothing of the actual workplaces and communities) in which democratic politics have traditionally been rooted. Those left politically adrift are often in a vulnerable state, easy prey for the infantilizers. A wave of militant fundamentalisms has ushered in an era of false certainties. Yet massive problems, such as climate change, an energy crunch and the threat of terrorism loom, with few credible solutions in sight. Our kids might think it’s time to call in Batman or Wonder Woman. Are adult reactions likely to be all that different?

The notion of infantilization can serve many political masters. In its conservative variant it has been used to underpin the critique of the ‘nanny state’. A classic 1970 text of this orientation was Klein and Jonas’ Man-Child: A study of the infantilization of man.4 They take the by now oft-repeated view that programmes intended to aid the poor and combat inequality in fact instill a childlike dependence in an ‘underclass’ that prevents it from getting a hold of its own boot straps. Such notions are useful if you think the poor are that way because they lack initiative. Recent versions of similar views have been encoded into the British legal system as Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) designed to micro-manage the behaviour of recalcitrant teenagers or cranky pensioners.

Such a narrow reading of infantilization does little to shine any light on the source of it and how it gets reproduced in the media and politics. There’s nothing here about the way those who use the techniques of infantilization can themselves become its victims. A good example is the way Robert Mugabe constantly plays with the historical grievances of Zimbabweans while himself apparently convinced that 1,000 per cent inflation is due to a few greedy shopkeepers. Crack some heads and all will be put right. This is a kind of ‘magical thinking’ common to many politicians, not least the late unlamented Tony Blair, so proud of his brave legacy in Iraq. Trevor Turner explores this kind of magical thinking on page 18.

Although having pretensions to being a ‘science’, psychoanalysis – like Marxism – is at its best when identifying tendencies rather than giving precise definitions and predictions. Any exploration of infantilization is by its nature imprecise and subjective. One of the dangers of such a critique is that it will be used against children. Too often kids are made to grow up too quickly, yet in an infantilized kind of way: young girls replete with lipstick and sexualized fashion, young boys made into ‘little celebrities’ on the athletic field.

We need to be clear about this – it is absolutely appropriate for an infant to act like an infant and a child to enjoy childish things. Children should have a secure space to behave in these ways. There is even a case to be made that adults should never lose the sense of playfulness and wonder at the world that comes with childhood. But the purposeful dumbing down of politics to cater to a series of petulant and self-centred impulses is of little service to either adult or child. It currently stands in danger of ‘hollowing out’ what democracy we do have – leaving an empty shell inhabited by political hacks and hucksters; all, to be sure, with spotless reputations and the proper ‘professional’ credentials. For the human species, the price for refusing to grow up could prove high indeed.

State of Emergency

From Adbusters

It was the climax of American journalism. Two young reporters at The Washington Post followed a story about a hotel break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972 and uncovered a scandal of corruption and cover-up that led all the way to the White House. Fighting through a maze of lies and deceit, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein forced President Richard Nixon to stand accountable for his crimes and resign. The media had the head of the most powerful figure in the world on a stick.

When the experts are pressed about the future of media, they all offer the same inexplicable answer: “I don’t know.” Despite all the money, talent and resources available, no one actually knows how to save the media. The Watergate scandal represented a golden age for journalism. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite was considered “the most trusted man in America,” Seymour Hersh broke the story on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and a generation of reporters had proved their mettle by bringing home the brutal realities of wars from around the world. By acting as the watchdogs to power, Woodward and Bernstein helped enshrine the media as an institution of integrity. It wouldn’t last long. The media’s success quickly made it bloated and cocky and in the 1980s it began to act less like a public trust and more like a business – selling its independence to promote the views of its advertisers. Before being fired from The Sunday Times in 1984, famed British war photographer Don McCullin lamented, “The paper has completely changed: it’s not a newspaper, it’s a consumer magazine, really no different from a mail-order catalog.” By the time the major media powers, from Fox News to The New York Times, threw their support behind the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, the media had become an institution of distortion.

But just as the media were reneging on their biggest responsibility, with almost biblical timing, the digital revolution attacked. Faced with a mass migration of advertisers and consumers to the internet, the old media suddenly found itself struggling for survival in the electronic age. For the past five years, newspapers and broadcast stations have announced layoffs and staff cutbacks on an almost weekly basis. Newsrooms have been gutted and the last remaining vestiges of investigative journalism are disappearing. After defining democratic debate for more than a century, the old media will be lucky to make it out of this decade.

But without any alternative ready to fill the vacuum, democratic discourse is sitting in a no-man’s land. The old media is quickly withdrawing from it role as a watchdog, but the new media is far from ready to step in and replace it. If nothing materializes soon, we might have a time without the existence of an institution that keeps governments or corporations in check. The future of the media and democracy now hangs in the balance.

“The bottom is coming out of the cup,” says Robert W. McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-founder of Free Press, a non-partisan organization dedicated to media reform. “It’s a social and political crisis. In the United States, our whole constitution is founded on the idea that there will be a viable press system so people have the necessary information to govern their lives. Without that press system, it makes a whole mockery of the constitutional system because people in power will know things that the population won’t.”

Most disturbingly, no one has the slightest clue what the new media model will look like. There’s talk of citizen journalism, hyper-local reporting, public and private hybrids and multimedia monsters, but when the experts are pressed about the future of media, they all offer the same inexplicable answer: “I don’t know.” Despite all the money, talent and resources available, no one actually knows how to save the media. Although the media industry remains faithfully optimistic that some sort of solution will be come down from cyberspace and save journalism, they can’t actually say how it will happen.

If the media wants to find a solution, it’s going to have to start doing a better job of reporting on the problem. Pick up any newspaper or turn on any evening news and you’ll rarely see the media actually address the crisis. But the evidence is apparent in the watered-down political coverage, the increase in advertorial features and the heavy reliance on wire services. The lack of real reporting is meant to compensate for the fact that major media companies have gutted their newsrooms beyond recognition and no longer have the budget for expensive investigative reporting. However, the downsizing only confirms the view that the media has lost its relevance and only causes more people to tune out. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the number of Americans accessing the news is down ten percent from 1994. Even more tellingly, 27 percent of people under 30 get no news at all. We’re seeing the emergence of a generation that will never get its news from newspapers, television or radio again. The old media is dying.

Like a drunken surgeon, the media has responded by cutting off its most important limb: journalists. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, 3,000 jobs were cut at daily newspapers between 2000 and 2005. Another 1,000 cuts came in 2006, and according to Media Life magazine, more than 900 newsroom jobs were lost at American newspapers between last April and August alone. Network news, radio and magazines haven’t fared much better and have seen staff reductions of roughly 10 percent over the same time period. Thousands more jobs will likely disappear in the next three years. No media outlet of any size or shape is safe today: the BBC recently laid off 450 people in its news department, while the century-old Kentucky Post announced it will simply shut down on New Year’s Eve.

While any downsizing hurts journalism, it’s the slash-and-burn at newspapers that’s causing the most alarm. Although television and radio have a much broader reach, print journalists still do the bulk of the newsgathering. Dean Baquet, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times who was fired for refusing to make drastic job cuts, told PBS’s Frontline, “If we [newspapers] disappeared tomorrow, most of the people who call us dinosaurs would disappear, too. All the bloggers who exist to comment on us, the Googles and Yahoo!s . . . who rely on what we write about in California and the nation and Washington, they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t exist.” Any hope the media has in the future will depend on newspapers finding a formula to make journalism affordable.

“Newspapers are crossing a dark valley in hopes that there’s another mountain on the other side,” says Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. “In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, newspapers made good profits and big chains saw them as a good investment. Now there’s competition everywhere you look and the web has sucked up much of the classified advertising. It’s created a rough period and everyone’s looking hard for the economic model that will sustain the kind of journalism the world needs. Democracy requires quality journalism. Necessity is the mother of invention, and journalists are creative people. So I think we’ll find a way.”

But newspapers have been scrambling to find this Holy Grail for the past decade with little success. Owned by public corporations that sit on the stock market, they have seen their value fall more than 30 percent over the past two years alone. Technology has allowed for a dramatic increase in competition that has fractured the public’s news-gathering habits and kept any media from having the kind of dominance that newspapers once enjoyed. According to the Pew Research Center, 71 percent of Americans read a newspaper on an average day in 1965. Today, it’s just 40 percent.

Print media is not alone on this sinking ship. All other forms of the media have also seen their viewers and readers flee over the past decade. Ten years ago, 60 percent of Americans watched the CBS, NBC or ABC evening news. Today it’s just 28 percent. Since 1998, the number of radio listeners has dropped from 49 percent to 36 percent. Meanwhile, almost a third of Americans now get at least some of their news from the internet. For the first time, the old media cannot control the flow of information. Even the major media players can see the writing on the wall.

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing The [New York] Times in five years,” Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher told Israel’s Haaretz in early 2007. “And you know what? I don’t care.”

While the internet is widely seen as the source of problems for the of newspapers and news broadcasts, much of the media’s undoing is its own fault. Although it’s been slow to adapt to the digital age – mainly because it couldn’t find a way to make a profit from the new technologies – the current crisis is more about the media losing touch with its values.

A week after Time Inc. cut 650 jobs from Time magazine in 2006, it managed to scrounge up $4 million for exclusive photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitts’ newborn child. Journalists such as The New York Times’ Jayson Blair and The New Republic’s Stephen Glass infamously fabricated dozens of articles for their publications and helped destroy the legacy Woodward and Bernstein cemented three decades ago. But perhaps the worst betrayal was when commentators Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher were caught accepting thousands of dollars to promote the Bush administration’s policies. The media has been transformed from a check on power to a power that needs to be checked.

In its annual report on American journalism, The State of the News Media 2007, the Project for Excellence in Journalism states the public perception of journalists has been on a steadily decline since the 1980s. “Journalists see themselves, as Humphrey Bogart put it in the movie Deadline USA, as performing ‘a service for public good,’” the report states. “The public doubts that romantic self-image and thinks journalists are either deluding themselves or lying.” This media crisis has not been caused so much by a technological changes, but by a moral breakdown.

“The gatekeepers have let the barbarians inside,” says Neil Henry, a former Washington Post correspondent and professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. “When you allow so many instances of failure, whether it’s cases of fabrication like Jayson Blair, or the failure of reporting in the lead up to the Iraq War – where so many journalists were too close to power to ask the tough questions – or whether it’s selling the naming rights to television stations and allowing advertisers to control news content, these incursions have been growing.”

This deterioration of the Fourth Estate has created a void, one which the new media has been all too willing to try to fill. While the corporate media falls by the wayside, a wave of bloggers and citizen journalists has emerged over the last ten years to pick up the slack. In the past three years, bloggers have exposed a member of the White House press corps as a male prostitute and Republican party plant, found that local governments in Colorado deliberately created traffic to push drivers onto toll roads and, most famously, discovered that the documents used in a CBS 60 Minutes segment to show how President Bush got special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard were forgeries.

With major media institutions cutting back on reporters around the world, citizen journalist sites like NowPublic.org are often the only source the public has to find out what’s happening on the ground. Citizen journalists have been able to give vivid first-hand accounts of life in Iraq, the battle to stay alive in New Orleans and government suppression of protests in Burma. Armed with the power to make their own media, citizen journalists have shifted the balance of power and allowed the public to control the flow of information for the first time.

“Citizen media is leading to lots of changes in media of all kinds,” says Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media and co-author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People. “The audience just doesn’t have to consume, but is part of the conversation and it’s had enormous effects already in this whole shift. But while there’s been a lot of stuff happening, it’s still not clear where we’re going to end up.”

Gillmor has been one of the leading proponents of citizen journalism, but his expression of caution is notable. Citizen journalism received a great deal of hype as the new challenger to the corporate press, but has suffered some early defeats. Gillmor’s Bayosphere, a citizen media site “of, by and for the Bay Area,” shut down within a year – he sold the site to Backfence.com, which also folded. Other citizen journalism sites have suffered from a lack of organization, interest, professionalism and, most of all, a lack of finances.

Even the most ardent proponents of citizen journalism admit it’s not supposed to replace the old media, merely supplement it. While the digital revolution may have leveled the playing field, regular citizens still lack the resources and skills to spend months doing hard research, interviews, fact checking, and navigate through the halls of power. If the new media is struggling online, how much hope is there for the old media?

Perhaps the only certainty in this new age is that the old model is dead. What might be the most depressing fact of the current crisis is that newspapers are continuing to make incredible profits. According to the International Newspaper Financial Executives, the average major newspaper makes a 15.6 percent pre-tax profit. The Tribune Company, which own the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, has a 21.4 percent pre-tax profit margin. In contrast, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, operates at a 5.4 percent profit margin. Although the media is suffering from major revenue loses, the gutting of the public watchdog is happening because media corporations are insisting on maintaining the same extreme margins.

With Wall Street obviously unable to uphold its responsibilities of a public trust as important as the media, the idea of non-profit organizations acting as the new media stewards is increasingly gaining steam. Mother Jones, Harper’s and National Public Radio are all non-profits and produce some of the best journalism in the world, partly because a social agenda is built into organization’s mandate. Even newspapers have begun to adopt the model with success, such as Florida’s St. Petersburg Times. While they’re still confronted with the same problem of attracting an audience in the digital age, because non-profits funnel revenue back into their projects, they offer the media at least one formula for stability.

“The media can be done as a non-profit and it’s something that makes me salivate when I think about it,” says Charles Lewis, a former producer of 60 Minutes and president of the non-profit Fund for Independence in Journalism. “The concept is simple. There are a lot of immensely talented individuals who have nowhere to ply their wares journalistically and you have an educated and informed public in the US, Canada and around the world that want good journalism. What’s required is marrying those two up. It’s not rocket science, it’s simply a matter of cash and sustainability.”

Decades before Woodward and Bernstein, the media’s sustainability came from placating the power brokers. In Upton Sinclair’s 1919 classic muckraking exposé of the media, Brass Check (a reference to how prostitutes were paid at the time), the journalist condemns the American media for turning the profession into a cheap, bawdy trash. Almost a century later, the media has begun to backtrack to its most shameful past. However, the difference today is that the public is no longer forced to consume the corporate media if it wants news and can look for new souces of information online.

Death-calls for the media are not new and were just as widespread during the advent of television news in the 1960s. But the competition between broadcast and print ended up helping journalism mature and produced one of the greatest eras in its history. While there are still more questions than answers about surviving online, the digital revolution certainly has the potential to do the same and could give journalism more power than anything Woodward or Bernstein could have ever imagined.

As McChesney points out in his recent book, Communication Revolution, we’ve reached a “critical juncture” and the media could go in many different possible directions. The new era could give the major corporations that already have a firm stranglehold over the media even more power, or journalism could dissipate altogether and lose all relevance to our lives. Either scenario would silence democratic discourse.

In order to avoid the worst-case scenario and take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it’s important that the future of the media be placed in the proper hands. If it’s distributed equally amongst corporations, non-profits, journalists and the public, then a true balance of power can be achieved and the media can return to once again being an institution of integrity and a watchdog to power.

Labour Laws and Protections
A not-so-illustrious history results in one question: how far have we come?

By Lynn Cunningham
From "This" Magazine

1872
As part of a widespread ninehour- workday movement, printers strike Toronto papers. To almost everyone’s surprise, it turns out that union activities are illegal, and union leaders are jailed for sedition. The Tory government quickly passes new laws, the printers are freed and the shorter workday instituted. Almost a century later, another strike by Toronto printers doesn’t go so well. In 1964 they go out to protest increasing automation. When they vote to return to work the following year, they are locked out. Their picket lines finally come down in 1972, long after their jobs have rolled off the presses.

1912
Saskatchewan passes An Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities. Were the MLAs thinking of banning women from dangerous mill work? No, the act forbids women from working in a “restaurant, laundry or other place of business or amusement owned, kept or managed by any Chinaman.” The law is upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada, and a slightly revised version remains on the books until 1969.

1923
Free public schools are the norm and compulsory attendance is the law for children in most provinces until they are 12 to 14, depending on where they live. There’s some correlation between school-leaving age and restrictions on the age of minor miners. Nova Scotia, for instance, allows 12-years-olds to both leave school and work underground.

1935
In an attempt to offset the devastating effects of the Depression, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett proposes a New Deal that legislates such things as maximum work-week laws and unemployment insurance. Too late: Bennett is thrown out of work himself and most of his laws are successfully challenged.

1982
The Workmen’s Compensation Board, established by the Ontario government in 1914, is finally changed to the Workers’ Compensation Board in 1982. By this time, women make up 41 percent of the workforce.

1999
Minimum wages across the country range from $5.50 (New Brunswick, Newfoundland) to $7.15 (B.C.), usually with lower rates for those under 18 (but not, as was in the case in the 1920s, for “defectives”). While poverty advocates and social reformers link low incomes to “food banks, homelessness [and] loan sharks,” the Fraser Institute’s Marc Law produces “Minimum Wage Equals Minimum Opportunity”— doubtless for an hourly rate slightly higher than the cost of a latte.

2000
Naomi Klein’s No Logo is published, detailing all manner of social ills, including the widespread manufacture of many of the West’s fave consumer goods in third-world sweatshop conditions reminiscent of those in the early 20th century.

2007
The New York Times reports on the early 21st-century sweatshops: nail salons. Fierce competition among shops means lowball rates, and hence crummy tips. Workers are forced to work 60-hour weeks without overtime pay or lunch breaks, and suffer from skin and breathing problems from the polishes and other beauty products they use.

Copyright © 2008 Red Maple Foundation ISSN 1491-2678

2008-01-23T15:23:00.000-08:00

Racism Remains A Problem
Why are people of colour having trouble getting good jobs?

By Karl Flecker
From CCPA Monitor

A recent population projection study done for the Department of Canadian Heritage predicts that by 2017 one in every five residents of Canada will be a member of what the government defines as “a visible minority.” This means that, in just 10 years, there will be from 6 to 8 million people of colour living in Canada.

Add to this picture an aging population and declining birth rates, and the result is a country that is replenishing its population base largely through immigration. And since 80% of the immigrants to Canada now come from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific region, the vast majority are people of colour—and they are also the primary source of growth in our labour force.

Consider these statistics:
Among the 7 million Canadians aged 18 to 34, 20% are persons of colour.

One in three of 5-to-15-year-old Canadians is racially visible.

Two-thirds of all children of colour born in Canada are under the age of 16.

The majority—56%—of Canada’s Aboriginal population is under the age of 24 (compared to 34% of all Canadians).

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples forecast over 10 years ago that an additional 225,000 jobs would have to be found over the next 20 years just for members of this community.

The percentage of racialized immigrants with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) or higher is 31.5 %, while the proportion of Canadian-born workers of colour with a BA degree or higher is 37.5%. For those not racialized and Canadian-born, the figure for those with a BA or higher is only 19.1% for the same age group.

Racialized immigrants hold the second highest unemployment rate (10%) eclipsed, surprisingly, by Canadian-born workers of colour (11%), while white workers face the lowest unemployment rate at 7%.

The unemployment rate for racialized immigrant youth (15-to-24-year-olds) is 14.8%, and for racialized Canadian- born youth 15.5%–compared with the overall youth unemployment rate of 13.3%.

Bottom line: The average earnings for workers of colour are significantly lower than for other workers. In addition, the type of work they may have is insecure, with fewer benefits and protections. And, tragically, higher education, when viewed in colour, does not translate into more income or more job security.

Racial discrimination, both overt and covert, is clearly a large contributing factor to the poor labour market outcomes of workers of colour. Lower incomes, higher unemployment, and precarious work are prevalent for workers of colour as a whole. The fact that Canadian-born racialized workers are doing slightly worse than racialized immigrants underlines the force of the racism operating with impunity in the labour market.

The conclusion is hard to ignore: economic disadvantage is racialized, poverty is colour-coded, and the racialized cohort, because of their colour, are not living in the black. Racism persists in Canada, and it is impeding people of colour from entering the labour market at a pace—and place—commensurate with their skills.

One 1995 study, for example, found that the gross earnings of South Asians in Canada was nearly $7,000 less than the national average, and that the earnings of Aboriginals were $9,000 less.

Another more recent development that serves to deny racialized communities fair access to jobs is the series of “national security” policies that Canadian governments have rushed to implement in the wake of the 9/11 events in the United States. Prominent among these policies is a 186-page piece of legislation called the Anti-Terrorism Act and Security Certificates legislation that resides under what is ironically called the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

These two legal tools grant vast powers to the police and other Canadian security officials to monitor (spy on), detain, and incarcerate immigrants who are predominantly folks of colour, to do so outside of a due judicial process, and even deport them to countries where they can be tortured.

And what persons are most vulnerable to the arbitrary application of these laws? Naturally they are members of Canada’s communities of colour–particularly the bearded, suspicious-looking Muslims or Middle Eastern types–or their kids–dubbed by the media “the homegrown terrorists.”

Maher Arar was the most prominent victim of such barbaric treatment, but other Muslims—Adil Charkaoui, Mohammed Harkett, Hassan Almreii and Mohammad Mahjoub, to name a few—have been detained for years. Others, including Canadian citizens Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nuredin—were “rendered” overseas to military officials in Syria and Egypt to be incarcerated and tortured with the likely knowledge and approval of some members of the Canadian government.

Since 2001, Canada has spent (overspent) almost $8 billion on increased security—including extra funds for policing, the military, and immigration, airport and border controls—a vast sum allocated to fighting the “war on terror,” mainly at the behest of the United States.

How will the allocation of such vast public revenues to a national (in)security agenda affect the hiring, retention, and promotion of equity-seeking groups that are the first to be put under surveillance? Will the national insecurity agenda help or keep out some groups?

We got some idea of this threat last year from a U.S. regulation that prevents Canadian workers holding dual citizenship with some 20 countries from working on U.S. military contracts. It’s called the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR).

An aerospace industry worker in Montreal was told he would have to revoke his Lebanese citizenship in order to qualify for working under his private employer’s U.S. military contract. A Venezuelan-born aerospace worker, Jamie Vargas, has filed a human rights complaint, claiming that the ITAR rule is discriminatory because it denies him work on the basis of his place of birth. He cites occasions when he and another employee working at Bell Helicopter Textron were excluded from a computer program because of where they were born, thus adversely affecting their employment prospects.

Given the billions of dollars in military contracts and the many new jobs that could flow from the insecurity agenda, this kind of job discrimination against those born in or holding dual citizenships with certain countries can be expected to worsen. The race, rights, and equity agenda is colliding with the insecurity agenda and its fixation with alleged risks and lists of suspects. A “terror watch” list compiled by the FBI has swelled to include more than half a million names.

A spokesman for the U.S. inter-agency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which maintains the government's list of all suspected terrorists with links to international organizations, said they had 465,000 names covering 350,000 individuals. Many names are different versions of the same identity--"Usama bin Laden" and "Osama bin Laden" for the al Qaeda chief, for example.

The NCTC database has grown at an incredible pace, more than quadrupling since 2003. And rest assured: this is not a white list; this is brown and black list. Canada is now building its own “no-fly” list, which has already resulted in a couple of children with the same names on the list being prevented from boarding Air Canada planes. The mother of one of the boys, when she complained, was actually advised by an airport security official to change his name! No one outside the security apparatus can find out if they are on the list. You won't find out if your name or your wife’s or kid’s names are on the list until you arrive at the airport.

So where is all this racial profiling and risk-list-building going? Consider not only which members of our community are most likely to make it onto these new lists; consider also how much our governments are investing in infrastructure, administration, and technology to compile, share, and utilize this personal information.

Consider, too, that when the federal Minister of Transport introduced Canada’s no-fly list, he also disclosed that it would be followed by a much broader screening program using sophisticated computer software and complex algorithms that determine risk factors based on undisclosed criteria. What he was referring to was the computer profiling and security check of all travellers (land, sea and air) in order to assign to each and every one of them a "security level." The technology to do this is being developed at the National Risk Assessment Centre in Ottawa.

The program will parallel--and be interoperable with--a similar program underway in the U.S., in effect putting in place the infrastructure of a North American Security Perimeter. In October of 2006, the U.S. government disclosed that its border security program will screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual, and retain that information for up to 40 years. Imagine the deterrent effects on long-term job hunting if your name wrongly appears on one of these lists.

According to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office--the equivalent of our Office of the Auditor-General--more than 30,000 travellers already have been falsely associated with terrorism as they crossed the border, took a plane, or were arrested for a traffic offence.

And, to be fully functional, the system will rely on biometrics identifiers, thus the push to introduce biometrics passports (a technology that has some glitches in it when looking at folks of colour) or other forms of biometrics I.D. cards. Under such a scheme, records are kept on everyone and the concept of "presumption of innocence" is reversed: every citizen becomes a suspect. All of this is being incrementally implemented here in Canada without any political debate or input from our elected representatives.

Think of it this way: if the new risk assessment screening program were assigning a colour to every prospective traveller—orange for slow down, green for you’re free to go, and red meaning you’re not free--what colour do you think you will get in Canada’s new insecurity system? And to what extent will it depend on your colour?

(Karl Flecker is the national director of the Anti-Racism and Human Rights Department of the Canadian Labour Congress.)

On Critical Mass and the First Amendment

By Reverend Billy
From Yes! Magazine

Reverend Billy—that would be me—was arrested while reciting the First Amendment during a Critical Mass bicycle ride in downtown New York City. I joined the hundreds of bicyclists who have been arrested over the years for their wheeled First Amendment expression. The New York police have curtailed, or demanded that we get Kafka-nightmare police permits for: dancing, shouting too loudly (as defined by the officer) with the unaided voice, parading, biking, postering, handing out political leaflets, using a battery-operated bullhorn, selling art on the sidewalk, well—you get the picture. We certainly do. We have our own adjustment to the First Amendment. “NYPD shall make no law… .”

People sense that now is the time to support the First Amendment. Critical Mass bicyclists are supporting it by saying that it is their only required permit. The rides are peaceable assembly. Their free expression comes in an intriguing form—the act of traveling by bicycle up streets and down avenues where defenders of the internal combustion engine have built a thick book of pre-emptive, car-friendly laws.

Critical Mass is leaderless and has no set route for its parades. To the cops it is like a mirage. Something in the sinuous mystery of the rides makes them gravitate to their power. The uninstructed bicyclists slowly circle out from Union Square and might suddenly take a hard left up 16th Street in an act like the flock-mind of birds. They just go.

Critical Mass represents freedom in public space, where ads, cell phones, surveillance, and traffic jams have melded together to make sections of Manhattan the outdoor equivalent of a privatized (First Amendment-free) super mall. These bikers don’t wear logos; they are not en route to a purchase. The bicyclists are opening up public space as citizens see them wheeling by, and their trips through the city are ushered forward by a rolling citizens’ cheer. Critical Mass bikers make it realistic that there is more in life than consumption, and people who see them feel relieved.

What form would the Boston Tea Party take today, against our psychological traffic jam? What is our equivalent to Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus? … of Lenny Bruce talking dirty? … of Wangari Maathai lowering a seedling into the ground? We are instructed by all the enforcers of consumption that to speak up is inappropriate, to act up is illegal, and to ride a bicycle you must file your parade plans. But if we all begin to re-inhabit public space bravely, then there is a critical mass we can reach with the help of the First Amendment’s 45 words.

There has been sacrifice for our freedoms, and not only sacrifice in war but also here at home as strikers, civil rights marchers, anti-war demonstrators, and now Critical Mass riders put their bodies on the line. We are walking around inside the freedom that has been opened up by brave people, their bodies, and their words.

The First Amendment offers all of us our sweaty bodies and souls back. Our 45 beautiful words invite us to appreciate who we always were, and that is the most powerful thing. I mean, that is my faith.

The Fine Art of Raising a Ruckus

By Jen Angel
From Yes! Magazine

On the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, San Francisco Bay area activists locked themselves to barrels in front of the world headquarters of Chevron. They were there to draw attention to the link between climate change and war, and specifically to the oil law before Iraq’s parliament that would give much of the profit from Iraq’s natural resources to foreign corporations like Chevron.

How do we know that’s what they were protesting? Their giant banners read, “Chevron loves Oil Wars” and “End Chevron’s Crimes from Richmond to Iraq.”

Likewise, the barrels that the activists were locked down to were painted with slogans like, “Stop the Iraqi Oil Theft Law” and “Chevron = Climate Criminal.”

Red-clad demonstrators held placards in the shape of oil drums, and there were 10-foot-tall puppets of the corporation’s leadership.

And there was street theater: a “Tug of Oil War,” a funeral for the last piece of ice on earth, and a performance by a political theater group called the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane (www.insanereagan.com). In short, the activists completely dominated the visual space.

The Power of Spectacle
Art, music, and theater are often more effective than speeches and leaflets.

Jessica Bell, one of the organizers of the March 19, 2007, Chevron protest, says art and culture communicate in a way that is “more interactive and participatory, not just in how protesters interact with the public, but how activists interact with each other.” Bringing in culture creates space for people to learn, grow, and express themselves. She adds, “Art and theater can also challenge people—activists and observers—by putting them in new situations.”

Rebel Clowns
Imagine being a police officer during the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, preparing to face thousands of protesters. Now imagine being confronted by an army of clowns.

The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army was organized by UK activists and included hundreds of clowns (some veterans, some novices) from around the world. The point, according to Clown Army participant Subsubcommandante Robin Hood, is to “confront the eight most dangerous men in the world—the G8—with ridicule and disobedience; from clowning traffic to a standstill and blocking G8 delegates on the A9 motorway to undermining police discipline by placing them on the unfamiliar terrain of laughter.”

Film footage of the protests show a befuddled group of police officers who stand idly by while the clowns take over roads. What does clowning do for the protesters? “Rebel clowns work with our bodies to peel off the activist armor and find the person who once felt so deeply,” he says. That’s how we “find courage to both feel and overcome the fear and despair that can make activists withdraw behind that armor.”

Pushing the edge of protest means opening space for creativity, experimentation, and growth. Billionaires for Bush, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, and other activists around the country are creating new ways to challenge consumerism, war, and empire.

“Public interventions by artists catch the public off guard and disrupt business as usual,” says Nicolas Lampert, an activist and radical art historian living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “These types of actions also encourage people to think and question their own daily routine and the daily routine of the city. In actions such as these,” he adds, “artists present other possibilities—the possibility of reclaiming public space.”

“Old power relations that have been reified and made invisible suddenly stand out in stark contrast when art is used to point them out in a novel way,” says University of California at Davis political theater professor Larry Bogad.

“Just as important, a spectacular, participatory, creative protest can give participants and passersby a sense of the better world we want to see,” he says, “and not just what we’re against.”

Author and activist Stephen Duncombe urges activists to learn the art of using public spectacles to influence public opinion and dominate culture. In his recent book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, he points to the Bush administration’s May 2003 “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier stunt as an example of spectacle and theater.

Duncombe also cites a now-famous quote by an unnamed senior advisor to Bush (now widely believed to have been Karl Rove) who told a reporter, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality.” Conservatives, Duncombe says, understand how important it is to create images and narratives to support their agendas, or “to manufacture consent” as Walter Lippmann argued in 1922.

Duncombe argues for the “ethical spectacle” using the same techniques as the conservatives to advance a radical or progressive agenda to “manufacture dissent.” But, he argues, we must do this in a way that is not manipulative or exploitative.

“Our spectacles will be participatory: dreams the public can mold and shape themselves,” he says. “They will be active: spectacles that work only if people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire.”

“And finally,” he says, “the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.” These criteria will allow us to meet people where they are, he says, drawing on pre-existing desires and redirecting them toward a positive, more just world.

Stephen Duncombe and all the activists who use theater and art to communicate are saying one thing: dreams and spectacles are important ways of imagining the future world we want to live in.

2008-01-19T18:14:00.000-08:00

Victories in 2007

By Robert Weissman
From Znet

It's easy enough to recount what went wrong in 2007. But it wasn't all bad. Not only did grassroots movements and citizen campaigns -- and sometimes governments responsive to public demands -- defeat and resist countless corporate power grabs, they won some vitally important, affirmative victories.

Like every new year, 2008 offers renewed hope, and the chance for new beginnings. There really were some important gains in 2007 that suggest countervailing forces to concentrated corporate power are on the rise.

The following list of 10 victories from 2007 doesn't claim to be all-inclusive. And almost all of the victories are partial and inchoate. Whether they blossom into fuller achievements will depend on what happens in 2008 and beyond. Have ideas for victories that should be added to this list? Send me a note (rob@essential.org) or post a comment on the blog.

1. Cultural Change on Global Warming
There were numerous small steps forward to meet the greatest challenge of our day, including in the biggest carbon polluting country, the United States. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a respectable energy bill; the ultimately adopted energy bill will modestly improve energy efficiency in the United States. Many U.S. states are doing much more, most importantly requiring electric utilities to source an increasing amount of their energy from renewable supplies. The Sierra Club and grassroots groups have combined to defeat dozens of coal-fired power plant proposals. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Bali in December ended with a fizzle, thanks largely to U.S. intransigence, but even at Bali, there was agreement that climate change is a real threat.

This last point is probably the main achievement of 2007. There is now no serious argument about the reality of climate change and the need for action. Going forward, the challenge is to generate the political will for meaningful carbon emission cuts, immediately and for the long-term.

2. Bank of the South
Latin American countries joined together to launch the Bank of the South, an effort to create an alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Latin American countries -- not just Venezuela -- are making contributions to the new institution, which will then make project loans, especially for initiatives to facilitate regional integration.

Says Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, "Politically, the new bank is another Declaration of Independence for South America, which as a result of epoch-making changes in the last few years is now more independent of the United States than Europe is."

3. Treatment for People with HIV/AIDS
Somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million people with HIV/AIDS in developing countries are now receiving life-saving antiretroviral treatment. This was only possible because of campaigns by people with HIV/AIDS in developing countries and their allies in rich countries. First, activist campaigns and speeded-up generic competition brought down the price for life-saving drugs from more than $10,000 a year per person to, in some cases, less than $100 per person. Then, campaigners successfully demanded aid money be made available to save lives.

Treatment coverage is only around a quarter to a third of need, and global need will grow dramatically in coming years. More international and developing country funding will be needed, and there will be ongoing disputes over patent and pharmaceutical issues. But significant progress is underway.

4. Thailand and Brazil Face Down Big Pharma
In January, Thailand issued compulsory licenses -- an authorization for generic competition for products that remain on patent -- for two medicines. This followed a prior compulsory license in December 2006. The resulting lowered prices on the medicines enabled Thailand to expand treatment significantly in its public health system -- the cost of a heart disease drug fell by 98 percent, and just the initial price drop on an AIDS drug enabled the country to provide the medicine to an additional 20,000 people.

Brazil followed Thailand's example in May, issuing its own compulsory license on an important AIDS medicine. The compulsory licenses led drug companies to lower prices on key AIDS drugs around the world. Abbott Laboratories lowered its middle-income country price on a vital AIDS drug by 55 percent.

5. The Billionaire's Tax Loophole Comes Under Scrutiny
2007 saw new attention focused on the incomes of super-rich private equity and hedge fund managers in the United States -- and the stunning fact that they exploit a tax loophole to lower their tax rates to less than that of their secretaries.

The "carried interest" loophole lets private equity and hedge fund managers characterize a big portion of their management fees -- their cut of the very high profits they make for investors -- as capital gains income, instead of ordinary income. That means they can pay federal taxes at a 15 percent rate, instead of 35 percent.

The House of Representatives passed legislation to eliminate the loophole, but it failed in the Senate.

The issue won't be going away, however. Says Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO, "It's finally dawned on people that the richest Americans aren't paying any taxes."

6. The U.S. Minimum Wage Goes Up
It's still a long way from where it should be, but popular support for raising the minimum wage forced Senate Republicans to accede in May to a minimum wage rate hike.

The lowest paid workers in the United States (not counting farm workers and others exempted) will earn $7.25 in 2009. Roughly 13 million workers are expected to see their wages rise as a result.

7. McDonald's Agrees to Pay Tomato Pickers More
McDonald's in April agreed to pay a penny a pound more for the tomatoes it uses, with the extra money going directly to Florida farmworkers. McDonald's agreed to the arrangement in response to a farmworker campaign coordinated by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The coalition had earlier won a similar victory against Taco Bell. Farmworkers earn about $10,000 a year. If the entire industry went along with the penny-a-pound arrangement, farmworker wages would rise by about 75 percent.

Unfortunately, an intransigent Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is refusing to implement the McDonald's accord, fatuously claiming that it would violate unnamed federal and state rules. McDonald's is placing its extra payments in escrow. Meanwhile, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is now focusing on Burger King, which is largely owned by Goldman Sachs and other private equity operations. They continue to reject the penny-a-pound demand -- which would cost Burger King as estimated $250,000 a year.

8. School Fees Phased Out
For decades, the World Bank and other international agencies instructed developing countries to impose educational and health user fees -- charges to go to school, or get access to care. The result: poor children (especially girls) were locked out of school, and sick people from poor families were denied healthcare.

Healthcare fees remain widespread, but primary school fees are finally being phased out throughout many of the world's poorest countries, in part due to 2000 U.S. legislation requiring the United States to oppose World Bank loans that include user fees. Primary school enrollment increased by 36 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and 22 percent in South and West Asia between 1999 and 2005, according to UNESCO. "Much of this is due to the abolishment of primary school tuition fees in 14 countries," says Global Action for Children. "This ground-breaking measure has leveled the playing field, allowing many of the world's poorest children access to the school house door."

9. White-Collar Drug Pushers Punished
In May, the maker of Oxycontin, a highly addictive painkiller, pled guilty to charges of misbranding its drug. Purdue Pharma will pay more than $600 million in connection with the guilty plea.

Oxycontin offers major benefits to cancer patients and others with chronic pain, but is prone to abuse. It is especially popular in Appalachia, where it is known as hillbilly heroin. U.S. Attorney John Brownlee says that scores of people have died as a result of Oxycontin abuse. The federal case against Purdue charged its sales reps misled health providers -- including non-specialists in pain management -- about the addictive properties of Oxycontin.

Purdue, a privately held Connecticut-based company, launched a major effort to avoid prosecution, including employing Rudy Giuliani to meet with prosecutors and argue against filing of charges.

But Brownlee refused to back down, though he did make some concessions. He did agree not to charge company executives with felonies (three pled guilty to misdemeanors), and he agreed to accept a guilty plea from a Purdue subsidiary, leaving the parent free to continue selling the drug to Medicare and other federal programs. The government could have come down harder on "white-collar drug pushers," says Dr. Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen's health Research Group.

10. The Bush Countdown Begins
Only 385 more days of the Bush regime.

Happy New Year!

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and director of Essential Action.

(c) Robert Weissman

The Ethanol Effect: When Alternative Fuels Go Bad

By Cameron Scott
From Mother Jones.com

"Everything about ethanol is good, good, good," crows Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, echoing the conventional wisdom that corn-based ethanol will help us kick the oil habit, line the pockets of farmers, and usher in a new era of guilt-free motoring. But despite the wishes of Iowans (and the candidates courting them) the "dot-corn bubble" is too good to be true.

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

The Ungreening of America: No Clear Skies
In a Texas oil town, the assault on the nation's clean-air laws has hit close to home.

By Donovan Webster and Michael Scherer
From MotherJones.com
2003

Shortly after 4:30 P.M. on Monday, April 14, 2003, the power went out at the Motiva refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. The massive plant shut down instantly and, as is common when something goes wrong at a refinery, the "product" in the pipes -- tens of thousands of pounds of highly pressurized liquids and gases -- was released through the smokestacks. In this particular incident, 256,653 pounds of toxic chemicals were hurled into the air over the next 24 hours.

"That refinery was blowing hot," says Hilton Kelley, the tall, sturdy, 42-year-old founder of a local group called the Community In-Power Development Association. "And that cloud of poison hung over us until, I'd guess, 10 or 11 that night."

It wasn't the first such incident, or "upset," at the 3,800-acre plant, a century-old, grime-stained industrial giant that glowers above Port Arthur's pancake-flat landscape. Motiva had experienced seven in just the previous 11 weeks, and the record of Port Arthur's other refineries wasn't much better; during one six-month period last year, barely a day went by without a toxic accident of some kind.

And so, Kelley knew just what to do as 128.3 tons of vaporized poisons -- including sulfur dioxide, hexane, carbon monoxide, isobutane -- began sifting earthward. He went door to door, warning his neighbors to either leave quickly or stay inside with the windows shut tight. He also made a phone call, to a toll-free number at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state agency charged with monitoring airborne toxic releases.

When a TCEQ staffer finally arrived, Kelley says, "I asked the guy, 'You got any air-monitoring equipment with you?' And the guy said, 'No.' And I thought, So...what? You're here to watch?"

"Around here," Kelley says, "it turns out April 14 was just another day."

Port Arthur and Pollution have gone together ever since Texas' First major oil well was discovered in 1901, at the Spindletop derrick just up the road in Beaumont. The city's First refining facility was built that same year, and Port Arthur boomed along with the oil business. Janis Joplin was born here, the daughter of a refinery engineer, and sang in the choir at First Christian Church in the '50s. But by the 1990s, mechanization had taken away most of the refinery jobs, and Port Arthur -- along with much of the Gulf Coast oil belt between Houston and Baton Rouge -- fell on hard times.

Today, Port Arthur resembles nothing so much as a gated community in reverse. Sprawling refineries hide behind chain-link fences topped with razor wire and guards at the exits. Outside the fences, in the predominantly African-American neighborhood known as the Westside, streets are potholed, and every third or fourth house is empty and overgrown. All around Port Arthur, clapboard Victorians from a more prosperous era stand in want of paint and shutters, and tall weeds grow in the sidewalks of once-busy downtown avenues. Unemployment hovers around 13 percent, and the only buildings that see much activity appear to be City Hall and the offices of the local paper, the Port Arthur News.

Spend a few days in town and you'll find that the air always carries a throat-tickling mix of murky sea spray from the Gulf of Mexico and low levels of airborne sulfur, given off by the refineries. At night, above the dark shapes of enormous live oaks, the sky often glows orange with flares and the plants' thousands of lights; a constant, low electric hum from the refineries blankets the city like east Texas humidity. Port Arthur ranks high in just about every national pollution statistic -- the city and surrounding county are among the top 10 percent for major chemical releases; environmental cancer risk; levels of carcinogens; and levels of toxins that interfere with fetal development. According to a study by the Austin-based Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition, more than 20,000 children in the area are exposed to toxins that can cause cancer, learning disabilities, and birth defects.

This, in other words, is the kind of place the federal government promised to start cleaning up a generation ago, when Congress passed a series of sweeping environmental laws including the Clean Air Act of 1970. The act never quite lived up to its name; many companies ignored its mandates, or learned to accept environmental fines as part of the cost of doing business. But in the 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began cracking down on companies that were violating the law, threatening power plants and refineries, including some in Port Arthur, with costly lawsuits if they did not install state-of-the-art filters and scrubbers.

Now, the Bush administration has pulled back on that effort -- and, according to critics, demolished the foundation of the Clean Air Act itself. It has issued rules that relax key provisions of the act, allowing thousands of dirty power plants and other industrial sites to increase pollution without any Fines or penalties. Fifteen states have filed suit to block the changes; a national group of state and local air-pollution officials says the rules will result in "unchecked emissions increases that will degrade our air quality and endanger public health."

Though the administration characterizes the policy shift as minor -- a "response to a longstanding, bipartisan call for reform," as an EPA briefing paper puts it -- changing the clean-air rules has long been a top priority for companies that have donated millions to the Bush campaign. In March 2001, just two months after Bush took office, the National Petroleum Refiners Association, which represents several of the companies operating in Port Arthur, told the U.S. Department of Energy in an internal memo that "the EPA's enforcement campaign against U.S. refineries should be halted and re-examined." And that, in effect, is what happened: The administration's proposed changes would legalize what until now were violations of the Clean Air Act, in some cases creating a permanent exemption from rules that were supposed to have kicked in three decades ago. The EPA has also released a plan it calls "Clear Skies," which would loosen Clean Air Act standards for most of the nation's power companies. And it has taken the pressure off companies that violate the law, cutting inspections staff and reducing Fines and criminal charges against polluters.

"What is so profound is that this is the First time in the history of the Clean Air Act that we are going in the wrong direction," says Judith Enck, a policy adviser to New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who has Filed suit challenging the administration's new rules. "For 30-plus years, there had been a gradual tightening of standards. This is the First time the federal government has tried to weaken the act. We're in uncharted territory here."

Hilton Kelley came back to Port Arthur in February of 2000, a local Eagle Scout turned Hollywood stuntman. "I was working on the TV show Nash Bridges with Don Johnson," Kelley recalls. "I decided to make a visit home, like I did every few years, and what I found was beyond belief. Because of the increasing air pollution, the people of Port Arthur were too sick to help themselves. They were beat down. The town was dying, and I saw a need here that I thought I could fill."

Three months later, Kelley put his Hollywood career on hold and headed home. "That last day at work, Don Johnson said, 'We'll miss ya, Hilton. Go and get your hometown cleaned up and come back to work,'" remembers Kelley, doing a dead-on impersonation of the star's gravelly voice. Back in Port Arthur, Kelley hooked up with two local ministers -- Reverend Alfred Dominic and Dr. Roy Malveaux -- who had, after years of watching their town's decline, started a campaign to clean up the refineries. "Our goal," says Reverend Dominic, "has never been to shut the refineries down, only to make them better neighbors. Hilton came home from California, and he became like an 'on' valve for this campaign and this town. He just turned it loose."

These days, Kelley patrols his old neighborhood in his 1995 Buick LeSabre, carrying the environmental activist's low-tech equivalent of a James Bond gizmo -- a "bucket-style" air monitor, literally a white five-gallon plastic bucket that pumps samples of air into sealable plastic bags. Kelley uses it to make "grabs" of polluted air during refinery upsets, then ships those samples to a private lab. "The refineries' attitude has always been, 'If you catch us, we'll pay the fine -- if you don't catch us, so much the better,'" Kelley says. "So I decided to be the guy who started catching them."

As we drive the streets of the Westside, Kelley -- in shorts and flip-flops, his mobile-phone earpiece always in place -- shows off the sights of what he calls "my toxic reality." Our First stop is Carver Terrace, a cluster of red-brick buildings wedged between the fence lines of the Premcor and Motiva refineries. "I was born here," Kelley says as we cruise the grid of streets. "And this is a federal housing project, meaning the people who live here pretty much by definition have nowhere else to go. They're stuck living next to a refinery that throws toxic chemicals over its fence, sometimes every day."

Kelley steers the car into the driveway of a white bungalow, and we head inside. The house is occupied by a woman and her three daughters, each of whom has been diagnosed with asthma. The girls' inhalers sit on a table in the kitchen and the woman -- who, like many people in the neighborhood, doesn't want her name used -- explains that in the past when one of the refineries had an accident, company representatives would troll Carver Terrace, paying $50 a head to residents who'd sign a waiver promising not to sue for damages. "They don't do that anymore," she adds.

A few miles away, Margaret Jefferson lives with her four children just outside the fence line of the BASF plant. "I grew up here, and I grew up with asthma," she says matter-of-factly. "And when I had children, all four of them got asthma, too." Jefferson says she used to have to take the kids to the hospital constantly; now she keeps inhalers and dozens of prescriptions within reach, and only ends up at the emergency room a couple of times each month. The doctors, she says, never tell her what might be the cause of the attacks. "They only treat it and send me home."

There are hundreds of stories like Jefferson's on the Westside; practically every household, it seems, is stocked with inhalers and a cupboard full of pills. Lillie Tilley, who lives half a block from the Motiva fence line, gets eyewash and Pepto-Bismol by the boxful at the local dollar store. (Eye irritation and nausea are among the symptoms of exposure to airborne toxins.) All three of Tilley's children, aged 18 to 22, have asthma, as does she. "I did everything I could to make sure these kids were healthy," she says, "but they still came up sickly. I was trying to get them to get their education and get out of here." Asked whether she's angry at the refineries, Tilley -- who for years worked the graveyard shift at one of the plants -- says she's upset "because the children had to deal with it," then adds, "For me, myself, I just accepted it. We count on these refineries to provide for our families, but they are killing us off."

As we head away from the Westside, Kelley says it's not just pollution his organization is trying to combat; part of the group's goal is simply "to bring back a little hope to people here. I'm trying to get them to quit feeling so beat down, trying to remind them they've got to vote and protest things -- otherwise, they'll just get run over." He talks about the Juneteenth Festival the group is co-sponsoring, with a musical and civic program on a plywood stage Kelley built himself, plus dunking booths, an inflatable Moonwalk, and horseback rides. And he talks about a lawsuit local residents are bringing in Texas state court -- a massive "toxic tort" case against three refineries and three petrochemical plants. Five hundred people have signed on as plaintiffs in the case, Filed on June 25, claiming that plant emissions have damaged their health.

Spokespeople for the plants declined to comment on the specifics of the case. But several of them point out that there is no conclusive evidence linking refinery emissions to health problems among Port Arthur residents, and that a number of plants have installed cleaner equipment in the past 10 years. Industry representatives and civic leaders have formed a group to start an air-monitoring system and to donate money to community programs; industry officials have told the group that routine plant emissions have declined 50 percent since the mid-1990s and should drop another 25 percent over the next few years. "We are going to clean up the air," says Rick Hagar, spokesman for Atofina Petrochemicals. "We all live near a plant here." His own children, he notes, have been diagnosed with asthma; doctors initially suggested that plant emissions could be responsible, but then concluded that mold and mildew were the likely cause.

No one has ever conducted a comprehensive survey of what's in Port Arthur's air, or what it might be doing to people's health. But a smattering of studies and government data suggests some troublesome patterns. In 1998, the Texas Department of Public Health found that the Westside had levels of ozone, hydrogen sulfide, and benzene (a known carcinogen) that constituted a "public health concern," and that there was a "plausible relationship" between releases of those substances and health problems in the neighborhood.

Two years later, the EPA dispatched a Louisiana chemist named Wilma Subra to Port Arthur. Subra, who has won a MacArthur genius grant for her work on pollution in "fenceline" communities, asked Westside residents to fill out logs when they smelled a strange odor or experienced specific health problems. The symptoms people reported having -- everything from headaches and sore throats to cough, nausea, diarrhea, and difficulty breathing -- matched up exactly with the known effects of chemicals released by refinery "upsets," according to Subra. Residents also reported air that smelled like "something dead," "acid," "chlorine," "ammonia," "oil-spill-like odor," and "paint odor, very strong."

In another study, in 2000, University of Texas toxicology professor Marvin Legator surveyed people living in public housing in Port Arthur and compared their health with a control group in Galveston, some 60 miles away. More than three-quarters of the Port Arthur residents had respiratory illnesses, compared with less than 10 percent in Galveston. More than half had immune-system problems, compared with just under 12 percent in the control group, and over 80 percent reported ear, nose, and throat irritation, compared with less than 25 percent in Galveston. "This is a pretty bad place," says Legator. "Certainly it's one that I wouldn't want to live in."

Fundamentally, the argument over the Clean Air Act rules is a fight about dinosaurs -- plants that are no longer supposed to exist. Back when Congress passed the current standards, in 1977, lawmakers faced a choice between forcing every industrial plant in the country to clean up immediately or spreading the change out over time. They opted for a process called New Source Review, under which companies had to install state-of-the-art pollution equipment when they expanded their plants -- something that was expected to happen within a decade or two. "It would never have occurred to anybody," says Curtis Moore, who was counsel to the Senate Environment Committee in the 1980s, "that some of those plants would still be in existence."

As it happened, however, companies increasingly opted to evade the cleanup mandate by keeping their old plants going, rarely notifying the EPA even when they undertook major expansions. "Industry proved much more clever and creative at exploiting the loopholes" than Congress expected, says Donald Kettl, a political scientist who chaired a recent review of Clean Air Act rules by the National Academy of Public Administration.

Under pressure from both industry and environmentalists, the Clinton administration began to draw up changes to the Clean Air Act standards, especially to New Source Review. But the process took a much more aggressive turn under Bush, according to Bill Becker, who heads a national association of air-quality officials. The new administration was aiming not just to change the New Source Review requirements, he says, but to lift them entirely for many plants. "Someone in the administration got very greedy," he says, "and put things in there that the industry had not even wanted."

Why did the administration opt for such a sweeping revision? Part of the answer may lie with Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, which for much of 2001 met in secret to draw up a plan for expanding the nation's energy output. Representatives from power companies and refineries, the industries most affected by New Source Review, made contact with the task force dozens of times. A private memo to the task force from one of the nation's largest electricity producers, Southern Company -- which contributed a total of $2.4 million to Republican candidates and the GOP between 1999 and 2002 -- warned that the EPA's "extreme" use of New Source Review "threatens the safe, reliable, and efficient operation of energy production facilities across the country." Industry leaders also hired former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour and RNC chairman-to-be Marc Racicot to plead their case before the Cheney panel. In May 2001, the group issued a report recommending that the EPA review "the impact of [clean air rules] on investment" in utility and refinery expansion.

Nineteen months later, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman released the New Source Review rules, characterizing the changes as a way to encourage plants to modernize and improve air quality. But according to some of the EPA's own calculations, the effect could well be the opposite. Under the new rules, for example, plants can use their two worst-polluting years of the past decade as a baseline for future emissions -- an approach that, critics note, effectively rewards the dirtiest plants. According to one EPA memo, that change alone would allow 50 percent of all the nation's industrial plants to expand without being forced to clean up. The rules, notes Becker of the air-quality officials' group, also create a major new loophole for plants that release toxic chemicals during "upsets" such as the one at Port Arthur's Motiva. "If you are an attorney for industry and you can't Find ways to escape New Source Review," he says, "shame on you."

The rule changes had an immediate, and drastic, effect on another Clinton-era EPA effort -- a push to crack down on companies that had been operating in violation of the law for decades. In the late '90s, then-EPA civil enforcement chief Eric Schaeffer launched enforcement actions against more than 150 companies for suspected New Source Review violations. Among the targets were dozens of refineries and petrochemical companies, including at least two in Port Arthur, as well as 51 of the nation's dirtiest power plants -- a collection of mostly Midwestern facilities that together are considered responsible for air pollution that kills as many as 9,000 people a year. The agency's goal was to push the companies to negotiate settlements in which they would agree to reduce emissions and spend millions on community programs.

But the talks grew distinctly chillier, Schaeffer recalls, after January 2001. "When the Bush administration came in," he says, "they basically said to these polluters, 'Don't worry, boys, we're going to change the way we enforce requirements.' And if you're negotiating the law and, literally, they're right behind you rolling the law up and putting it away, what kind of leverage did I have?" Schaeffer quit his post last year, complaining that the White House was "determined to undermine the rules we are trying to enforce." The Bush administration has signed settlements in 17 of the cases he brought; negotiations in several others have stalled. The EPA has Filed no new complaints for New Source Review violations since Bush took office.

Before he left, Schaeffer managed to hammer out a cleanup agreement with Motiva, one of the Port Arthur plants his agency had targeted. The company promised to install new pollution-control equipment, start an aggressive self-auditing program, and pay Fines for future emissions violations. EPA officials say negotiations with other companies are continuing, but have not produced any settlements. One of the Port Arthur refineries, Premcor, announced plans for a massive expansion this spring.

Lillie Tilley, for one, has given up on waiting for Washington to force the Port Arthur plants to clean up. One of her sons works for a refinery -- "It's a livelihood," she says -- but when her daughter graduates from high school next year, Tilley hopes the girl will move to Seattle, where she has relatives. She remembers visiting the Northwest once and being struck by the tall trees and the mountains. Most of all, she remembers the air. "You could breathe," she says. "You could take a deep breath and enjoy."

© 2003 The Foundation for National Progress

2008-01-19T16:12:00.000-08:00

Taking On Big Media in Canada

By Steve Anderson & Robert Hackett
From Canadian Dimension Magazine
2007

Progressive-minded Canadians have long been concerned that private media concentration threatens democratic values. In June, 2006, even the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications Report on the Canadian News Media warned that there are “areas where the concentration of ownership has reached levels that few other countries would consider acceptable.”

Consolidation was supposed to aggregate resources to allow for the production of quality programming for a relatively small but diverse and dispersed population. In actual fact, consolidation has meant the loss by Canadians of crucial access to a diverse range of information and viewpoints about our communities, our country and the world — and lost access to a means of expressing ourselves to a mass audience.

As the focus of governments and policy makers has shifted toward strengthening commercial media, public broadcasters have been defunded (forced to rely increasingly on commercial revenue) or privatized outright. The CBC, for example, receives from Parliament half of what it received twenty years ago on a per-capita basis, and Canada ranks sixteenth out of eighteen industrialized countries in terms of public financing for public broadcasting. The community-media sector — a vibrant site of domestic programming and public participation, in some countries — remains relatively weak because of a lack of dedicated funding and regulatory support.

The result is that our media reinforces a narrow frame of public debate and dialogue, diminishing Canadians’ sense of new and different possibilities and alternatives to everything from political issues to our everyday lives. This loss is especially felt by progressive movements for social change, and by people who in general have less access to power in society.

In media as much as in healthcare, most Canadians do not benefit when private profits are put ahead of public responsibilities. But public-interest decision-making can only be brought about by a popularly based common front that challenges those who currently dominate the policy process: well-organized corporate-media lobbies that are laying the groundwork for widespread deregulation of the industry.

Fortunately, such a common front is emerging. Canadians for Democratic Media (CDM) is a campaign-oriented, movement-building media-reform organization. Its primary goal is to increase informed public participation in Canadian media-policy formation. It seeks to generate policies that will produce a more competitive, diverse and public service-oriented media system with a strong non-profit and non-commercial sector. Participants of this building network include civil society, labour and media-advocacy groups, prominent academics, grassroots media activists and Canadians from across the country.

Campaigning to diversify Big Media is a classic David-and-Goliath struggle. But in the U.S., led by flagship organizations like Free Press, an estimated three million Americans successfully petitioned politicians and the American broadcast regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, to forestall the FCC’s efforts to further erode limits to media concentration. Backed by a growing mass base, Free Press and its many public-interest allies are now recognized policy “players.”

There’s no reason we couldn’t achieve something similar in Canada. Working with existing progressive organizations, CDM has already run a “Stop the Big Media Takeover” campaign, generating several thousand e-mail letters and briefs to the CRTC’s call for input on media diversity and concentration last summer. Polls show that the Canadian public is already onside on media issues. It’s just a matter of getting organized and giving the issue political traction.

For more information about Canadians for Democratic Media, please visit www.democraticmedia.ca.

2008-01-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

Trump Draws Criticism for Ad He Ran After Jogger Attack

By Michael Wilson
From The New York Times

On May 1, 1989, Donald J. Trump took out full-page advertisements in four New York newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. Mr. Trump said he wanted the ''criminals of every age'' who were accused of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park 12 days earlier ''to be afraid.''

Thirteen years later, as new evidence raises the possibility that the five teenagers convicted in the attack had nothing to do with it, their supporters are focusing some of their fiercest anger at Mr. Trump.

''Trump is a chump!'' protesters shouted during a recent demonstration, accusing Mr. Trump of, at least, further inflaming passions and perhaps tainting the defendants' future jurors. Some called him a racist. Supporters of the Central Park defendants have demanded an apology.

One does not appear to be forthcoming. ''No,'' Mr. Trump said yesterday. ''They confessed. Now they say they didn't do it. Who am I supposed to believe?''

The lingering anger over the ad underscores the powerful emotions unleashed by the case 13 years ago, and by its sudden re-emergence at the forefront of public debate. Just as the case came to symbolize the feeling of vulnerability among New Yorkers, especially white New Yorkers, the ad seems to represent, for its detractors, the perceived rush to judgment against five black youths. The text of the ad is misremembered at times, with protesters quoting words like ''animals'' and ''wilding'' that did not actually appear in it.

In 1989, Mr. Trump paused in building his real estate empire to run the 600-word ad in The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and New York Newsday, at a total cost of $85,000, under the boldfaced heading, ''Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!''

In the ad, Mr. Trump said Mayor Edward I. Koch had stated ''that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,'' to which Mr. Trump replied: ''I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.'' At the time, the attack victim was still in a coma.

The ad does not name any defendant, instead referring collectively to ''roving bands of wild criminals.'' The five young men confessed, four of them on videotape, and served prison sentences. But last January, a convicted murderer, Matias Reyes, announced that he alone had raped the jogger and that the teens who had confessed had not been present. DNA tests linked Mr. Reyes to semen on the jogger's sock. Lawyers for the original defendants have called for their exoneration, and a report from the Manhattan district attorney's office on the new evidence is due in court on Dec. 5.

''At the time there seemed to be very little question, but all of a sudden this seems to come up,'' Mr. Trump said. ''I do have tremendous respect for the district attorney, and I'm sure the right answer will come out.'' The confessions mystify him, he said. ''Why did they confess to the crime?''

Michael W. Warren, a lawyer for the men, said there was a growing resentment for Mr. Trump's advertisement. ''It was outrageous,'' Mr. Warren said, ''the manner that Mr. Trump used to engage in his own personal form of rhetoric. A lot of people felt it colored the eyes of prospective jurors who ultimately sat on the case. Now it's even more appalling, with new evidence that points exclusively to another person. I think Donald Trump at the very least owes a real apology to this community and to the young men and their families.''

Carol Taylor, a writer and demonstrator at the recent rallies, was not surprised at Mr. Trump's recent comments. ''Of course he won't apologize, because he's a rich white colorist male who is wallowing in the unearned privilege of his white skin color,'' she said. On Monday, she held a sign that said: ''Donald Trump, don't be a chump. For dissing black boys so bad, where's your full-page apology ad?''

A protest is planned near the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown on Sunday. ''I'll be there. I think I'll make my sign bigger,'' Ms. Taylor said.

Mr. Trump shrugged off the planned protest. ''I don't mind if they picket. I like pickets.''

Enemies of the Ocean
A list of companies, politicians, and countries who do the most damage to the world's oceans.

By Jonathan Stein
From Mother Jones.com
2006

Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.)
Pombo has used his position as chair of the House Resources Committee to try to weaken laws protecting fisheries and marine mammals, as well as end a 24-year-old federal moratorium on offshore drilling. Though he represents an inland district, he’s one of the only American supporters of commercial whaling. He has read a pro-whaling resolution into the Congressional Record and has accepted more than $23,000 in foreign junkets from the International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources (IFCNR), which attacks antiwhaling and other environmental regulation worldwide. Pombo later claimed he didn’t know IFCNR was private and therefore that accepting its money may have violated the law. The group is identified as a “private foundation” in the “Who We Are” section of its website.

Japan
Japan offers multimillion-dollar “grants” to poor countries in exchange for pro-whaling votes on the International Whaling Commission. In a famous example, both St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines changed their antiwhaling position two weeks after their prime ministers took trips to Tokyo. The two countries then received $20 million in aid from Japan.

Gorton’s
Generations of U.S. consumers have been told to “Trust the Gorton’s Fisherman,” but its Japanese parent company, Nippon Suisan Kaisha Ltd., has killed some 2,700 whales under the guise of “scientific research” since buying Gorton’s in 2001. McDonald’s gets its Filet-O-Fish from Gorton’s.

Pesticide and Fertilizer Industries
Chemicals used in Midwestern farms flow down the Mississippi toward the Gulf of Mexico, where the largest dead zone in America waits. The industries are such strong backers of Rep. Pombo that he let them write a bill undoing the Food Quality Protection Act and introduced it into Congress.

Cruise Lines
Cruise ships can produce 30,000 gallons of sewage and 19 tons of garbage a day, most of which is dumped into the ocean, often in brazen defiance of federal laws. Add to that diesel exhaust equal to 12,240 cars, and you’ve got what the Bluewater Network calls “an emerging crisis.”

Canada
Blame Canada for having lax offshore dumping regulations and municipal waste laws, and for each year allowing hundreds of thousands of seal cubs to be clubbed, shot, and sometimes skinned alive and left to die on the ice. Until 2001, Canada even subsidized the seal hunt.

Red Lobster
To protest the seal slaughter, the Protect Seals Network launched a boycott of Canadian seafood. Darden Restaurants, the U.S. parent company of Red Lobster and Olive Garden and a major seafood importer, has refused to bow to Protect Seals’ demands. Instead, it co-funds IFCNR with the likes of the International Fur Trade Association, the Japan Whaling Association, and Monsanto.

The FDA
Toxic PCBs are regulated by the FDA in commercially sold fish while the EPA issues consumption guidelines for fish caught recreationally. Using standards set in 1984, the FDA allows such high levels of cancer-causing PCBs in farmed salmon that, according to an Environmental Working Group study, were they present in wild salmon, the EPA would restrict consumption to one meal per month.

Europe
Since Europe’s waters are running out of fish, fishermen subsidized by the European Union (to the tune of $350 million in 2001) have headed toward West Africa, where fish stocks have fallen 50 percent in the past 20 years. The rarity of fish in West Africa contributes to the bushmeat trade—meaning that leopards, monkeys, hippos, and antelopes are paying the price of EU overfishing.

© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress

Canada's Supreme Court Opens Door to Deportation of US "War Resisters"

By Guy Charron
From Global Research
2007

On November 15 Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that it would not hear an appeal for refugee status by two US soldiers who, in government-military parlance, “deserted,” rather than participate in the US’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The two conscientious objectors, Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, contested the decision of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRBC), later confirmed by two lower level federal courts, to reject their application for political asylum based on the illegality of the Iraq War.

Hinzman arrived in Canada in 2004 after his request for conscientious objector status was twice refused by the US Army and after learning that his battalion would be sent to Iraq.

Hinzman left no doubt as to the political nature of his actions. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction,” Hinzman declared. “They haven’t found any. They said Iraq was linked to international terrorist organizations. There haven’t been any links.” “This was a criminal war. Any act of violence in an unjustified conflict is an atrocity.”

According to those who have studied the US military justice system, persons prosecuted for desertion—as Hinzman and Hughey will be if they are deported from Canada—usually receive prison sentences on the order of five years. But the charge of desertion carries a possible death sentence.

The previous Liberal government of Paul Martin argued before the IRBC that the legality or illegality of the war could not be used as an argument in making a claim for political asylum (refugee status). The pretext used by the government was that only the International Court of Justice at the Hague has the authority and the jurisdiction to hear arguments concerning the legality of the war.

The IRBC quickly embraced the Canadian government’s arguments and refused to admit any evidence bearing on the war’s legality at Hinzman’s refugee hearing. Subsequently, the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the decision to disallow Hinzman and Hughey from arguing that the Iraq war was illegal. And on this basis, the Canadian state has concluded that the two men are not at risk of “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment” for their political views and has denied them political asylum.

Habitually Canada’s Supreme Court provides no explanations when refusing to hear a case and it followed this course when it announced that it would not hear Hinzman’s and Hughey’s appeal.

The Supreme Court decision will have an immediate effect on some forty other US soldiers who have sought political refugee status in Canada and an estimated 200 others who have fled to Canada but not formally applied for refugee status.

Unless the Canadian government gives them special permission to stay in Canada—an improbable scenario given the close ties between the minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper and the Bush administration—Hinzman and Hughey and the other war resisters will be turned over to US authorities and tried for the crime of desertion because they refused to participate in the Bush administration’s illegal Iraq war.

In justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration concocted a new and patently illegal doctrine of “preventive war,” under which the US gave itself the right to attack a state if it believed it could constitute a threat to the US at some point in the future. As for the various justifications Washington gave for the war, from weapons of mass destruction to the reputed ties of the regime of Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda, they have all been exposed as lies.

The war has, moreover, resulted in untold violence and countless atrocities. According to studies by reputable agencies, the war and the accompanying destruction of Iraq society have caused the death of over one million Iraqis and the flight of millions of people from their homes and Iraq altogether.

If the Canadian government intervened in the Hinzman and Hughey cases to prevent their raising the illegality of the war, it wasn’t just to save the Bush administration from embarrassment. Ottawa feared Canada would become a haven for “war resisters” and a pole of resistance to the war. Given a different decision on Hinzman’s and Hughey’s refugee claim, thousands more might well have joined them.

According to the Pentagon’s own figures, most likely underestimated, desertion is a growing phenomenon. The US army admits that 4,700 soldiers deserted in 2006 alone, an increase of over 40 percent compared to 3,300 soldiers in 2005, and up by 80 percent compared to 2003. These figures do not include personnel from the Air Force, Navy, or the Marines. (See: US Army reports rising desertion rates)

The attitude of the Canadian government and state to the Iraqi war resisters is in sharp contrast to that which it adopted in the 1960s and early 1970s during the Vietnam War. Then some 50,000 young Americans fled the military or obligatory conscription and were given refuge in Canada.

If the decision of the Supreme Court did not hit the front pages, neither did it pass unnoticed. It was the object of articles in daily papers all over the world.

In sanctioning Hinzman’s and Hughey’s deportation and refusing to allow them to challenge the legality of the Iraq War, Canada’s highest court has officially adopted the credo of “might makes right,” tacitly affirming the legitimacy of the Iraq war and more generally wars of aggression.

The court’s decision and the Canadian government’s intervention in the war-resister case underline the fact that the Canadian state’s attitude towards international law is entirely self-interested and subordinated to the protection of the Canadian elite’s own interests. When international law comes into conflict with the Canadian government’s and state’s perceived needs, it is simply put aside without further ado.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Canadian ruling class judged that its interests lay in signing agreements and declarations to the effect that soldiers had an obligation to refuse “illegal” orders, if these went contrary to international law. The Supreme Court has effectively announced that these signatures are not worth the paper they are printed upon.

All major sections of the Canadian elite support the immigration-judicial establishment’s decision to refuse political refugee status to soldiers opposing US army orders, notwithstanding that doing so would make them complicit in war crimes. Since the beginning of this affair, newspaper editorials have portrayed Hinzman and the other soldiers as “deserters, not refugees.” It was the Liberal government of Paul Martin that intervened in Hinzman’s case to prevent him from arguing the war was illegal and this month’s refusal of the Supreme Court to hear the war resisters’ appeal was no doubt toasted in private by the Conservative government. Harper, it should be recalled, chastised the then Liberal government for refusing, at the eleventh-hour, to have the Canadian military join the US-led invasion of Iraq, because it had not been endorsed by the UN or even the US’s traditional allies.

There are two principal reasons for the Canadian elite’s rallying behind the US over the war-resister issue.

Big business fears Canada may be branded as insufficiently supportive of Washington’s wars of conquest and that this could jeopardize its access to the US market upon which 40 percent of the Canadian economy is dependent.

Secondly, Canada is involved in its own imperialist adventures, having deployed the Canadian army to Afghanistan in its biggest offensive role since the Korean War of the early 1950s. The Afghan war is greatly unpopular at home and the Canadian elite does not want to lend any legitimacy to the US war resisters for fear that their example might help give rise to a similar phenomenon in the Canadian military.

There is no question that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) is implicated in war crimes in Afghanistan. The CAF has declared that the Geneva Convention articles do not apply in Afghanistan. Recently two further government documents have come to light that show that the Canadian government knew that prisoners turned over to Afghan security forces by the CAF had been or were likely to be abused and tortured. The CAF has been regularly implicated in the murder of civilians, both by calling in air strikes and by shooting at unarmed civilians in and around Kandahar.

In Afghanistan, Canadian soldiers are paying a “blood price” so that the Canadian ruling class can be, to use the words of the CAF Chief of Staff Rick Hillier, “respected” in international bodies like NATO and so that it can “influence and shape regions and populations in accordance with our interests.”

© Copyright Guy Charron, WSWS.org, 2007

Cold War II

By Noam Chomsky
From Chomsky.info
2007

These are exciting days in Washington, as the government directs its energies to the demanding task of “containing Iran” in what Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright, joining others, calls “Cold War II.”

During Cold War I, the task was to contain two awesome forces. The lesser and more moderate force was “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” Hence “if the United States is to survive,” it will have to adopt a “repugnant philosophy” and reject “acceptable norms of human conduct” and the “long-standing American concepts of `fair play’” that had been exhibited with such searing clarity in the conquest of the national territory, the Philippines, Haiti and other beneficiaries of “the idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” as the newspaper of record describes our noble mission. The judgments about the nature of the super-Hitler and the necessary response are those of General Jimmy Doolittle, in a critical assessment of the CIA commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954. They are quite consistent with those of the Truman administration liberals, the “wise men” who were “present at the creation,” notoriously in NSC 68 but in fact quite consistently.

In the face of the Kremlin’s unbridled aggression in every corner of the world, it is perhaps understandable that the US resisted in defense of human values with a savage display of torture, terror, subversion and violence while doing “everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America,” as Tim Weiner summarizes the doctrine of the Eisenhower administration in his recent history of the CIA. And just as the Truman liberals easily matched their successors in fevered rhetoric about the implacable enemy and its campaign to rule the world, so did John F. Kennedy, who bitterly condemned the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy,” and dismissed the proposal of its leader (Khrushchev) for sharp mutual cuts in offensive weaponry, then reacted to his unilateral implementation of these proposals with a huge military build-up. The Kennedy brothers also quickly surpassed Eisenhower in violence and terror, as they “unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity” (Wiener), doubling Eisenhower’s annual record of major CIA covert operations, with horrendous consequences worldwide, even a close brush with terminal nuclear war.

But at least it was possible to deal with Russia, unlike the fiercer enemy, China. The more thoughtful scholars recognized that Russia was poised uneasily between civilization and barbarism. As Henry Kissinger later explained in his academic essays, only the West has undergone the Newtonian revolution and is therefore “deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer,” while the rest still believe “that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer,” the “basic division” that is “the deepest problem of the contemporary international order.” But Russia, unlike third word peasants who think that rain and sun are inside their heads, was perhaps coming to the realization that the world is not just a dream, Kissinger felt.

Not so the still more savage and bloodthirsty enemy, China, which for liberal Democrat intellectuals at various times rampaged as a “a Slavic Manchukuo,” a blind puppet of its Kremlin master, or a monster utterly unconstrained as it pursued its crazed campaign to crush the world in its tentacles, or whatever else circumstances demanded. The remarkable tale of doctrinal fanaticism from the 1940s to the ‘70s, which makes contemporary rhetoric seem rather moderate, is reviewed by James Peck in his highly revealing study of the national security culture, Washington’s China.

In later years, there were attempts to mimic the valiant deeds of the defenders of virtue from the two villainous global conquerors and their loyal slaves – for example, when the Gipper strapped on his cowboy boots and declared a National Emergency because Nicaraguan hordes were only two days from Harlingen Texas, though as he courageously informed the press, despite the tremendous odds “I refuse to give up. I remember a man named Winston Churchill who said, `Never give in. Never, never, never.’ So we won't.” With consequences that need not be reviewed.

Even with the best of efforts, however, the attempts never were able to recapture the glorious days of Cold War I. But now, at last, those heights might be within reach, as another implacable enemy bent on world conquest has arisen, which we must contain before it destroys us all: Iran.

Perhaps it's a lift to the spirits to be able to recover those heady Cold War days when at least there was a legitimate force to contain, however dubious the pretexts and disgraceful the means. But it is instructive to take a closer look at the contours of Cold War II as they are being designed by “the former Kremlinologists now running U.S. foreign policy, such as Rice and Gates” (Wright).

The task of containment is to establish “a bulwark against Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East,” Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper explain in the New York Times (July 31). To contain Iran’s influence we must surround Iran with US and NATO ground forces, along with massive naval deployments in the Persian Gulf and of course incomparable air power and weapons of mass destruction. And we must provide a huge flow of arms to what Condoleezza Rice calls “the forces of moderation and reform” in the region, the brutal tyrannies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and, with particular munificence, Israel, by now virtually an adjunct of the militarized high-tech US economy. All to contain Iran’s influence. A daunting challenge indeed.

And daunting it is. In Iraq, Iranian support is welcomed by much of the majority Shi’ite population. In an August visit to Teheran, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, President Ahmadinejad and other senior officials, and thanked Tehran for its “positive and constructive” role in improving security in Iraq, eliciting a sharp reprimand from President Bush, who “declares Teheran a regional peril and asserts the Iraqi leader must understand,” to quote the headline of the Los Angeles Times report on al-Maliki’s intellectual deficiencies. A few days before, also greatly to Bush’s discomfiture, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Washington’s favorite, described Iran as “a helper and a solution” in his country. Similar problems abound beyond Iran’s immediate neighbors. In Lebanon, according to polls, most Lebanese see Iranian-backed Hezbollah “as a legitimate force defending their country from Israel,” Wright reports. And in Palestine, Iranian-backed Hamas won a free election, eliciting savage punishment of the Palestinian population by the US and Israel for the crime of voting “the wrong way,” another episode in “democracy promotion.”

But no matter. The aim of US militancy and the arms flow to the moderates is to counter “what everyone in the region believes is a flexing of muscles by a more aggressive Iran,” according to an unnamed senior U.S. government official – “everyone” being the technical term used to refer to Washington and its more loyal clients. Iran's aggression consists in its being welcomed by many within the region, and allegedly supporting resistance to the US occupation of neighboring Iraq.

It’s likely, though little discussed, that a prime concern about Iran’s influence is to the East, where in mid-August “Russia and China today host Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a summit of a Central Asian security club designed to counter U.S. influence in the region,” the business press reports. The “security club” is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which has been slowly taking shape in recent years. Its membership includes not only the two giants Russia and China, but also the energy-rich Central Asian states Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was a guest of honor at the August meeting. “In another unwelcome development for the Americans, Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov also accepted an invitation to attend the summit,” another step its improvement of relations with Russia, particularly in energy, reversing a long-standing policy of isolation from Russia. “Russia in May secured a deal to build a new pipeline to import more gas from Turkmenistan, bolstering its dominant hold on supplies to Europe and heading off a competing U.S.-backed plan that would bypass Russian territory.”

Along with Iran, there are three other official observer states: India, Pakistan and Mongolia. Washington’s request for similar status was denied. In 2005 the SCO called for a timetable for termination of any US military presence in Central Asia. The participants at the August meeting flew to the Urals to attend the first joint Russia-China military exercises on Russian soil.

The association of Iran with the SCO extends its inroads into the Middle East, where China has been increasing trade and other relations with the jewel in the crown, Saudi Arabia. There is an oppressed Shi’ite population in Saudi Arabia that is also susceptible to Iran’s influence – and happens to sit on most of Saudi oil. About 40% of Middle East oil is reported to be heading East, not West. As the flow Eastward increases, US control declines over this lever of world domination, a “stupendous source of strategic power,” as the State Department described Saudi oil 60 years ago.

In Cold War I, the Kremlin had imposed an iron curtain and built the Berlin Wall to contain Western influence. In Cold War II, Wright reports, the former Kremlinologists framing policy are imposing a “green curtain” to bar Iranian influence. In short, government-media doctrine is that the Iranian threat is rather similar to the Western threat that the Kremlin sought to contain, and the US is eagerly taking on the Kremlin’s role in the thrilling “new Cold War.”

All of this is presented without noticeable concern. Nevertheless, the recognition that the US government is modeling itself on Stalin and his successors in the new Cold War must be arousing at least some flickers of embarrassment. Perhaps that is how we can explain the ferocious Washington Post editorial announcing that Iran has escalated its aggressiveness to a Hot War: “the Revolutionary Guard, a radical state within Iran's Islamic state, is waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.” The US must therefore “fight back,” the editors thunder, finding quite “puzzling...the murmurs of disapproval from European diplomats and others who say they favor using diplomacy and economic pressure, rather than military action, to rein in Iran,” even in the face of its outright aggression. The evidence that Iran is waging war against the US is now conclusive. After all, it comes from an administration that has never deceived the American people, even improving on the famous stellar honesty of its predecessors.

Suppose that for once Washington’s charges happen to be true, and Iran really is providing Shi’ite militias with roadside bombs that kill American forces, perhaps even making use of the some of the advanced weaponry lavishly provided to the Revolutionary Guard by Ronald Reagan in order to fund the illegal war against Nicaragua, under the pretext of arms for hostages (the number of hostages tripled during these endeavors). If the charges are true, then Iran could properly be charged with a minuscule fraction of the iniquity of the Reagan administration, which provided Stinger missiles and other high-tech military aid to the “insurgents” seeking to disrupt Soviet efforts to bring stability and justice to Afghanistan, as they saw it. Perhaps Iran is even guilty of some of the crimes of the Roosevelt administration, which assisted terrorist partisans attacking peaceful and sovereign Vichy France in 1940-41, and had thus declared war on Germany even before Pearl Harbor.

One can pursue these questions further. The CIA station chief in Pakistan in 1981, Howard Hart, reports that “I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with this wonderful order: `Go kill Soviet soldiers’. Imagine! I loved it.” Of course “the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan,” Tim Wiener writes in his history of the CIA, repeating the obvious. But “it was a noble goal,” he writes. Killing Russians with no concern for the fate of Afghans is a “noble goal.” But support for resistance to a US invasion and occupation would be a vile act and declaration of war.

Without irony, the Bush administration and the media charge that Iran is “meddling” in Iraq, otherwise presumably free from foreign interference. The evidence is partly technical. Do the serial numbers on the Improvised Explosive Devices really trace back to Iran? If so, does the leadership of Iran know about the IEDs, or only the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Settling the debate, the White House plans to brand the Revolutionary Guard as a “specially designated global terrorist” force, an unprecedented action against a national military branch, authorizing Washington to undertake a wide range of punitive actions. Watching in disbelief, much of the world asks whether the US military, invading and occupying Iran’s neighbors, might better merit this charge -- or its Israeli client, now about to receive a huge increase in military aid to commemorate 40 years of harsh occupation and illegal settlement, and its fifth invasion of Lebanon a year ago.

It is instructive that Washington’s propaganda framework is reflexively accepted, apparently without notice, in US and other Western commentary and reporting, apart from the marginal fringe of what is called ‘the loony left.” What is considered “criticism” is skepticism as to whether all of Washington’s charges about Iranian aggression in Iraq are true. It might be an interesting research project to see how closely the propaganda of Russia, Nazi Germany, and other aggressors and occupiers matched the standards of today’s liberal press and commentators..

The comparisons are of course unfair. Unlike German and Russian occupiers, American forces are in Iraq by right, on the principle, too obvious even to enunciate, that the US owns the world. Therefore, as a matter of elementary logic, the US cannot invade and occupy another country. The US can only defend and liberate others. No other category exists. Predecessors, including the most monstrous, have commonly sworn by the same principle, but again there is an obvious difference: they were Wrong, and we are Right. QED.

Another comparison comes to mind, which is studiously ignored when we are sternly admonished of the ominous consequences that might follow withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. The preferred analogy is Indochina, highlighted in a shameful speech by the President on August 22. That analogy can perhaps pass muster among those who have succeeded in effacing from their minds the record of US actions in Indochina, including the destruction of much of Vietnam and the murderous bombing of Laos and Cambodia as the US began its withdrawal from the wreckage of South Vietnam. In Cambodia, the bombing was in accord with Kissinger’s genocidal orders: “anything that flies on anything that moves” – actions that drove “an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency [the Khmer Rouge] that had enjoyed relatively little support before the Kissinger-Nixon bombing was inaugurated,” as Cambodia specialists Owen Taylor and Ben Kiernan observe in a highly important study that passed virtually without notice, in which they reveal that the bombing was five times the incredible level reported earlier, greater than all allied bombing in World War II. Completely suppressing all relevant facts, it is then possible for the President and many commentators to present Khmer Rouge crimes as a justification for continuing to devastate Iraq.

But although the grotesque Indochina analogy receives much attention, the obvious analogy is ignored: the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, which, as Soviet analysts predicted, led to shocking violence and destruction as the country was taken over by Reagan's favorites, who amused themselves by such acts as throwing acid in the faces of women in Kabul they regarded as too liberated, and then virtually destroyed the city and much else, creating such havoc and terror that the population actually welcomed the Taliban. That analogy could indeed be invoked without utter absurdity by advocates of “staying the course,” but evidently it is best forgotten.

Under the heading “Secretary Rice’s Mideast mission: contain Iran,” the press reports Rice’s warning that Iran is “the single most important single-country challenge to...US interests in the Middle East.” That is a reasonable judgment. Given the long-standing principle that Washington must do “everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America,” Iran does pose a unique challenge, and it is natural that the task of containing Iranian influence should be a high priority.

As elsewhere, Bush administration rhetoric is relatively mild in this case. For the Kennedy administration, “Latin America was the most dangerous area in the world” when there was a threat that the progressive Cheddi Jagan might win a free election in British Guiana, overturned by CIA shenanigans that handed the country over to the thuggish racist Forbes Burnham. A few years earlier, Iraq was “the most dangerous place in the world” (CIA director Allen Dulles) after General Abdel Karim Qassim broke the Anglo-American condominium over Middle East oil, overthrowing the pro-US monarchy, which had been heavily infiltrated by the CIA. A primary concern was that Qassim might join Nasser, then the supreme Middle East devil, in using the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East for the domestic. The issue for Washington was not so much access as control. At the time and for many years after, Washington was purposely exhausting domestic oil resources in the interests of “national security,” meaning security for the profits of Texas oil men, like the failed entrepreneur who now sits in the Oval Office. But as high-level planner George Kennan had explained well before, we cannot relax our guard when there is any interference with “protection of our resources” (which accidentally happen to be somewhere else).

Unquestionably, Iran's government merits harsh condemnation, though it has not engaged in worldwide terror, subversion, and aggression, following the US model – which extends to today’s Iran as well, if ABC news is correct in reporting that the US is supporting Pakistan-based Jundullah, which is carrying out terrorist acts inside Iran. The sole act of aggression attributed to Iran is the conquest of two small islands in the Gulf – under Washington’s close ally the Shah. In addition to internal repression – heightened, as Iranian dissidents regularly protest, by US militancy -- the prospect that Iran might develop nuclear weapons also is deeply troubling. Though Iran has every right to develop nuclear energy, no one – including the majority of Iranians – wants it to have nuclear weapons. That would add to the threat to survival posed much more seriously by its near neighbors Pakistan, India, and Israel, all nuclear armed with the blessing of the US, which most of the world regards as the leading threat to world peace, for evident reasons.

Iran rejects US control of the Middle East, challenging fundamental policy doctrine, but it hardly poses a military threat. On the contrary, it has been the victim of outside powers for years: in recent memory, when the US and Britain overthrew its parliamentary government and installed a brutal tyrant in 1953, and when the US supported Saddam Hussein’s murderous invasion, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many with chemical weapons, without the “international community” lifting a finger – something that Iranians do not forget as easily as the perpetrators. And then under severe sanctions as a punishment for disobedience.

Israel regards Iran as a threat. Israel seeks to dominate the region with no interference, and Iran might be some slight counterbalance, while also supporting domestic forces that do not bend to Israel’s will. It may, however, be useful to bear in mind that Hamas has accepted the international consensus on a two-state settlement on the international border, and Hezbollah, along with Iran, has made clear that it would accept any outcome approved by Palestinians, leaving the US and Israel isolated in their traditional rejectionism.

But Iran is hardly a military threat to Israel. And whatever threat there might be could be overcome if the US would accept the view of the great majority of its own citizens and of Iranians and permit the Middle East to become a nuclear-weapons free zone, including Iran and Israel, and US forces deployed there. One may also recall that UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 3 April 1991, to which Washington appeals when convenient, calls for “establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery.”

It is widely recognized that use of military force in Iran would risk blowing up the entire region, with untold consequences beyond. We know from polls that in the surrounding countries, where the Iranian government is hardly popular -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan -- nevertheless large majorities prefer even a nuclear-armed Iran to any form of military action against it.

The rhetoric about Iran has escalated to the point where both political parties and practically the whole US press accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that “all options are on the table,” to quote Hillary Clinton and everybody else, possibly even nuclear weapons. “All options on the table” means that Washington threatens war.

The UN Charter outlaws “the threat or use of force.” The United States, which has chosen to become an outlaw state, disregards international laws and norms. We're allowed to threaten anybody we want -- and to attack anyone we choose.

Washington's feverish new Cold War "containment" policy has spread to Europe. Washington intends to install a “missile defense system” in the Czech Republic and Poland, marketed to Europe as a shield against Iranian missiles. Even if Iran had nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, the chances of its using them to attack Europe are perhaps on a par with the chances of Europe's being hit by an asteroid, so perhaps Europe would do as well to invest in an asteroid defense system. Furthermore, if Iran were to indicate the slightest intention of aiming a missile at Europe or Israel, the country would be vaporized.

Of course, Russian planners are gravely upset by the shield proposal. We can imagine how the US would respond if a Russian anti-missile system were erected in Canada. The Russians have good reason to regard an anti-missile system as part of a first-strike weapon against them. It is generally understood that such a system could never block a first strike, but it could conceivably impede a retaliatory strike. On all sides, “missile defense” is therefore understood to be a first-strike weapon, eliminating a deterrent to attack. And a small initial installation in Eastern Europe could easily be a base for later expansion. Even more obviously, the only military function of such a system with regard to Iran, the declared aim, would be to bar an Iranian deterrent to US or Israel aggression.

Not surprisingly, in reaction to the “missile defense” plans, Russia has resorted to its own dangerous gestures, including the recent decision to renew long-range patrols by nuclear-capable bombers after a 15-year hiatus, in one recent case near the US military base on Guam. These actions reflect Russia’s anger “over what it has called American and NATO aggressiveness, including plans for a missile-defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, analysts said” (Andrew Kramer, NYT).

The shield ratchets the threat of war a few notches higher, in the Middle East and elsewhere, with incalculable consequences, and the potential for a terminal nuclear war. The immediate fear is that by accident or design, Washington's war planners or their Israeli surrogate might decide to escalate their Cold War II into a hot one – in this case a real hot war.

Back to Main Menu