Category Archives: Media

Barnum & Bailey’s 8-Year Vendetta

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For those readers who disbelieve that people hack and stalk journalists for their work, here’s the mother of all cases – Barnum & Bailey’s 8 year vendetta against Janice Pottker. I blogged it before but wanted to re-post this section from the Salon article in which it was described, because it shows that what was done to Ms. Pottker was only the tip of the iceberg. Barnum & Bailey’s behavior toward contract workers and animals was even worse.

Mind you, Ms. Pottker would never even have known had B&B not got into a fight with someone else.

Ergo, bloggers and journalists who don’t have political backing are better advised to forget their injuries, stay away from those who’ve injured them, and allow the fates..or the furies... to step in…

Surprisingly, they often do.

Jeff Stein:

“If Jan Pottker’s reporting on the circus turned up enough dirt to lead Ken Feld to launch a vendetta against her, according to a sworn statement by Joel Kaplan, the private security man and wire-tapper for a Feld Entertainment subsidiary, there were worse things going on than Pottker or even PETA could have imagined.

Angry that Feld had failed to pay him, Kaplan first sent a threatening letter to Feld saying, in essence, according to three sources who read it, “I’m the last man you want to piss off.” When that didn’t work, he gave an astounding deposition, under oath, about his duties at the company, which later made its way into the Pottker case file.

“What I did [was] illegal. Immoral, unethical, a long list,” Kaplan testified on April 22, 1998. “Very long list. Do you want some of those?”

“Yes,” Feld’s lawyer said. What followed was a long list of charges against the circus that would seem to stretch credulity, and which is not backed up by any specific evidence from Kaplan. But Kaplan swore to it all under penalty of perjury.

“We had … sexual assaults; pedophiles on the show; we had, you know, thefts; we had people we basically threw out of the buildings; we had people that didn’t even have clothes on their backs.” Later, Kaplan added, “We had people, pedophiles, taking kids in, the performers, taking them into trailers. We had some vendors who raped a few and the concessionaires in the building, and it was on and on and on.”

In Kaplan’s telling, the circus sounds more like Sodom and Gomorrah than Barnum & Bailey. But Kaplan had only begun. “We knew that drugs were actually coming (in) from the show side, working men, the performers,” he added after a break. “Mr. Feld was told that.” But they were not allowed to test the performers, he said. He also claimed that the working men were selling drugs to the food and concession vendors.

Kaplan continued with stories of “despicable living conditions,” and drug problems that led to tragedy. “We had two people die on the train, from overdoses.”

Many employees were “undocumented aliens,” Kaplan went on. “We had criminals, people with extensive warrants out for their arrest working as working men under assumed names.” As director of security for the concessions arm of the circus, Kaplan said he was closely involved in that. “[W]e started doing criminal checks in the later years.”

And when sick employees filed for workman’s compensation, he bugged their rooms, put electronic tracking devices on their cars, surveilled, harassed and otherwise helped the company outlast hard-pressed claimants until they’d take any crumb that the company offered, he testified.

And that was just the treatment of people. “We had some real problems with the elephants,” Kaplan testified. “I was told [by the circus veterinarian] … that about half of the elephants in each of the shows had tuberculosis and that the tuberculosis was an easily transmitted disease to individuals, to human beings. The circus, the elephants, were transported all throughout Florida, which is illegal to do that in the State of Florida.”

From  “The Greatest Vendetta on Earth,”  Jeff Stein.

Chinese and Russian espionage? (Updated)

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In the news today,  intelligence officials seem to have found evidence of Chinese/Russians mapping US infrastructure:

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” a senior intelligence official told the Journal. “So have the Russians.”

The espionage appeared pervasive across the United States and does not target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official.

“There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official told the paper, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama was not immediately available for comment on the newspaper report.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

Protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration’s cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week.

The sophistication of the U.S. intrusions, which extend beyond electric to other key infrastructure systems, suggests that China and Russia are mainly responsible, according to intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists…..”

More here at Reuters.

My Comment

I am not sure what these “software tools” left behind  were……and where they were left behind.

Since Homeland Security is a pervasive umbrella bureaucracy, it could refer to any part of government at any level.

Now, which companies are responsible for Homeland Security software and intelligence gathering?  See below for information on CACI.

Notice also that intelligence is no longer afraid of any terrorists being behind this threat. They wouldn’t have the sophistication, say officials.

Oh really? But we’ve been orange and red-alerted for the past eight years about just that threat, haven’t we? And somehow, these same not competent terrorists managed to pull off 9-11, didn’t they? And elude  the mighty forces of the US for years….despite our  dominance in global electronic surveillance technology…

But now, suddenly, officials know right off the bat that terrorist couldn’t be behind this.  Anyone else find that reasoning a bit suspect?

Please note, the officials who gave this information are not named in the piece.  Would help if we could find out who these unnamed intelligence people and cyber-security experts are.

 Update:

One of the most important, if not the most important, company involved in Homeland Security is CACI, a company I wrote about in LOE (it’s in the section that was cut out).

CACI’s chairman, Jack London, recently (March 24, 2009) addressed a symposium on asymmetric threats to US and Global Security in Arlington Virginia. His remarks included the following useful reference:

“Harvard professor, Joseph Nye, the man behind the term “soft power,” along with former deputy Secretary of State – and former CACI board member – Richard Armitage, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year: “Smart Power is a framework for guiding the development of an integrated strategy, resource base and tool kit to achieve U.S. objectives, drawing on both hard and soft power.”

From the section cut out of LOE (this part completed around early 2005)

“We can monitor the entire globe,” says CACI’s CEO Jack London (21)

The depth of this penetration of government is not limited to telecommunications and intelligence. CACI also handles the Federal Aviation Administration’s global administrative-data network and runs a system for the Justice Department that lets lawyers pick through millions of documents for what they need. In July 2004 Transportation Services Administration, the villain of the pat-down searches abuse and an agency of Homeland Security, also became a new client. CACI’s  “Knowledge Management” systems capture and convert data to digital format, publish on the internet, manage the Freedom of Information Act process and declassification, electronic information distribution, and related services for the entire Department of Justice (including the FBI, Tax, Drug Enforcement, and Immigration & Naturalization) Defense, Transportation, DHS Customs and Border Protection, and the Environmental Protection Agency, computer and interrogation services to the Defense Department, and other agencies. (22)

CACI is thus at the heart not only of military intelligence, but of internal security, internet technology, air transportation, and law enforcement at home. It encompasses the most vital powers of the state in an octopus-like penetration of populations abroad and at home.

The nerve center of this octopus coincides with power centers and power brokers in Tel Aviv and Washington….”

See also, this piece from December 2005, on CACI’s involvement in disinformation and what’s been called Defense Support for Public Diplomacy, a blending of diplomacy, information ops and psyops.

Now, from my previous posts, you know I believe that our dear leaders are cornered and that the end game is about to roll out. What could that be? Keep temporizing while grabbing more power, use the power to hide how much has been lost and by whom, whistle cheerfully and twist as many arms as possible to keep the vaudeville act going, meanwhile start fanning public anger against everyone possible, from random rich people, CEO’s, bonus recipients, immigrants, China, Russia, terrorists, socialists, communists, anyone in fact other than the specific group of financiers, regulators and politicians whose finger prints are on this mess.  At some point, should things get bad enough, war  will be declared. For further support for this take, check Jake Towne’s very detailed analysis of why the stimulus money just isn’t enough to do anything (with which I agree, in the sense that this isn’t a problem that can be fixed…however, I disagree that it won’t cause inflation – it will, eventually) and why war might be the avenue out.

March Madness in 2009….and in 1939

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From a recent piece at Lew Rockwell,  Nightmare on Wall Street

March Madness

Insurance giant AIG, already rescued by the public, comes back for more. The bill now totals almost $200 billion, nearly half of which goes to foreign banks, including the very banks that shaped government policy on the bank bail-out, a criminal conflict of interest.

  1. China and the US face off over US surveillance in Chinese waters, as well as over Chinese currency pegging
  2. The Bernie Madoff investigation reveals that family and friends of the ex-Nasdaq chief connived in his fraud, which prosecutors charge, has been going on since the 1980s. Money-laundering through an English bank is part of it.
  3. After three rescues, Citigroup ends up trading at around $1 and needing another round of government aid. That brings the government’s total commitment to Citi to over $300 billion.
  4. Net capital flows to the US turn negative, auto sales fall sharply, and pension-funding shortfalls are destroying company balance sheets.
  5. The Fed Reserve commits to buy $300 billion in Treasuries (creating $1 trillion in new money). The bond market reacts positively. But, in what seems like a warning from the other side of the Atlantic, when the Bank of England tries to auction British bonds, it fails to find enough buyers for the first time in seven years. The market is signaling its belief that the UK government is effectively bankrupt.
  6. Upward pressure on LIBOR, the London interbank offer rate, continues relentlessly. This is a measure of the willingness of banks to lend to each other and it’s showing severe credit market stress…..

*******

and,

“As reports about the AIG deal circulate and stir up public anger, the USNS Impeccable, a survey ship (read, spy-ship) faces off with Chinese ships in what the US claims are international waters off Hainan island. But the encounter is also within 200 miles of the Chinese coast, a zone China considers its exclusive economic zone. Hainan is also a key strategic base in the South China Sea and the location of China’s biggest submarine base. This comes just days after US military talks with China resume.

The US claims it’s a Chinese provocation, although it’s hard to believe that a Chinese spy ship snooping around Americans coasts would be greeted with brotherly love. It seems more likely to be a US provocation.

Notice that the incident reinforces Barack Obama’s provocative warnings to the Chinese about currency manipulation during the presidential campaign. Obama was apparently playing to the part of his base that is China-hawkish and protectionist. Notice that this is also a neo-conservative position, as human rights interventionists (let’s call them liberventionists) would like to see a tougher US posture in places like China and Darfur.

In short, the big government wing in both parties likes the “Chinese currency manipulation” motif……”

And in a recent piece at Lew Rockwell and Human Events,  Pat Buchanan writes:

 March Madness in 1939

“Made a fool of by Hitler, baited by his backbenchers, goaded by Lord Halifax, facing a vote of no confidence, on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain made the greatest blunder in British diplomatic history. He handed an unsolicited war guarantee to the Polish colonels who had just bitten off a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Lunacy, raged Lloyd George, who was echoed by British leaders and almost every historian since.

With the British Empire behind it, Warsaw now refused even to discuss a return of Danzig, the Baltic town, 95 percent German, which even Chamberlain thought should be returned.

Hitler did not want a war with Poland. Had he wanted war, he would have demanded the return of the entire Polish Corridor taken from Germany in 1919. He wanted Danzig back and Poland as an ally in his anti-Comintern Pact. Nor did he want war with a Britain he admired and always saw as a natural ally.

Nor did he want war with France, or he would have demanded the return of Alsace.

But Hitler was out on a limb with Danzig and could not crawl back.

Repeatedly, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. Repeatedly, the Poles rebuffed him. Seeing the Allies courting Josef Stalin, Hitler decided to cut his own deal with the detested Bolsheviks and settle the Polish issue by force.

Though Britain had no plans to aid Poland, no intention of aiding Poland and would do nothing to aid Poland – Churchill would cede half that nation to Stalin and the other half to Stalin’s stooges – Britain declared war for Poland.

The most awful war in all of history followed, which would bankrupt Britain, bring down her empire and bring Stalin’s Red Army into Prague, Berlin and Vienna. But Hitler was dead and Germany in ashes….”

My Comment

In an earlier piece,  Nationalization In a Time of Monopoly, I noted the ominous end game in which we’re finding ourselves:

“First, it [the state] creates debt everywhere until the capital base of the economy is destroyed and production is in tatters. Banks become bankrupt, except for those that have government connections and can consolidate. The monopolies have nothing to restrain their anti-market behavior and push their own agendas in concert with the state. With no limit to cheap credit, the money supply swells. Workers can no longer keep up with inflation. The lopsided development of the state sector crushes savings and production in the remainder of the economy. Jobs dwindle.

To supplement them, the corporate-state creates make-work programs on the domestic front. When bad times and discontent persist, it looks abroad.

Then comes war.

That is where nationalization in a time of monopoly will take us.” (Lew Rockwell, March, 2009)

*******

That warning cannot be emphasize enough. We meddle further at our own peril.
Beware any further ceding of power to the government.

Before any more doing  –  undo, undo, undo.

Or , as Buchanan shows in his gripping time-line, when this end game rolls out, we will find that even countries that do not want war with us now,  will be forced into it.

Media-Trix: The Partisan Press…

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“In the 1980s, the rise of the right-wing Likud government in Israel brought to the surface a long held but submerged desire among many hard-line Israelis to expel Palestinians from their land under cover of a larger war, one that would destabilize the Middle East and fragment the Arab states……..

Such a widespread Middle Eastern War was not regarded as in the national interest by Israeli realists or by Americans, who were prepared to let Saddam Hussein’s Iraq remain, as it was providing the balance to Iran and regional stability Yehoshafat Harkabi, an expert in Israeli foreign policy, dismissed the Pax Israelica, concluding that Israel had not enough power to succeed on such a grand scale, when it had failed in Lebanon against the weakest Arab state. (64)……..

In 1990, as the Cold War came to an end, this campaign to capture public opinion and government policy for the right commenced openly, deploying the language of cultural or religious war and manipulating public opinion through the strategic use of propaganda in the media, think-tanks, and opinion journals. Leading it was the prominent neo-conservative Richard Perle, who set up the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf to promote a war against Saddam Hussein. ……….

It is not “Jewish consciousness” that spontaneously drives Israeli settlements, but rather specific forces that have orchestrated that consciousness.

The proof for this lies in a 1990 National Jewish Population Study that found that 52% of Jews in the US married in the five years preceding the study had married a non-Jew and indicated that a very large and increasing proportion of the Jewish population was actually disconnected from involvement in its heritage.(69)

It was two Orthodox programs, the Lubavitch Hasidic and the Aish Ha Torah, that first challenged this assimilation.  I have already noted some of Aish Ha Torah’s activities in relation to CACI. The Lubavitch, a branch of Orthodox Hasidic Judaism (part of the Haredi with whom they share a virulent Jewish chauvinism), are also highly praised in the American media, for instance by  New York Times religion editor Peter Steinfels, (70) although they are criticized by many Orthodox themselves and although some of  their web sites decry Jesus Christ virulently (71) and suggest that that the true Messiah is the 7th  Lubavitch, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who has stated controversially,

“This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world … A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity.” (72)……..

Before his death in 1995, Schneerson, whose birthday was made into Education Day by President Reagan, greatly expanded Lubavitch outreach and influence in politics in the US (76) and Israel and on Jewish studies world-wide. Among other prominent US backers of the Lubavitchers on Capitol Hill are Senator Joseph Lieberman (D.Conn.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Assistant Secretary of Defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Comptroller of the US Department of Defense, Dov Zakheim, an ordained Orthodox rabbi and former Comptroller of the Pentagon, and Stuart Eizenstat, former Deputy Treasury Secretary.

Billionaire gold and diamond magnate, Joseph Gutnick of Australia, who credits Schneerson with directing him where to mine, was subsequently appointed by Schneerson as his main representative to the Israeli government. Gutnick, who was instrumental in the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel in 1996, is also a Hasidic rabbi. (77)

The movement of such right-wing groups to the center and the creation of a “Jewish consciousness” can be significantly attributed to the Mega Group, convened in 1991 by Rabbi Lurie under Leslie Wexler, CEO of Victoria’s Secret, and Charles Bronfman, a top executive of Seagrams Corporation. At first it was made up of some 20 Jewish billionaires, including  Bronfman’s brother Edgar, Chairman of the World Jewish Congress; Harvey Meyerhoff, the Baltimore real estate magnate; Laurence Tisch of Loews Corp.; Hollywood mogul, Stephen Spielberg; Max Fisher, a Detroit oilman; Max Lender of Lender Bagels; and Leonard Abramson, the founder of U.S. Healthcare, (78).

Initially the object was simply to raise money quickly for Operation Exodus, which  was United Jewish Appeal’s billion-dollar campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration. Mega Group members dominate the board of trustees of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the pro-Israeli think-tank in Washington, that has been campaigning for an Iraq war as a the centerpiece of  a “war against terrorism.” Both JINSA and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy are heavily underwritten by Irving Moskowitz, a right-wing Zionist business magnate and JINSA board member who has lavishly financed the establishment of several religious settlements in Arab East Jerusalem. (79) Among the Mega Group’s institutional bases are the World Jewish Congress, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, and the United Jewish Fund, a recent merger of the major American and Canadian Jewish charities. Disbursing annual gross contributions of nearly $3 billion, Mega is now one of the most powerful concentrations of Jewish charitable giving, overshadowing even the traditional giant UJA. (80) The most important of Mega’s high-profile Jewish programs is Birthright Israel, which promotes trips to Israel for youth. Members of  “Mega” have financed the candidacies of every Likud prime minister, including of course, Sharon. (81) It was under the wing of Mega that many of the prominent neo-conservatives of the Bush administration have come to power……….

….In 1996 another  group of neo-conservatives, also with ties to the Likud, prepared a report for Netanyahu, then Likud prime minister. Headed by Perle, the group included among others Feith,  David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Meyrav, ensconced both at the right-wing Hudson Institute and the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). ……….

There were also calculated and far-sighted inroads through espionage into US defense policy. Again, this espionage is intimately bound up with government contracting and is, in effect, industrial espionage for the defense industry. Leading neo-conservative Richard Perle, who was caught spying for Israel while working as an aid to Senator “Scoop” Jackson in 1970, went on without reprimand to maintain a revolving door between work for Israeli defense firms and for the U.S. government, even being placed in charge of international security policy in 1982. In that position, he was able to circumvent protocol and hire two other pro-Israeli functionaries who had earlier had their security clearances revoked for espionage, Stephen Bryen and Michael Ledeen. In 1982, Douglas Feith was investigated over allegations that he had handed over secret documents to the Israeli embassy, but after being fired from the NSC,  was nevertheless hired back by Perle. On  leaving the Pentagon in 1986, Feith promptly started a law firm in Israel. In 1987, the most famous spy of them all, Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, was imprisoned for life for selling a roomful of U.S. secret documents to Israel. (88)

….. In March 2000, Wall Street’s high-tech index Nasdaq fell, taking with it the highly speculative markets in the US and Israeli that had made the rich much richer, but had also ruined labor-intensive industries and spawned a dispossessed underclass in Israel. (89) The neo-conservatives were also simultaneously faced with the prospect of the lifting of the decade-long sanctions on Iraq. This was presaged by French and Russian plans to break the air ban that fall and the decision by Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s independent-minded President, to visit Iraq as part of a tour of OPEC nations designed to strengthen the oil cartel as a global force. Chavez also convened an OPEC Heads of State summit in Caracas, the first of its kind since 1975 and challenged wealthier nations to assume responsibility for what he called a manufactured oil crisis. (90)

These developments were the impetus for the now famous policy paper calling for American world domination, released in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century. The PNAC Statement of Principles was signed by Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, as well as by Eliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, Zalmay Khalilzad, and many others.

With the prospect of Saddam rising from the ashes, things began to heat up. Two interesting meetings took place —  Martin Indyk, US ambassador to Israel met without authorization in August with the former head of the Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, in the process triggering a CIA probe that suspended his security clearance; at the same time, Mega member, Ronald Lauder of cosmetic giant Estee Lauder, a major financial backer of Sharon, met with Sharon in September 2000 during the fragile peace process unfolding under Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. Apparently these meetings set the stage for Sharon’s visits to the Islamic holy sites on the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, accompanied by armed security guards. It was seen by many as a staged provocation. The Palestinians, disillusioned by the concessions that had won them no part of the global pie, exploded that fall in the Second Intifada.

Then, at the end of the year, Saddam Hussein switched the reserve currency of Iraq from the dollar to the euro. At the time it was a purely political move, as the euro was low, but a warning was sounded in DC……..

In February, the instability that resulted in the region gave Sharon and the right-wing a landslide victory. During the course of the year, for the first time since 1953, Israel’s GDP actually fell. Immediately, Sharon launched a propaganda offensive inside the United States, aimed at winning American support for his plans to overturn the Mid-East peace process. One prong of the offensive consisted in hiring two U.S. public relations firms- Rubenstein Associates and Morris, Carrick, and Guma – to promote Israeli government propaganda in the media and government circles in the US. (91)

“We don’t want to be seen as the Sanhedrin,” insists Mega’s Charles Bronfman. But, in fact, it is clear that Mega was part of a calculated promotion of religious sentiment that enabled the rise of a right-wing government in Israel that would enact the policies that the elites favored, ultimately for financial reasons as much as religious ones. The other prong of the pro-Sharon propaganda offensive, a think-tank, was created jointly by Mega members,  Abramson, Edgar Bronfman, and hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt (owner of the New Republic), and the Israeli government. (92) It was named Emet, the three letters representing  the beginning, middle and end of the alef-beit (the Hebrew Alphabet) and literally meaning truth, but a truth with a specialized meaning –  Emet is the realization (the end) of God’s primordial will (the beginning) in his Creation (that is in the physical world).

Even before the Israeli government, however, it was the Israeli lobby in the US which was consulted…………

Emet at first lacked focus and was not very successful. But then came 9/11 and it was transformed. It became the very effective Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which claimed to be a non-profit and a non-partisan group dedicated to eradicating international terrorism. FDD targeted its advertising at Washington, the Hamptons, and college campuses, even establishing fellowship programs that took 52 undergraduates and 19 professors to Israel in 2002, ostensibly to study the effects of terrorism first-hand. But far from being apolitical, FDD was a front for right-wing politics: its president, Clifford May, is a former Republican National Committee PR man while Vice-President, Nir Boms, is an academic liaison for the Israeli Embassy in Washington and has served in the Israeli Defense Forces. The $3 million annual budget comes mainly from Mega with Bronfman, Steinhardt, and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus each giving  $250,000 in 2002. (94)

Despite the claim to be anti-terrorist, one FDD official, Dr. Walid Phares, is closely associated with the Pro-Israel Lebanese militia, Guardians of the Cedar, and materials from the Israeli terrorist group Kach have been found on the website of another……

The American media is already an easy mark for such control because of its corporate character. Music, film, and TV production, cable and satellite channel ownership, and book and magazine publishing are all controlled by about fifty firms, of which about ten completely dominate most of the areas. According to one expert, only ten media giants – AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media  – control most of what is viewed and read in the US, even on internet. (95) Because of the concentrated control of this oligopoly, what competition for viewers does remain fosters unhealthy sensationalism instead of more insightful or comprehensive coverage……

Add to these institutional flaws, the domination of the Zionist lobby’s powerful machinery, and it becomes clear why reporting on the Middle East in general and American foreign policy there is thoroughly biased. Even without Emet’s public relations work, the media is completely dominated by pro-Israeli writers. Eric Alterman, a Nation columnist, lists the commentators and publications in America that can be counted on to be reflexively pro-Israel and then points out that are were less than half a dozen on the left who were reflexively pro-Palestinian in the same way(99)…..

In the mid 1970s Si Kenen, editor of the AIPAC-affiliated Near East Report based in Washington, DC, started a column, The Monitor, to clarify “controversial issues and to expose negative propaganda.”(101) One of NER’s main targets was the team of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, whose column was syndicated in about 250 American cities. When the columns contained errors about Israel, Kenen would orchestrate a letter-writing campaign to the papers carrying the columns. Eventually, Evans and Novak stopped writing on the Middle East for several years.Similarly the pro-Israeli watchdog groups, CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) and FLAME (Facts and Logic About the Middle East), intimidate print or TV journalists who dare contradict the official line on the Middle East. CAMERA has repeatedly confronted and attacked CNN, PBS, and NPR for their reporting and has pursued aggressive tactics against book stores and college libraries, indicting even the National Geographic, Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East, Webster’s New World Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica for “unabashed inventions.” (102)……

A propaganda network, a culture permeated with self-deceiving exceptionalism and obsessed with domestic cultural divisions, a language of bureaucratic normalization and contextual distortion, and the commercial nature of the mass media – these are the reasons why the torture story stayed on the sidelines for two years before surfacing. They are also the reasons why the story has disappeared as suddenly as it surfaced….”

My Comment

That’s part of a chapter from The Language of Empire that got cut out of the original book. I’m putting it up on the website as it contains a lot of research and background helpful to understanding how the media works today.

Read the whole chapter by clicking the button Media Control (LOE) at the top of the blog, or on the side. Note: The excerpt above has long sections cut out.

Left “Gate-Keeping” On Controversial Topics

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“It should be noted that the MacArthur-funded Nation, for which Corn is a staff writer, has ties back to the CIA and its former director William Casey, and the Manhattan Institute, and Chief Editor Katrina vanden Heuval’s father was involved in “Operation Mockingbird”, a CIA project originating in the early days of the Cold War to buy influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and put reporters on the CIA payroll. Solomon is the Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington and is the ostensible head of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting), funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, Working Assets group, and the Schumann…”

—  Charles Shaw in “The Gate-Keepers of the So-Called Left”

 

Comment

I originally included the part on Michael Ruppert in the excerpt above. But I haven’t read a lot of Ruppert, and his take on a number of things about which I do know a bit (such as, the bail-out) is very different from mine, so I decided not to include the reference, in case I should seem to be endorsing him.

Of course, I do post pieces on this blog, with which I don’t always agree.  But usually they’re about things I can make a judgment on.  I can tell if what I’m posting is completely off the wall, possible, plausible, or convincing.

I haven’t mastered enough of the facts about 9-11 to make that kind of judgment. Ergo, no Ruppert.

But I certainly do resent the way discussions about 9-11 are censored, directed elsewhere, or regarded as disreputable or pointless. It’s one thing to decide you’re not the best person to discuss an issue. It’s another thing to stifle discussion from conformity, fear, or plain pig-headedness. Anyway, with or without Ruppert, the post was meant to bring up the issue of “gate-keeping” among progressive outlets.

(There’s no such thing among right-wing outlets? Discussion for another post..)

Nightmare on Wall Street

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Here’s the central argument of a long piece I wrote on media manipulation of the bail-out story, its effects on the policy debate and on the price of gold, “Nightmare on Wall Street.”

“Gold Underwhelms

By the end of the week, after a month of relentless international friction and spiraling financial and economic collapse exacerbated by make-shift and venal policies from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, the Dow is actually at 7776.18, a full 700 points higher than at the beginning of March, Gold – the crisis commodity – is below the band of resistance and looking weak, and the Dollar Index is trading strongly over 85.

Gold’s underwhelming performance did not surprise everyone, of course. The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, the leading activist group on gold manipulation has alleged for many years that leading bullion banks (such as, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase) have been colluding secretively with central banks and world monetary authorities to sell gold whenever necessary, so that rising bullion prices don’t tip off the market to insidious currency debasement.

In fact, GATA is now pressing for an independent audit of US gold reserves at Fort Knox, something that hasn’t been done since President Eisenhower.

GATA’s efforts are commendable. But attention needs to go equally to another kind of manipulation – the manipulation of public perception.

Between the Lines

Take the nationalization debate.

On the face of things, nationalization versus private-public partnership seems to be a debate pitting the good guy, the People’s Pundit (Paul Krugman) against the bad guys, the Bankers’ Bozos (Geithner and Bernanke).

But these terms preempt thinking about more limited and nuanced approaches. And that makes you wonder if the public isn’t being set up to be patsies, no matter which of the two sides it picks.

Take Krugman’s March 1 op-ed, “The Revenge of the Glut,” which blames the crisis on Asian savers. It’s published on the Sunday just before the Fed Reserve begins stone-walling on AIG and before Bernanke and Greenspan also decry the Asian savings glut.

On that, the Pundit and the Bozos are singing from the same page.

Then, look at Krugman’s March 6 op-ed, “The Big Dither,” where he demands nationalization at once. His argument is that government is going to have pour trillions into the crisis anyway, so why not now and why not with government control, so the government gets the upside as well?

If that’s the extent of his reasoning, it’s clearly flawed.

For starters, it’s perfectly possible for the government to do nothing now and also nothing later. It could just stick to prosecuting wrong-doers and ensuring a safety net and redress for victims. Throw a few more jail terms at the problem, and some of the money we think has vanished might reappear. Bottom line: There’s no need for the public to absorb the bad debt of banks at all…with subsidized loans or anything else. Just let the bank’s bond-holders take the losses.

Secondly, with such a crooked set of players, why wouldn’t nationalization just put more power into the hands of the banking cartel?

Thirdly, whatever upside potential remaining bank assets might have, they might not cover the explicit and hidden costs of a full-scale government take-over.

Fourthly, the Swedish solution that Krugman likes to push turns out not to have been nationalization at all. In Sweden in the 1990s, only one bank, Gota Bank, was taken over and that only after it had collapsed. So says William Isaac, the only one in the debate who’s actually nationalized a bank (“Bank Nationalization is Not the Answer,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2009).

Isaac points out that Sweden’s largest bank was about a tenth as big as any one of the three largest banks in the US. Unlike Sweden, the ten largest banking companies in the US hold two-thirds of the nation’s banking assets.

If what’s needed is to put some institutions into receivership and to make sure bondholders take losses that the public’s now taking, why not just say that? Why use the term nationalization, which has much broader implications and can set precedents we don’t want in other areas?”

More at Gold Seek.

Goldman Changes Mind On Gold

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“Goldman Sachs now says it expects the gold price to average $930 this year.”

 Comment

Well, well.  They must be reading us.

Because readers of our humble blog will note that holding to our guns staunchly we’ve said the gold is not performing as well as it might….and unlike Goldman, we didn’t wait for a drop to say that… We’ve been saying that right through even when gold looked like it was going to take out $1000 (Of course, we wish we’d bought a little and taken a quick ride too)

We’ll change our tune in a hurry if we have to, but our own experience over the past year has been that it’s better to wait for the dips.

Quote:

“Gold has gone sharply down below 900.  Already I feel better, although it puts my SLV nibble in the red.I held off buying because I thought GLD showed more strengths on its down side moves – but recently I was just wondering if I was wrong after all and whether it was making a solid base at around 900-920.  Good thing I held off. That plunge down was sharp and shows that the corrective thrust is stronger than the upthrust still….”

That’s from an earlier post, “Gold Below 885” (March 18) Also check out “Dollar Index Imponderable” (March 20)

You can check them, and others, by using the search function on the right…..or just search “gold” and you’ll get my take on it over the past year…I’m long term bullish but bearish in the short term, and possibly also in the midterm.

Global Games: World Bank Boosts the Buck

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“The dollar will remain the world’s dominant reserve currency and a strong U.S. currency is critical to lifting the world out of economic and financial crisis, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a newsmaker event at Reuters’ London office, Zoellick announced a $50 billion program to reverse a sharp drop in trade in the global crisis and urged G20 leaders to back the effort.

But he played down the chances of a dethroning of the dollar as the world’s leading currency.”

More at Reuters.

Good Cop Paul and Bad Cop Tim

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 “Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter which proposal is being batted around, whether it’s diddled this way and called “nationalization” or twiddled that and called “helping the market” or “preprivatization” or “private-public” or anything else –  none of it is likely to make a substantial difference, as long as the government stays trapped in the sticky web of Goldman Sachs, AIG, & Friends.

“Nationalization”  is likely to have been no more than “internationalization” – linguistic cover for a power-grab across national lines by the globalists, masquerading as economic therapy for your friendly neighborhood business.
And a power grab can be hustled through even without “nationalization.”

In fact, with nationalization shelved, Geithner has just turned around and asked for extraordinary powers for the Treasury.

Maybe Krugman is simply playing good cop to Geithner’s bad cop. And the real goal – more power for Treasury –  is a done deal regardless of which program gets by the public?”

Comment

That’s the conclusion of a long (very long) piece I’ve been working on this whole month about what looks like a propaganda thrust involving most of the administration. I don’t buy the Bernanke/Geithner versus Paul K spectacle. I  have a feeling that anyone whose voice gets heard at that level in the debate is already an insider and debates well within the parameters of the acceptable.

I have not way of proving what I’m saying, but when I put the timeline together (which is why it’s taking forever) it does give a better explanation of everything that’s happened so far. And it explains why gold hasn’t really done much in a crisis that ought to have set it on fire…

New York Times Shills For AIG

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Boo-hoo. Poor AIG employees are suffering unfairly from the public outrage over executive bonuses.

Look, we know these guys aren’t the culprits. The bad guys are too powerful (Hank Greenberg & Co.) or have skipped town.

So, yes, we know that the letter writer isn’t the  problem. BUT….

He and his colleagues ARE senior people who worked at AIG  while rampant fraud/crime was prevalent at other divisions. Did any of them say anything or do anything about it? AIG was involved in repeated infractions of the laws, over decades – a lot of which had already been exposed to the public eye or was being prosecuted.  These guys didn’t know? Give me a break. And sez who the other divisions did nothing shady? How much do we really know?

Even if they themselves didn’t do a thing wrong, in light of their company’s centrality to the whole financial crisis, they should have had enough decency to have refused their bonuses.  Where’s their public spirit?

Yes, the whole bonus fracas is a distraction and purely symbolic. But symbols are important. And people are understandably outraged.

Instead,  we get this rather narcissistic letter in the Times that tells a single personal story.

Dear me, senior managers at a major financial firm work 12-14 hours, do they?

So do a lot of people who don’t get that kind of compensation.

Tough. There’s a serious problem and everyone has to contribute what they can, especially the people directly involved in the crisis.

Notice how the NY Times has been playing the bonus story.

Read this story by Allen Salkin

He says AIG rage isn’t healthy – chill it, you yokels.  Interesting. I checked through Mr. Salkin’s archives to find out if he’d ever commented about politics so directly. But no. The only time since 2000 Salkin ever had anything to say about politics was recently – to try to douse rage over AIG and to defend their executive salaries (you need 500k to live in New York, he says here).

Thousands of people in the financial industry were killed in the 9-11 attacks. President Bush went on a rampage in Iraq that killed thousands of US servicemen and women and mutilated tens of thousands of them, in addition to killing over a million Iraqi  civilians and reducing the country to near rubble in many areas. It was, arguably, a genocide. Since the 1990s, the financial industry in New York has created huge bubbles of fraud and crime that have destroyed the life savings, income, credit, and productivity of  millions of people and firms all over the globe and has set off what looks like a global depression that could last for years. Did Allen Salkin at any time tell any of the frenzied speculators, corrupt regulators, and slavering real estate salesmen who pushed all this on the public to take a yoga class and chill? Did he tell them that lying, cheating, swindling, cosmic looting and mass murder are “not healthy”? No, I don’t recall he did.

Had New York journalists been doing their duty ( a central discipline necessary for practitioners of yoga) in the past two decades, I doubt the world would be in this mess.

Selective high-mindedness isn’t reason speaking. It’s servility to power masquerading as spirituality. Don’t fall for it.

The outrage over the bonuses was a distraction, yes, but it symbolized for struggling working class and middle-income people what’s wrong in the let-them-eat-cake world of the financial elites. To treat their outrage (which was also carefully orchestrated by the administration, by the way) as simply populist feeling gone mad is strangely and suspiciously selective.

Full disclosure: Salkin called me for comments for his piece. I said roughly what I said above. He didn’t use those comments.

PS: Nice to see Karl Denninger thinks along the same lines.

I have no idea who Denninger is but his take on things is almost identical with mine (dollar contrarian, psyop-savvy).

PPS: I note that Matt Taibbi wrote a post on this same letter and posted it on Alternet the day of this blog post.